I Am the Sky

I'm apparently convincing more and more people, by no intention, that I'm an introvert... I've tried to stop being indignant when I hear someone matter-of-factly refer to me as such. I'm not anti-introvert, some of my favorite people are introverted, but it's more that it's not totally true of me.

Something I've learned is that I need to think things through and make sense out of them for myself. Some things take more of this processing than others, and then some may require no thought at all -- if I say "I've never thought about it," I'm likely just being honest. I process a lot, not just often but on repeat. Yes, sometimes it's overthought, but mostly it's just processing. The chaos, busyness, and noise of life can become overwhelming, and are at times cause for great adventure, others cause for retreat. Whether experiences, plans, goals, or tasks, I need to settle into what I think or feel about things, to be comfortable and confident in navigating life. That may be a very internal thing, but I have never fully lived in my inner world.

In the last year I've gone on an arduous journey; falling in love, fighting for it, then being separated from whom I shared that love with. Which, all in a year, I can hardly believe!

Love grew quickly, which I think we couldn't help. It was natural and we were easy companions. My family wasn't really in favor - well they were, then they weren't...some maybe were again, I don't know. See they had a lot of thoughts and assumptions - many of which they didn't share with me (which of course still got back to me anyway, as news travels in large families). Then there was the distance which prevented my friends from really getting to know him, or his getting to know me. They knew only of the plights of the relationship, shared to solicit their insights. No one could know how we felt about each other, how easy it was to trust one another with our stories, how close we felt.

Through this I began to find that the safest, most familiar place in my outer world was him. He was the person who noticed if he didn't hear from me for a few hours. He was the person interested in my every stupid thought, or passing whim. He was the person who called because I sounded sad over text. He was the person that put up with all my quirks and frustrating habits, rather patiently. He was the person who never grew tired of me.

The older we get, the harder it is to have deep friendships. I began to notice this a while ago, but managed to be okay with my extroverted world full of a-little-more-than surface level friends. I know plenty of people who have a feel for me, yet know so little about the depths and lengths of who I am. Then we happened. I had a best friend that was as into the friendship as I was, a love, the only discord being our distance-separated worlds. My world became phone calls and texts, time between weekend visits, and thinking about how to defend my most important relationship to all the other important relationships. I often thought about how it was like being forced into a corner where I was virtually alone.

Fast forward to this relationship ending, against my hopes and heart. Now, my world is vastly different than it was little over a year ago when this all started, my outlook is different. There are a lot of relationships I haven't invested in in a while - a lot that haven't invested in me in a while. Most of all, with hands full of heart pieces, I don't feel like letting just anyone in to my world right now.

Society is full of people with quick tongues - heck, I'm sometimes guilty of that! (But I'm learning.) Right now, I often live in my inner world, and have been for a while, as I've trekked this path. Many people who've been unfortunate as to only really get to know "me" on this leg of the path have seen me in atypical form. I may very well appear to be an introvert, when it's actually that I've found a lot of pain which has sent me inward. And I ran out of grace for people taking the opportunity to express opinions such as I was settling anyway, or good for me, or there's someone else "better". So not only did I lose my best friend, but a lot of trust elsewhere was damaged. I had been very vulnerable, and so became very hurt, but only because I loved very deeply. For all that pain, I still hold that that was a worthwhile journey, to love and be loved deeply...so when I'm told some sort of 'attaboy' or 'good riddance', it only hurts and causes me to linger in my world.

After so many times hearing it said with the same sureness one would use in naming the color of the sky, I'd begun to wondering if I was now an introvert. But that's something I've learned this year, when there is no safe place to process verbally, I retreat inward. With that and the slow rebuilding from my brokenness, I have certainly been more in my inner world this year than any other time in my life.

I could understand how in a dust storm so many would think the sky is a muddied gray, but in fact when the dust settles they will find that it is a rich, bright and deep blue.

