on being late, or, process walls
Your heart burns red at dead ends, and yet, you trust that there is a way forward, because you’ve been here before, and you know you can start again. Look past the stop signs to the beauty just beyond. Look how the earth’s clay painted red meets the orange brushstrokes of the sky. What if this view is all for you? And what if you are better for it? Go back. Try again. And again. And again, and tell your heart, you will not miss out on what was meant for you. (Morgan Harper Nichols, from her book, How Far You Have Come)
I woke up this morning with the house. Curled up under the quilt in desperate need of washing, I listened to the bangs and clatters of everyone else in their own morning pathways, a kind of ordinary, quotidian dance.Wednesday. May 26. And my first concrete thought splintered its way through the low hum of the morning sounds: how on earth is it the end of May? How did that possibly happen? June is next week? I don’t know if it’s been the chilly, constant wind here in Boise, or the never-ending news and discussions about masks and vaccines and the latest COVID-19 updates, or the return of the unshakable feeling that I’ve been spinning my wheels and going absolutely nowhere, but May felt like it came and went quicker than usual this year. And all of a sudden, June is upon us.
In my family, June means birthdays, picnics, bike rides, and whichever sister was most recently at college settling back in to the fabric of our home. This year, though, on top of all the usual transitions, June is accompanied by all sorts of shifts with COVID-19 and protocol changes, in the city, in the state, in churches, and at my own workplace. It marks anniversaries and memorials and remembrances, which comes with renewed trauma and grief. At work, fully-vaccinated employees are able to remove masks, and while that feels like good news I thought I’d never hear, it is something new and surprisingly difficult to get used to, again. As I said to my mom the other night, “nothing is easy and everything is hard!”
This beginning of June seems to have come from nowhere, the first month of the new season almost begging us to pause and take stock, to turn about and reflect on the last. So much has happened, and yet it feels as if no time has passed at all. I feel as if while I was learning how on earth to live through crisis, to pivot, to shift, as I discovered important life-changing things about myself, about my community, about my God, time flew past me and left me stranded by the side of the road, with nothing to show for my wanderings but holes in the knees in my jeans, a pile of used-up journals, and a fistful of wilted daisies.
As we step into another year of living with Covid, I’ve found it personally difficult to reflect on the last year with grace. If you are like me, it can be easy to reprimand ourselves for the way we handled different situations, be it in relationships, actions, and the spending of time and money, when we were all trying our best to navigate waters we never had to before, when we were dealing with a grief different than anything we’ve known. It’s been a slow year, a paused year, a rolling-backwards year, which sometimes, frankly, can be hard to stomach.
As I look at the way other people are recovering from months of trauma in their own way, and as I scroll past endless photos of people living out their seemingly glamorous lives, in marriage, engagements, pregnancies, new jobs, published books, casting gigs, music albums, and travel, the feeling of falling behind schedule rears its cruel head inside my tight chest. I slide into the fear of not measuring up, wondering how the people on the other side of the glass made it much farther than I have in the same amount of time, and simultaneously hating myself for taking so long to even get where I am now, which never ever feels far enough.
And friends, the thing is, although I prefer being late to coffee dates, I hate that feeling of perceived late-ness to my own life on the whole, the snake that creeps in and steals joy like an insidious fear. I am tempted to begin to panic, thinking I am moving too slowly, too wildly, too indirectly, when in actuality the slow, meandering growth is exactly what has sculpted my life, the lessons I am learning impressed upon my heart in their own time. I forget the people I envy are dealing with their own unseen struggles, just like I am. I forget I am loved completely and entirely, in the middle of the story, before I have done or accomplished what I dream might transform into the elusive, un-name-able pinnacle of my life’s work. I get drunk on impatience, and therefore become easily frustrated when I see my first drafts, figuratively and literally, fail to blossom into the masterpieces I covet to have created. I am terrified of wasting my time on work that others might perceive as embarrassingly awful, or, even worse, “just okay.”
