Season of hustle, soul at rest

Photo: Heather Kaufmann // Durham, NC // winter 2019

I must remember that it's just a season, this year of hustle. (Well, it's not quite a whole year, just an academic year.)

How does one keep her heart at rest when there's so much pressure to do, do, do? And I want to maintain a spirit of excellence in my work, I want to finish strong. I will finish strong.

Then I remember the quiet moments. Walking among the young trees in a New Zealand orange grove, sneaking up on the birds, all by my lonesome. But not lonely.

Drinking in the faint light of stars with friends on a hanging bridge, also in New Zealand.

Mosquitoes biting all my available limbs last summer and I didn't care at all, cicadas chirping, trespassing with friends in Chesapeake.

There's a constant tension within me between my ambitions and my limitations. Wanting more, but also being content with the present. And it's not about wanting more stuff; it's about wanting more experiences, more connection with people, more knowledge (I always want to be reading more!), and wanting to create more. I have so many ideas bubbling every so slightly just beneath the surface, and I am trying to be ok with the reality that I can't get to them in this season. I am made for eternity, and my spirit feels that longing. 

These words echo throughout the full days,

"He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together."  [Colossians 1:17] 

And somewhere between those words, between the thousands of thoughts racing through my head, my soul finds rest.

a credo to live by

Photo: Heather Kaufmann // Durham, NC // spring 2018

Thank you, Kelly Flanagan, for these words that so accurately portray the longing within me to create:

"It's as if artists have given a megaphone to the voice of grace, so they can always hear it saying: You're not here to be great; you're here to create. You're not here to make a difference; you're here to make beauty. To make a little order out of the big chaos. To add a little abundance in a world of scarcity." 

[taken from Loveable by Kelly Flanagan. Zondervan, 2017]

I knew then it was over

when I had short hair, ages ago // 35 mm // Virginia Beach oceanfront

I was babysitting for a friend a couple years ago, and jotted down this poem in her dimly-lit living room after putting the kids to bed. Something about the author's unabashed telling stirred in me an eagerness to take risks, to jump when the opportunity presents itself. And simultaneously to be aware of the beauty and gravity in each of our choices.

Genesis 1:28
Kate Daniels

In the dank clarity of the Green Line tunnel
we hatched our plan - to grow a creature
from those nights of love, those afternoons
of thick scents, those liquid mornings, odor
of coffee mingling with musk. Actually, he wanted
six, he said, standing there in the chill, a train
thundering up like an epiphany the two of us
verified together.

I knew then it was over, irrevocably
over, my previous life, alone and unloved, could see
how it would finally play itself out, starring him
and our creatures, the chaotic kitchen, the rumpled
beds, my wrinkled shirttails smeared with egg.
Helplessly, I tilted toward him and those sweet
images, to his mouth and his smell, toward my life
and my future, the nights we would recline, locked
and rocking in groaning love, the months my belly
would expand with our efforts, the bloody bringing forth
of two of him and one of me.

I stood for one last moment alone,
inside a cloud of grace, a pure and empty
gift of space where history released its grip.
Its bulging bag of bad memories burst open
in the doors of a train and was carried off
to a distant city I swore never to revisit.
And then I turned to his lips and his tongue,
to our hands in our gloves unbuckling each other,
calculating how quickly we could travel
back home. To anyone watching, it must have
looked like lust - two lovers emboldened
by the anonymity residing in a subway stop.
What kind of being could possibly see
a new world was being made, a universe
created? Who could have known how called
we were to what we were doing? How godlike
it was, how delicious, how holy?