Dad's Trees

I gazed nostalgically at the tall, bushy pines on the hill that runs up from the freeway to the road that intersects the street I grew up on. As we drove by, I explained to my companion that when my parents first moved there twenty-eight years ago, those pines weren't there, rather it was a barren expanse of tall grass. When I was maybe about seven, I said, my dad climbed through a break in the chain-link fence which served to keep out the riffraff. He took with him some young pine trees, and a shovel. 

Those trees now served to remind of something, though I never really knew what. Often when I drive that road headed for the most familiar place I know, I admire the now tall pines and think of the mark my father has unknowingly left on something formerly drab and uninteresting. He unknowingly built me a memory, in planting those trees, and revealed a part of his heart that I hadn't fully understood for years.

Although he does have a thing for landscaping, my dad isn't exactly what you'd call a tree hugger. I even remember asking him about the pines when I was a teenager, because frankly, I'd always thought it was a little peculiar. Why go to the trouble of illegally planting trees on the side of the freeway, at least a football field's length from our home? He responded, so matter-of-fact, that that space needed something and he thought they would look nice. That answer not only surprised me, but it never quite felt sufficient. 

Recently, a neighbor who lives behind my parents went rogue, conquering their eight-foot privacy fence by ladder on either side to cut down some trees in their yard that he didn't like. Naturally this sparked conversation when my parents told me. Now, my father doesn't always seem like the most emotional person, but under a certain protective layer of toughness - which I can't rightly call a 'facade' - he is one of the most sentimental people you'd ever meet. After decades on this earth with him, I still learn new things all the time. He is a man of greater depth than he lets on, or perhaps even knows for himself. He told my mom and me a story that I found enlightening as to why he planted the pines all those years ago.

His mother had lived in the same house for many years, possibly the house he grew up in, I honestly don't know. His dad wasn't around a lot growing up, traveling often for work, so my grandma, Sally, was quite a tough little lady, by the sounds of it. I can tell by the way dad talks about her that he had a great deal of respect for her, but was also quite protective of her, as her only son. He told us how upon a return visit to his family home - some time after his dad had passed away - he was grieved to find that his uncle had convinced his mother (in some strange Canadian obsession with empty yards) to rip out the great trees that had lined the back edge of her lot for many years. Even as he gave the account, the disappointment resonated in his tone. 

He recounted that one day after school when he was young, probably about middle-school-age, his dad had called him out to the yard behind their humble rambler. There my Grandpa Joe was with a shovel and several young trees, ready to be planted. Eager to help and likely hungry for any smidgen of quality time, my dad ran over and started away at digging in his new little league uniform. His dad quickly scolded him for working in his white uniform (here my mom noted he still does yardwork in nice clothes) and told him to go inside to change. He did, and the two planted what would grow into tall, beautiful overseers of Granny Sally's little abode. 

My heart rose and fell within the span of that story. My dad doesn't often let on to such offenses having wounded him, but with the right attention the mysteries of his quirks unfold. As he explained the beginning and end of those trees in his yard, I understood him a little bit more than I had before. Those pines will now hold a different meaning for me; a new sentiment.

These are the moments I love; my dad is full of stories, and many of them seem to reveal things about him that I never knew were hidden beneath the surface. Many of these tales are tied to behaviors that have always been perplexing or curious. Many give a peek at the impressionable heart which drives him.

Now I just eagerly await the story that solves the mystery of his affinity for fake flowers...

Summer Night Nostalgia

Sometimes when I'm falling asleep at night, I think maybe I'll wake up in the morning and be a kid again. It's probably nothing short of normal, but I have, since, graduating college felt the sting of the reality of growing up. And there's something about a humid summer night, with only an oscillating fan for relief, that reminds me of childhood. Maybe it doesn't help that I gave up on the idea of holding onto my queen bed for being married some day and returned to a twin, for which I have one old pale pink fitted-sheet from when I was a kid. Laying there, sometimes I slip into thinking, what if I wake up tomorrow and I'm nine again? Nine was a good age, I think. You were still your own person, with reckless abandon.

