Mostly I’ve found that there aren’t words to express the depth of this part of our lives.  I see you going through things I can’t fix for you so instead of talking to you about staying strong, I’m going to draw pictures of sharks and dedicate them to you or stay deliberately quiet on the other end of the phone while you sigh over and over again or dance with you behind the counter at the café to keep your mind off of the situations that await you when you clock out.

 On Saturday, I sat around in my family’s backyard in Jersey surrounded by 30 of the people who’ve known me the longest and loved me the best, and I realized that sometimes nothing is more important than nearness.  I didn’t have much to say or even the desire to share every minute detail of my ridiculous/stressful west coast life, but I just wanted to be next to them, to feel safe and cherished in their presence.  That was enough.

There is obvious merit to filling everyone in on the details and hearing their affirming and concerned responses, but it’s exhausting to relive every emotion through the retelling of events.  Being in that backyard is like being 12 years old again.  My to-do list consists of swinging so high I almost break the branch off the chestnut tree and eating as many cookies as I can without getting sick and finding ways to sneak sips of beer without anyone noticing how much I’ve drank.  There are no responsibilities or expectations other than to be there.  That’s all that’s required of me in that setting, and I revel in that simplicity and ease of existence.  The best birthday gift I received this year was the freedom to be just as silly and uninteresting and honest as possible in complete and utter safety for 3 whole days.

And so I’m hoping to become a woman of fewer frivolous words and more presence.  As a human, I have little more to offer than to be a safe place for you to just be.

In the spirit of intentional brevity, I will leave it at that.  See you around.

Love, LR(G)

i collapsed into my mom’s arms and sobbed as i clung onto the fabric of her shirt like my life depended on not losing physical contact.

none of us make sense on our own. a magnet is just a hunk of metal when it’s not near another hunk of metal. the feeling of being completely safe with another human being in a state of total vulnerability is ultimately one of the few things that make us human. we are intentional creatures in those moments.

i am (A) because of and for (B).

this has been a year of losses, but something really profound is happening in my life again. the process of wrangling the chaos of each day’s events feels something like herding cats, but there is this other factor happening that makes all of that seem a lot more manageable.

this factor expresses itself across dinner tables and in notes left on the counter and in concerned voicemails and in the sound of your footsteps coming up the wooden stairs to our porch and even just in shared heavy silence. this factor is you.

and as each of you has played even the tiniest role in manifesting this sort of stability and comfort amidst the chaos, you’ve saved my sanity. you’ve made it ok for some days to be painful to a weird new level. the fact that you’re a phone call away or just pulling up to my house on your bike or trying to shove an entire jumbo bag of m&m’s under my bedroom door at 9am on a sunday means that i’ll be just fine.

thanks for being my (B).

love, (A)

i don’t even know what to do with all of this information.  i am so terrified to forget even one tiny word, let alone what i’ve seen and felt as all of this occurs.

the only metaphor i can come up with is that of the addition of one tiny drop of water in a lake.  the ripples extend for miles and all from just that one minuscule disruption.

sometimes it starts as something small, like the tiniest hint of an idea or a long-forgotten experience.  lately i’ve enjoyed the process of discovering my worst fears and then throwing myself into the midst of them.  it sounds almost sadistic when phrased that bluntly, but for me it’s the only way i’ve ever found permanent progress.  the only way to seek and destroy every shred of hesitation about the unknown is to head right for that unknown.  bathe yourself in every unforeseen circumstance.  “disruptions” so often tend to be the threads that tie my life together.  so i guess that’s not even the proper word for them after all.

i discussed this with someone i have grown to deeply respect recently, and he said that life is about preparedness for the disruptions.  if you can train yourself to build just enough structure to sustain the complicated pieces of a life and yet leave enough room to be flexible, teachable and available, you’re all set.  you’ve figured life out.

i had a pretty set vision for my life at one point.  i headed down that path and stayed focused and yet: all of a sudden i am here on the other side of the country learning (by trial and error mostly) about things that began to form in my mind when i was 5 years old and all of a sudden could read the words on shabby cardboard signs.

sometimes i wonder about how i found this job on craigslist.  isn’t that totally silly?  all of the incredible people who’ve invested in my life over the past 3 years have come from one singular email. 

