in the long night season

I'm sitting on my couch. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the blinds lowered over the window. Except that they hang crooked. I can never seem to get them even. Those two strings never hold with the right amount of tension. The side that's higher lifts inches above the window sill. Beyond it, a small, insistent glow from the white Christmas lights I left strung around my porch peers through the dark night and into my window. Drops from the first (late) winter rain sit on the window. They catch its light and sparkle. The condensation blurs the edges. Around it all: night.

This is life right now: dark mornings, dark evenings, couch-sitting, small details, mundane details, crooked details that I still can't seem to get right after all these years. Tension held un-balanced. January is all about starting small, slow, silent, a stark contrast to the bright, fast, full December we just paraded through. Hopefully, it's about noticing, about keeping candles lit and lights glowing even if they're small, about the grace that holds a never balanced life -- still whole, and worth living.

These are the first attempts at creative words I've written in over a month. Of the many things I may have learned about myself over this past year, one is that words are hard-won is transition. The un-balance is weeks and months when my head is wrapping itself around how to live. I haven't yet learned to dig words out until I'm on the other side. Something else I've learned, or am learning, is how darkness creeps in after those large, bright full days are over until night is longer than day. But night seasons are part of how the world moves and spins, how it turns over, part of the creation God called "good" (is what my pastor said yesterday, and I am trying to believe him).

Or maybe this is the way I am supposed to write it: after many long nights, day will always become longer than night, and something brighter than twinkling Christmas lights will announce itself through the cracks in my crooked blinds. I'm sitting here. I'm waiting.

[If you are reading, thanks for joining me here. I may or may not be adding more words in the coming weeks... stay tuned.]

photo: sunrise at griffith park

words are living everywhere, even when i'm not at home

It's coming down to the end now, and I feel empty of ideas. I've been trusting each day to bring one of its own, and only a few times have I relied on old ideas to push me through to the next day, the next time words magically morph together into a picture, an idea, a story. Writing this way (is there another way?) is more difficult, I'm learning, when I'm busy. When I'm not at home much. Last night, I finally opened my door at 9:17 to find my apartment just as I'd left it that morning at 7:30 - on the kitchen counter, an empty bowl with streaks of missed yogurt crusting on the inside and the spoon resting at its side; in the dining room, the sunflowers that told me a week ago that their slow death had started, now hanging their heavy, bald heads while their crinkled yellow petals covered the table around them in memoriam; in the living room, clean unfolded laundry filled a basket, intended for folding, for more order than I was able to invoke. It all hinted at a life that has not cleaned up after itself. At a life that is not at home.

The bowl was still on the counter, the sunflowers bowing their heads, the laundry wrinkled in the basket when I left at 5am this morning for my running group. Two hours later I was at my desk at work, answering emails and greeting coworkers and planning a sleepover with a friend tonight nearly an hour away.

So I write now, in the in between, without much to say, trusting that even that is something to say. Thankfully, words can be found in all sorts of places. They are living everywhere, waiting for me to pick them up and put them together and make them lived in. Even when I am not at home.

here i am, here i will always be

I often sit behind them at church, an imperfect family of four. Him, with a balding head and a belly, she with the story of one lost before she had these two. Both of them older than they thought they'd find themselves when they finally found each other and their two young ones. But then the young ones came and it was like life never existed without them. First a boy who once he started to run wouldn't stop, who has a short round nose and mousy brown hair that makes him look like an excited little puppy. Then a girl with the biggest eyes you've seen, and dimples and thick brown hair to go with them. The boy walks in holding his mother's hand, and the girl rests her head sideways on her father's shoulder as he carries her. During worship the boy stand on the pew next to his mother and puts his hands in her hair, his eyes wide and smiling as he feels the softness of it, and its length. The girl has lifted up her head and is now resting on her father's belly, his arms holding her up. She faces her father and puts her hands on his lips, then his eyes, then his cheeks. It's as if she's blind and is trying to figure out who it is that stands in front of her. She already knows, but still wants to feel all the different parts of him. And I think about how much love and intimacy they are forming in these moments, just being there with each other, the boy and girl feeling around for their parents in the mess of their physical bodies, searching for where they came from and where their home is found. And the parents allowing their young ones to touch them, to know them, saying here I am, here I will always be.

finding the cracks

After I graduated from college, I picked an apartment in the city. It had the most bedrooms (3) for the cheapest price ($560 - can you believe it?). I hadn't inhabited that amount of space since I left my parents' house for college, so even though the kitchen had no counters to connect the stove and sink and fridge, and even though the floor felt crooked and the windows, when opened, let in the shrieking sounds of the city corner below, I wanted it. I still can't believe my would-be roommates consented, though two of them would rotate out a few months in anyway.

The apartment was the second and third floors of an old house, so we had a neighbor down below. We ran into Raul when we got into our cars, and the locked stairway in our apartment that used to lead downstairs when the house was still a house let his music and marijuana seep into our living space. Eventually we got to know Raul. Or, we got to know things about Raul. Originally from Puerto Rico, 25 years old, suspended driver's license. I imagined starting some kind of neighborly relationship with Raul, and we did get somewhere. A gentleman, he helped us shovel our cars out of snow more than once. I remember being in his apartment with him a few times, I think to talk about cooking Puerto Rican food, but I'm not sure we ever made anything together.

