Final Thoughts for the New Year: The Big One

Now, after that brief interlude, to reconnect with what I was talking about before, the subject of New Year's Non-Resolutions. Here are a couple more from me. Maybe just one more. One more big one.

You know, you might not be able to tell from what I post on here, but The Grand Plan is always very much on my mind. It's a big plan, an audacious undertaking, and I feel like if I'm not careful, working on it and towards it day by day, it will slip right through my fingers. So clearly, this is the next step, to pursue work in some kind of art therapy kind of area to give me some actual experience. Because, you see, I wonder to myself from time to time if I would actually like living The Grand Plan once I actually get there. And, since it is unthinkable to do all that work and then not enjoy it, I want to be able to find out now if this will work for me. So one of my amorphous directions for 2009 is to pursue work that will get me closer to actual experience in the art therapy/spirituality realm.

But...oh dear. So many things could go wrong. What if I can't actually find such a job. There are very few such jobs in all of Buffalo, and what's to say they would give such a glorious opportunity to an inexperienced little twit like myself? The job market in Buffalo is generally not regarded as a great one, and the economy sucks, who's to say I'll get any job at all? Probably I'll end up working as a waitress at Denny's--getting hit on by trucker's and having chocolate milk thrown at me by bratty little kids. Not to speak of the unlivable wage, so I won't be able to afford my apartment and I'll have no place to live and no food and...

There I go again. The wretched little voice inside me that's constantly prattling on (what beloved guru Anne Lamott would refer to as K-FKD) telling me that I'll never get what I want; just because I want it, it will elude me. That nothing will ever work out for me, so why should I even try to pursue my dreams? And then, there are those quieter, more sinister voices, the fears beneath the fears. Not that I won't be able to find opportunities, but that even if opportunities should come, once I'm in them, I'm sure to fail. I'm not good at actually working with people. I have nothing of value to say. People won't respect me or listen to me. I don't actually care in an empathetic way about other people's problems. And I'm too afraid of the kind of people that need help (former drug addicts, homeless or inner city youth, etc.) to actually be any good to them. Talky, talk talk.

So what I want in the New Year, what I really want to pursue, what I really want to do in the next year (or, more realistically, through the rest of my lifetime) is to silence the voices of fear. The voices of not being good enough, the voices that stop me from pursuing things before I even begin. Or, if I can't silence them, I'll live my life in spite of them. Perhaps that is the best thing we can do, to just work around the little gremlins until they die off from never being fed. Or, here's an idea. Give them a crash pad of their own, somewhere else they can hang out so they don't just rattle around in my head.

So, this is me, manifesting in hope. Yes, world, yes printed word, hold me accountable. This is the direction in which I intend to walk in the new year.

So...uhh...anyone want to give me a job?

You Too?!?!

Really?!?!

First Things reads xkcd too?

Bestill my heart...the internet makes fast friends of us all.

Thoughts for a New Year

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about New Year's Resolutions. Generally, in the past, I have hated the idea of making resolutions at New Year's. People always seem to resolve to do things like lose weight, which is really rather absurd, for a weight-obsessed culture like ours to do anything that makes us focus even more of our attention on something so shallow. What I object to is New Year's resolutions set with the aim of "self-improvement." These seem to be so burdensome to people who spend all their time and energy focusing on this idealized version of themselves that they're trying to get to, rather than the person that they are and the life that is going on all-around them. I know from experience that that kind of goal setting will only lead to self-castigation and self-disappointment if I try to pursue it.

However, this is not to say that I am necessarily against people trying to better themselves. The way that I am trying to think about it this year is more amorphous, like what directions do I want to pursue in 2009? What paths should I head down in a more intentional way, where would I like to see myself having moved towards at the end of this year? I don't want to set any agendas, make any graphs or charts, detail any daily checklists. But I do want to be intentional about the kind of person I am becoming.