when i look back over the years, there have always been people investing.  my parents, my extended family, my best friends, my high-school mentor, and now several others here in seattle.  there has always been someone i could call in the darkest moments.  yes, i am often a disruption too.  we are all disrupted and all disruptions. 

and as i’ve navigated the complications of the relationships i have here in this city, i’ve found myself wanting to be alone more and more.  seattle culture is very strange that way.  it’s easy to slip through the cracks or fall into an extreme.  those seem to be the two easiest options. 

and so i’m thinking that the real thing we can be doing to fix the cracks everyone keeps slipping through is that process of investing.

in the past 3 months, i’ve had 4 different friends lose someone to suicide.  i know plenty of people who struggle with depression and loneliness and the constant burden of being seen and accepted by their peers.  living in a city that values self-sustenance to a completely dysfunctional level is a huge contributor to the issue.

something has clearly gotten lost in the shuffle.

for some of us, we are thrust into the midst of where we were meant to be with very little effort on our own part.  my life’s investors have been the guardrails during this process for me.  my parents are two of the most generous, selfless people you will ever have the privilege to know.  they give and give without any consideration of the cost to themselves.  it’s nutty.  their support and guidance is all it took for me.

and yet, the experience is profoundly different for others.  i spent an hour on the phone last week with a man from ethiopia who had to flee the country during the civil war in the early nineties.  he spent a good portion of his twenties in a refugee camp in kenya (i’m sure you can picture the living conditions there) and after returning home, he had to fight tooth and nail just to finish his degree.  he had to sacrifice so much just to receive an education.  he now works for Food for the Hungry Ethiopia.  his desire to help those in need came from his own struggles.  he knows what hunger feels like. 

i’ve often wondered at our western ethnocentric mentality that leads to crazy things like dropping food from airplanes into third-world countries.  how do you think that makes the people on the ground feel?  how does that undermine the amazing things that people in the community are already doing to meet the needs of the people there?  the ultimate goal is not to be fed.  that is a symptom of the disease.  the disease is dependency on broken systems and a generational loss of the human dignity that each person is entitled to.  we are meant to sustain ourselves, and dignity is inextricably tied to our ability to provide for ourselves and our families.  when the circumstances of a place add up to the inability of the inhabitants to support themselves through work, the systems themselves are the issue.  a lack of food is not the issue.  that is merely one symptom of the issue.

so rather than dropping pallets of food from the sky, we should examine the political/social agendas that keep people in poverty.  the population of gaza is an example of this.  there is no work there, and with people unable to leave the strip, they cannot work in israel anymore either.  they have no way to support their families.  while immediate aid (food, electricity, etc.) is of course needed, shipping in supplies periodically is not a viable long-term solution.

last year i had the pleasure of meeting a man from manila who had grown up in a slum and managed to pull himself up out of poverty and complete medical school.  he later committed his life to opening up a clinic in his hometown to combat the rampant disease that overran the slum.  what he discovered through his many years serving people there is that the way to combat disease is not only to treat people at the clinic who already have contracted symptoms but to get to know the people in the community, learn about their lifestyles, their belief systems, their culture and behaviors.  in doing so, he discovered that many of the health issues of the community stemmed from widely-held and age-old superstitions about certain water sources.  the residents were drinking and using unclean water to bathe rather than traveling a to a cleaner water source on the edge of the town.  by working with local leaders and several key residents, he was able to change the peoples’ minds about the issue.  the residents trusted and loved him from his years of care for them, and so the indigenous leadership was willing to support his efforts.  the people took ownership of the solutions because they were involved in the planning on the most foundational level.

and in our own neighborhoods here in the west, this is true as well.  whatever solutions we think we see from the outside may be skewed until we get to know the community.

the “us” and “them” mentality that has developed over time is just another factor contributing to the loss of dignity.  how is a person supposed to believe they can work and be part of a society that constantly reminds them that they are somehow less of a person, only worthy of a handout and not the ability to sustain themselves and determine their own destiny?

we all need development.  those of us who grew up in middle-class america in loving families often have a hard time understanding that need because it was so automatic in our own lives, we often don’t see how crucial it was for us.  we think we’re independent.  we think we’ve accomplished everything by our own will and efforts.  that couldn’t be less true.  the circumstances of our lives have added up to our success.  we had the financial resources, the people/support resources, the emotional/mental capacity to make nonharmful decisions, a societal norm that allowed people who look and act like us to succeed easily.  we have had tons and tons of development.  it was prearranged for us from the moment we were conceived.