One night, I parked my car on the street after a work holiday party, feeling slightly nauseated, and walked past his windows to the stairs up to my place. He stopped me outside his door. "I made fish-head soup for you and your roommates." His boyish enthusiasm betrayed his Latino machismo. I felt my stomach turn and knew that this was one instance in which I could not forget myself to honor my neighbor. Sitting before a bowl of tiny fish heads looking up at me from a pungent broth was going to require more than a deep heart - I needed a solid stomach. I told him I'd just eaten at my party and he graciously offered to send the fod upstairs with me so my roommates and I could eat it later.

When I moved out of that apartment, I don't remember formally saying goodby to Raul. But I've met other Rauls in the ten years since. We met somewhere between stranger and friend. In some ways, it feels like the things that defined us - language, culture, history, upbringing, opportunity - were walls stronger than the ones that form the buildings we live in. Yet most of those apartments, like the first, have been pretty flimsy, so I wonder the same about what separated us. Maybe if we'd pushed up a little harder, we'd have found the cracks.

a white girl and white rice

Growing up, I didn’t eat much rice. If I did, it was fluffed into pilaf or doused with cream of chicken soup. (Is it shameful to admit that was one of my favorite meals?) White rice was completely off my radar until my older sister went away to overnight camp. When I was preparing to go for my first time, she told a story about how they served white rice one night, and since they strongly encourage children to try everything, even if it’s new to them, she had some. I was terrified by the white rice story. Would they make me eat it too? Would I gag, or worse, vomit? I even had a nightmare the night before I went away (ok, it was probably really about more than just rice, but that’s how it came out). My mom reassured me that I didn’t have to eat it if I didn’t want to. I stuck with bread and potatoes to fill my white-food quota that week.

I didn’t really begin to like white rice until I realized it was never meant to be served solo (was it?) or with variations on the chicken and creamed soup theme. Two of my housemates come from cultures that serve it under rich and spicy curries, in pockets steamed with meats, and with tasty stir fries, so it’s a staple in our household. Their daughter, who is almost 18 months old, repeats the word desperately before each dinner, like it is what she’s been dreaming about since before she was born. And maybe she was. She nods, points and tries to grab when she sees it. Once it’s cooled and on her tray, she takes it by fistfuls and shoves it into her mouth. What doesn’t make it in covers her face, hands and arms, and I wonder if she isn’t more satisfied by the idea of being completely covered in it (if only her skin could absorb it!). I don’t get quite as excited about it as that little girl, but it has its place.

Ironically enough, one of my most enduring and poignant arguments with roommates to date was over  a rice cooker. I found it soon after I moved to LA in a thrift store for $9. It was in decent shape, and it was large enough to hold rice that would feed a crowd. The lid was on a hinge and clicked into a locked position, so that very little steam could escape while it cooked. One roommate and I would keep warmed rice in it for days. (I questioned the sanitation of this habit at first, but then googled it: you can keep it in there for up to 72 hours, my friends.) A few years (and different roommates) later, after a trip away, I pulled the rice cooker from the cabinet to make some rice and found that it wasn’t working. When I mentioned it to my roommates, they said it had broken while I was away and they didn’t know what to do, so they prayed for it and put it away. One even admitted that she didn’t care about my rice cooker. At that time I was horrified — my precious, lid-hinging-and-locking rice cooker! How could anyone not care about it (or at lease care that I cared)? By chance, a woman at our church offered us hers for free, since she never used it. The thing had a removable glass lid that nervously jumped when the steam got going, and the first time we made rice it burned (how do you burn rice in a rice cooker?). It just wasn’t the same. 

We worked through it, but it took some time (again, the situation revealed much more than disappointment about or disinterest in a rice cooker). We still all know what we mean when we say, “remember the rice cooker?”

I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this except that I had some rice with pumpkin curry for lunch today and as I shoveled every last grain into my mouth, I thought, I love rice.

my sweet golden hour

I had just graduated from college. I was living in an apartment for which I paid myself, I had just opened a credit card, gotten a cell phone, and started paying my school loans. In other words, I had bills. I also had a job which didn’t pay me much, but at the time it felt like a jackpot, and it was more than enough to cover my bills. I had roommates, and together we had laughs and taco salad night but also disagreements and quirks and petty annoyances. We weathered snowstorms and biting cold morning walks to the market before the sun even rose (we called those “adventures”) and other internal seasonal shifts that we were in no way ready for or expecting. Some came like an angry afternoon storm and broke the unbearable thick weight of life, and others were as subtle as a chilled fall breeze that whispered of something soon to die. There were break-ins and there were break-downs, of both the emotional and automobile sort, all accompanied by tears. I moved twice, started dating once, broke up once, and swore off all of these things for the rest of my life at least once, but probably more. I loved work and hated work and wondered how I could really work eight hours a day and if getting an average review after my first year meant I would be just average now that I wasn’t in school anymore. I was at times annoyingly hopeful and at others desperately needy and I learned that I needed to learn how to get back up after taking a few hits. (It would be more years until I actually learned how to do that.) I also learned that five year plans are so over-rated and interruptions - the holy kind - aren’t rude but rather incredibly merciful. 

This was my sweet golden hour of life, when the fresh early dew sparkled and danced in new sun. To look at a photo of it, all you’d see is the glimmering light.