"Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well."

When Westley and Buttercup are walking through the Fire Swamp, he tells her about his time with the Dread Pirate Roberts. He worked for the pirate after he was captured in exchange for a stay of execution and every day, the Dread Pirate Roberts would say, "Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning." And this went on day after day until the Dread Pirate Roberts who captured Westley retired and passed on the mantle to Westley.

Now I don't think that the Christian life entails a daily threat of death (or at least, any more than your regular existence in the world entails the daily threat of the unpredictable end of your life), but I do think there's a day-by-day transformational aspect to our lives and I think it's just as jarring as what the Dread Pirate Roberts' said to Westley. Or maybe it's just that tomorrow isn't promised, and we work with that in mind, finding that there's a habitual rhythm in the uncertainty. You don't count on tomorrow, but over time the threat of nonexistence is tempered with the reasonable assumption that you'll be allowed to continue the work you've started.

I guess what strikes me is how this anecdote reflects a bit of our salvation. It's not just the preparation of your community before salvation and not just the day itself, when your heart realizes how loved you are because of and in spite of who you are, that corrects the hearts of men. Westley asked for his life from the Dread Pirate Roberts because of the love he had cultivated in his life and the Dread Pirate Roberts gave him another day because of it, but after that day, there was another and another and another. Life goes on after we're preserved and we have to get up daily and live into that until our salvation becomes a routine.

No one tells us each night that we've done a good job or reminds us that life will most likely kill us in the morning but I think we'd live differently if it did. We've been saved once. We are saved again daily. How much more deeply would we live if we bent our lives around the knowledge of that grace, working every day, building up a lifetime of unlikely muscles? Imagine the exercise of those muscles in the world. The kindness. The joy. The love.

Imagine the work we could do with those muscles, how powerfully we could live into the promise of our salvation. Remember how much we need that right now. Remember how much we'll need that from here on out.

gif source

Montage

Before I get going, I want to offer a post-father's day observation: Dads are just the boys they were in grown up bodies. We see them as these adults when we're little, adults who maybe make fart jokes but adults nonetheless. But I gave my dad a t-shirt for father's day and for a hot second he thought it was glow-in-the-dark and was kinda disappointed when it wasn't. Dads, man. Tiny male humans in adult male bodies. Gotta love 'em.

***

Caveat: I wrote this post on my like tenth plane in two weeks.

***

I think that your twenties are typically the montage state of your life. 

Let me explain. 

See, in a movie, there’s the pre-montage character, there’s the montage-inciting incident, there’s montage, and there’s the post-montage character. There’s usually a lot of stair-running in the montage. It’s the symbolic transition from shapeless sack of uselessness to action-ready sack of usefulness. Or there’s a stack of rejections until the main character lands the job or, in my favorite montage, a bunch of wacky characters go on adventures fighting Nazis while forging unbreakable bonds of friendship (looking at you, Cap and the Howling Commandos). But the montage is there for a reason. We need to see the transition but we don’t need to live the transition. 

At the beginning of your twenties, you’re just out of college or you’re just beginning your life as an adult and you’re pre-montage. You’re figuring out your goals, you’re deciding what your priorities are, and you’re trying to see where you fit. Maybe you’re not useless, but you’re still a little bit shapeless. You feel like you’re you, but you’re not the person you will settle into with the comfortable weight gain of middle age. You’re malleable. 

Then the inciting incident happens. It might be college graduation, it might be getting married, it might be some flash of inspiration and purpose, but something happens in your life that sets you off on your montage-state. 

Now, it might not be a positive montage. It could be very neutral- you might not be working to be a person different from what you are. Maybe you’ve already gained the skills you need and your montage is day after day putting in the work you need to do to be financially secure, slowing refining your friend circle, living out the years in relative peace. Your montage-inciting incident would probably be a sigh as you settled into your desk. 

Or it could be a negative montage. Most of us passively ruin our lives, but a few bright stars actively self-destruct. 

All the same, there’s a repetition of days and activities in your twenties that builds you into who you will be. The same could be true of every segment of your life, I guess, but I find that for most of us who get to go on past thirty, this is where the building happens, a process so complex and involved that it takes a decade to make it happen. 