and so it’s easy for the middle-class to say things like “why doesn’t he just get a job?” or to look down on mothers who rely on welfare to raise 5 kids in a one-bedroom apartment.  we have never known what it’s like to work 60 hours a week and still be unable to make rent because the minimum wage in our country is not enough to support a family on and welfare subtracts funds for each dollar you earn.  we don’t know what it’s like to have such low self-esteem that it’s more natural to be dependent on a system that your family has depended on for years than to confront a society that is foreign even in its social customs. 

i know how to answer interview questions, how to handle authority, how to save money, how to read a bank statement, how to talk to a landlord.  i was never taught these things outright.  it was through the osmosis of my middle-class existence.  for someone who comes from a different background, trying to navigate my world would be like watching me try to start a life in the middle of the countryside in russia.  i wouldn’t know the social norms, the language, the customs.  it certainly wouldn’t be an effortless transition. 

and even so, the transition would still be somewhat ok in the sense that i have an intrinsic value instilled in me from birth because i grew up in a loving family.  what if i didn’t have that?  what if i didn’t know how to trust authority figures because of years of abuse?  what if i had been shifted from home to home so my only understanding of stability was transience itself?

development looks different for each person.  but ultimately it comes down to that investment process i mentioned above.  it’s not about handouts or short-term work projects or social programs.  these things are all great in their own right, but to change the way our society distributes wealth and cares for the mentally ill and makes it possible for everyone to support themselves with no more than 40 hours of work logged each week, we need to invest in people.  whether or not we come from background that makes it easy to see how the investment of others in our lives has saved us, it has saved each of us.

oh my god this has gotten really long.  my brain might explode if i don’t get all of this written down.

anyway, those are my thoughts for now.

love, LR

we are not good listeners.  i am 100% including myself in this accusation because i am the one i’ve witnessed this in the most recently (but i spend more time with myself than anyone so maybe you are a worse listener than me but i just don’t know it).

i mean we obviously see the world through our own specific lenses, but what’s been plaguing me even more than our differences in perspective is the way in which i see us all projecting our own selves onto other peoples’ situations.

i’ve struggled long and hard with the idea of solidarity, and i think this is the puzzle piece that was missing: even when i think i have achieved solidarity with another human being’s situation, i haven’t.  i am still me in that situation.  i still have my 25 years of history and the 25 years of thought patterns and ideas and even completely subconscious behavioral traits that come with my history. 

so is solidarity impossible?

yes.

but hear me out.

solidarity in its purest form is definitely impossible because even if i was to sell everything i own, break my lease and quit my job, i will never understand the life of the people i pass by on third avenue every day.  that is impossible.  but i think the beauty of that is that human life can become a work of mutuality.  none of us is getting life completely right.  but maybe the disparities of our experiences add up to something wiser and richer than we could ever dream up in our own small realities.

a few weeks ago, i listened to a man i respect very much give a lecture on this subject: how to affect social change without imposing your own pain on the people you’re trying to help.  he said this: “our addiction to being understood is the root of the problem.”  RIGHT?!

we are absolutely going to become inadvertent predators if we do not deal with our need to be understood BEFORE we try to step into someone else’s shoes and truly learn how to listen and affect change based on what we hear of their unjust circumstances.  i mean, you can’t hear if your ears are covered, and our own issues and unresolved pain are the metaphorical earplugs in this picture.

throughout history, people groups who have denied their pain ultimately resorted to violence.  it’s written all over the bloody story of humanity.  the aforementioned lecturer said this also: “if we don’t transform our experience of pain, we will transmit it.  our success is tied to our wounds.  the first condition of healing is to give voice to pain.”

so here is where i’m heading with this:  listening (and i mean really listening) is probably the one of the most demanding and painful human activities.  the energy required to leave ourselves out of the equation, to truly experience a person’s life from THEIR point of view instead of our own is beyond us really. 

but there is hope for us.

