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.

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. 

My Happy Thought

In the few short weeks that have followed the appearance of our Ellie, I have found myself daydreaming from time to time.  I have caught myself thinking, half-consciously, now we're a real family...

I know that that's ridiculous.  We were a real family before Ellie was born, before she was even thought of.  Ben and I were a real family even before Addie came to us.  We were a real family from the day we were married, when we committed to be a forever unit, to build one another up and to grow together for the rest of our lives and long after.

But life is a long time - not to mention eternity - and I can't help thinking about it, envisioning family photos taken someday in a studio or on a carpet of fallen leaves.  When I was a new bride, my husband was one of the only real certainties of my future.  There would be him, me...and whatever other family members might happen along.

Almost a year and a half later, Addie came into our lives, and they were, of course, changed forever.  My imaginary family portraits began to feature her little face as well.  Alongside the baby pictures that began to appear on our walls, I saw, in my mind, other pictures - the first day of kindergarten, Christmases and family reunions to come.  And yet, in addition to Addie, the pictures included a number - no one can say how many - of nameless, faceless little strangers.

Ellie is yet another piece to that puzzle.  Now that she is here, I feel that I know something more about both of my daughters than I did before.  Each one adds a new backdrop to the other's life.  Each adds a clarifying line to the vague contour of our future as I see it before us.  All of those yet-untaken photographs are one less part imagination and on more part reality.

So, in those moments of sunshiny contentment, this is what I see - lots of murky, undefined years, but each one is filled with my girls, my husband and with abundant promise.

Backyard Fantasies

Since I was a teenager, green has been my favorite color and, in many situations, it still is.  At this point, I'm not overly biased.  I haven't insisted on having every room in the house or even one of them painted in some forest-y shade and after years of complaining to my mom that I was so tired of that shade of burgundy that she used all throughout the kitchen, I can see that appeal in it.  It might even make an appearance in my own home someday.  We'll see.

However, ever since we moved out here, I have been painfully aware of the absence of my long-time favorite color from most of the scenery.  In February, I realized that it probably wasn't a healthy habit to, in a moment of homesickness, spend an hour or so researching some random, scenic town a thousand miles away, down to the house I would buy, the church I would attend, and the library I would frequent, should we happen to move there.  Instead, knowing that our plans don't include leaving this town for a couple years more, I started to fantasize about how to bring the green to me.  

It started with the day we took Addie to the track and allowed her to play in the sand.  I decided that we would need a sand box to keep her company during the summer.  My mind moved to the enclosure in which the box would sit, lest she should get any ideas about running away.  The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that the yard inside the fence should be green - and not with synthetic turf either (it's been suggested).  With real, living grass.  (The original dream actually included ivy climbing the fence and a line of sunflowers, standing sentry around its perimeter.  I've since put that vision on hold.)

The new fence, as seen from out back porch

In the background, you can see the garden we've started
planting with our neighbors.  It'll be a monster if it ever
takes off.

I acknowledge that it's sort of a long shot.  No one in our neighborhood has a lawn.  I don't know it that's for lack of trying or simply because the thing is impossible.  Nevertheless, we marked out a spot behind the house.  A few weeks ago, we got a fence.  Finally, after weeks of shoveling gravel, tearing up weeds, and a few rather vain attempts to level the small area, we spent an evening spreading top soil, grass seed, and fertilizer.

In the process, Addie rediscovered her inner mud-monkey (which had mysteriously gone missing for the majority of the yard-clearing process.  Now, the yard is wet, muddy, and speckled with oh-so vulnerable little seeds.  I have found myself going to the window or the porch every few hours or so, just to check for sprouts.

Lately, it's been Addie's thing to get a bottle and flop down somewhere on the kitchen floor to drink it.  When she ran out of steam for playing in the dirt, she finally settled down right in the muddy doorway, taking a front-row seat to watch the sprinklers work their magic.

I'm ready to acknowledge that we might never see a nice, thick lawn  covering our little strip of yard, but I'm also ready to fight all summer long to make it happen.  As much as I would (will) love to have a nice, cultivated yard, a retreat from the surrounding dust, the very act of putting my heart and hands into the project has been a healing balm.  Therefore, so help me, I will dig and plant and water and repeat until I have a lawn to show for it or until the effort puts me into labor. And in the meantime, I will learn to love this land.