So, with that end in mind, one of the things I would like to pursue more this year is to become a more intentional writer. I think that I have always had a really hard time with making art and writing a part of my identity. The terms always seem to encompass so much that I have been afraid to apply them to myself. I have been afraid to make the switch from "Yes, I write stuff sometimes," to "Yes, I am a writer." But beacause of my self-doubt, I think I have actually tried to distance myself from the craft since graduation. As though, yes, that was something I indulged in in my foolish youth, but now I've moved on to more productive hobbies. But the fact of the matter is that I am writing all the time, and I think I just need to commit to doing it in an intentional way, with an eye to the craft of it. Along with that, I am hoping, hoping being an operative word, to be able to post more to this blog this year. I think we have all taken note that posting once a month really doesn't cut the mustard. I had hoped to be able to post at least once a week, and that just wasn't happening, in part because I think I set such exceptionally high standards for myself, that the content much be deep and the language beautiful before anything could be posted, so I ended up with these epic treatises that I could only get around to writing about every month. I of course want to respect the time of anyone reading this and keep an eye on quality, but maybe not to such an extent that I paralyze myself. And I think friends would appreciate hearing from me a little more often, for the sake of keeping in touch.

Another facet of this writing thing is that I would like to start using my degree in a lucrative manner. I am not really sure what this would look like, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately because my friend Dan has a degree in choral conducting, and so he goes around and conducts choirs. Seems pretty simple, but this has been striking me as a revolutionary idea because how many of my other friends have jobs that actually relate in any way to their degree. I am not saying this in the sense that the degree is the important thing, but most of us chose our degrees because we thought we'd enjoy jobs working in those fields. So why aren't we in those fields now that we have those degrees? Well, there are actually a number of reasons that that is probably the case, but I think in my case it also has a lot to do with that distancing thing I was just talking about. I don't know if a job as a "writer" (whatever that could mean) is necessarily in the future, but perhaps, publishing? I just have this strong conviction that I shouldn't hold myself back just because I feel unqualified. I'll let someone else tell me I'm unqualified. I want to believe that I could do it until I find out differently.

So, any ideas where I could go with this writing thing? Or, do you have any New-Year's-amorphous-non-resolutions to share? Do tell!

I have a couple more thoughts about directions for the new year, but in the spirit of posting more frequently and briefly, I'll stop here for today...

Come to Be

What I want to write about is the day after Christmas. I feel like the day after Christmas has always plagued me with a sense of disappointment and disillusionment that fairly boots all the joy of the Christmas season clear out the door. As a kid (and, let’s face it, as an adult too) I can remember constantly feeling, on that most dread day, that Christmas had not been enough. There weren’t enough presents, not enough merriment, there was just not enough time for all the cookie-baking, carol singing, present wrapping, and everything else that was supposed to make this “the most wonderful time of the year.” Every year, it is easy to feel like I didn’t get enough Christmas.

I guess this is not a surprising state of affairs for a culture in which every experience is touted as a pinnacle, a higher peak than the last. But I think what is surprising to me is that I often get the same sense spiritually. I think this has been the first year that I have plunged into the church year and found what a leap into darkness this first season is. Advent, after all, is proclaimed as a coming light to people currently walking in darkness. But this season which begins in darkness is supposed to grow ever brighter until suddenly, blindingly, Christ, the self-proclaimed light of the world, enters the picture in the form of a vulnerable God, a weak baby that puts to shame all my high-minded expectations of myself.

This is how it was preached to me this Christmas Eve at a large, Texan, Methodist church. The preacher was telling a story about how he and his brother used to go every year to visit his Grandmother’s house, and, most particularly his Grandmother’s swimming pool. It was just a cement hole in the backyard that had filled, over the years, with rain water and leaves and branches and all manner of scummy, slimy things that lurked in murky waters. The point of the games was to play near the water, without actually falling in, which would obviously result in death. So, as you might expect from a story like this, one day this boy had fallen into the pool and was thrashing around, expecting doom any moment when the college kid who lived next door saw what was happening and jumped the intervening fence to come and rescue him, pull him out, clap him on the back a couple times and absently ask, are you okay? before striding back over the fence.