if we can set aside our need to be seen and to be understood (including our motives being understood), we can even just for a brief amount of time truly attain some small shred of selfless solidarity with another human being.  this means dealing with our own pain apart from the pain of others.  we can give voice to our pain together, talk it out, share our experiences verbally, but we need to process our own lives apart from those of the people we are seeking to help. 

what anyone else has seen of the world is not any better or worse than what we have seen–merely different.  hugely different.  if we want to affect social change, it has to be from the ground-level, which means seeing each individual issue from the ground level.  if you want to learn how to rehabilitate a housing project, don’t approach the city council with a plan.  eat dinner with the residents.  have coffee on their porches.  meet with teachers at the local schools.  find out how many grocery stores are in that neighborhood and what the average price of the necesseties are vs. the average weekly income of the families living in the housing.  and most importantly: listen. 

it’s hard to admit, but as i meet people from such different backgrounds, it’s hard to truly listen.  i bring my own experience to the table, which can of course be useful in specific ways but it can also be the roadblock to truly helping in a way that is nonharming and contextual.  what i would do in a situation is not necessarily the right thing for someone else.

for instance, when i hit rock bottom a few months ago, the only people i trusted to give me advice i would actually act on were molly and my mom.  that was it.  and only because they know how i think, how the rhythm of my life is flowing, how i process.  they have solidarity with me because they see my life through my eyes as much as is possible.  and that’s because they have spent years listening.

so yeah.  that’s where my head is at.  yeesh. 

we are not good listeners because we are so consistently focused on our own needs and history.  i want to fix that in myself.

thanks for listening.  heh.

love, LR

i probably would have spared myself a world of hurt if i’d have realized certain things several years ago rather than last week, but hey, progress is progress, right?

in these past few weeks i’ve been through hell.  i mean: my personal hell (it’s different for everyone).  as i faced down a daunting decision and my motives for deciding the way i did, i discovered that sometimes you need to shut out everyone’s advice and go with that aforementioned spot-on intuition.  everyone just has so so much advice.  and i know that generally means i have people around me who genuinely care about my well-being, but i do think that the overwhelming amount of factors and characters involved in such decisions makes it hard to take all the advice into consideration.  you could literally go mad trying to process all of it.

and so i tucked all of your words into the back of my mind and did what i knew was right for me:  stayed right here in seattle. (for the time being)

someone i love dearly said this to me: “you can’t take everyone with you on your adventure.”

i mean, no shit you can’t.  obvious.  obvious but important.  i am not on the settling-down page.  i’m not even close to that page.  i want adventure and challenges and new faces.  that’s what i have here.  in nashville, i have my anchors and that won’t ever change.  i do think i may end up there yet.  sometimes knowing that they’re behind me, always a phone call away, literally saves my life.  i love them terribly, but i just can’t take everyone with me on my adventure.

and so here i am.

i’ve made some adjustments, as have my circumstances on their own.  the adjustment has been painful (as always) but also a huge relief.  quite frankly, everything is as it should be for the first time since i moved to seattle.  my life is now arranged in such a way as to promote my mental health rather than detract from it.  i am the happiest i’ve been in 4 years and that’s the truth.

there was no need to spend so many years being so meek and defeated.  i am not a meek person.  i’m here and breathing, and that’s a pretty great start.

love, LR

I still don’t know if I’m more terrified of moving back to Nashville or staying in Seattle.  The emotional turmoil I feel the moment I start to think about giving up every bit of the life I’ve built here is almost unbearable.  This is my blood, sweat and tears.  To cut my losses now would feel like I’ve wasted all that effort.

And so I am in limbo.

I’ve been waking up every morning with my heart beating out of my chest.  I have got to make this decision soon or I might not survive the summer!  Ack.

The thing is, I’ve got some good things going on here.  On Mondays I get to hang out and make coffee with kids who need some steadying influences in their lives, on Wednesdays I get to play cover songs in a basement in Shoreline with my guru, and every day I come to a job that, while stressful, is important to hundreds of people around this planet, people I love so so much and who need someone to guide them through their coursework.  I get to hang out with them when they’re in town for class, catch up with them on the phone all day, get emails with photos of their families and the people in their villages, get to know them and the work they do to fight poverty.  It has been one of the hugest privileges of my life so far to know them.  How would I survive those goodbyes?

