Author: laurakcav
Revisiting the Desert
Matt and I went on a little vacation to Las Vegas over the weekend to rest and try snowboarding (my first time). It was a nice getaway, other than people smoking on the no-smoking floor of our hotel and Matt’s getting altitude sickness from our little snowboarding adventure on Saturday. As we drove through the desert on our way back home yesterday, I was struck again and again by the unvarying ugliness of the landscape, the repetitive monotony of the drive, and the stark contrast between the barrenness of our desert vacation and the beautiful tranquility of our beach-side home.
Our drive home reminded me of the contrast between the spiritual wilderness I endured for several years since moving to California and the rest and growth I’ve begun to enjoy in the last few months. Here’s a little taste of my spiritual “desert vacation,” an excerpt from a piece I wrote and posted two years ago:
There is something haunting about the barrenness of the desert. The dry, cracked earth produces little more plant life than bristles, thistles, and thorns. I am sitting on the hillside overlooking St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, California. The cemetery rests behind me, just up the winding dirt path. The sun is unmerciful, but I shiver, defenseless against the wind. It is Ash Wednesday. I have never been to a monastery before. I envy this rhythm of life so firmly established here, so deeply rooted in history, tradition, and meaning. I envy the unrushed movement of the brothers as they go about their daily tasks with studied patience. Mostly, I envy the cultivated attitude of reverence toward solitude and stillness. Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten season, is marked by fasting, prayer, and quiet. I have hiked up this hill, away from the monks and visitors, in order to break the silence with my sad song. Read the rest here.
What I noticed as we drove back toward California was something I had never been able to imagine while I was stuck in my spiritual wilderness: we were leaving the desert. We had stayed in the desert for a time, but we weren’t living there. Now we were going back home, back to where we live, back to the mountains and the ocean. I was in the desert for so long, it felt like I was living there, like I was going to live there forever. Now I see moving to our home by the beach as a physical representation of the spiritual move I was making from the wilderness to the ocean, from barrenness to new life, from anguish to peace.
When we arrived home yesterday afternoon, we unpacked the car and made a bee-line for the beach to catch the sunset. Every time I watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, I marvel that I live here now. I can see this every day if I want to. I’m no longer surrounded by noise, rushing cars, flying helicopters, and smog. Now I’m surrounded by vacationing families, retirees, quiet days, and quieter nights. And, oh yes, the sunset. Here’s what I see every day as the sun goes down:
“Yearly” Examine, Elephants, and Psalm 131
Welcome to the year 2012. Today I decided to begin the new year by reviewing the old one, using the Daily Examination of Consciousness as a guide. Some of what came up was expected, and some surprised me, but overall it was a fruitful time. I used a journal my brother brought back for me from China when he came to visit me in June 2010. I had only written in the first couple of pages, recording spiritual exercises from September and October 2010 before I got engaged in November and my life was completely taken over by planning a wedding, getting married, moving several times, working overtime, and becoming overwhelmed by fatigue. 2011 was a crazy year. Now in 2012, I hope to fill the pages of this journal with my encounters with God through various spiritual exercises.
As I closed the journal after my prayer this morning, I noticed there is an elephant on the front. Out of curiosity, I looked up the meaning of elephants and came across these adjectives in my web research: grace, prosperity, power, loyalty, wisdom, luck, solitude, intelligence, honor, stability, patience, temperance, chastity, reliability, dignity, royalty, pride, determination, responsibility, sensitivity and social connection. Specific to China, the elephant represents happiness, longevity, and good luck. Wow, that’s a lot to live up to. In any case, I like that the elephant is a symbol of so many positive traits and that 2012 is the year of writing in my elephant journal.
I also had my Bible out in case I needed some inspiration during my “yearly” examine, and I happened to flip through the Psalms and come to one I’ve never really noticed before: Psalm 131.
1 My heart is not proud, O LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
2 But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.3 O Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore.
Over the past two years, God has used a lot of imagery about babies to teach me about dependence on and trust in God to take care of the the things that burden me as well as to take care of me. Now, as I move into a new season, I believe God is using this psalm to show me I have grown enough to become the weaned child–older and more content with the waiting and patience that come with seeking God. Now that life isn’t so crazy and I have more free time to invest, my soul has become still and quiet, hoping in and waiting on the Lord as King David modeled.