You know the metaphor, if you’ve grown up around churches. I can’t tell you how many times I heard variations on the same story. I was in peril and Jesus dragged me out by the scruff of my neck and slapped me on the shore to dry off. Hooray. The light has come into the darkness and blinded all those whose pupils did not dilate quickly enough and left them dazed, seeing fuzzy patterns on the undersides of their eyelids. No wonder the day after Christmas looks so bleak. We expected a downdraft of glitter on the breeze, the strumming of harps that would indicate that the Great Miracle where Everything becomes Different had finally, finally come. But no, this year is just as bleak as the last.

But what I assert is that Christmas is not like the sudden appearance of someone coming to pull you out of a swimming pool. I much prefer Dante’s immortal lines:

“In the middle of the road of my life
I awoke in the dark wood
where the true way was wholly lost”

I acknowledge the darkness of the woods, and the lostness of my condition. I acknowledge the fragility and weakness that comes with my humanity, the ease with which the very essence of my life can be undone, and the wickedness within me that I have come to know through the terrifying intimacy of a long acquaintance. It is very dark, in this wood, in this world, but my experience has taught me, at least as far as my own story is concerned, that God’s way of salvation is not to pluck us out of the darkness, out of the confusion, and set us on a high hilltop from which we can never be moved. It seems to me more like when Christmas happens (and never forget, Christmas can happen at any time of the year) suddenly—zap!—someone is there in the darkness with you.

I also acknowledge mystery, my dears, and so this may be all I can say. I do not know the ways of God, the shapes he makes as he moves through the darkness of a dark wood. Is she there to comfort, to shield? Is he there to guide? Will she take you down an ever darker road, the road of perils, for reasons unknown? Will he travel close at your side or on a distant but parallel path so that you can just barely follow his adjacent movements through the trees? I don’t know how to answer these questions and at this point I am not ever all that sure of the validity of the question. When does the one being led really understand the leadership of the one showing the way? If I knew the terrain, I would not have come to find myself so lost.

Well, then. The one thing I know, the one truth that is very large if we allow it to be, is the truth of presence. God, who was once only very far away has come very close; God has come to be. With us. So perhaps on the day after Christmas it seems as if nothing has changed because on the first brush, this change seems like such a small one. But my hope is that it is a small change like changing the angle of trajectory is a small change. It’s only in traveling the course that any real difference can be discerned.

I could not believe in a God who pulls me out of all my problems, dusts me off, and sends me on my way, because I’ve never seen that happen. But perhaps I could place my hope in a God who zaps himself into my darkness, who leads me in the way mysterious, destination unknown, but who is, at the end of the day, there.

I could, perhaps, believe in the God who has come to be.

Peace for the New Year,
S.

Sugar Rush

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear! Yes, I know, I know. It's been since November (early November) since I last posted. Ouch. You have no idea, you will never know how many times during the week I think to myself, especially in this Advent season. You have no idea of the lofty goals I sent for beautiful, meditative reflections for each(!) week(!) of the Advent season. Unfortunately, as you can see, that has not been the case. I don't really know what to say. Although there have been no recent catastrophes (in my life at least) things, on the whole, have been fairly stressful. Work, family stuff, and a busy social life all keep me far away from the inner quiet that I try to return to each Advent season. This year, I have been working on being more self-reflective, more present to myself and my internal state of being. Unfortunately, that has not been terribly conducive to posting lengthy monologues for all the web-net to see. And again, alas, today will not be the day that this gets accomplished. But I have two other offerings for you, besides stating that I am determined to get at least one quality post up before Christmas.

Although the limitations of technology prevent me from being able to let everyone taste my recent creations, I can at least offer these lovely pictures of some of the things that have been consuming my time:







May I introduce Cranberry Pecan Bars, Hazelnut Tea Cookies, and Cashew Toffee? Nice to make your acquaintance! These little gems have been my joy and crown this holiday season. I am a rabid traditionalist at Christmastime in particular, so when I get home with the fam it's going to be nothing but the classics: sugar cookies, peanut butter cookies topped with a Hershey's kiss, and maybe a batch of chocolate cheesecake bars. But because I have an opportunity to be traditional once I go home, while I'm here in Buffalo I have the freedom to be wildly experimental, particularly because here I can feed people so many more cookies than my constantly dieting family would ever have permitted. And, voila! Batches of beautiful, terrifying boiling sugar start appearing on every burner of the stove.