I want to make music and I want to ride my bike and I want to see the water and mountains out my bedroom window every morning and I want to continue learning about social justice in the city and I want to be there for the Street Bean kids and I want to build the friendships that are even now just beginning to take root.  These have been the hardest years of my entire life, and to what end if I leave now?

And yet.

There is my sanity to be considered.

No offense, mankind, but you can be pretty cruel.  Someday I’ll look back and laugh about some of it, but there are things that have been said to me in this city that I wouldn’t say to my worst enemy, let alone someone who cares about me.  But I too have been cruel in my own ways.  I certainly know how to alienate people unintentionally, so there’s no doubt that hurtful words have been spoken. (Sorry) 

I think the most important lesson I’ve learned recently is that forgiveness is usually a pretty important first step. You’re allowed to feel hurt and get angry and hideout a little bit, but if the process doesn’t start with forgiveness, you’re not going to heal and your friendships won’t survive. Everyone hurts everyone, we all make mistakes. Who am I to judge?

You know, I’m going to stop being such a hermit. I’m usually pretty exhausted (emotionally exhausted especially) by the end of my workdays, but I’m ready to learn to save some for friends, to just save a bit for later. Work should never be my whole life. I’ve given too much to it already

And so I’m giving myself one week to make this decision.

I’ll see my family this weekend and have some time to talk more with them about it and just clear my head of Seattle stuff. I’m not exactly impartial when I’m still so deep in it.

No matter what I decide, I’m giving up something. What would await me in Nashville later this summer is a cheap room in an adorable home in an artist community with my best friend and another good friend as roommates, not to mention nearness to the people who’ve been there for me through all of the craziness of 4 years of life there. Those people are my family, and Nashville will always feel like home for that reason.

I really really want to be home.

Ok. One week, Seattle. You’ve got one week to change my mind and convince me to stay. After that, I’m going to begin making plans, giving notice, and once again minimizing my life to fit into my car. Yikes

Love, LR

sometimes a song will play or i’ll find a small scrap of something in the bottom of an old purse or i’ll “accidentally” follow a link on facebook and all of a sudden, it is Then and not Now.

for the most part, Then was pretty painful.  and when i remember what Now is and where Now seems to be heading, i feel so incredibly relieved.

Now is good simply because it is no longer a Reaction but merely Action.  moving to seattle was a Reaction, as were a great many of the smaller events that took place shortly after.  living reactionally is what we humans do when everything switches to crisis mode.  i’ve even learned a little about what that looks like for folks living in poverty this week.  it’s survival and nothing more.

by now, my life is driven by different forces, more appropriate forces, and mostly just by the unleashing of what was hidden for so very long.  i’ve been accused on multiple occasions of being “hard to get to know.”  yep.

i woke up this morning and for a moment i did literally forget where i am (locationally speaking).  that feeling of confusion and fear felt vaguely familiar.

i’m sitting in the sunroom at the back of randy’s house.  the sun just rose behind the row of orange trees lining the alley, and people are starting to emerge from their homes.  my dear friend mrs. shannon labare will be picking me up for 2 more days of california adventures before i head home on tuesday.

this is Now.

last night, i had dinner (we ate so so much guacamole) with 3 of my fellow students and the conversations we had were incredible.  we debated over what we’ve seen and learned this week and bounced ideas off each other and got frustrated together and it was glorious.  i love to read and learn on my own, but this is what was missing: growing in community with others who care about what i care about.

Now i am a student and a philosopher and a listener and an observer and a leader and a small but steady part of a movement toward social justice in our country.  Now i am.

i could ultimately boil down Then into a list of bulletpoints.  and with each bulletpoint, there would be an accompanying list of small bits of myself i lost along the way.  i’m not sure you ever regain what you’ve lost, but i do see how those empty spaces leave room for the new bits of things you pick up along the way; how the losses of Then make room for the Now.

yesterday we met Dr. Lula Ballton, who was actually present at Dr. King’s march on washington d.c. in 1963 and she talked about the racism she experienced as a small child and how it was quite literally the driving force for all of the social justice work she’s done since.

we are wounded.  all of us.  our Then has added up to subtraction.  i’ve seen this over and over again.  just look at the foster care system.  some of the kids i work with have been through hell, have been treated like they’re a piece of property.  that is their Then.