Today at the beach, I failed to restrain a chuckle as this dad with two children, very close in age, struggled to calm them from the vicious, apparently contagious cry-cycle they were inflicting on one another. I watched his valiant effort to calm and re-dress them while whichever one he wasn't paying attention to burst into crocodile tears. I chuckled, but not out of a mean spirit; rather, I appreciated that this father dared to go it [to the beach] alone. Think me not insensitive, I assumed he was simply taking them on an outing and not forced by some tragic circumstance to parent alone this way all the time. I appreciated him.

My dad, and again not to slight him in any way, was not much of a kid person. I always say I think he likes us a lot better now that we're adults. His version of such an outing was to take us to the Y with him, while he got in a workout, we swam endlessly - and cheerfully - in the pool. On the way home was a Super A, and dad's treat was to stop and let us each get a can of Super America brand pop. There was something extra-good about that soda, even still I think nothing can quite compare. Oddly Shasta is the only thing that's ever quite come close. I think I drank a lot of grape soda back then, but there was also a strawberry-kiwi or watermelon-something...that was dad's excursion, albeit a relatively safe one.

I have what feel to be infinite memories of getting home in the summer time from a family vacation where we roadtripped somewhere. It was usually hot and sticky; it was usually July, sometimes to Duluth and back for Independence day. We always brought our own pillows with us, all piled into the car. Being Losiers, we left late and got home late, so I was almost always asleep when we finally arrived. I learned the feel of the car slowing down on our exit, and my body would wake just enough to sense that we were minutes from the comfort of home. I knew the right, then the hot-left, then the other right, and up into the driveway. I'd sit up and sleepily verify my inferences, looking through the windshield at the house number on the garage, lit by the floodlight above it. 1110.

We'd always unpack the car of at least the essentials. I remember that feeling of mellow-dramatically trekking the stairs to my room, and the sweet relief of plopping on my belly into my familiar, welcoming bed.

Sometimes, in the summer, I imagine that I will wake tomorrow in my white, four-post bed, in my bedroom with the blue wallpaper with little pink bows all over, and stumble downstairs to pour a bowl of Berry Kix.

A Photo & 'a long time ago'

You know how I know what I love...

How a photograph can break your heart and make it feel alive all in a masochistic instant; nostalgia.

I think a lot about nostalgia. I've lived a lot of moments I absolutely loved, and I just lived right in them. Now being in a place I don't constantly tuck away memories every day, or any other time I just wander to reminiscences of my favorite moments, I feel that tension. And almost every time I stop to think about it, I think about how amazingly blessed I've been to have the experiences I have, seen the things I've seen, and laughed the laughs I have. Simultaneously my heart aches to go back to the places, knowing full-well I can't.

There is a tension in nostalgia; gratefulness for experiences and a sense of loss for the moment you once lived in so fully, being so far away. I try not to allow myself to compare this time to those, because in theory it will always lose, but I try to think about what beautiful things I've seen; what a beautiful life I've lived and how many years I have to follow with more beauty.

The Weight of Identity

There is great power in knowing who you are; great benefit. This doesn't necessarily mean that the opposite is true; one is not weak because they do not have a true, reality-based understanding of their self. They are however prone to deception; there is vulnerability.

You've probably met someone who would fall into the category: they either tend to have some far-off ideas of self-aggrandizement, or they have no idea of the wonderful things they have to offer. The latter is something I'm passionate about, and I see so often and wish there something to put in the water; some easy remedy, but there isn't. Then again, people who are amazing and painfully aware of it, detract from said amazingness...not exactly attractive company to most.

Identity is a repeated theme to me, as I said it's something I'm passionate about and interested in. It's something I'm constantly exploring in myself, and constantly noticing in others. Lately I've been thinking about the weight of our identity, and where it lies. Were I to identify myself, some pieces would come the more I thought about it, or are things I could easily forget, even about who I would claim myself to be. And even further, sometimes I'm told things about myself, that for all my introspection, I find hard to believe. Sometimes, beyond all that, I think I am things, bad things that I am not; and until I am told otherwise, I might live under.