Terrifying, you say? But why terrifying? That seems like something of an overstatement, but those of you who have ever done any sort of candymaking know where I'm coming from. I myself was permanently scarred by a batch of...something I was trying to make in middle school with my best friend Traci when something went terribly wrong. I'll spare you the gory details, but somehow all that was left when the dust settled was a sheet of wax paper covered in crystallized, non-carmelized sugar blobs which somebody was going to have to eat. We're Irish dammit, which means we will never waste food, no matter how wretched or cavity inducing.

But even in the sensible, adult world of well-equipped candy production, the field is rife with danger, there's the worry about burning or about undercooking, flame control, rate of water loss, and hello! can we imagine what even a drop of 300 degree melted sugar would do if you got it on your skin. It's what my great love and mentor Alton Brown refers to as "culinary napalm." Needless to say, there is much to fear in this brave new world of candy making.

But, feeling adventurous, I decided to jump in with both feet, trying not one, but two different sugar melting recipes for the consumption of my dearest friends and colleagues. These were both made on the same night, and let me tell you, tension in the kitchen was high. First gasp! there was not, as I had assumed, any light corn syrup in the house! Then, the panic of substitution--will honey change the flavor? Adding the cranberries, which immediately clumped in the middle of the pan as they cooled the sugar in the immediate surroundings before everything melted again.

And the toffee, oh toffee should only be attempted by those with nerves of steel! After a brief stir, you actually remove your spoon from the pan and keep an eagle eye on the thermometer as the the temperature climbs higher and higher, agonizingly slowly while the color of your mixture goes from buttery gold to taupe, to pale brown, to a rich caramelly color but by this point you've bit your fingernails down to stubs, knowing that only a few measly degrees stand between you and burnt sugar madness while the climb of the temperature slows to a crawl, 296, 297 and you're ready to rip the whole thing of the burner, sure that you smell charring in the air but you force your hand away from the dial as beads of sweat run down your forehead, 298, 299 and time seems to stand still as every ounce of your willpower is poured into waiting for that last degree, trusting that sweet, grandmotherly Paula Deen is not leading you into rack and ruin, willing yourself to holding on as the caramel darkens that one last shade...300! You kill the flame but now it's the clock your racing as you add salt, vanilla, and thick meaty cashews you've been toasting in the oven and stir frantically to get everything combined before the sticky mess is forever welded to your sauce pan--but no, it's out now, it's on the cookie sheet and cooling innocuously, the residual heat slowly melting the pieces of fine Belgian chocolate you casually scattered over the top as though to say, "What, this old thing? Why it's the easiest thing in the world to make!"

Phew, I get tired just reliving the whole experience. But it helped me to understand the whole Bungee-jumping, jumping out of airplanes phenomena. What a rush! Of course, next time the stakes won't be so high, now that I'm a seasoned veteran, which means I've got to find something new, something even more terrifyingly risky to stick my chefly neck out on...oh, and everything did turn out deliciously, thanks for asking.

But, of course, I understand if victuals are not what you came here looking for. After all, this is, by and large, not written to be a food blog, even if those are what I spend all my time reading. Okay, well if you came here looking for food for the soul, the best I can offer is some warmed up leftovers like this, or maybe this if you're in the mood for some Marian devotion (and, let's face it, who isn't?).

And soon. That's all I can say now is soon. I hope that the beautiful, nourishing words are given to me soon, that space to reflect and be refreshed is soon given to me. And if that is the case then, I promise, I will pass some along to you!

Little Deaths

This may sound ever so slightly macabre, but I've been thinking a lot lately about death. Don't worry, I have good reasons for it. Not so much the celebration of Halloween, which I wrote about in my last post. That holiday I view more as the ultimate postmodern celebration of our limitless potential to create and live out of alternate selves, anyway. But, the nearby holidays of All Souls Day, and in Hispanic cultures, Dia de los Muertos, started the ball rolling on this one. This was the first year that All Souls Day was really brought to my attention through the church I attend here. The music chosen for that morning was the most beautiful requiem mass, composed by someone called Gabriel Faure, about whom I know nothing, but I suspect Dan knows a whole lot, so you could ask him if you really wanted to know. They also had a reading of something called a necrology, which is just a list of all the names of people from the church who have died since last All Souls Day. I didn't know any of the people named, but it was a time to remember people in my own life who have died. And then this Sunday we again had a very somber tone in a sermon talking about the passage in Matthew about the narrow way, how difficult it is to follow Jesus, how demanding, how so much is expected of us. And also we directed our attention for a while to the needs of the world, war and hunger and human cruelty.