and so what about Now?

this week we have explored a homeless encampment, taught English to laotian refugees, met with the mayor, hung out with former gang members who now help other guys get legitimate jobs, met people in the neighborhood who are trapped in generational poverty and are joining together to expose the systemic problems in fresno that are keeping them downtrodden.

what randy has been trying to show us is that if Then is going to become Now, it has to be in community with others.  the issues are too-huge.  poverty is a housing issue, a mental illness issue, a public healthcare issue, a job issue, a social security/disability issue, and the list goes on.

and so when i get back to seattle, i’m going to start my interviews.  randy has given me some names to start with, people who are already fighting poverty not only on the ground but also at the infrastructure level.  so i guess this is my research stage.  Now is the time to study.

so here is the point to all of this: we each have a Then and a Now.  but there is also a collective Then and Now.

my personal Then was painful, yes, but part of my healing, part of my Now, has been the act of truly seeing where i am and more importantly: where we are.

as Feed Those Hungries continues to build momentum in mine and molly’s heads, i think i will have more to say about these things, about what we’re learning.

once my course project is finished, once i’ve done my research and tried to unravel the real needs of our city, i might even post it somewhere public.  i want to expose Now for exactly what it is.

as always, thanks for listening.

love, LR

what i’m dealing with now is the mixing of the two.  and it’s turning out to be the most profound experience of my entire life so far.

there are the inherent factors, the facts of who i am, the mechanics of my self.  and then there is the barrage of experiences that have been otherwise external to the mix until now.

the thing about it that makes it so painful is that it’s messy.  i mean, of course it is.  this is nothing less than the reconciling of who i am at my deepest and darkest levels to the outward environment i’ve existed in and made mistakes in and loved in and been disapointed in and disappointed you in.

when you begin to examine your own heart and motives and fears and hopes, you simultaneously begin to see that the lines that separate our experience of life from others’ experience of life are so very thin.

quite frankly the difference between me and some of the homeless kids i work with is a set of good parents.  and the difference between me and some confident girls i know is the absence of heartbreak during their formative years.  this list goes on and on.

and so this particular thinness of lines has been the first struggle i encountered in this journey.  guilt was my most obvious and most primal response.   i mean, why should i have been so privileged from the moment of my birth while others are thrust immediately into insurmountable odds?

but here is what i’m learning:  the dry ingredients of those lives is no different from my own.  i too have felt unwanted and hopeless and i’ve certainly known loss.  it’s the wet ingredients that have differed for us: the experiences they’ve known have often been harsher or at least more frequently harsh.

and so we all are forced to have this same profound mixing experience, no matter the level of disparity between the dry and wet ingredients.  feeling guilty is irrelevant.  we are handed what we are handed, and whether you believe it was random or not, it’s the Fact of existence.  and as such, it creates this amazing puzzle dynamic to the nature of Community.  we need each other, are capable of loving each other, fit together perfectly, because the dry ingredients are similar but the wet ones aren’t.  we are all pieces but of varying shapes.   we are all Human but we experience it so differently.  it’s amazing when you really think about it.

the next struggle: for someone as independent and autonomous as me, it’s a frustrating reality to face the fact that i have no choice in the matter.  i can plan and plan and even arrange the circumstance of my life to a very small degree, but i CANNOT control what is and isn’t going to happen.  in my own life, i am the smallest factor in a huge pot of Factors.  the ending sum is only affected by my tiny variable a proportionately tiny bit.

this does not sit well with me at all.  i want some guarantees!  i want to feel hopeful without even a twinge of doubt.  but that will never happen.  and it shouldn’t.  because despite the mechanics of my self being that i want to have control, the mechanics of the world is that i cannot.

and so the wet ingredients (a.k.a. my experience of this uncontrollable world) meet the dry ingredients in such a way that mixing the two is impossibly painful.

this is why i hide and why i mull and why i start to pack my car to move every few months and then unpack it again and stay right here.

this isn’t my quarter-life crisis or boredom with my job or the final remains of love lost.  no, this is much much more.

this is the struggle at the very core of humanity.  how to reconcile the internal to the external.  how to be “yourself” in the midst of “everyone else” and to even know what “yourself” is in the first place.

