looking through me

Tag: memories

fall

The needle will nudge 85 degrees today, but I stepped outside and the morning air had a bite. My bare legs and arms sent a quick query to my brain: sweater? It’s been months since I’ve had such a thought.

Giant dewdrops weighed on the grass blades waiting to seep through my thin-soled flats. And it was natural moisture, not a leftover soaking from the sprinklers.

I started my car and flipped on the windshield wipers squinting as the sun refracted through the persistent dampness clinging to the glass.

It’s fall.

Memories flooded back of morning treks across the wet junior high field. Then stomping my dripping, grassy sneakers on the blacktop in a futile attempt to remove the clinging vestiges before my first period English teacher could send me back out to excise any evidence of nature that might soil her industrially linoleum-ed classroom. And a few years later standing on the soggy grass of the high school field, feeling the dampness work through my shoes during zero period. Before long I’d be peeling off layers and tying them around my waist as we ran through our field show. The cool air a mild relief from the exertion of marching and playing the flute.

Leaves might not change color and abandon their branches here. But—in a day—the easy-to-miss transition has brought cooler, damper mornings as we move a little farther from the sun’s scorching rays.

And the fingers of change give me moments to feel the shift in rhythm, to absorb what has been and is no more, what is still to come and what lingers on the fringes of possibility. Snippets of spontaneous reflection and reminders of lessons learned but forgotten sail in with crisper air.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.


Follow on Bloglovin’

wildly good

“Wildly good.”

What would that term apply to in my life? A meal? A vacation? A dream? Or . . . it’s the phrase that popped into my head when prompted with “your past.”

My past? The one I think of as ho-hum, a little bit boring, a zigzag of non-sequitur jobs, a lot of investment and not much payoff—that past?

“Wildly good” is not a caption I would write for the life in my wake. But here it is screaming in neon across my frontal lobe.

Really?

I require context. It’s how I learn; it’s how I assess meaning; it’s how I make decisions; it’s how I assign worth. Yet I peer into my past and see a lack of cohesion. I see events and circumstances in isolation. I see a bunch of pieces and no indication they fit in the same puzzle except for the fact they are strewn across the table of my life. I see an absence of significance.

But I failed to notice my hands were so full of personal, historical minutiae I’d lost—or never found—the narrative thread. In looking back I latched onto the hard, the disappointing, the not quite moments, the desert sojourns; and I let them overwhelm the good, the exciting, the successful, the fun, the light. As a pessimist optimistically calling myself a realist I wrote off the positive as nothing special.

My past does include pain and frustration and deviated dreams; but it also includes an amazing family, a support network both widespread and tightly woven, three degrees with no debt, zip lining in a rain forest, holding my newborn nieces and nephew, walking the land Jesus walked, deep friendships, skydiving, investing in people, freedom to explore multiple career paths, resources with which to be generous, a well-stamped passport . . . an experientially and relationally rich life.

Putting the pieces in context is key.

In fact, with a little prompting, I’m realizing my life—my past, my present and my future—is wildly good.

 

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.


Follow on Bloglovin’