Christmas Eve

Hello friends! I am writing to you all from my mother's computer in Ridgecrest. It is Christmas Eve, and we are all in our respective happy places (and by 'we' I mean my mother and father and me). Mom is sitting under a light blanket, looking up pertinent verses to augment an upcoming Bible study lesson, Dad is dusting and rearranging the eclectic memorabilia that constitute the full extent of my family's concept of interior decorating, and I am just soaking up all the comforting family ethos that makes me 'charmingly quirky' to friends and 'just plain weird' to students. Whenever I am home (Ridgecrest), it's like a small but significant part of my insides unwinds, my inner kaleidascope aligns, some sort of deep-seated constant dissonance resolves, and things just make sense. Dad is looking at one of his favorite books, and regaling us with little known facts about the Ancient Celts and their subtle influence on Roman sculpture, when he informs us that he would really like to learn to speak Gaelic someday. Mom just sits next to me, radiating peace. I hope your Christmas Eve is just as lovely.

pretty

On his last visit to the Northwest, my dad bought me a Christmas tree. That's right, a little four foot tall bona-fide Charlie Brown Christmas tree. It currently stands "mounted" on an old cardboard shoe-box directly in front of my living room window, where the twinkling lights can thoroughly confuse any passing motorists who happen to look up. It's got two strings of colored lights wrapped around its diminutive frame. The bright little colored sprinkles of light are reflected in a festive cone in my window, very nearly doubling the Christmas cheer.

I just might leave it up all year.

Rain, Running, and Stories

It rained all night last night, and I mean RAINED, so that I woke up several times to hear water pelting down onto the skylight in my room (I love my skylight, by the way). I didn't mind it because today is Saturday, and I have no plans until tonight--except to write.

It's been ever so long since I last wrote, and many things have happened. Among these things is a sort of re-working of my insides (the invisible emotional ones, not my actual bodily insides) which is the closest I will come to making an excuse for the recent dearth in blogwork. It's taking up a big chunk of space on my hard drive and making all my other programs sluggish and unresponsive. I like to think that the other side of this process will bring you a stronger Sarah, or at least one who knows who she is and where she's going. We shall see.

In lighter news, you are now reading the blog of a runner. That's right, I, who have historically been the athletic antithesis of fast, run. And I actually like it (!). I never really ran before (not on a regular basis) because it was hard to ignore the fact that it looked and felt ridiculous to expend that much energy and still be traveling that slowly. But now I have friends who run with me, and where two or more are gathered, "ridiculous" turns into "social." My friends and I run three or four miles at least once a week. We keep trying for twice or thrice a week, but it doesn't always happen. Of course, our pace is alot closer to that of the tortoise than the hare, but it's the thought that counts, right? My favorite part is when we've just finished running, and one feels a delightful combination of accopmlishment and well-deserved exhaustion. Ultimately, I think the habit gives more energy than it takes. The work week hasn't been kicking my butt the way it used to... So my P.E. teachers were right after all. Fancy that.

On to the next subject: stories. One of my church friends has a little boy, a very cute little boy, who asks me to tell him a story every time he sees me. It's very flattering, especially when he actually listens to whatever I tell him. Sometimes the stories are the kind you usually get when you're making things up as you go along (like the surprisingly creepy one with the giant worm eating his way out of a giant apple in the mysterious old ladies' basement), but some of them were not half bad. So, at the behest of another friend who often overhears these stories, I have begun to write one of them down. I thought maybe I'd give it to her as a Christmas present, since, at the rate I write, it will probably be December by the time I get to the end. But the experience of actually writing a story with a beginning and an end is new and, mostly, pleasant. I've journalled and written poetry, but I've never been able to finish a story. However, if I can successfully resist my heavily ingrained perfectionistic tendencies, perhaps I will have a modest fairy-tale to share with you all in the (relatively) near future. Again, we shall see.

Well, I have to go buy toilet paper and shaving cream. But I promise to write again soon.
Bye, friends!