this is only the very outer edge of my thoughts at the moment, but i’ve already rambled on for too long.  i have plenty more in my head, but i’ll just let that mix a little bit more before pouring it out.

love, LR

the shape of things is about to change soon, like it does every autumn.  some higher power has decided my life is supposed to crumble around me every october.  every single year like clockwork.  i could walk you through a summary of this for the past 5 or so years but that would break my heart all over again, so no thanks.

this october wasn’t the roughest but it was rough.  Lauren’s Financial Crisis 2009 isn’t over yet, but the worst is (i hope).  i am definitely making different choices these days, whittling down the accumulation of nonsense to a simpler existence.  it’s actually been kind of great. 

this isn’t my first time attempting this task.  in europe, i washed my clothes in a sink and wore the same outfit for 15 days straight and read the same book so many times, half the pages fell out.  when i moved to seattle, i fit my entire life into my car and 3 boxes shipped ahead. 

it’s a wonderful thing to feel mobile.

3 weeks ago when financial armageddon occurred and i wasn’t sure if i still had a job, i immediately started making arrangements to move back to nashville.  this is now and will probably constantly be my Plan B for as long as i’m living in seattle.  there is still the possibility that i will be out of a job any time before december, and i’ll let you know if my room is available for rent.  a pretty great space for relatively cheap, you know?  i’ll let you know.

in the meantime, i’m just going to sit here at my desk every day and work my ass off with no guarantees.  i think i’m getting an ulcer.

god i hate october. 

fortunately, it is now november which is, in turn, all about reconstruction.  i get to see my mom very soon, which will help a ton.  she always makes me feel sane again.  it’s been 6 months since i’ve seen my family, and that’s pretty cruel.  super cruel.

a girl needs her family, you know?

waking up every day without even the slightest bit of security has been exhausting but i’m learning a ton about my priorities.  i mean, when the rug is torn out from under you, you start to really notice what you grasp for first.  someone i met recently told me the most important thing to do at this age is examine my motives and admit if they’re ugly.  i guess that’s just step 1.

at least being all tangled up in this first step has distracted me from the petty drama of being twenty-something.  what an incestuous mess.  it’s like a decade-long gray area.  and if you know me at all, you know i am too left-brained to deal with gray.

without even realizing it, i will construct a perfectly linnear structure for my days and expect life to fall within its boundaries.  ridiculous.

anyway, that is a tangent for another day.  maybe even tomorrow. 

these are going to be some long days.  i’m working from 7-3:30 and then volunteering at the cafe from 4-8 and then walking/biking home and i’m seriously going to need to keep up this overcaffeination thing i’ve got going on lately. 

i can’t say it enough: come visit me.  i will need friendly faces.

love, LR

i love the idea of rest.  i love the fact that even the natural world works in the same way our hearts do.  it’s a tribute to the power of a good “retreat and regroup.”  when nothing esle seems graspable, there is always time.  nature takes 3 or 4 months to rebuild its strength right below the surface and then one day in april, all of winter’s silence is replaced by millions of small expressions of new life. 

i’m ready for a little quiet.  i’m ready to focus.  i’m ready to rebuild.  

for me, this winter will mark the beginning of the manifestation of a long-standing dream.  the best part is that in the midst of the jumble of humanity in this city, i’ve found others with this same dream and in the past few months we’ve built and built and tonight is the first celebration of the project at hand.  when i’m in that space surrounded by people so in love with the same idea, i feel completely and utterly at rest. 

i’m excited about a lot of things right now.  and since there are no trees to climb or tennis games to be played or bike rides to the beach to make, i am free to be undistracted for the first time in months.  i’m thinking that a nice quiet house this weekend will be the perfect setting to take the first steps toward allowing my heart to rest.  i’ve done a lot of soul-searching on this west coast adventure, and i’m nowhere near finished. 

i am a writer and a seamstress and a rider of bicycles and a lover of songs and a recluse and a reader and a chef and a creator and a decorator and yet none of these things are who i am.  i’ve often confused people with their simple definitions but these things are nothing more than the outward expressions of the self.  we try to fit into categories because that’s easier than truly learning to know ourselves and to examine even our most despicable motives. 

we are strange animals, to be sure. 

it’s still raining and i don’t even mind.  even the smell of wet pavement makes me feel at home.  i’m at home.

love, LR