I will take Psalm 131 into 2012 to remind me to wait on God with the patience of a toddler (however little that might be), confident that I have tried God and found God indeed dependable and trustworthy. Welcome, 2012!
Goals for 2012
After some thought, here are my goals for the new year:
Writing goals
Start a new journal
Blog twice a week
Make a dent in my reading list
Spiritual health goals
Try a new spiritual exercise each month
Practice the examine every day
Find a church community
Find a new spiritual director
Physical health goals
Ride my bike more than 5 miles
Use my new sleeping bag
Use my pilates videos at least once a week
Emotional health goals
Make a new friend in the SB area to have tea with
Watch at least 3 sunsets a week
Revisiting Contemplation
In honor of the anniversary of Thomas Merton‘s death (December 10th, 1968), I have decided to re-read New Seeds of Contemplation. It’s been a while, and I forgot how much I enjoy his writing. Here’s a bit from the first paragraph of the book:
Contemplation is the highest expression of [one’s] intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete.
I like that idea that contemplation is the completion of reason and faith. It helps me to understand why God has been leading me the past several years out of my left-brained intellectual self and toward a more right-brained, mystical experience of who God is and who I am in God and because of God’s presence in my life. My college years were very much defined by St. Anselm‘s concept of faith seeking understanding. I expected my graduate years to be much the same, yet I found myself drawn to fringe classes like Power Encounter and Theology and Popular Culture. I discovered PIHOP and began an unexpected journey into the tangible experience of God. Instead of lining my bookshelves with academic volumes and commentaries, I filled a whole bookshelf with new and used titles from the Prayer & Spirituality section at the bookstore where I worked. Now, I’m excited to revisit New Seeds of Contemplation in light of my spiritual journey and see what new truths God has in store.
Trees: A Vision
“But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream. – Jeremiah 17:7-8
Has God ever answered a question you didn’t realize you were asking? I was wondering idly what season I’m in now, and to my surprise, God answered me! Now, I have been in a very wintery season for the past few years, but now that I sit reflecting and searching my inner life, I realize I’m not really in that season anymore. Getting engaged, getting married, and moving to a new area haven’t exactly been the easiest experiences of the past year. In fact, it’s been an incredibly stressful year. But they are happy things. For the first time in a long time, I’m satisfied with who I am and where I am in life. I no longer feel pain I can’t describe or identify. I no longer feel dry and far from God. Instead, I love being married to my wonderful hubby. I love living in Carpinteria where it is quiet and peaceful. I love working from home. I especially love having only one job. I love being able to sleep as long as I want and stay in bed all day if I want. I no longer feel like my world is coming apart. Before I share what God said to me, there are three things you need to know.
#1: When my roommate and I decided to move to Sierra Madre several years ago, we ended up living on a beautiful little street called Esperanza. When we prayed over our new home, my roommate remarked that it was ironic that we moved onto a street that means “hope” or “trust” since we were both struggling with a very painful season of life at the time. About the same time, Jeremiah 17:5-7 came up in discussion with my spiritual director, and she encouraged me to mediate on the verses for a time, which led me to create this little picture to encourage myself that though I felt like everything on the left, I could hope and trust in God to bring me one day to everything promised on the right.
#2: Sometime later, Jeremiah 17:5-8 came up again, and I wrote this poem.
#3: I remember sitting in my living room about a year ago with a group of girls as my roommate led us in an exercise of Visio Divina (here’s a great resource). She asked us to imagine ourselves as a tree and to ask God to enter the image and reveal a truth to us. At that time, I tried to imagine myself as a tree, but I could only see the roots. It was dark and isolated, but I saw Jesus sitting on the roots and heard him telling me that the roots have to grow first before the tree can begin to grow above ground. There was a sense of promise that although things seemed dark and lonely in the moment, growth was still happening, and I would one day begin to grow in the light.
