spring

taking a break

May 6, 2021Posted in restTagged growing, reset, rest, springLeave a comment

You can’t rush spring. That much has been painfully, frigidly obvious since mid-March. You can’t rush the flowers that somehow know when it’s safe to poke their heads up. You can’t rush the tiny glistening shoots growing off the rose stems or the brilliant spear-shaped leaves misting the lilac bush in green. They’ll come when they’re ready no matter how often you stroll around the yard, socks wedged between your toes by the strap of your flip flops, squatting unsteadily by each plant and poking around under last year’s leaves in case you’ve missed something. They’ll come up, placid and glorious, exactly when they planned to. A wizard is never late, nor is he early. You can’t rush spring.

I don’t like taking breaks, and I’ve had to take a break lately. It’s very annoying. Breaks are when you’re not working. If you’re not working, you’re not getting closer to your goals. If you’re not working, there are probably things that need doing. If you’re not working, you can start to feel a bit aimless and unsettled and angsty. Breaks aren’t very comfortable. Ask anybody who’s been relieved to get a fifteen minute break from the desk only to sit uncomfortably in the lunch room or their car, scrolling aimlessly, waiting for the clock to start again. Awkward, I know.

But if you believe God or mental-health experts, taking breaks is apparently a good thing. It’s the reset, recharge, refuel moments that make going back possible, or even enjoyable. Breaks make you productive, weirdly enough. If you want to do your best work, you’ve got to step away for a minute sometimes. You need good sleep and some quiet evenings and a pint with friends, or a walk in the woods, a hammock in your garden. Even just a can of sparkling water sipped in the sunshine on the back steps, looking at all the dirt that will hopefully be a yard by the end of the summer (sparkling water is great for adding a splash of vodka.)

Breaks are all well and fine when you choose them, like a carefully planned vacation. I haven’t heard anybody complain about their vacation in Hawaii or a backpacking trip through the Colorado Rockies. The harder breaks are the ones you didn’t sign up for. The sick days, the cancelled projects you were excited about. When you have to set down a hobby in order to work an extra job, or take a break from school to earn money for the next semester. When you have to take a break from living on your own and move back in with your parents for a month or three during a transition. (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your parents. You know what I mean.)

That’s the type of break I’m talking about. The type where your doctor asks how you plan to relax over the next months, and lines up a row of supplements for you to take home. The type where nothing’s wrong that time and a little rest won’t fix, but time and rest are as challenging a prescription to fill as any.

I don’t think any of us believe that breaks really aren’t important, but sometimes the lie creeps in that if we take a break now, we won’t get going again later. You worry that if you don’t take this opportunity to run a half marathon, you’ll lose momentum in your training. Or if you set down the writing project half-finished, you’ll never pick it up again. What if this tale also disappears into the dark abyss of stories-never-finished? If I postpone climbing mountains now, will I ever start hiking again? If I don’t plant tulip bulbs this year, will I ever start a garden? I know how it goes. The narrative gets fatalistic fast. If I stop now, I’ve stopped forever.

Only, that isn’t how it works. I know it doesn’t work that way because I’ve stopped writing half a dozen times now. I stopped in college, I stopped after I moved to Colorado, I stopped after my first baby was born and again after my second. Lots of stops. But I always find my way back to it because writing is what I love. It’s not just important, it’s a form of breathing. Inhale, exhale, string words together. I have been shaping stories in my head since I was a kid, hiking and fishing and biking with my family. I created worlds a half hour at a time on my breaks from schoolwork. I sculpted careful sentences word by word while I stirred pasta for Mac’n’cheese or pushed a stroller down the sidewalk or scrubbed the dinner dishes. Taking a break from writing feels fatal and permanent and awful, even when I’m so tired it’s all I can do to sit on the back steps with sparkling water and hope the grass seed takes, but even a long and necessary break isn’t meant to last forever.

Winter isn’t forever either you know. Sometime in the fall you trim back the dead foliage in your garden and rake leaves over the beds. You turn off the sprinkler and empty out the hose and winterize the lawn mower. And then a few months later you rake off the garden beds and discover tiny green shoots. You squat down in your socks-and-sandals and grin at the miracle of it. The daffodils came back, just like they always do. Turns out they just needed a little break.