What I want to emphasize, though, is that things happen in montages. For those that are positive, those that make us into people we want to be rather than people we’ll accept becoming, we have to do something. We have to have a goal. We have to be willing to change our stars and to dive into the work that is remaking a human. We have to edit resumes and search for jobs and challenge our work schedules and stand up for ourselves and for others. We have to find the strength to stay in a system that needs us, every day noticing something or someone new that will help us move forward. We have to learn and grow through the experiences laid before us and through the ones that we find for ourselves. 

It is exhausting, this living, if we’re doing it right. It’s exhausting until the day that it isn’t, until we find ourselves at the end of the montage, having transformed into the post-montage character at last. I’m not in love with life in the montage. There’s a reason movies skip past those months and years. There are days and nights of relentless activity, of questioning and assurance, of dreams or nightmares calcifying into reality. But in them is the becoming of a person and we have to live into that. 

Go get to work. 

My Window

All my life, I've loved my bedroom windows almost as much as I've loved my bedroom itself. My room is my space, it's my sanctuary, it's my place to always be able to come back to where no one else needs to be. I have an overactive imagination. My room is the space where I can watch the play happening in my brain without worrying about my facial expressions.

But my windows have always been the perfect compromise between inner and outer life, especially at night when the sun's gone down and the door's closed and the whole world feels just a little bit claustrophobic. I love it when there are enough trees outside my window to give me privacy, but whose branches still split enough for me to see the stars. There's nothing like falling asleep by your window in the summer time, letting the crickets lull you to sleep while the last blinks of the fireflies dance against the twinkle of the stars. It's a symphony on the other side of the window screen.

Now, I know that city life does not afford this same pleasure. (I also know that I'm missing the cicadas this year and I have thoughts and feelings about that, too.) I know that you trade your tree line for a cityscape and I suppose that's even. I wouldn't have been able to take pictures like this from my room in Chapel Hill.

My tiny room has had a small saving grace in that I'm quite pleased with the view out my window. It could be better, but it could be a lot worse. And it's floor to ceiling, so even if it is the only window in the room, at least it lets in a lot of light. I hung an extra, thinner curtain so I could keep the blackout one pulled to the side and let the sun wake me up. It's a bit of a problem now that the sun gets up before 5am, but I manage somehow.

The thing that drives me nuts about my window, though, is not that it doesn't have a screen nor that it looks out over buildings. The thing that drives me nuts about my window is the mud spatters.

Seen here on the righthand side of the window, in all their sunset glory.

The mud spatters were one of the first things I noticed about my room because of course I went straight to my window and you can't help but see 'em. There's an active construction site right across from us so I assume it got thrown up from there but I also knew that Scotland was rainy and so I assumed they'd get washed away within a day or two.

Boy, was I wrong. These suckers have endured. The window's a little bit inset and so it doesn't even get properly soaked by the rain, even by storms, but still, I admire their dedication to ruining my view daily. Pretty sunset outside? Random fireworks over Carlton Hill or the castle? Particularly impressive clouds? Really dumb seagull on an adjacent roof? Better be ready to climb your desk and contort your body into odd angles because these mud spots are here. to. stay. 

Then again, one of my first nights here, I went to the window and for once it was clear and I could see the Big Dipper (which they actually do call the Plow here-- I had thought that was just a pedantic parenthetical in constellation books) and the Little Dipper hanging up in the sky over the city and it's like the mud never existed. The spatters couldn't block out my night sky. 

Life is like that, I think. You assume rain will wash away what's past, but some spots are stubborn. For mine, I'd have to make a complaint, call in a professional cleaning crew to scaffold up to the fifth floor because I can't open the window wide enough to get to them. It's not worth it to me for a little bit of aesthetic peace. Whenever they get around to it is fine. We'll manage until then.

Besides, if I really wanted to see beauty, I could just leave my flat. 

Breathe

I'm tired.

I was tired as I changed into my running clothes. I had to sink down onto my bed to put on my shoes. I gave up tying them once, took a minute to hold my head in my hands, counted to ten, and tried again. Then I stood up and stretched and left the house via the hundred-and-some stairs that run down from the 5th floor. That's not my favorite part of the run-- I turned my ankle a couple of weeks ago and it still creaks a little if I land funny. It's sore, but I'm keeping an eye on it. It's been all right.