Because Kirsten gave me a Look when we were talking about blogs.

Do you smell it? That's the smell of backpacks and pencil sharpeners, of new clothes and fresh haircuts. It is the bitter-sweet decay of fun as frivolous party dude Summer gives way to conscientious goody-two-shoes Autumn. I heard someone watching a professional football game yesterday. Nothing announces the end of summer like the muffled tones of John Madden thrumming through the wall.

Summer is fading. People are vacationing with the frenzied intensity of those who know that the park is about to close, that this ride will probably be the last...until next year.

I am not immune to the change, either. I begin to catch myself composing lesson plans and mapping out learning units and holiday programs in the quiet hours of the afternoon. I am even a little ashamed to admit that even though this has been quite possibly the best summer yet, I find myself eager to start another school year.
(I interrupt my reverie to inform you that my young cousinling Greta is currently trying to eat the couch. I wouldn't worry too much. She doesn't have any teeth yet. I may have mentioned her before. She is also affected by the coming school season, having recently sloughed off the summer laziness of sitting, blob-like, and eating her toes, in favor of a concentrated effort towards independant ambulation. She's not yet up to crawling, mind you, but she rolls with a grace and efficiency marvelous to behold--one leg flung into the air, like a lone synchronized swimmer in the olympic pool of carpet that is her living room floor. I would not be surprised if she skipped crawling altogether and went straight from rolling to walking. She has that sort of intelligent mischievousness about her. She also has an extremely arresting face...the sort of face that makes one impatient for the amorphous gurglings she currently emits to form themselves into words. A small part of me worries that she may skip words altogether and go straight to telepathy. I wonder that people have the nerve to produce more babies, when perfection has so obviously already been achieved. We pardon their ignorance, and smile with beneficence upon those whose progeny merely crawl and stare.)

There! my interruption has become more interesting than my reverie. Where was I?
Oh yes. School's starting...

Too late. Things are happening which are more interesting to me than writing about school.
Did I say I was looking forward to school? Blech.
Summer isn't over yet!

In which Sarah gets religious

I was listening to a very good sermon yesterday about the servant-hood of Christ as a reflection of his being fully God. And in this sermon, Pastor Josh used the Trinity as an example of God being God by serving. The Trinity (for those of you who did not grow up in Sunday School) is...difficult to explain. It's a way that Christians think of God, where he is three complete person-hoods (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) that together are one complete God (God). I'm not going to try to explain it because I don't fully understand it myself. But Pastor Josh was pointing out how each person of the Trinity serves or "submits" to the others. Jesus is always doing things because he knows they will please the Father, and the Holy Spirit is often described as submitting to both the Father and Son (Jesus).

So here's the thought that came to me: whom does the Father submit to? God the Father is indeed part of the Trinity, but I couldn't for the life of me think of a time when God the Father submits to the other two, at least not in the Bible. He is the head honcho, the source of everything, the creative will that started it all, and the final judge as to how it will all end. Whom would He put Himself under?

And here's the answering thought:
Us. God submits to us. Now before you start throwing things at your computer and deleting me from your 'friend' list, let me explain. According to the Bible, God created people with the ability and responsibility to decide what to do with themselves. In fact, a significant portion (if not all) of that blessed book concerns choices. God seems always to be commanding, warning, cajoling, encouraging, even begging people to choose one thing over another, and then responding to choices made. Now I know that there are times (like with the Pharaoh in Exodus) when it looks like God has rigged the system, but the overwhelming majority of the story of God the Father and his children (us) is one of paths presented, directions taken, relationships formed, trust given, trust broken, waywardness forgiven, love shared. Love can not exist without the ability to choose, and sacrificial love (like the love of Jesus on the cross) would just be stupid if it did not preserve this freedom of the beloved's. Inasmuch as God gives us this will to spend ourselves and our times as we see fit, he abides by our choices, and in abiding, he submits. To us.

Kind of a scary thought, isn't it? Cool, but scary.