Now in the moment I was wondering idly what season I had entered, I was not thinking about this image of the tree’s roots from that night with my friends, or the poem I wrote, or the picture I made. I was not thinking about Jeremiah 17:5-8. To be perfectly honest, I had not–until the writing of this post–even noticed that there was a theme of growing trees in the story of my spiritual journey. But suddenly there popped into my head this image of a tree. Now the tree wasn’t really a tree yet. It was still a sapling. It was young and bare, but it had a few green leaves beginning to unfurl on its flimsy branches. In that moment, I saw myself as the tree growing above ground, and I knew I had entered a new season: spring! New life and growth. Light and green. Health and hope. Without even noticing, I left the barren wilderness and frozen ground behind and walked into the fulfillment of God’s promise all those months ago.
Journey Through the Liturgical Year
I’ve decided (albeit belatedly) to follow the liturgical year over the next year and blog about it from time to time. Since the first Sunday of Advent was this past Sunday, I’d better get a move on.
Advent is a period of preparation for Christmas but, unlike Lent, it is not a period of penance. It is a period that focuses us on joy. We prepare ourselves to understand the full adult meaning of the feast. We come to realize more each year how great are our blessings, how beautiful is a life lived in concert with the Jesus who came to show us the way. We learn the joy of anticipation, the joy of delighting in a sense of the presence of God all around us, the joy of looking for the second coming of Christ, the joy of living in the surety of even more life in the future. – Joan Chittister
I started reading The Liturgical Year by Joan Chittister (read a review by my friend Wess Daniels) along with Eternal Seasons, which is a collection of excerpts from Henri Nouwen’s writing, edited by Michael Ford. Here’s something Nouwen said that struck me in his discussion of Mary’s response in Luke 1:38 to the news that she was pregnant with God’s child: “She was saying, ‘I don’t know what this all means, but I trust that good things will happen.’ She trusted so deeply that her waiting was open to all possibilities.” In reading these books, I am reminded that Advent is a season of waiting–unlike the waiting of the lenten season–that is full of hope, expectation, and joy.
I have spent the last three years learning to find meaning in the painful, barren waiting the lenten season teaches us. I have cried, rebelled, and begged God for answers when the only answer I ever received was wait, wait. Today in my readings, I realized that my last three years of waiting have been all wrong. I wasn’t meant to wait in a prolonged state of repentance, despair, and emptiness. I was meant to wait in hopeful and joyful expectation of the next season in my spiritual journey. I realized today as I read about the Advent season that I consistently used as my breath prayer the line Mary used to express surrender to the season God had brought her into when the angel Gabriel brought her the news. For three years, I have prayed with Mary: Let it be to me as you have said.
This realization has given me new eyes to look back on my experience of graduating from seminary and trying to figure out what to do next. I see now that what I perceived as barren wasn’t barren at all. In fact, it was pregnant! Now I can’t speak from experience, but any mother will tell you that pregnancy isn’t exactly the most pleasant experience. In fact, it can be quite unpleasant and even painful to endure nine months of ever increasing weight, movement, and discomfort. Nevertheless, there is also hope, expectation, and joy. I’m not sure what my season of waiting is going to bring into being, or when that expectation will be realized. What I do know for sure is that all those times I felt forsaken, I wasn’t. All those times I felt empty, I wasn’t. Instead, I am filled with the very fullness of God–living and moving inside of me. I want to be like Mary. I want to be open to all possibilities, as Nouwen said, and I want to trust that it is all going to be for good. Something is going to change, and I can’t wait to find out what is coming…or becoming!
The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance in a world preoccupied with control. – Henri Nouwen
In Defense of Mud
It’s raining today, a rare treat for Southern California. I think the weather I miss most about the South is our fantastic thunderstorms. I used to sit on the swing on my front porch and watch the rain pound and the sky light up like it was alive. ( The sky can be such a show-off.) Today I sat staring out the window at work, watching the storm and feeling six years old again. The world was full of joy when I was six years old, full of beauty and magic and wonder and possibility. This was the year before I grew up, the year before my whole world shattered, before everything changed. When I was six, I used to run out into our grassy front yard wearing only my pink-and-blue polka-dotted one-piece and twirl. How I loved to twirl at that age, the last year I was a child. I would twirl in the warm summer rain, arms outstretched, and drink in the world the way only a child can–with innocence and simple bliss.
