Coming Home. Becoming Home.

The last day of the year and I have to scrape windshield ice but I don't even care. My broken laptop has been resurrected and I whisk it off to a coffee shop to warm its chips and wires, to warm my belly with fancy mocha and pumpkin bread, to warm my hands and my soul with inspiration and words, again.

It's been too long, friends, and I'm sorry. Life and hiccups have kept me away but all is well and all will be well.

Happy New Year.

Our Jacob is finally home, and we are grateful. The holidays are still lingering in a hush, woven into this creamy gray vapor that hangs around us, barely noticeable upon the cracked cement sidewalk, the aged headstones peeking out behind bare branches at the cemetery I drive past to get here. It's a fitting sort of state, as weather often is, for the end of things, this year, a little dreary but not unpleasant…a wash of whiteness and stillness like a curtain being dropped. The romantic in me will see the same sights in Technicolor tomorrow. I'm a dreamer that way, and new years always hold new promises, new adventures, and I'm game.

I declared 2012 the year of Home. I thought, perhaps, after much weariness from our nomadic years that it might have been the year of settling down, the year of tying up loose ends, the year of holding down the fort in pajamas and feeling like a normal family for a change. It sounded so healing just a year ago, so safe and warm, a year of Home, a year of family and laughter and too much good food. What I wanted, looking back, was a quiet place for my heart to nurse its wounds, a space to linger long on whatever was supposed to come next.

It was that. Sort of. In some ways.

Just not like I expected.

Because the year of home…the year I planned for coming home, was really about becoming home, in a million ways that were nowhere in sight on the milky gray horizon of last winter. And this next year, too, will be a series of blind-sighted developments, surprise plot turns, and new things big and small. I return to college in seven days, four days before I turn 33.

So I'm pondering today all the words that I think might mark 2013 in a way I can't even imagine from where I sit right now. Bloom. Revel. Embrace. Worship. Jubilee. Inspiration. Wonder. Explore. Listen.

I hope, no matter what, that this new year will be full of words, full of life and connection and a still sort of dwelling on the magnitude of every present moment, for me and for you, my friends.

Stay safe, tonight.  

Sticky Sleeves, A Timely Word

It is blue dawn now, and a layer of ice glistens from atop the deck railing, wispy fog streaking the landscape like pulled-apart cotton balls.  Quiet settles out there and in here, and I lay my arm in a drizzle of pancake syrup and pronounce it good.  After all, this is home.

So that seems to be my word, this year, having never done the word-for-a-year trend before, but heavy on my heart this January that life, this go 'round, needs a bit of definition, some pronouncement upon it for the next few hundred days.  I asked Him for a word, to settle something into my heart, and he gave me one.

Home.

Source

And yet, I fought it.  It wasn't very profound.  Shouldn't this be the year of Giving or of Grace or Faith?  The year of Prayer or Simplify or Grow or Fly?  I wanted to Dream, to Create, to experience the depth of Peace this year.

You can, He said.

At Home.

So even as my friends erase my address book entry for the 21st time in 15 years, I settle into a season of home.  Of learning that of all the things I strive to be, the who I am at home is the who I was most created to be. 

And while this sounds so warm and fuzzy, it's more of a difficult concept for me than for most, I suspect.  I am rather domestically disabled, at times, but heap upon the expectation that my home be perfect…warm and inviting and filled with creativity and love and delicately hung window treatments that perfectly frame the world beyond.  The world where I can be somebody and I want to make a difference for all those people out there, in the world, and my sights can grow long and distant and far too grand, sometimes, with the idea that if I could only be good and perfect, I might earn peace and grace. 

But I am somebody already, nearly everything to a few little hearts and a big one here and there are walls that contain all I really need to do or be in this wide world, and it starts, I know, right here, at home.

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