to celebrate

This morning I woke up apprehensive and restless. I've been having more of these days recently. Days where my head seems to be tied up in knots, my heart racing for reasons I can't quite name. Settle down and be quiet for a minute. Maybe I'm tired. Stressed. Overworked. Sometimes I wonder if life gets any easier, or if the whole thing is like this. Maybe I secretly like it this way, I am afraid of my life without the anxiety, the rush, the not-enough-ness-- it has become my comfort. I don't know what it would be like to be prepared and on time, can't imagine such a life... hrrmmph.

It seems like the holidays came quickly this year. People keep asking me if I get any extra time off from work-- something about this seems like an irrelevant question; they seem to ask from a place of observation outside of my vision. Or maybe it just catches me off guard because I am on this treadmill sort of life and the part of the belt with the words about what that next part of life holds (and by "next part of life," I mean next week) hasn't come around yet. I'll think about it when it comes and goes. Which will occur soon enough.

Tonight I was talking to my sister in law about a time to meet for dinner or a day, or whatever. Dates seemed to be flying at me a thousand miles an hour and I tried to get my bearings, suddenly overcome. And she said perhaps the most graceful thing I think I've heard in a while, rescuing me beautifully: "I can see that trying to think about this just raised your blood pressure by about fifty points-- don't worry about it right now." Whew. Off the hook.

How did my life get like this again? Is this part of the season of transition, where everything is difficult and messy-- am I still working towards something better, more freeing, less exhausting, more balanced, more.... and perhaps what I am really longing for is more of a less.

I am in a season in which it seems that the entirety of my broken heart is being layed open, I am dancing with The Flayed One, my heart cut out, skins removed, everything exposed. I am being squeezed through the press, scattered on the threshing floor. And, as all the leaves are falling off to ready my world for winter, I see the painful truth of all the dead branches that have been hidden underneath. There seem to be a thousand ways that I just want to get turned around. I want a new heart. Some new life. I dream of a day that I can get just a little closer to who I really am-- free from all of this fear, eyes open to what is true, walking around, liberated.

There is this book I always seem to stumble across on the bargain table at The Boulder Bookstore called "Love Begins in Winter." I often pick up the collection of stories and want to buy it simply for the title. I find myself whispering, "God, I hope so," under my breath as I finger the pages.

It's another set of holidays now. I woke up this morning, made some coffee and enjoyed it sitting down for a change. I poured it into a cup without a lid and found no reason for running out the door with my breakfast in a cup or on a paper towel. I took my time in the shower and put on a favorite violet dress, gray stockings, and the black shoes with a certain mysterious click that always makes me feel beautiful walking around. I put on an extra coat of mascara and spent ample time lovingly taking strands of hair in hand, inducing curl that so often illudes my fine locks. How lovely and beautiful I felt today.

I few years ago, I began to think about what it would be like to live a life of celebration. I mean, I want to be known as one to really celebrate.

I think often about what it means to honor things. As I've worked more and more with children, I've come to see that the best way to spend time with them, to help them grow, to learn from them, is to devote myself to honoring who they are. I think about my relationships with my friends, with my family, and I want to know how I can honor who these people are. I want to give honor to those who have come before me, to those who have provided the content of history. And the thing about honor is that it is quite a lofty undertaking-- it requires a great deal of listening, a complete putting aside of myself, a sacrifice of all of the ways I want to assume or impose myself and my power on things. The only way I have learned to truly honor is to stop, to observe, and to provide space.

And I think about these days that often become so harried, so rushed, so stressful-- these things that we call "holidays", the "set apart" days-- and I want them to be days that I really stop to honor whatever they were intended to honor. I want there to be space to hear whatever these days have to say to us.

It seems so easy to let all of these things get buried under all of our obligations, all of the "shoulds" and "musts" and "have-to's" of the traditions that started out as those very acts of honor.

And so here is what I think-- we so badly need these days and we so badly need to stop and listen to them, to remain open to what they have to say to us rather than becoming entrenched in what we are told they should be. We need them to remember. We need to take out a few moments to curl our hair and put on dresses so we can remember that life is worth celebrating. We need to take those days and remember that there are people and sacrifices and successes worth getting dressed up for. And sometimes I need those days in order to remember that I am worth getting dressed up for.

I was thinking today that perhaps one reason that sometimes the holidays can be so difficult because they are the moments in life that we are forced to stop-- they are the white spaces in our over-packed lives-- and take a long hard look at what our lives really consist of. We are faced with the reality of our relationships, the truth of our finances, the condition of our hearts. No wonder we try so hard to cover them up with so much extraneous obligation and expectation.

And so today, I woke up and put on a dress that helped me to remember what I've been forgetting for so many busy, busy weeks. I remembered that I am a woman of beauty. I remembered that there are so many people who love me so deeply-- regardless of what I wear. I remembered that there are days that I need not be in a rush. I decided not to make a pie nor did I condemn myself (too much) for leaving the house late again.

And I remembered again today that the Lord has given us these days to celebrate because these are the spaces that we are able to stop and remember what is true-- these are the days that we call a truce on the battleground so we can catch our breath-- which is ultimately the source of our life.

I am in the midst of a season in which the daily cry seems to be "give me a new heart!" Oh how I beg. And I think, even as the Lord is so deeply at work in me in ways I cannot see and do not understand as I walk and work out the activity he has called me to, it is on these days of contrast, the time-outs, that he does some important redirecting of our hearts, if we will allow him. If we, for a few minutes, put aside all the business of this season and begin to honor them as days to simply listen, holy days to observe, it seems only right to expect to be transformed by them. And this is the desire of my heart.