The writing comes back. It always comes back. I always find a way to set a new pattern or rhythm for writing – the nap-times, the mornings. The moment I get back from my after-dinner walk. This is the thing I’m reminding you because I need to hear it so desperately myself: breaks don’t last forever. We sleep for eight hours and wake up with the kind of energy you don’t find pulling an all-nighter. Breaks are like that too: you go away, you come back better. You come back with perspective and fresh ideas and a new project tingling in your fingertips because somehow, even when you’d rather be prescribed a cup or two of afternoon coffee with just a swirl of cream, a break is what you needed after all.

the weather ski

June 18, 2020June 16, 2020Posted in adventure, courage, motivation, writingTagged Bemidji, Colorado, courage, encouragement, finding hope, hope, Minnesota, pandemic, parenting, quarantine, snow, spring, sunshine, weather, winterLeave a comment

It is not winter anymore, but I think this essay is more about hope and heart than snow, and maybe even in June we have things to learn about the cold.

When I was in high school, my family went on a ski trip to a town a few hours drive east of our home. It was a once-each-winter trip. Most years we’d drive there in the morning and drive home after they closed, unpacking the ski boots and snow pants on sore feet at midnight. This year, some friends who lived nearer the slopes were out of town, and offered us the use of their home. We accepted gladly.

In the morning, when we were cooking a big breakfast and slowly stretching out our legs, we noticed a single cross country ski standing straight up out of a drift in front of the kitchen window. It was blowing slightly in the wind. Mom chuckles at the kitchen sink, and points it out to Dad when he joins her. They laugh together, and the sound draws all five of us kids, pushing and crowding around their shoulders.

“Maybe it’s a Weather Ski,” Dad jokes, and puts on a radio announcer voice, “Yes, the weather ski is bent at just a ten degree angle, so light winds today. Keep a watch out for black ice.”

My brother chimes in: “Friends, the weather ski is at a forty-five degree angle; looks like a real blizzard out there!” We laughed together companionably and then scattered again, leaving Mom still washing dishes and the curved, colorful ski bobbing in the intermittent breeze.

Now it is springtime in 2020. I never planned to check the weather as part of my morning routine. Usually I just dress for whatever the day might bring. Jeans, a t-shirt, a jacket, a down vest over it all if it’s cold. But this year, almost the entire nation is under a quarantine. We’re fighting a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. And since I’m not getting dressed in a hurry to take my toddler to play dates and library programs, I’m slowing down to check the weather. That single app on my phone with its prediction of sunshine and temperatures is the indicator of whether we’ll even get outside. My mood seems to rise and fall with the weekly highs and lows.

Some weeks are warm and sunny. The highs reach for the 70’s for days in a row. I put on shorts and dig out 3T shorts for a toddler who still calls them pants and we find sun hats for him and his sister. We wrangle out the double stroller and head for the grassy spaces in the park. The weather has smiled on us. In weather ski talk, maybe the ski is fading and peeling in the heat – a warm one today folks!

But intermittently, cold days come. Back in Minnesota, the ski is probably bobbing lightly in the wind while its snowdrift takes on a new layer of white. Here, our red-brick patio slowly disappears under a steady film of flakes. So does my energy. The two-year-old runs from one part of our tiny home to another until he feels the cooped atmosphere too. Then he lags and droops like a wind-bent ski-tip, clinging to me when I let him and sliding to the floor in despondency when I try to get up, do the dishes, finish the laundry – anything to spur us into motion.

Sometimes it is cold for so many days that I stop checking. I don’t open the curtains in the morning. There doesn’t seem to be much point. Who wants to look at the tired, frozen pile of snow on the patio anyway? The little blue toddler truck that he pushes with his feet is as deeply buried as the real vehicles that we’re not using – that’s what happens when you stay at home for a full month I suppose. I take one look at the picket fence and see the snow in delicate heaps on its ridged top, and I lose hope for the day. The sudden mischief of a black squirrel brushing snow off in bursts, left and right, as he scampers along the rails is lost on me. I’ve already turned back inside to wonder what will become of our day, stretched long and white until the distant evening.