I hadn't run in more than a week. I would have gone out Friday or Saturday but my bag wasn't back from the airport yet and my running shoes were in that bag, packed in my luggage despite the fact that I did no running while I was back in North Carolina. I meant to, but the best laid plans... But that time away from exercise ended up with my body protesting every step of the mile out to the swan pond and my lungs actively rebelling a quarter of the way into the mile back.

When I'm out practice, the rebellion is all I feel. I forget how to breathe. I know that there's some way to breathe like an athlete, where you're using your lungs and your diaphragm and not trapping all the oxygen in your panicked larynx and trachea and I know that I must have known this in the past because I've been athletic before and been able to breathe breaths that don't sound like the gasp of a brokenhearted teenager between sobs, but I don't remember how. I'll look up a youtube video about it or something. I just gotta practice.

And practice I will, until the right way to breathe becomes second nature, until my lungs get the oxygen they need to power my legs and my arms and my heart as I run. I'll find a rhythm and I'll get better. I kinda have to. I've put down money for this half marathon in October, so I've got skin in the game and I know I'll make good on this promise I made to myself. Honestly, I'm pretty sure it's going to be worth it regardless of how the race itself turns out. It's forced me to take on a healthy habit, which has forced several unhealthier ones to the back burner. I can feel my body changing. I've watched my attitude change. It's made me go outside, where all the people and the nature are.

But that's where I want the life lesson here to end because I am tired. I am so tired. Maybe it's because I hadn't realized how exhausting the cycle of grief, anger, and apathy is after a mass shooting. Maybe it's because I was already worn down by all the words and spin from this election cycle, from this year. I want to keep my Facebook closed and to stay off Twitter because the things I read either sadden me or make me feel guilty for not being sad. Or angry.

We need to learn how to breathe again.

Breathing means taking in the air around you and letting it fill you with life, reveling in the dependence that signifies humanity.

Breathing means letting others into you, pulling in molecules that have travelled through the lungs of your neighbor and their neighbor and trees and plants, connecting every respiring thing on this Earth together, taking the same atmosphere in and letting it back out.

Breathing is preparation.

Breathing is restoration.

Breathing is what allows us to live toward the next second, is what lets us sing or speak or shout, is what powers our muscles, our brains, steeps our blood, this same blood we all share, in the oxygen we need to do great feats of might or mind. Every human who has ever loved or lost or held or hated has needed to breathe. Everyone who has died, everyone who has killed, everyone who has been held on the sidelines while the world around us crumbles, we all breathe. We have been given an abundance of the stuff of life, a thin skin around our globe that has been more than enough, and if we had only thought about it, maybe we could have been united in the miracle of breath, of humanity, before the trigger was pulled.

Breathe with me.

Pull humanity into your lungs and let it back out again. Thank it for all the good it can do, for all the good it has done in your life. Reach out to the Greater Than that you know and hold out your hands for the burden to be placed on your heart. Sing to yourself that love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love. Breathe it. Believe it. Inhale your connection to this world and hold it, its fragility and fragile people, and do it again and again and again and again and again until it is second nature to to count every other human on this planet as your brother and your sister, your neighbor, someone who you would never abandon or harm or ignore regardless of sexual identity, race, nationality, religion, or class. Breathe until you realize who you are.

Then stand up.

Listen, loves, I know we're all so very tired, but stand up with me and work these muscles until we're fit again. Let's care for our injuries now with deep compassion but not let them stop us from standing again. I know it seems impossible, it seems like anger and hate will always win, but we won't know if love can win until we've started the race, until we have actively stretched out the limbs of our care and started using them, watching the change it makes in our society, among us people, as we use these muscles of love day after day after day. Let's earn our exhaustion not with bearing the burden of disappointing thoughts but with action.

Let's breathe in and begin.

*************

Update: I'm glad to have seen so many people reading this. I think we're all looking for a way to cope and engage and I hope I've helped. If you're ready to start stretching those muscles with me, here are a few concrete ways to do that: 

-Talk to your loved ones and friends. Check in with anybody you know who's a member of the LGBTQ community and offer them your love and support. You might not know anybody in Orlando, but you do know someone who could have been killed in an attack like this. Offer food, lend an ear, give love.
-Attend a vigil. Have a quick google and then go out as you can. Visible outpourings of support can and do make a difference in how we see each other. 