As our lives grow, pivot, and shift into another season, it is so easy to feel like we are late to the game. That we’ve made wrong decisions, or at least haven’t made the right ones. That we’ve not done enough to make what we deem “significant progress.” While our life is not defined by our past, it is desperately hard to stand on the brink of change, like we are now, and refuse to shame ourselves for what we see behind us. Our God, who loves us entirely, certainly does not. Our past is to be honored because, like a winding river through a canyon, the steady flowing is carving out the specific road to where we are now.
In April, my sister opened her junior art show at Westmont College, and it was truly a delight to behold. She had the whole gallery to herself, and hung beautiful depictions of sea kelp that she screen and relief printed. While her finished pieces were stunning, my favorite part of the whole thing was what she called her “process wall,” displayed on the back wall of the gallery. Each piece included was some part of her process: practice prints, the template for her large woodcut, sketches, her color palette and drafts she decided not to include, layers upon layers covering the wall.
abigail’s process wall
And I thought to myself, how beautiful would it be if we did that in our lives? If we practiced vulnerability with each other, displaying our process instead of our destinations or arrivals? We hide the process in order to make it seem like we are the most impressive, successful, or put-together, when really, we are all trying our best in order to make something we feel is a life worth living. It is incomplete, and messy, and smeared with ink, and not every draft of every day is perfect, and definitely not every draft is worth sharing. There are re-writes and try-agains and new beginnings. But thank God for the drafts, for the practices, for the rituals that make up our lives, because it is in the meantime that our life is formed into something beautiful, even if it is slow and pain-staking and imperfect.
Where we see the struggle, where we see only the fact that the ground is really hard to break through, God sees roots digging down, spreading, growing, and feeding us with the strength to step from the end of the branches in due time and into the springtime we are promised. As author Kelly Minter writes, “God does so much of his best work under the soil.”
where i need to be, most days (the happiest trader joe’s art room)
This is why trusting the process is so important. It allows for pivots, for growth, for reflection and for looking back with grace. It allows us not only to accept our past for what it was, but to look forward to the future with hope and expectancy. It allows us to participate in what is happening around us with the fullness of ourselves, to cease the hustle and hurry and struggle, and rest in the moments we find ourselves in. It allows the unseen to matter. The more we lean into the understanding of God as opposed to our own, delighting in his simple presence now, the more we are able to trust the voice telling us where we are is where we need to be, even if that is so hard to actually believe.
where i needed to be, wednesday morning
In my Bible reading this week, I stumbled across something that held my attention. It hid in a tiny little verse in the tiny little book of Amos, in the Old Testament. As he speaks to the evil priest who is banishing him as punishment for calling out the awful way God’s people were living, Amos says,
“I was no prophet, nor a prophet’s son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs. But the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel’” (Amos 7:14).
I can’t stop thinking about that. Amos essentially tended to trees during the ripening process before he became the prophet of God, God’s mouthpiece, speaking directly into the church’s injustice, oppression, senseless violence, idolatry, lies, greed and apathy that surrounded him. He cried out to God with the words that so many have prayed after him:“Let your justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
And this man, this poet, spent what probably was a good majority of his life working with cows and trees. I can’t help but wonder about Amos, if he felt as if his life was behind schedule, if he looked back with contempt on what felt like seasons of “unproductivity,” or if he felt frustrated with the ordinary-ness of it. I wonder about his life, as I struggle with getting out of my own way, as I try to swallow down anxiety about the pace of my life as I put milk on shelves and push carts through a crowded parking lot, as I play songs that lead to nowhere on the piano.
And then I wonder, maybe Amos needed those fig trees. Maybe he needed to be standing under them and looking at the morning light wash over the trees just so, in order to hear God call out to him. Maybe he wouldn’t have heard the voice calling to him otherwise.
Maybe we need the fig tree, too.