I have always loved the rain.
When I was six years old, I was a ballerina. Or I could have become one, my teacher confided to my mother, if I had been willing to put in the years of hard work and dedication necessary to acquire such discipline and skill. (But I was only a ballerina for a year, the last year I was a child. The year I turned seven–when everything changed–I found my mother sitting on a bar stool at the island in the kitchen, a wet dishrag in one hand 
and her head in the other, and told her very seriously that I was quitting ballet, that I couldn’t handle it right now. My mother understood. No one better than she.) I could have been a ballerina, and indeed what six-year-old girl isn’t enamored of tutus and silk-ribboned shoes? But what I loved best was the class after ballet: tap dancing. I remember our annual recital, the night I proved to the world that what I lacked in rhythm and grace I made up for in…being a six-year-old girl. We tapped our carefully memorized routine to “Singin’ in the Rain,” decked out in our green-and-blue polka-dotted rain coats and matching umbrellas. (I must’ve had a momentary obsession with polka-dots, a six-year-old girl’s prerogative). Years later, when I first saw the movie, I was excited to discover that my six-year-old memory could identify with Gene Kelly‘s difficult dance. (Watch the clip here.) I saw him tap around his umbrella and thought to myself, I can do that!
Our backyard was the envy of the neighborhood. This was the backyard my brothers and I still talk about with a hint of child-like longing. Sometimes I wish I could whisper in my six-year-old ear to enjoy it, no really enjoy it, because it’ll be a long, long time before we have any kind of yard to play in again. But I don’t think it would have changed anything. We could not have loved that yard better than we did that last year, when the grass had grown in fully, the playhouse de-spidered, and Angel towing us around in the little red wagon. On summer days when it did not rain, I would pull the hose from under the deck and set the sprinkler to wave at the sky with its long, slow arc across the backyard. My brothers and I would don our suits and run through the spray, tackling each other and trying to escape the sporadic and energetic attacks of Angel’s slobbery kisses and wet, muddy fur.
Ah yes, mud. I had intended to write about mud all along, and here it is now upon me. Someone told me today that mud is rain’s disgrace. That it eats shoes. That it slanders rain’s good name and drags it through the, well, you know. I must, in memory of my six-year-old self, beg to differ. So here are 10 reasons mud is great (click the links for more info on each item):
10. Mud stoves
9. Mud stencils
8. Mud run
7. Mud bath
6. Mud masks
5. Mud bricks
4. Mud therapy
1. Mud pies!
Welcome to the Garden
I spent the afternoon at the LA County Arboretum in Arcadia, California. My little brother gave me a membership for Christmas, and I have to say: best gift ever! I wish I hadn’t lost my camera last year so I could capture every moment, but luckily I have dozens from my previous visits. My brother complained when his gift to me arrived in the mail, “Why’d you make me give you a membership to a flower garden?” Believe me, the Arboretum is way more than a flower garden, although I did spend about half an hour smelling all the varieties of roses in the Rose Garden. God’s natural perfume! I’m exhausted from trying to take in 127 acres in 3 hours, and my blistered feet are complaining already, but it was totally worth it to bring in the new year with the creative genius of the Gardener. Amen!
Not that I put much effort into a list of goals I know I’m most likely going to give up on within a few weeks, but I have made one New Year’s resolution I hope to see through: blogging once a week in 2010. So here’s the plan: Tuesday afternoons at the Arboretum, winding down and reflecting over a pot of tea at Peets, and wrapping up with a Tuesday evening blog post. Sounds feasible, right? Here’s hoping! To help keep me motivated when I get bored or slip into those terrifying moments of total lack of inspiration, I’ve got a stack of books from the bookstore with my handy-dandy staff discount on a variety of subjects. Check the tabs for new stuff in different areas of inspiration–different paths around the garden, if you will! Comments are always welcome. I’m always up for banter, verbal sparring, or intellectual interrogation. (Interested in my old stuff? Click here.)
Welcome to the garden. Come on in.