-Donate blood. Not everyone can, so if you meet the qualifications the center nearest you sets out and you okay with needles, head over. Supplies are typically lower in the summer anyway and tragedies like this just make the need greater. 

-Donate to Orlando. Just make sure you do your homework so you know that your money's going where you want it to go.

-Contact your member of Congress. Nothing changes unless we use our voices. Take your time and think deeply about what's happened and what's been happening, and then use your voice. Talk to your representatives at every level of government, but also talk to your family and friends. Tragedies happen and we can't control that but we can control how we react. Engage. 

An Open Letter From a Running Girl

To the man who shouted out to my friend and I while we were jogging,

Thank you for the encouragement, sir. We will keep running.

But if you will, imagine with me for a moment. It's a different mental muscle than the one you used to decide to roll down your window, stick your head out of a moving vehicle, and induce your vocal cords into motion, but I believe it's there. So imagine with me that you are a fighter. A boxer. In a ring.

Have the picture in your mind?

Fantastic.

Now I want you to imagine that this is the biggest fight of your life. You've been training for years, building up strength in your muscles, getting knocked down, getting back up again and again and again until bruises are second nature to your skin and the ache of your muscles is a good familiar friend. You're tough. You're ready. You know that you can win this thing.

All around you is a huge crowd. The fight's sold out and everyone's ready for a show. The attention doesn't bother you-- you've been waiting for this moment for your whole life and you're ready to show off. Your coach gives you a quick pep talk, full of confidence in you, your abilities, your determination, and your endurance. There's no doubt in his mind that you can do this. The bell dings and you step forward to circle around your opponent.

Are you there? Are you mentally in the ring, fists up, watching the other man for any indication of what move he might make, trying to decide if the first punch should be yours? Are your feet dancing, shuffling, jumping small jumps to keep your weight perfectly balanced? Are you there? Absorbed? Ready to see what you can do?

Imagine the first punch.

And the next.

And the next.

Imagine this fight. Plan out your moves. Duck, dodge, take a hit, land a hit, land another, back the other man into a corner. Pull back your arm for a clear punch to his jaw as he lets his guard down and then imagine a high obnoxious voice cutting through the crowd, "Oh yeah! Keep punching him!"

You turn your head, distracted. And then your opponent pummels your ass into the ground. You couldn't ever have done this. You couldn't even maintain focus for one round of the fight. One catcall (what's the male version of catcall? rooster-call?) and you're through. You weren't ready for this and everyone in this gigantic auditorium knows it. Thousands of people turned up to watch you choke. As you tumble headfirst toward the mat, your last thought before blackness is, "What a compliment that girl paid me!"

No? It's not?

You're not proud that someone noticed your body? You're not elated that someone deigned to give you attention because of your physique? You had bigger things on your mind? You wanted to accomplish something? You're not grateful that this cockcaller took the time to offer you encouragement as you took steps to improve your life?

Huh.

Imagine that.

There's a way to extend this, make it more applicable to what happened when you called out to me-- imagine this is not even a fight, just your first round of training, and someone in the gym tells you to keep punching as the flabby meat of your arm jiggles after every punch. You, sir, probably don't have any insecurities at all, but imagine having to workout in front of a wall-sized picture of Chris Hemsworth without his shirt on. Eventually, it's going to get into your head that there are some standards up to which you are never going to measure. And even if you do find your way to seeing that this workout is for yourself, that it doesn't matter that you can't meet that unrealistic expectation for your body, there's still going to be that person at the gym who's going to leer at you as you work out, at best a distraction that you're going to have to learn to tune out.

Listen, I'm not telling you how to live your life. I'm just offering you a narrative in which you can see why we don't plan on running along streets anymore.

Best wishes,
One of the Running Girls

Time, She is a Passing

I never thought getting a fringe would make me have to rethink my own mortality but here we are.

Now I know that one grey hair does not middle age make, but this little sucker catches the light every time I look in the mirror, just shining there like a tiny dispatch from the skies to remind me that I will die one day and the longer I last, the more likely it is that my body, of which this rebellious hair is an already decaying piece, will give out on me and commit itself back to the ground whether I'm ready for it or not. It is the slow progression of entropy that drives the universe toward disorganized particulate quiet working its will on the pigmentation of my hair. Thanks, nature!

