Jesus. This spring.
Work has been great but literally so busy. I am only beginning to pull myself out of a very intense feeling of overwhelm...the kind of overwhelm where you have 300 unread emails and have to write down "text so and so back" to force yourself to do so. I have a ridiculous stack of random sticky notes and long lists that I've been carrying around with me from room to room, just attempting to make some sense of everything. It's not really worked! But we're getting there. And then....all the mess of the world this week. I don't have words for tragedy like this, but I also know not acknowledging it is worse. I don't know what to do about it, but I do know that we as a community must be less stagnant and passive about every important issue we face. Plenty of people who know more than me have pulled together great resource lists; Cup of Jo is a good one.
In our own families and households and friend groups and neighborhoods, we must all be more engaged and more human. More supportive. More caring. More discerning. More ready to take on the work of large changes, and more consistent with our practice of small changes. In this moment, I want to work on: being a better family member, specifically an "aunt" to Chris' very little cousin and a supporter of my own younger cousins; a more generous community member with my time and attention; being a more empathetic observer of my neighbor's lives; and more willing to sit with the news, research, and develop opinions about changes.
Even before this week, I've been thinking a lot about how I want to be careful not to disconnect from the world. Even the grief, even the pain: I want to bear witness to all, to feel the range of the human experience. One of the parts of our upcoming move we are most excited about is being back in town. Our current apartment is a perfectly nice, white-walled unit in a duplex. There is a neatly paved driveway filled with cars. There are fine, quiet neighbors. Someone cuts the grass every Friday. The whole town uses the exact same trash and recycling bins. We live in a cul-de-sac, with many nice, quiet houses. We don't know the neighbors...sometimes we pass someone when we walk the dog, but no one knows (or cares) who we are. When we first moved here, we were excited for more space. Isn't that what we're always searching for? The picket fence? The privacy? But as our move approaches, I am most excited for getting back to the messiness of buildings crammed together. I want to wake up to slammed doors late at night and loud, happy drunk voices in the street. I want to walk by people smoking on their front steps and past piles of free junk on the side of the road. I want to notice people working odd hours, and staying up too late on Tuesdays. I want to to see people existing outside of the apathetic suburbia molds. I want to feel the energy of the first really warm weekend and the quiet of misty Monday mornings. I want the hustle of digging everyone out after a snow storm and the ability to say "let's grab a drink" without grabbing the car keys.
The truth is as much as I'd love a yard for kids and the ability to plant gardens wherever I pleased, the joy and community I really want to belong to doesn't seem to be here. I want to be throwing elbows with the people fighting for parking spaces and not taking tomorrow for granted. My people are the baristas and bartenders and artists that still hold onto their 9-5's, not the guy who's sat at the same desk for 30 years and thinks we could buy a house if only we stopped spending all our money on coffee.
My childhood was isolated. At times I loved it, and at times it felt wrong. There's a lot of gray area to be found between the good and the bad of a homeschooled, conservative Christian upbringing, and I was certainly firmly rooted in the gray. The one thing I always felt, though, was utterly disconnected to the world around me. My lack of trend following and pop culture knowledge was praised by adults, and scorned by peers. I took a lot of pride in not liking what everybody else seemed to. But I also felt a lot of shame for having no grasp on what "real life" felt like. Real life is what everyone else was living; I was caught aloof and uninvolved, like I was watching a goofy sitcom where the outcome didn't matter to me. Whatever my childhood was, it wasn't living.
As an adult, I often still feel behind. The difference now, though, is that I can choose to be more connected instead of continuing to hide away. I can choose to not just talk about compassion, joy, being thoughtful, being neighborly, but to really act in that way. To shape my own life into the way I want the world to feel. There is much to be done on a macro level enable us to live as more whole communities. But the pieces we can really control are the small things, that take place inside our own kitchens and churches and bars and front steps. I want to take this move as a chance to be putting that work first.
All of these pictures are from our quick trip up to Burlington, VT in mid-May. Chris drove up from NJ, and I came up from NH. We got an Air Bnb downtown for two nights. It was a ridiculously hot weekend--in the 90's!--but we had so much fun walking around, going to our favorite used bookstore, and trying new sandwich and coffee places. We got to see my best friend and her boyfriend for a quick visit, and tried a very cool new-to-us restaurant called Poco which was so small, intimate, beautiful, and delicious. Our main reason for coming up was actually to get to see Sal Vulcano's show! I had bought Chris tickets back at Christmas and it ended up getting postponed, but we finally got to see him! So fun. This was our first time being in Burlington when it wasn't freezing cold, and we loved it.
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