Friday, October 2, 2015

Where Happy Comes From

Hi guys, I know it's been awhile.  I always feel a sense of hesitancy to post when I've been absent for so long, like I can't write about what's on my mind at this moment without first recapping where I've been and what I've been about for the last few months.  But I feel such a warm glow this evening.  I feel such a serene happiness that it would seem a shame and a loss to keep it to myself - because these things pass.

There are a small multitude of perfect-seeming things around me just now, and it's my habit to stop, when this little flutter of light, of peace, of...something sublime for which our language has no name - and analyze my surroundings.  Somehow, it will be all the better and what's more, more tenacious, if I can pin it to its source.

But as I rattled off to myself things that I certainly am happy about - and there were many - none of them quite resonated with the buoyancy I feel.  Each was a contributor, but none was at the core.  The bubbling, vibrant, almost-walking baby wandering the house at shin-height; the little girl who clung to my shirt at bedtime and said, "I wan' to cuddle wis you.  Mother, I wan' to cuddle wis you"; the blue-gray cloud cover and dappled tawny foliage, at long last acknowledging autumn; hope breathed into a long-cherished dream; the sigh of a Friday after a particularly hectic week and the impending arrival of my husband, after a week-long absense --

And the thing upon which I finally settled, the thing which, when my mind caught hold of it, brought the unmistakable feeling of yes was the soft, measured voice of Truman G. Madsen, as he delivered lectures on the life of Joseph Smith.  The CD recording carried me down the canyon and back today, through my errands and home again.  One cannot, I believe, learn about a devoted servant of God, one who taught the Gospel so vigorously and so joyfully, and who exemplified the things which he taught, without feeling nearer to God Himself.  It made me want to pray more fervently, to serve my neighbors more cheerfully, and to search the scriptures with greater energy and curiosity.  In short, I took the opportunity to saturate my thoughts, today, in the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and every aspect of my day was improved.

The Gospel adds vibrancy to our lives.  It liberates us to take joy in those things that we know to be most important, but in which we sometimes struggle to rejoice.  Every bright thing becomes brighter under its influence, and all true happiness is amplified.

All good things come from Jesus Christ, and He has not left us alone, to stumble in this world.  We have prophets - living prophets - to whom the Savior speaks and they speak His will.  Tomorrow and on Sunday, they will speak and we can listen.  Our lives can be saturated with this buoyant light, this abundant happiness.  This is real.



Friday, May 15, 2015

Burying Dreams

The grave digger carries a shovel.  In my mind, she walks with hunched shoulders against a grey sky.  In my mind, she has a heavy heart, so much so, perhaps, that her burdens have worn through its apex and fallen to the grave digger’s feet.  That grey-blue heart is perforated and ragged, with gaping holes.  I hear her heartbeats like gusts of defeat – weak, loud, empty, and really only suggesting a course to the air that wanders over graves, rather than compelling blood.  It’s a November sort of scene that I see when I visualize one who routinely buries stiffened and mottled flesh, pushing aside ghostly, withered leaves, and making a place to lay to rest long-loved dreams.

But another figure carries a shovel, too.  Another person, less weary, but with just as much reason to be, also  carries a dry and shriveled promise to be placed in the cold ground.  She prepares a place as the grave digger has done, presses and coaxes the earth to yield a resting place for it.  The placement is quick and the burial site marked, too, but she afterward looks up.  The sun is an April thing and leaves at her feet have been so long dead that they’ve forgotten to look forlorn.  Like the other earth-mover, she turns away and leaves the receptacle of her hopes in the cold and the dark of the ground, but she will return.  She will guard this place.  She will wait.  She will not forget, because she is a gardener.

I’m learning this about adulthood: the dreams that I cherished through my childhood, the vibrant ones to which I clung, and the visions to which I promised my heart, have, of necessity, began to gather dust.  As I change diapers, scrape dinners out of messy pantry shelves, and hurry between activities and obligations, those hopes have begun to wither.  Last October, I stole away a time or two, seizing a sunny hour at nap-time to harvest the beans that we had left out to dry for this year’s seed.  The pods crackled delicately and the beans had become white and hard.  My hands feel that way now, when I take up a pencil to sketch or open a blank word document to write.  My imagination and creativity stiffen with disuse and sometimes it makes me feel a little disillusioned, deadened. 

I wonder, but speculate that I would feel much the same way, even if these two precious girls hadn’t yet come into my life.  This disillusionment, this period of wandering is, I think, something most of us go through as we shed our childhoods.  If I wasn’t a mother, I might be realizing that the career I had chosen was not as fulfilling as I had hoped, that neither friends nor spouse nor busyness could completely stave off loneliness all of the time – that time could not be stretched or compressed enough to cradle my needs.  It’s a period when we all begin, probably never to cease, to realize that choosing the best things often means choosing the hard things and sacrificing other desires along the way.  And we do it.

When people ask me how I’m liking life, I usually answer wholeheartedly that I love it, that I’m working my dream job.  It’s true.  I am probably one of the luckiest people I know, to have all of every day to devote to two beautiful, healthy children who have more than enough energy to drain me of mine.  But there are moments, now and then, when I feel the weight of where I am and of those unanswered devotions to my teenaged ambitions.  There are times when, in spite of the work I do and the happiness it generates, I feel like a shell, and I miss the pleasures that I knowingly traded in for this hard-earned and mercifully granted joy.  I miss the exercise – the physical, mental, social stimuli and sculpting that I once thought comprised the path to becoming who I’m meant to be.  Sometimes, I feel lonely.  Sometimes I feel empty.  

The despondency rested a little heavily over me this week.  That’s a part of life, I know, so I pressed myself to move proactively through my routine.  It’s planting season and my neighbor and I have spent hours every morning in our garden plot, furiously digging trenches, tilling in fertilizer, and laying down drip lines.  Kneeling beside the row we’d designated for corn, I pressed holes into the soil with my middle finger, dropped two gnarled kernels into each, and pinched the loose dirt back over them.  Burying dreams, I thought. 

It wasn’t exactly an epiphany for me, really.  I’ve long thought of my extra-parental aspirations as gathering dust.  Atrophied, maybe, dormant, but not dead.  Still, as I thought about those buried corns, in the damp, cold darkness, it added a new color to my hope.  Yes, I will take up those dreams again someday.  I will have another chance to develop the God-given talents in my hands and body and mind, and when I pick them up again, they will be slightly wasted and wan, but perhaps they too will be changed from the last time I held them.  Maybe something will have sprouted, developed, that was not there before.  Something will be waiting to spring out of them that could not have come from my inexperienced, youthful vigor.


Right now, motherhood, and the effort to do things right and responsibly, has all but consumed me, like a hole in the earth; but I am not a shell.  I am a seed.  The life and light inside of me and the dark dampness around me, together, will do what pure sunshine and unbroken ease could not have done.  Even now, I am germinating.