Maybe we are seen under our own specific fig tree, and God is watering the grass nearby, waiting for just the right moment to speak in the way God knows we will hear. Or maybe God just wants us to be really good at tending sycamore figs.
Over the last five years or so, I have been slowly (slowly) learning that this circle-back, this pause, this willing trust, is quite possibly the hardest thing I’ll ever do, and, while it probably won’t ever get easier, it is also quite possibly the most important thing I’ll ever do. Still, the invitation to “be still and know” sometimes feels too frightening to keep on trying because goodness, how long will I have to do that? Aren’t I late enough already? How many seasons do I need to watch this stupid tree lose its leaves and sprout them again before my life happens?
under my tree
Today, my tired body is watching the sunlight dance on the leaves above me like a prayer, as if they hold the secret to salvation, just as I know my God is watching me underneath them, whispering truth to the words the Liar so desperately wants me to forget:
“Your life is happening, as sure as the gallons of milk in your hands. Look around at where I’ve planted you. The tree is part of your story. Try not to hate the sycamore.”
In her new book, How Far You’ve Come, poet Morgan Harper Nichols puts it this way:
“What a gift it (is) to be inconvenienced. When we are, we always have the choice to look, listen, and delight in the beauty that is before us. We have to train ourselves to look for light and hope, no matter if we’re moving at our preferred pace or not.”
That’s the goal, isn’t it? In this next season, the shuddering ground beneath our feet never ceases to inconvenience us as it transforms into a nail-picking, anxiety-inducing detour we never asked for. But oh, may we choose to look for the light in front of us, even as we learn to step into the discomfort of slowing down, of restarting. May we truly believe that, as Morgan writes in the poem I included at the top of this essay, “you will not miss out on what was meant for you,” and speak that truth to the nagging worry that we are running terribly late. I know my heart needs to hear that today, now, and again, and over, and over.
gibraltar rock, santa barbara, california
Friends, how accompanied we are, by each other, and by the God who sees, as we walk through our own journeys, at our own pace, even if the walking feels so frustratingly slow, even if you feel as if you’ve been sitting at a coffee shop for hours, waiting for God to show up, even if you feel as if you’re screaming down the highway at ninety miles an hour, expending a ridiculous amount of energy in every direction, but never actually arriving anywhere in particular. As we go, may we trust the detour is the road.
May we walk with God, instead of running up ahead of God.
May we know that this meandering road is not a personal flaw, nor your fault, nor a shameful secret, but it is the intention, the ordinary chapters quietly heading somewhere beautiful in their own time.
May we love the dark growth of the roots under the soil just as much as we love the daring branches stretching from the trunk, and reflect on the slow sprouting of our story with tenderness and grace instead of condemnation or shame.
May we feel fully seen under the fig tree, and may we look up into the branches and see God’s face, never forgetting that the fig tree might actually need us to love it.
May we cease to be so concerned with arriving on time, and cling to the simple truth that in the story of our life, there is no such thing as late.
You will not miss out on what was meant for you.
with you,
alyssa
P.S. I made a little playlist called process walls, my own personal soundtrack on loop during this season of my life. It echoes several themes in this essay, and I wanted to share it with you. It includes one of my favorite songs right now, called The Detour, by the Faithful Project, and it puts words so perfectly to the prayer my heart is crying out in response to all I’ve written today. The whole song moves me consistently to tears, and I hope the lyrics might be a prayer for you to hold closely in this season of opening, and of change.
P.P.S. Read the book of Amos if you get a chance. It’s short, don’t worry. Or, watch this video from the Bible Project to get the gist of it! As my cousin said, “it’s impossible to read the minor prophets without seeing how much God cares about justice.” So good for this current cultural moment!
P.P.P.S. If you want more reading on waiting and late-ness, check out the (newly edited versions of these) poems: when you say wait, maybe this time I will hear it
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drawing by Jill Kuhlman