Sweet Dreams

Happiness is...

a dream that doesn't dim with waking,

that takes shape in my prayers,

before my eyes

and beneath my hands.

A dream that did not begin with

and will not end with me –

a heritage.

Doorknobs and Grown-ups

The adventures never seem to cease, out here.  And they come at us when we're least expecting them.

If you're wondering whether that is what you think it is, you're probably right.  It's an apple, mounted where our doorknob should be.

Or, more appropriately, two apples where our doorknob should be.  What would you do if you fell asleep working on your computer, woke up at about 1:00 AM, decided to check on your baby before officially going to bed and found that your door had fallen shut and the doorknob jammed, locking you in your own bedroom?

You'd knock the screen out of our window and clamber out and around to the front porch, obviously, glad to have forgotten to lock the front door for once.  Or, more appropriately, if you were four months pregnant, hopefully your husband would be around to do that last part for you.

Once you had gotten the bedroom door open - a curiously easy feat from the kitchen side of it - you would remove the doorknob, naturally.  The only remaining dilemma would be how to block light and sound from coming in through the round hole in your door.  The easy solution, a wad of grocery bags, just wouldn't do.  It would look tacky.

So what do you do?  Decorate with fruit,. of course.  Two apples and a skewer - or sturdy plastic straw, or whatever - and voila!  Problem solved and door decorated.  For a few days at least, until the apples begin to get soft and brown on the inside...but that's another story altogether.

I said that adventures keep finding us out here, but for once I don't think I mean in 'Somewhere.'  This time, I mean the wild ride that is adulthood.  When you're a kid, adventures are something that someone reads to you from a book, or something that you paint with watercolors, or something that you dream up with your running feet and whooping yells.  Sometimes, it's like that for grown-ups too, where you're inventing an adventure or fueling it with hard work and imagination; but sometimes - often - it's more like finding out that you're out in the open water now.  Adventure finds you and you roll with it and learn to laugh.

Two-Sock Life

Folding laundry the other day, I came across an all-too-familiar problem.  I think we've all encountered matchless socks in our baskets.  When I was growing up in a house full of siblings, they covered the bottom of the basket, several inches deep.  To sort through them was at once mundane and daunting.  Even though there are only three of us at my house and the single socks are only a handful after the folding has been done, it's always a vague source of frustration in the back of my mind.  If there are so few of us and it's so clear whose socks are whose and we all wear two socks every day, how do we come up short?

Perhaps the most maddening thing about it is that, as I put the unpaired few on my dryer, planning to keep a keen eye out for their matches, I know that their opposites are very likely somewhere else - in a drawer, on a shelf, or under a bed, likewise, waiting.  Disorganized as I am, I will probably never be able to round up all of those single, waiting socks, to fold them neatly together and say that my life is in order.

It's rather like my daily struggle to juggle my time just right - to read the best books, to continually learn  new skills, to keep my house clean, to provide healthy meals, to play with my daughter when she wants my attention, to actively participate in my community and in church functions, to plan and execute fun family activities, and to do a hundred other things that really ought to happen daily.  It's like the pieces of my life, which I can never quite get to fall into place the way I think the should.  It's like the woman I know I should be by now, rather than the one I meet in the mirror.  I often feel like I'll never get it together - my socks, myself, or my family.

But do you know what the funny thing is?  No matter how scattered I feel, I wake up every morning to a home that, if not tidy, is pleasant and sanitary.  Regardless of the time I never mean to waste doing mediocre activities, we always eat well.  In spite of my struggles to plan creative and memorable activities, my family rarely wants for quality time to spend together and we laugh often.  And although my laundry always comes up short of a sock or two, all of us have matching (or pretty nearly matching) socks to wear every day.

I was never good at juggling.  Others have tried to teach me and I have tried to teach myself, but even with the light, airy scarves, that take their time coming down, I could never keep all three in the air for long.  Through those misfit, lonely socks, I have found another little bit of inspiration to keep on trying.  Life is a longitudinal effort, an exercise in endurance.  I can hardly expect to wake up tomorrow as the with-it, together woman I often want to be, and to keep on being her every day and every moment, as long as I live.  I can hope and try to progress, just a little bit farther today, though, knowing that the more I strive for balance, the more the scales will be tipped in my favor.  And meanwhile, partially through my own efforts and partially through the heavenly help that I will always have and never deserve, I can trust that I and mine will always have two warm socks to wear. 