I forced myself out for a walk one cold day. “Won’t I need a coat?” I wondered out loud. “No, just a vest,” my husband reassured me. He gave me a searching look, as if he knew I’d already resigned myself to all the warm layers I’d wear to fend off the cold. “Well then I’m wearing a hat,” I replied in defiance of his optimism.

I felt like a stranger to the sunshine, walking down the sidewalk towards the park. The air was cool, but not as cold as I had anticipated. The snow had stopped. The sun was lowering towards dusk but miraculously still held some warmth. I let myself take big breaths of the air I hadn’t smelled in days. It was cold and unscented in the dust and impossibly fresh. It tasted like morning air, spring air. My soul seemed to tiptoe forward with cupped hands and shining eyes, like a shy child. I smiled at the masked strangers as we gave each other wide berths – walking off the sidewalk around each other when we passed.

I have never been the first one out into the snow on a cold day. Not when I lived in Minnesota and adored the “snow globe” days of large flakes coming down slow in the still world. Not when the pines were lightly adorned with picture-worthy white on their branches. Not when the neighbor plowed the drifts from our driveway into one large, snow-fort-worthy heap. But I was once more resilient. I remembered how to see past the cold to the beauty. Snow may be frozen but it sparkles in the light. Winter may be cold but laughter in the outdoors is warm. The weather ski anchored in a drift outside the kitchen window may be bending and dipping in the wind but it’s not waving a frantic warning – it’s just an indicator, like the snow on the patio tells me nothing more than that it is snowy outside. Snow can’t tell me if I’ll find joy when I go out, or whether the work of bundling two children two-and-under into thick snow pants for a short walk will be worth it or not. The weather can only tell me if I need a vest or a coat, not if I’ll find hope in the too-bright sun and air that’s still somehow fresh as a mountain morning.

It turns out we DO have fun outside, even if some days it’s just poking our heads out to see how cold it really feels. But at least I’m learning not to rely on how far out of the shade the patio snow drift is lying. The weather ski has been reduced again to just that – an old, slightly faded cross country ski nodding along to the wind and the drifted snow – not a needle on the gauge of hope that bends closer to zero as the wind speed increases. I check the app on my phone and plan which part of the day is best for a walk – when will the wind die down, when will the stroller find the least resistance in the snow? When can we get outside in the cool air and carve hope out of the sunshine? I check the weather and I think of the old weather ski, and I smile.

the waiting months

April 23, 2020April 23, 2020Posted in beauty, courage, parenting, writingTagged April, Dairy Queen, in-between, joy, March, memories, parenting, seasons, spring, springtime, toddler, toddlers, waitingLeave a comment

Spring and waiting seem to go together like coffee and cream. It’s not winter anymore; some parts of the country have crocuses and snowdrops springing up and snow hasn’t been on the forecast for weeks. At the same time, a certain Dairy Queen in Moorhead, Minnesota opens for the season March 1st and you can see a line of people with spring in their hearts and winter boots on their feet stretched out several feet long, waiting to get ice cream that they hope will, with an irony as swirled as their chocolate-and-vanilla cones, convince the cold to leave again.

But whether you’re licking an ice cream while you stand in the snow, or welcoming snowdrops, there’s no finality to March and April. They’re an in-between. Spring probably doesn’t feel fully real yet in the first warm days. And yet spring is a season unto itself. These months may be seem to be a segue to summer but they’re really a destination too.

I think there are seasons in our lives that feel like that. We’ve waited and worked to get to where we are and we’re there now, at a destination of sorts, but it’s a moving, shifting destination. An arrival that signals an end and a beginning, and is itself a long, stretching, middle. It’s like having toddlers. (So many of my ideas and writing and topics revolve around toddlers right now.) You’ve waited and wanted to become a mom, and then you were eager for them to be walking and talking, and now they’re walking and talking, and you know that childhood comes next but it’ll be a minute yet, and here you are! But here you remain.

It’s possible that this is largely the sleep deprivation talking. The nap strikes, the refusal to eat dinner. Don’t misunderstand me – I love this boy of mine and his sweet attitude and his constant activity and his curiosity. I love him deep and whole and I love him all the time. But if you’ve ever gotten on a treadmill to run at a fast jog for hours until your legs give out and then another lap for good measure, you know what kind of energy and tenacity it takes to parent a toddler.

