under the moon
“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”(mary oliver)
I write to you today on this very second day of February, cocooned under my pink blanket- a favorite hiding place- and sitting on the floor against my childhood bed, watching the branches of my tree outside the window, with it’s baby blossoms, sway back and forth in the wind of what seems like the precursor to the thousandth rainstorm of our very wet winter. A branch of the tree is split, uneven and aggressive and sharp, as if it’s been struck down by lightning. The low hum of the heater slows me down, reminds me to breathe for a moment, an everyday constant in this year of change. I pick the skin around my thumbnail in between sentences, and I stare again at the broken branch, trying to find words to describe the way the stub of wood looks, like it was unwilling to leave the tree but was powerless against the haphazard wielding of the ax.
At the beginning of 2020, I had what I thought would be a brilliant idea. I decided that I would do one new thing every day. I knew that this year would be one of big changes, movement, full of exciting new adventures that would require bravery and courage. Turns out, I was right, but in all the wrong ways. I thought my list would include things like:
decide to attend Regent College
move to Vancouver, Canada
fly to New York City by myself
throw a bachelorette party in L.A.
audition for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival and Boise Contemporary Theater
introduce myself to the cute barista at the coffee shop
And the list goes on and on. Obviously, I knew there would be mundane things in there too, but I thought those would be practice for the really big important things I was all prepped and ready to do. While we’re being honest, I should say that I also thought it would make a really cute blog post. Alas.
I don’t need to tell you how that clearly did not happen. Funnily enough, the first two items got removed from the list only one month in (actually, one year ago this week!) The whole graduate school visit was entirely anxiety-ridden, beginning with an hour and a half long meltdown with a torrent of tears about what to pack (how does one look like a graduate student??), was nearly decided against almost immediately after I arrived on the campus, and ultimately discarded after visiting the theater that was in the basement of a worn down building and smelled like feet.
And then came March, and everything fell away.
I think what I find most interesting about 2020 was it’s complete stripping off of everything I thought I knew about myself. Our small lives seemed hacked away, willy-nilly, and left out in the rain like a discarded sneaker (including the tragic fact that the aforementioned cute barista quit just before the COVID ax swung in). I still continued to do one new thing every day, but they were normal, and not normal, and every day things, like trying a new drink or learning to wear a mask at work or making a conscious choice to do something I’d been dreading or asking a new friend to get coffee. They were sometimes mundane, like starting a new Netflix show, and sometimes little gifts hidden underneath a whole pile of ordinary, like pausing to watch the light dance on the kitchen floor as the sun set.
golden hours
And it was here, in the middle of these apparently profound-less moments, as the world fell apart and my feet rooted down, terrified, into the freezing ground, as my heart sat naked and raw and revealed of its shame and its pride and its fear, at this well in the wilderness, that the Spirit hovered over me. Quivered. Seemed to be almost visible, almost tangible, like the way you can see the shimmering waves of heat from a flame. I shuddered under the shadow, and I, for the first time in a long time, actually stopped.
Almost immediately, my lament took the shape of words that poured out of me like a stream of water. Songs and melody and the dance of my fingers on the piano became a balm to the blossom-less stem of my body. These new things- a glorious surprise!- so deeply hidden inside, as much a part of me as the hundreds of freckles on my nose, as ordinary as a cereal bowl, burst out of me, inevitable, and unashamed, and, for the first time in a long time, it felt weightless.
It was almost as if the world had to stop in order for me to stop, too. In order to remind me of my younger self that would create songs as I sang in front of my closet trying to pick out an outfit. As I sat, hunched over and scribbling down poems at my grandma’s kitchen table. As my sister and I, as children, laughed and danced to a made up song in our swimsuits in front of the hotel mirror. As I spent every elementary school summer reading hundreds of stories, and writing hundreds, too. As I sat on the porch with my dad as the rain fell, telling stories and pretending to fish. As I leaned my back against my bed, in the same spot I am writing in now, my most secret place, recording myself on my pink mp3 player, reading a short story I had written or singing my favorite songs (as I side note: I recently found these recordings and they are hilarious and so pure.) As I wrote tiny poems in a tiny journal about all the feelings of growing up, and tucked it away so far I only recently found it. The candle, somehow always burning, somehow never blown out. Glimpses. Whispers. Breaths.
A few months before our life became a pandemic, I had been praying about what that life was supposed to look like for me. I was so afraid that if I opened my hands to it, if I took up enough courage to name that nameless something in my deepest dream, God would take everything away and leave me with a meaningless life I hated every minute of. That my life would turn out to be like George Bailey in the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life (not to knock that movie though. It’s fantastic.) That if I told God, “my life is yours,” I would never see it again. And truthfully, in a lot of ways, I haven’t.