So anyway, things are getting a little bit busy over the next month or so and I want to focus all my available mental energies on my dissertation and some more formalized writing. I've got a few posts banked for Wednesdays and I'm sure I'll pop in and out, but for the most part, we're going to take a summertime break for the Monday/Friday posts starting now. Lord willing and the creeks don't rise, I'll be able to pick back up in July.

Happy June, blog friends!

The Highlands: The Video

I'm usually all about forcing clear narrative arcs on my life, but, as we've already seen, I couldn't make that happen with this highlands trip. There's still not a narrative in the video, but it's another chance to get a feel for how good the trip was.

My Ghost: Updated

You might remember that one time I talked about catching a ghost on camera? Well, boy, do I have an update for you! But before I update you, let me remind you that I live in a place that sometimes looks like this:

There's a construction crane just over that rightmost building. Fog, y'all. 

There's an amount of spookiness that seeps into your bones when you live in Edinburgh, I think. Now, let me remind you of my ghost:

That little green dot. At Greyfriar's Kirkyard. 

And let me remind you that it's 1000% not the lighting because here's another picture with the sun in it, but no ghost: 

Now, when I went to Iona, which is famously a "thin place", where the spiritual realm is closer to the physical, and I was ecstatic to see the ghost (green dot) show up. Maybe it was a fairy after all! 

By a reflecting pond

Up on the highest point on Iona

A friend of mine even caught it on her camera! 

Look at that fascinating glare around the ghost! 

If it's caught by another camera, it has to be real, right? Right? 

Well, not quite. It could just be the sun. Or a bright light.

See the green dot and the red glare, just below the human?

Or below the lamppost?

Yeah, dudes. It's mostly the sun. 

It's like a Where's Waldo of the little green dot. At Castle Urquhart on Loch Ness. 

Sometimes more obvious than others. In Princes Street Gardens. 

It's faint, but bottom center of the photo, off to the left. From the top of St. Paul's in London.

It gets brighter or fainter depending on how clearly the Sun is in the photo.

Top of St. Paul's again.

Castle Urquhart from a distance. See how much paler the dot is when the sun's behind the clouds? 

Honestly? I don't remember, but test your knowledge here! 

It's a camera thing, y'all. As long as there's a bright light, you'll find the green dot. 

Weird dot in the center. In the tunnels under Castle Urquhart. 

In front of the trash can. Outside of City Hall. 

I think I could go back to any picture I've taken with an iPhone where a bright light is involved, but this evidence is enough. It's an overexposed pixel or something. I'm trying not to google it because that's a rabbit hole I don't want to fall in. I was weirded out by how it appeared to move, but I think it's just the angle you hold the phone at. It can't hardly be the same from shot to shot. 

See? 

It moved! 

Yeah, no, definitely the Sun. The Sun and some science. Optics. Newton. Physics. But hey, this is a fun experiment that you can try on your own at home! NEVER LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN but you can hold your phone up and tilt it to watch the green dot move around. Science! 

But, again, I want to remind you, this is the country I'm staying in:

The fog got worse.

It's sometimes spooky here. You do feel like you're closer to what used to be. And let me tell you, I never thought I'd want to have the Sun in a picture until I came here and missed the Sun so much. When you see it, it may as well be in the picture, like the friend from back home who you know super well and who came to visit for the weekend. What I'm saying is that the sun doesn't shine much here and that makes you think things you might not otherwise and I don't regret my fancy. 

Because it's the X-Files, you know? It's those moments where you choose to believe that there's something out there that science can't explain. Yes, most ghosts are exposed wiring and human imagining, but I firmly believe that there's something out there that we don't understand, or there's something in our minds that we can't explain. Maybe the atmosphere does it and maybe we're all dupes and maybe this is all there is, but I think it's worth investigating. I think it's worth thinking about. Even if we debunk every single ghost anyone's ever found evidence for, the fact that new ghosts are found every day points to something we have questions about. We want to think that there's something bigger than us or outside of us or beyond us. We hope for something out there. And I think that's worthy. 

Ghost aren't real, everyone. 

But it's also more complicated than that.