It’s just like the month of March. You’re in between two starkly contrasted seasons and it’s a season of its own and it seems to be longer than January and February put together, ya know?

But don’t swear off children just yet. Recall the snowdrops I was talking about. They’re not the only spring flowers. Snowdrops come and then crocuses come, and soon there are even daffodils. Here in Colorado the golden forsythia glow even on a cloudy day. There are green spikes of irises reviving in my neighbor’s garden bed. The sharp yucca plants become more vibrant. Lilacs are stirring. Trees are budding out before they sprout leaves. You may lay down on the landing of the staircase in exhaustion and open your eyes to discover your toddler bending over you to give you a goodnight kiss as he “tucka ‘oo in” for a nap. You may find that one day when you lay down next to him in the middle of the nap strike, you both begin to giggle uncontrollably, down on the floor, face to face. Making memories, I hope. Laughing memories that stay bright in the dusty storage banks of recall.

Look for those moments. Hunt for them. Lay down – a patch as small as the landing of the stairs will do – and stare at the ceiling until you can remember what it is about this season that brings you joy. Don’t hustle too far too fast yet: let moments of happiness “tuck ‘oo in” to the season of in-between. It is better when we linger.

homesick

May 3, 2018May 11, 2018Posted in adventure, writingTagged Anselm Society, Colorado, flowers, Imagination Redeemed Conference, Imaginationredeemedconf, Lord of the Rings, Minnesota, seasons, spring, springtimeLeave a comment

I used to say of Minnesota that the air was made fresh again in the spring. All the old winter air was gone, I averred. It was all brand new. The soft mists above the melting snow, the clear air in the greening valleys, the air coming through my open window at night; it was all clean, unbreathed yet.

Lanier Ivester said, at a conference last weekend, “I think we are all homesick for a garden.” Ohhhh I think so too. I walk and walk down the streets, past the blooming yards in our neighborhood. The purple lilacs are beginning to flower and I pause by them wherever I find them, just breathing, smelling.

I remember reading The Two Towers and hearing in my mind the deep voice of Treebeard saying “I used to spend a week just breathing.” Yes – I could spend a week just breathing the springtime air.

Tonight was soft and fresh from a scattered rain. The wind was blowing cool off the treetops and I sat outside even in the late afternoon damp chill to enjoy the wet, fresh scents. It was lovely to sit here, in my dry, desert state and remember the freshness of a spring season in my childhood. I think we are all homesick for a garden, a garden in the springtime air.

April 16, 2018Posted in adventure, habitsTagged beauty, Colorado, daffodils, flowers, hiking, hyacinths, minne, seasons, spring, walkingLeave a comment

I have always said that fall is my favorite season, until it is spring. Then spring is my favorite. It is still true, and it is spring now. Last year at this time I made it my goal to walk a mile a day until Erik was born. I started walking, sunshine or no. I took laps around the park, crossed the busy street into the quiet neighborhoods, walked along the golf course and the bike trails. Spring was popping up everywhere, and it is again.

There are hyacinths growing, and tulips and daffodils and grape hyacinths. I see the spiky shoots that will be irises this summer, and the waxy lilac leaves unfolding slowly. Creeping ground covers are subtly regaining color from their tough roots to their tender fingertips. Trees are slowly, slowly greening and blooming. This city is its most vibrant self during the spring, I think.

I put Erik on my back and we set out. I take mental pictures over and over – that sweet cottage with the cherry tree, a glimpse of sky through that the willow branches. Erik pushes against my back and turns his bald head to watch the passing cars, neighborhood dogs, anyone on a bicycle.

In Minnesota, spring began as soon as the air was above freezing temperatures. Puddles grew, roofs dripped through the gutters, snow glistened, mists formed. The air itself seemed new and fresh; indescribably so. There is no damp, new smell of changing season in Colorado. We are “high desert” after all. But there is a fresh scent still – a whiff of pine carried down the mountain, the dry-green smell of yuccas washed over the sun-baked rocks. Yes, there is still a hint of spring in the air, even as on the ground.

Spring has a power like no other season to get me outside in Colorado. I like to wander, to discover. I hunt beauty and bloom, keeping photographs as my bounty. We come home with roses in our cheeks, and set out again tomorrow.