Life and Poetry...

Yesterday was, well, stressful.  It was a Monday on which I woke up to a very long to-do list, without a really solid plan about how I was going to attack and conquer said list.  I tend to be an anxious person, to let stress get inside me and gnaw at my nerves, and I'm sure that my blood pressure was a little above where it should have been.  The worst part was that I couldn't seem to put my finger directly on the problem.  It's like there was something in the air that was forcing me to live on the verge of an emotional sneeze.  Not a good feeling.

Yet, as I whittled away at my list of things to do, managing to wedge in just a little bit of me-time during the (glorious) afternoon nap, I found myself approaching evening.  We were having company over for supper and my husband arrived home early to help me get ready.  A mere forty minutes beforehand, I finally began to throw together a soup and found out, to my surprise, that I felt...happy.  It was like a warm, fuzzy, almost euphoric quality had made its way into my day and had just been waiting there to be recognized.

I have noticed in the past year or so that those moments happen quite frequently.  As my own, somewhat scientifically-minded, overbearing psychoanalyst, my natural reaction is to go back through everything that was said and done throughout the day to pinprick the exact cause that brought about this feeling of peace.  Often, I can do it, but there are also quite a few days, like yesterday, when I can't.  More importantly, I can sometimes quell the 'why?' and 'what happened?' questions, to simply enjoy the sensation.

It took me back to a beautiful, gray day, toward the end of my fourth semester of college.  I was doing well in my classes and I had recently been accepted to the program that would carry me through the next two years of school.  It had been a season of self-discovery for me.  That was the time when I had learned that I could decide to be happy, and I had been.  As wildly happy as I knew how to be.  And yet...that anxiety hung over me like a cloud.

I had gotten the opportunity to spend the semester studying a variety of things unrelated to my major, among them, the works of Pope, Johnson, Shelly and Keats, and loved every minute of it.  But on that steely-gray day, crossing the campus, I found myself thinking, your life isn't a novel.  It's not a poem.  You've got to grow up.  This is the way life really feels and it's time to get used to that.

I was wrong.  It has taken me all of the years between then and now to begin to see the cadences to which life flows, the lovely words that lie beneath breaths and between sunsets, and the repetitive phrases that make sense of heartbeats and heartbreak.  Life is poetry, though sometimes it's difficult to find and keep the rhythm.  Someday, I might revisit this thought, to explain what made the difference in my perspective and how I discovered what I now know, but for today, this much is sufficient.  

Looking back at that moment of confusion, I'm so grateful that I was wrong.

Embracing the Familiar, as Far Away becomes Home

This morning, I am enjoying the aftermath of the first snowfall in our new home.  Yesterday, I enjoyed the storm from our kitchen floor, with my daughter craning her neck in wonder, trying to figure out what was making that plinking sound on our stove-pipe.

Today, I stepped outside to toss a diaper, and found that a silvery rime covered everything, from my front porch to the sloping ranch-land across the railroad tracks, and far beyond, drip-dripping into a warm, muddy morning.  Despite our rather sudden move, from the rocky mountains to this high desert, winter still knows where we are.  What's more is the strange realization - one that should have been obvious - that snow found this place long before we ever did.  It's odd, but somehow that warms my heart.

My mom, husband, and others can attest to the fact that I've spent many a precious minute whining about the lack of trees, the lack of mountains, and the lack of just about everything to which I'm accustomed, in this landscape.  But I think I'm ready to take all of that back.

Right now, I love it here.

Happiness is...

Morning,

sitting here, on my bed,

folding a week's worth of laundry,

listening to my daughter

who is playing on the floor,

enunciating "da-dd, da-dd,"

in a warm October house

as sunlight trickles through the blinds.

The Make-Over: Ceaseless and Sorrowless

The other major change I made to the blog was, obviously, the web address.  After I changed the name, I thought that I really out to have a new web address too.  Why not, right?  I wanted something to match the type of things I hope to write about as well as the name.  I wanted something to remind me of why I started blogging in the first place.  But, alas, I couldn't come up with anything I liked, much less anything that hadn't been taken.  So I have up.

As is the way with these types of things, though, the right idea eventually found me.  I've found that brainstorming is only really productive if you have some clouds in your brain to begin with, maybe a little wind.  I don't know how it is for anyone else, but I can seldom will myself to be creative on the spot and come up with good results.

