Five Minute Friday - Wild Stillness

Five Minute Friday - Join The Gypsy Mama at (in)courage today 

for just 5 minutes of writing without regard to perfection.  Today's topic:  "Still". 

GO

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With 11 kids that live in this house, give or take a few at any given time, I have very little time to be still.  Even while I sleep, my mind makes mental lists and I gather and fret and worry about all that tomorrow will hold.  My eyes roll into the darkness and head sinks down heavy on pillow-fluff and there’s the cry of a nightmare, the need of clean sheets from a nighttime accident, the allure of another glass of water.  I rarely get to be still.

In just a few minutes, I’ll head for the airport and after this flight and that, and a bit of a drive eastward, I’ll arrive in Destin, Florida for some much needed stillness with a good friend.  There is stillness found in laughter, sometimes, did you know that?  There are friends with whom your soul settles and you are made quiet, even amidst raucous amusement and loud, long-overdue catching up.

I am desperately in need of this, and so grateful for the chance to slip out for just a few short days.  Close your eyes and slip your mental toes down into the warm sand, lean back and breathe in saline air, and be still with me. 

STOP

Be back Monday or Tuesday, friends.  Have a beautiful weekend!

When You've Lost Your Muchness

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“You’re not the same as you were before.  You were much more “muchier”.  You’ve lost your muchness.”

So says The Mad Hatter to Alice in Wonderland.

And it resonates because I too have lost my muchness.  I think sometimes it’s just slipped away…melted… when I lack inspiration and the energy just won’t come to create or tell stories or do the things I know I was created for.  But it didn’t melt.  I see now that like an avalanche my muchness has been buried, rubble-topped and stunted deep beneath… my muchness.

Stay with me here.

The valuable muchness that I have been given, and yours too – the vibrant soul full of life and words and gifts for the sharing collapses so often between the muchness of life – piles of stuff and lists and emails, things to clean and things to store and things to buy.  And the muchness of life is suffocating, sometimes – the life that pulses with the Spirit and love and all things magic and miracle gets buried beneath the keeping up of the life that no one ever designed us for.

Have you lost your muchness?

Are you, too, gasping for grace-swirled air beneath the rubble pile of the rat race?

The Lord is keeping me up at night with a laundry list of the things in my life I need to let go of in order to make room for the abundance waiting outside my door.  Things, obligations, expectations, and even ideas.

There is muchness within me, waiting to get out, kept prisoner by an entirely different kind of muchness.

And so, I begin a journey of release, of letting go of the muchness I hold in my hands to be full of a muchness that arouses my soul, awakens the life of abundance that we’re all designed to have.

  

Where in your life can you let go, today?  What can you surrender to make room for that which is so much more? 

Nothing. Something. Miracle.

I’d forgotten how much I love baking.

 Busy hands and a busy mind -- stress and anxiety and fretting about things to come – had kept me from it mostly since I’ve been here.  A birthday cake here and there, a batch of mix-box cupcakes, a quick glazed little number when company arrives… but that little white tin of baking powder sits mostly untouched these days, especially after my stand-mixer went on the fritz last November.

Tonight, there was quiet – if not in my home, then at least internally – and here I am reunited with this former flame, inspired again by granulated sugar and berry-stained lips and the magic that happens when the elements clash and the fiery heat is applied.

There is peace here, tonight.  It smells like warm blueberry cake and crème fraiche with fresh strawberries and tastes like enchantment, and rolling berry pulp around my tongue I can’t help but awe anew at the miracle of seeds and dirt and sun that collide into this – a strawberry!  A cantaloupe!  A tangerine! 

Miracle, I say, and nothing less.

And, too, it seems miraculous to me this chemical reaction we call baking happens at all, and perhaps that’s why I love it so.  It is creation, a very ode to our Maker, to toss in a bit of white powder with more white powder, and with a little help from the animal kingdom (or an improvisation thereof), throw in a splash of this and a crack of that, and whip it all up together in a glass dish, subject to extreme temperature, and there we have it… something beautiful and succulent is born.

So we feast with our eyes and our mouths and our tongues are transported and hearts are lifted and bellies are filled, and this, too, is miracle.  Before there was nothing, and now there’s something… and it’s miraculous.  And so goes all types of creativity, it seems. 

There isn’t, and then there is, and it is good. 

And it is the Creation Story again and again playing out in our breakfast and work days and knitting and speaking and singing and loving and painting and scratching out this chicken scratch for the world to see – Nothing. Something. Miracle.

It is Monday and another week I am blessed to count blessings, to slow and recognize all these miracles in all their forms:

- A whole house smelling of blueberry cake and strawberries.

- My husband, serving this week on a mission trip in the Dominican Republic.

- A fruitful answer to a long-ago desperate prayer.

- So much wonderful encouragement from fellow bloggers.

- The delicious anticipation of a girls’ getaway with a friend I haven’t seen in way too long.

- A sense of taste.

- A surprise greeting card arriving by mail today from a pretty amazing guy I know.  Return address?  “Left side of the bed”.  Guess who it was from? *wink*

- This week, less talking, more writing.

- Little Caleb, climbing up in bed with me in the wee hours for just a quiet closeness we both must have needed.

- A family’s blessed increase.

- Redefining home and the painful process that brings me so readily to my knees.

- Canteloupe and tangerines and all the delicious miracles that fill our kitchen.   