The way I see it, this is all very timely because fall to me is a season of many little deaths. Even if it's only the death of the beautiful weather that we'd enjoyed all week, the last gasp of summer that we awoke to find so abruptly extinguished on Saturday (!!!) morning. Each leaf is dying for another winter, the grass is dying, the flowers in our front yard are dying. The summer season is dying, more slowly and gently than I expected, but it passes nonetheless. I don't really think of winter as a time of death, but more as a time of rest, a long nap where the world dreams white dreams, a time of quiet and reflection and hopefully building strength. It's hard, though, to give up summer. It's hard to give up the leaves and the warm days and the busy calendars. But I feel like the most important thing to do is to become at home with the change. I think that's why fall is gradual, why things go slowly, bit by bit. Alicia and I were talking recently about how we need to learn to be at home with the cold, at home with winter, to not resist it with the way that we talk or think about it. It's a neutral thing, really, winter is. Even a good thing. And we'll make it through so much better if every puff of icy wind doesn't make us grumble about the wretchedness of life.

That's a thing that seldom gets mentioned when we speak of all these little deaths. A death can, in fact, be a good thing. It could be the death of a part of yourself that was holding you back, that didn't belong to the truest version of yourself. It could be the death of a terrible season of your life, allowing you to be reborn into something new. It could be the stripping away of something which you clung to which is no longer necessary to your life. Little deaths.

So here are my reflection questions for fall: What is dying in my life right now? What do I need to let go of, whether with joy or with regret? And what could I lay aside for a winter rest, knowing that I can take it up again in another season?

Spooktacular!

Okay, now I know this is belated, but HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

Contrary to rumors floating around out there, this is not my first Halloween, though the celebration did kind of fade into oblivion for a while, due to my very Evangelical upbringing. But this Halloween was special somehow, I was just so excited to celebrate. Then again, I am always excited to celebrate everything. But this Halloween had pretty much everything a girl could ask for. I decorated home and office with creepy fake spider webs and little ghosties and a cardboard chandelier decorated with skulls and pumpkins and tombstones and the newest edition to our house, a very cute gargoyle who I have named Victor (10 points if you can guess why!). I also got to carve my very own pumpkin, during our first ever Art Night (more details about that in a future post, I hope). But basically I spent three hours working on this masterpiece of a pumpkin and I am so proud. I made this design which is supposed to look like gothic, twisted sort of stained glass windows, and then on the other side I carved this deranged raven-bird creature. The windows aren't really carved through, I just took off the top layer of the pumpkin and the light kind of glows though the pumpkins walls in this eerie way. It's great and I hope to be able to post pictures soon.

Also, for Halloween I got to dress up in a homemade costume. I was a gypsy, which was fun, but easily confusing as I also kind of looked like a pirate chick. This effect was enhanced by the fact that I was wearing enough eye-liner to be mistaken for Johnny Depp's sister. If only. But I love costumes and I loved that everybody else had costumes too. So creative! We had Princess Leia, Mary Poppins, a Marine, a suicide bomber (very un-PC, but what can I say?) a reindeer, Clark Kent, a hippie...man, it just goes on. And this motley cast of characters was all assembled at Becca's house for a Halloween party!!! I guess at this age, being past the era of trick-or-treating (sadly) a party is pretty much the best way to spend Halloween. And this was my favorite kind of party: not too many people, lots of friendly faces and one very hysterical conversation about the origins of tapioca. The only thing that was missing was trick-or-treaters, but my impression was that that isn't really something that's done here on the good ol' west side. Oh well. All in all, a practically perfect Halloween!

S.

P.S.--Oh, and I almost forgot, happy Feast of All Souls!