I haven’t been in a play in three years. I did not get to travel to Broadway this year, or audition at a theater or festival. I am not in an acting class, or reading a play, or teaching little kids how to breathe from their diaphragm. The theater, once the shining star of my life, has faded for the season- though, I don’t think, forever. For now, it’s quiet, sleeping on a pillow in the moonlight of my little boat. Add to that all the never-ending multitude of changes we have all faced in the last year, and the way God has been stirring drastically in my own heart as I learn and grieve and ask for forgiveness and seek to live and carry my privileges rightly in our current climate of racial justice and reconciliation in our broken nation, my old life has been nearly washed away. The funny thing, the amazing thing, is, I am alright. I am not falling to bits, as I thought I would be. I am not alone and unhappy, as I was sure would be the case. Instead, I am profoundly thankful for simple joys like health and being a part of a family, and in awe at the way God moves, at the current that has ushered my small boat into this big sea, under the moon, on the tides, in awe of the ever-abundant vocabulary of the Maker, and the Maker’s ever-abundant love.
All to say, here I am, this side of tragedy, standing in the circle with my hands raised high, declaring to you that I am in the middle. That despite my best efforts, that despite my desperate attempts to stay hopeful, I am afraid, nearly every day. But, as I heard in a writing workshop recently, “fear will always be in the car. It just doesn’t get to drive.” I am learning, bit by bit, that that shift comes by learning to cling to what is true, and to be right where I am, surrounded by a cloud of faithful witnesses, a bevy of kind words in an overflowing basket from people who care for me. And on those days when the cloud is silent, my God is not. My God is present in those tiny, ordinary shadows that make you pause on some Tuesday in February. My God is present in the fists of those calling for justice. My God is present in the ache, in the anxiety weighing on my chest, in the shoulders that carry everyday burdens, in the sink full of dishes, in my third cup of tea.
And on those days when the cloud is silent, as I am trying new things in the small, ordinary day, I am met by my maker, taught to be brave in the unexpected newness I did not plan for, abided with, overshadowed in darkness and covered in light all at once.
a sink full of dishes, February
A dear professor I had in college once drew a circle on the whiteboard, and underneath it, a line that touched the bottom of the circle in one singular point, and continued on. “We exist in time,” he said. “God does not. We can’t meet God tomorrow, or yesterday. We can only meet him today, now. There is no going back.”
I long, every day, for that person that I used to be. But what is life for, if not to be loved, and given away, bit by bit? What is life for if not to be lived, shifting with the seasons? As Mary Oliver writes in the quote I included at the top of this post, “sometimes I need/only to stand/wherever I am/to be blessed.” I think about that all the time. That life, in spite of everything, exists in front our eyes and the blessings are there, playing dress up as the every day rhythms and routines, if only we unfurl our tightly wound sail, if only we look up!
I could go on and on (it’s still raining, after all, and there is still a half-full glass of tea next to me.) I could share the entirety of my “new things” list, but I don’t want to bore you to tears, and I’m already just grateful you read this whole piece. So, I am going to close the only way I know how in this moment, by sharing a few lines of an unfinished poem I wrote a long while ago.
May it not be said of me: she sat, she wasted, she was too afraid.
May it also not be said: she was going too fast, speaking too loud to hear.
I bring the living- with bated breath, to see you. I bring the living, who is nearly dead, to see you, hoping that this day might shape me into someone braver, more generous, might grow the tree of my body, roots ever plunging into the soil, leaves ever reaching for the sky.
Your boat is small sailing, dear friends, over a dark sea. It’s scary. Things you thought would be awake are asleep, and things you thought would be sleeping by now are awake, or are waking up, standing next to you, leaning on the railing and staring out over this great big night. Feel them next to you, your sweater brushing against their shoulder. Look up at the expanse of stars as you sail under the moon, just as endless as the sea. Your maker, who made you and your boat and the stars and the sea, is next to you, simply breathing with you. Your maker made you well, and is making you new.
You are not alone. Just stand there, raise your hands. Breathe.
I remember so many mornings waking up in this room, wondering what on earth I was doing with my life, if the boy I liked would be late for first period, if things would be the same the next time I woke up under this quilt. I remember when furniture was in a different place, or didn’t exist, pieces one by one making their entrances and exits into and out of the room with time; their appointments coming and going. Life is hard- it is hard to know how to love, willingly and well. It is hard not to judge. Harder still to simply slow down and sit in the sun and watch the squirrels scamper around the tree and upwards, as if gravity exists only as a theory or figment of one’s own imagination. Down here, we cry and shout in anger and frustration, burdened by logistics- and up there they climb higher, weightless, unafraid of the skinny branches. They are not afraid of what-if’s.
They just simply climb the tree.
-alyssa
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p.p.s. I’ve written a few new poems around themes from this essay, with a few coming soon, ideas all ruminating in their own ways, as well as the introduction to, and first installment of, a new personal project. Find them in the poetry section of the site.
