I spent the morning (from 6 am til noon) sitting in the back of my dad's drift boat, floating down the world famous Bow River while my aunt and uncle were fly fishing.
I'm going to Elbow Falls for a bit this afternoon.
Then birthday dinner tonight.
Another good day.
I'm going to see dinosaurs today... lots of them.... or at least their bones.
I'm also going to the desert today.
I love the mountains, but the desert has it's own strange beauty.
There are things floating around me lately that defy words...
Lyrics from an as yet unrecorded song by Jacob and Lily that I heard at a couple of their shows a few months back... "...I heard that if I sold it all and bought a field I'd find myself a treasure..."
Lyrics from Jason Upton's song "You Decide What's Beautiful": "...You live in the tension, live in the tension, live in the tension of creation... you decide what's beautiful, you decide what's glorious... you're funny like that, you will not be controlled... way beyond men, way beyond our ideas... you live in the tension... you come to the broken, you live with the broken..."
Thoughts from an invitation I received this week, and from posts on Kirk's blog this last week or two...
A growing sense of expectation, coupled with a growing desire to spend time in quiet waiting.
A growing need to engage in the world - to engage in issues of justice, to care for the environment, to love on those in the "gutters" of the world.
A desire to make pilgrimage. To walk and pray and listen at various places around the globe.
A need to spend time with those people who make me most myself, most free to walk in the things of depth that God has placed in me.
A need to be in the mountains. I have tentative plans for two separate weekends over the course of this month. One on my own, staying with some friends, time for retreating, hiking, reading, and refocusing. One as a part of a gathering of people who pray.
A fascination with engagement with culture and politics, but from a place of separation. Engagement and separation...hmmm.... (see this post and particularly the article it links to, from earlier this week.)
I find myself very glad for a week away from the concerns of the office, the politics, the tension. A week to allow myself to once again rest and breathe. To spend time with family, and time at a conference for leadership development. To celebrate my birthday, and the birthdays of some others. To think and pray, and wait and wonder... That's where I'm at on this Friday morning.
From the episode in the third season titled "Dead Irish Writers".
Amy: Canadian, huh?
Donna: yeah.
Amy: You feel funnier?
Donna: No, but I am developing a massive inferiority complex.
Gotta love the quick minds of these writers, and, as a dual citizen, gotta love this sort of tongue in cheek, poking fun at the stereotypes humor!
I feel like I should have something profound to say here. I don’t.
I’ve been waking every morning around 5 am again. While it is not by any means unusual for me to have sleep problems this has been oddly consistent. At least there don’t seem to be the usual onslaught of nightmares included with the inconsistent sleeping patterns.
I’ve hit that point of tiredness where your brain quite stubbornly refuses to function. I think I’ve bored my roommate to tears the last few nights, by calmly plopping myself on the couch with a magazine or cookbook, and popping a dvd into my laptop, and vegetating for the hours between dinner and bedtime. Then I crawl into bed, do my devotions, and read approximately two pages of a novel before I start falling asleep. I put the novel away, take off my glasses, and sleep until the aforementioned awakening at 5.
Life seems fuzzy and slow at the moment. A rhythm slowly returning, but not yet in a meaningful way. Things are once again being accomplished in the week they need to be accomplished, though.
One more box to sort through, and I’ve completely unpacked and settled into my bedroom.
Settling in to the rest of the house is taking longer. We’re unpacked, but it doesn’t feel like home yet. I miss having people to talk to about the important stuff of life. Yes, I have a roommate, but we are entirely opposite people. I find myself hesitant to trot out the really big important matters of life and faith in her presence. While I’m comfortable with people disagreeing with my thoughts and positions, I don’t really want to be fighting those battles on the homefront as well as everywhere else. I really need my home to be a place that I can retreat and recover. A place of prayer and rest.
There are moments when it begins to feel this way – an evening when my roommate was out and I prayed my way through the house. A little while last night as I relaxed on the couch with a beautiful Steve Bell song playing, and simply allowed my soul to be quieted and worship.
All in all, I’m glad for a week of vacation. Time with my immediate family, and the family members coming from Wisconsin. Three days at a conference on leadership connected to the church. Days with a break from my new house and my roommate. Days with a break from work, and a slower pace. Then a week back at work, and a tentatively scheduled weekend in the mountains. A week back at work, and a fun weekend in Calgary. A week back at work and another weekend in the mountains. And then, summer will draw to a close, a schedule will resume, and I’ll be a happy lady!
On a side note, apparently I look quite a bit younger than I actually am. In my second year of university I was mistaken by a camp pastor whom my parents were chatting with as a camper at the junior high camp going on that week! (We’d driven some junior high students down, and I was waiting for the return trip while my parents were chatting.) I thought that those days were behind me (though I still get carded when we go to pubs) until two weeks ago. A very well-meaning lady was visiting church, and approached myself and the junior high student I was chatting with. She introduced herself, asked a number of questions, and it became increasingly clear that she had mistaken me for being much younger than I was. When she asked me if I was looking forward to going back to school in the fall, the jig was up. I very nicely informed her that I was almost 24 years old, and had finished a five year university degree two years previously, and worked full time, so summer didn’t have quite the same distinction for me that it had for the young lady I was chatting with. Ah, well… my aunt says I’ll be grateful for a youthful appearance 25 years from now!
Well... I have today and tomorrow left, and then I have a week of holidays from work.
We have relatives coming in from Wisconsin, and I'm going to hang out with them and do day trips. I'm also going to give my grocery budget a break and let my mom feed me most meals for a week!
So, if things are quiet around here for the next week or so, that's why.
See ya around!