What does our self-proclaimed and self-recognized (in the sense of believed and bought-into) identity do in our lives? How does it compound on each interaction and activity throughout each day, to form our perceived identity tomorrow? It affects our motivations, it affects our relationships, our actions, our pursuits, our relenting. The security, or lack thereof, in who we are - and not what we do - is detrimental!

One of the biggest things I notice is that we do not look to secure places to reflect back to us who we are. We look to people who don't know us, well or maybe at all. We look to activities; hobbies or occupations. We look to cultures and societies. We tend to look to a mirror that says we are not enough, or we are not the standard. Since when is there a standard on identity?

If only it were simple, I often think. And it often seems simple...from the outside. But when you begin to untangle that knot of the compounding misleadings of the years of a person's life, you see that there is no simplicity. There may be clarity as you begin to see the weight of words, and interactions, and expectations...and countless other things, but never one single culprit.

There are days at the end of which I find that I am totally fulfilled; totally at peace, totally secure. Usually I think about it, and I am operating as who I am with no fear, concern or anxiety about if I am what I am, or doing what I am, or am what I'm doing! Those days have me thinking, among all the starkly obvious deluded souls - what if all those people could operate freely as who they are? What would this world look like? And how do we begin to see and be who we are?

Weary Seafarer Among Waves

I am in my boat; it is in the ocean. The waves rock me, I know them well. I shouldn't find myself caught off guard by any one, at this point, but so often I still do. I am tired and tossed by them. I am a sailor, made for the ocean, but somehow it holds animosity for me - like the flame of a candle up to me, taunting; a small threat capable of great destruction.

The waves keep coming, they are relentless. Each time I think, I am a sailor, made for the sea, and yet each time I wobble and waver on their account. Some are smaller, for which I'm thankful to learn balance. Others come fast and hard, chipping away at the vessel. I know that they are coming, my heart races at just the thought. They are apt to find me - aboard a boat, in the ocean, and they are waves. They are relentless. Oh! How my tired heart longs for steady currents.

Such a craft is not made for such water, so it seems. Feels as though I am in a small dingy, while others tell me it's a great and beautiful ship, with an excellent keel. Still, for some it's not good enough: it has its cracks and its loose planks, so it is unfit for sea, they say. No matter what I'm told, the reality is it's ravaged by the water; the very thing for which it was made. Often as I feel her brittle creaking and hear a subtle groan, and think, maybe it's best not to sail anymore.

I could always talk myself out of sea sickness, again. Or maybe, truly for the first time. One day, the education of each wave will be the honor of this ship, the tales to be told years after my passing. And so I must bolster my heart and my vessel for the storms inevitable to fare, - for if I am a sailor, I must certainly stay well out to sea.

Something to Say

It's not often that I feel like I should have something to say. Usually I just do have something to say. I think I'm either in a phase, or I'm just growing up and in that, learning when to speak up. I feel like I have been learning that. As silly as it may sound, a while back a friend tweeted a proverb about not having a quick-tongue, and I was challenged, in general.

The proverbs are riddled with wisdom telling us it's better to mind our mouths than to spew without care, even if it is effortless. For me it's so often effortless, to have anything to say, though at times it comes stumbling out...and so that tweet (of all the ridiculous ways to get convicted), it stuck to me. I've been followed around by the notion that just because I have something to say doesn't mean I should. The times to hold my tongue have presented themselves, the fruits of which have typically been clear.

Then what to do when you feel like you should say something but don't know what? Not a situation I often find myself in, but I've been encountering this more now, too. Maybe it's a part of learning the balance; learning to be further choice with my words. I'm more of a fan of intentionality than an employer of it...I've also realized.

Intentional speech. I feel like it could make the world go round. Assuming clarity comes with it, which it rarely seems to. But what power might come with words that are not just pointed but weighed?

I guess, today this is what I have to say.