Anyway, that's what occurred to me during the sermon at church yesterday. I hope I didn't make your head hurt.

Next time I shall try to come with a modest joke or something fun like that. Not that deep thoughts aren't fun, but it's the sort of fun one associates with climbing mountains--worthwhile, but not particularly comfortable.

:)

Well, faithful followers, it is time for your monthly dose of Sarah.
To tell the truth, I have been putting off this post because most of my blogworthy thoughts occur at decidedly un-blogworthy moments...you know, like when I'm driving somewhere, or in the middle of church, or when I'm showering (see last month's post), or otherwise incapacitated (is that too strong a word?).

So anyway, I thought I'd just write what's floating around in my head right now because if I wait for inspiration to coincide with convenience we might as well just pack up and go home.

I'm going to be twenty-seven in a few weeks, an age that is significant because of its resounding insignificance. There's nothing new I get to do. My last milestone (25) is now more than a year gone, and there is now no use even pretending I'm anywhere close to being a kid anymore. My coming-of-age seems to have come already--my 'self' has been good and discovered--and I face my life with that same feeling of surreptitious and somewhat emberassing disappointment that one feels at 10 o'clock on Christmas morning when one's pile of gifts lies, naked and small, among shards of discarded wrapping paper. It's not that I'm ungrateful. Far from it! I have one of the sweetest deals ever: a freakin' awesome job, amazing family, marvelous friends, and an almost indecent amount of freedom and opportunity. I think I'm just feeling the loss of all the sheer possibility that I got so accustomed to growing up. We're always being told as kids that we can do anything, that someday the world will belong to us and who knows what we'll make of it or of ourselves. But hardly anyone talks about the fact that being one thing necessarily negates being everything else. It's not that I couldn't drop everything and join the circus, it's that I can't do that and continue teaching music at Conway. So now I've arrived at my future. I've unwrapped the gift, as it were, which like Schroedinger's cat, no longer exists in multiple states, but presents a single concrete reality. I really shouldn't whine. I could have unwrapped a dead cat.

So much for my birthday. Living is really quite complicated, you know? I hadn't really expected that. In other news, I have a new apartment. It is a beautiful place, a converted attic that combines the charming secrecy of my last place with the even greater charm of having windows I can look out of and an entire hallway to call my own. You know you've made it when you've got your own hallway! Also, I have begun to try my hand at growing things. (Wish me luck--you are reading the blog of someone who has killed a cactus). My wonderful downstairs neighbor brought me some pretty little flowers (they look like pansies, but they're not) and a great big pot full of carrots (which I shall be eating as soon as they're big enough--fun!). Soon I would like to add a small herb garden to my little balcony-at-the-top-of-the-world, and who knows what else.

Well the day, like me, is no longer young, and I have "miles to go before I sleep." So I shall sign off now.

Maybe I'll start carrying a notebook around so as to catch those mocking little blog-thoughts before they flutter away. Hmm...

June contribution

I read poetry in the bathroom. (TMI, I know. But it's my blog.)
I do this because poems, most poem, are shorter than novels, and nobody likes ring-butt.

So anyway, this morning I was reading poetry, and then I took a shower. Everyone knows that the best thoughts come to us in the shower, and this poem came to me there.
(Incidentally, this is why I take long showers. I like to think.)

For Alisha, Adrienne, SHS, and me
(upon our turning twenty-seven)

I was old when I was younger
I'll be young when I am old.
I do not think I'll ever match my age,
if truth be told.
I'm always pushing forward
or else I'm looking back.
I don't know what to do with all this
mental bric-a-brac.
Experience collected
doesn't add up very well,
and where the heck I'm s'posed to go from here
I can not tell.
True living is a secret
that all good grown-ups keep--
You fill the day as best you can,
and then you go to sleep.

So there it is.
(I hope you like it, Alisha. You inspired it. Well, you and a book of children's poems...and a nice warm shower.)

Bye everyone,
I'm off to Kaua'i!