*Update:  After this post went up, I got a call from my amazing mother-in-law, letting me know that they were passing down my husband's great-grandmother's sorta-heirloom Kitchen Aid stand mixer down to me.  She hadn't read this post, but it was a timely gift, fitting for what I had just shared here hours before. Love when things like that happen, don't you?  Little ways that God wraps His arms around us with the grown-up equivalent of a surprise treat.  *smiles* 

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One of the greatest inspirations and encouragements to me each and every day is the support of online communities like (in)courage, Proverbs 31 Ministries, and, most recently, my discovery of The High Calling blog site.  I am blessed to be a new member of this community and excited about fellowship and growth opportunities through the many great writers that also find community here.

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Get Empty... to Get Full

The Gypsy Mama asks us to join her this Five Minute Friday, where we just write for 5 minutes, without regard to whether it’s just right.  I do love a soul that embraces imperfection.  Join us, would you?

Today’s prompt:  Full.

GO

My head is full.  Full of information and schedules and things I’m supposed to remember but are stuck somewhere between synapses, trapped in the gridlock that is my brain.  My heart is in similar condition – packed up with cares and causes, worries at the state of things, all my grand plans to save the world or at least one hurting person at a time.  I am full of their worries and my worries and joys and memories and the words of people that hurt me long ago. 

My home is full and mouth is full and memory and shopping cart and schedule and pantry and drawers and laundry baskets… all full.  Overflowing, even. 

And like an out-of-date computer, I sputter and try desperate to manage all of this, but numbers and signals get jammed up inside, bumper-to-bumper, and my eyes glaze over with a human error message:  “Memory full.  Data input overload.”

God has been dealing with me, lately, in my fullness, showing me that it’s all the wrong kind of data taking up the limited space within.  I am so full of data that I am crowding out the fullness of love and peace and the Holy Spirit. 

Haven’t I any room for the fullness of grace? 

It is time to purge.

Purge from my body and mind, my spirit and home, my mouth and closet and calendar.  Get empty, to get full.

Turn left to go right.

Get empty, to get full.

STOP

The Practice of Love

We look at each other and we know, wordless, that we have come to an end, toes edged right up against all that we can take in this moment.  There is a terrible reality hanging in the air, the kind of moment when all you can think is this can’t be happening.  But it is.  And we keep on breathing through it.

But there we stand, the mix of fear and worry and exhaustion painted plainly on our faces, suddenly aged beyond our years, silent before the Lord that only knows how the rest of this story will go.  And I am struck by the sight of us there and more than the weight of the horror is the weight of what stands out to me in this heightened moment – our togetherness.  Lovely though they were, the rings and vows and wedding guests dabbing at their tears that marriage-day seem so futile now, in this, in the face of real. ugly. painful. scary. life. 

This is commitment.  This is love.

Standing soul-bare, side-by-side and I have never been so empty.

And I have never been so full.

It occurs to me only here, only just now and in the hollow quiet of this barren moment that at the bottom of fear and loss and emptiness is only awareness of what remains when there is nothing else.

In this moment I see that the strong love is the quiet love.  The love that fears together and wonders together and laughs together and sits quietly together when there are no more words to be said.  Love is the practice of love’s presence.

This broken girl is two kinds of bride all at once and imperfectly running toward renewal at both altars -- altars of faith and of matrimony, covered over by the love that is action and the love that is left over in emptiness, running over in abundance.

Linking to:

Not a Windowpecker

I’m sitting here in blogland, middle of the afternoon, feet up and pink toes splayed in relaxation, a few quiet moments left before the cacophony of the day continues.  I’m enjoying the rural view from my dining room window – giving thanks where I usually fail to – recognizing the beauties I so often let slide past me, especially those right there, right within my reach, just within my view.

  

A woodpecker flies sideways, then slides its claw-toes into the window screen of my dining room.  It cocks its head a bit, then steadies itself and begins pecking at the window.  A few taps, and he’s confused… this is not, after all, what he’s after.  This window is not porous enough to accommodate his beak and so with added might, he taps again, frantically this time, and I’m worried he’ll crack the glass.

Silly woodpecker.  Doesn’t he know this is all wrong – that his efforts are in vain?

But still he continues – dizzying himself, I imagine, with persistence, and the tapping continues on and on and his wings begin to flutter and ruffle and I sit, watching, for how little I obviously know about woodpeckers and their attempts to make due in unlikely conditions.  I wonder if he is lost, just a bit off-track of where he’s supposed to be, or if he’s deliberate.  Does he want in here?  Here, a world made for people and home goods and not, at all, for woodpeckers?  Or is he just confused – dazzled so completely by his own window-reflection that he’s lost sight of his purpose?  How long before he notices that the window is not a tree?  How long before he gives up and finds work more fitting for what he was created to be – a woodpecker, and not a windowpecker?

The tapping intensifies and I rise from my position for a closer look, knowing this misguided little guy contains the power to damage the window with his erroneous tapping.  I walk slowly but still he spots me and flies away, far off until I lose track of where he’s gone – in search of the very work he’s made to do.  It is in him, and he will find it, even if he stops at a few more windows along the way.

But as he flies, I see my own likeness in crimson feathers and rattled beak.  What an off-center bird we have here – exhausting himself at all the wrong efforts, and there I am too, right beside him, tapping hard at glass when I ought to be in search of trees – beating my face, my spirit, against a window into a world that was never meant for me. 

Silly girl.  Don’t I know that all this struggling is, too, in vain?

I am wearing myself thin with all the wrong efforts, feathers ruffled, standing sideways, dangling from the screen that separates me from the world I was made for, poking at my own reflection in the sunlight, startlingly and suddenly aware, like this bird, of what I am and what I’ve been made for.  And I’ve been here, tapping at glass for long enough to know, now, that it is time to fly away and find a tree.