But where was I?  Ah, yes - the address.  The bolt of inspiration that caught up to me after I had given up on it.

When I was in college, the LDS Institute held weekly devotionals wherein a guest speaker spent an hour or so with a chapel full of students, offering motivation and inspiration (or trying to do so, at least.  One of the first devotional addresses I can remember involved the speaker saying something like "You know you're in college when you spend $200 for a book you don't want, don't read it, and sell it back for $7.  Neener-neener.").  It was in one of these devotionals that I was first introduced to Arthur Edgar O'Shaughnessy's "Ode."

I was working on getting into nursing school at that point, but I was also very interesting in poetry.  I set out to find the full poem, fell in love with it, and committed it to memory.  You probably know the one I'm talking about - "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams..."  (It is not a Willy Wonka original.  Don't be deceived).

The seventh stanza reads:

"But we, with our dreaming and singing,

Ceaseless and sorrowless, we!

The glory about us clinging

Of the glorious futures we see,

Our souls with high music ringing:

O men!  It must ever be

That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing

A little apart from ye."

It seemed like the perfect companion for a title like "Tales from Far Away."  My life has diverged from all of my friends' and family's.  We are not far, and yet apart.  Not separated, and yet irreversibly divided.  And wherever we are, time moves on, ceaseless.  We have sorrows, but they are not what define us. 

I married a man who loves to sing.  He is always singing something and he sings sunshine into our home.  If anyone asks, we are out here in the middle of our lovely Somewhere, living our dreams.

The Make-Over: Tales From Far Away

Ever since my blogging identity crisis, I've felt the need, as I begin again to try blogging on a regular basis, to give the page a make-over.  Anyone who read my earliest posts when I first began writing them will have noticed that almost everything has changed: my background, blog title, self-intro blurb, and now my web address.  Some of those things will probably be subject to change on a semi-regular basis, but getting a new title and address felt like kind of an extreme, though merited change, so I decided to try to add some explanation.

The original blog title and web address were the products of boredom.  I was in a new home, relatively far from my family and friends, had applied for work and been hired, but had to wait for weeks for the background check to come through, and had no means of transportation to explore my new home town.  On top of that, I was still in the beginning of my pregnancy and was still feeling somewhat...shall we say newly pregnant?  Once, during a phone conversation to my mom, as I moaned and groaned about my lot in life, she said, "Why don't you start a blog?  That'll keep you busy."

So I did and I used the first name and web address that came into my head, unwittingly turning my last name into what sounded like a religion or philosophy.  When we were contemplating moving here, I settled on the name 'Tales from Far Away.'  In a way, that seems silly, since one of my best friends from high school is now living over a thousand miles further from home than I am.  Another is living across the Atlantic, and one of my best friends from college has been travelling across Europe on business.  What right have I, a measly 500 miles from every place I have ever lived, to claim the description 'far away?'

First, there is the fact that, among both my family and Ben's, we are the outlier, not counting his sister who is serving a mission in Taiwan, of course.  We communicate with the family via email, phone calls, and internet video chatting, but when it comes to family gatherings, ours are the faces that will almost always be absent.  We're out here having our own little adventures and doing our best not to focus on the ones we know we'd enjoy if Ben's job had kept us closer to home.

Then, there's the feeling I've had almost since we were married, and which has certainly grown stronger since then, that when we got married, in a lot of ways, we got up and left the world behind.  Most of our former associations with friends and acquaintances of single life faded away or disappeared altogether.

What's more, we've changed.

I used to imagine that, as a single girl, I was always standing at a crossroads.  I could go in any one of several directions, or in other words, I could develop and encourage any one of several inclinations, and each of them might be equally good.  In marrying Ben, however, I chose on of those roads to follow.  He did the same.  Where our inclinations matched, where our desires and tendencies harmonized, there we walked.  Had we married different people, we might each be different, to some extent.

I am, all the time, pleasantly surprised as I realize where our marriage, and now our family, has taken us.  I keep seeing things in Ben, in the way he treats me, or just in the way he thinks and acts, that I never thought to look for in a prospective spouse when I was dating.  They are things I didn't even realize I wanted.  It's funny how two distinct and separate people can also be, in so many ways, a single entity.

So I guess that's the truest reason I can think of for the blog's name.  Ben and I are far away in the same way that every marriage takes partners far away.  I'm hoping to give the people I love a few glimpses into our little world.