Some People Collect Spoons or Goofy Figurines...

Ansel Adams, Redwoods, Bull Creek Flat 

(c) 2010 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

I have little interest in decorative spoons, or stamps, or cheap porcelain angels. I like snow globes, but I would rather not have to dust them. Instead, I keep a collection of quotes. I collect quotes from books and talks, from random radio broadcasts or signs on museum walls. Some of the words inspire me. Some make me laugh. Some just sound nice rolling off my tongue. Because one cannot collect anything without imposing that collection on others, here are just a few of my quotes of the moment.

My friend Ansel on love friendship art nature

Ansel Adams tops my list of quotes this week. In a letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright, he once wrote:

"I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends."

Adams went on to describe his epiphanies about love, friendship and art. I intended to include those epiphanies here, but then I read this sentence at the end of the letter: "I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer."

I thought of a long ago moonrise over the mountains that illuminated something both essential and inexplicable for me, and I remembered the profound peace of a certain slant of light drifting through the leaves on a quiet Sunday afternoon. I understand the power of nature to bring clarity and make of life something noble and grand and positively divine, if only for a fleeting moment.  

Peter Lake on the satisfaction of responsibility

I love the book Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin. For me, he is an Ansel Adams of words. In Winter's Tale, Helprin gives us the wonderful character of Peter Lake, a poet thief and master mechanic. Peter falls in love with Beverly, and at one point tells Beverly's father:

"When we drove across the lake this afternoon and Beverly held the little girl in her arms, I felt a responsibility far more satisfying than any pleasure I have ever known."

While perhaps not the most evocative example of Helprin prose, that quote strikes a particular chord with me today, on the heels of Mother's Day. No satisfaction I have yet experienced compares with the glorious weight of another soul intertwined with mine.

Alice Ann on teaching teenagers

This week brings to a close another year of teaching early morning seminary to a group of bleary-eyed, yet wonderful teenagers. Each schoolday morning we gather at 6:00 a.m. and study scriptures together. Sometimes they sleep or do homework. Often they sing spontaneously and out of tune in the middle of a lesson, and even more often they wander hopelessly off topic. Sometimes they grumble about early mornings and other injustices, and sometimes they sit rather sullen in the shadow of their hoodies. I regularly despair of teaching them anything of value. And yet, as my friend Alice Ann Harrop reminded us in a recent teacher training workshop:

"The Spirit isn't stopped by hoodies."

Despite the hoodies and the grumbling and the meanderings, I love these kids. I see glimmers of brilliance and compassion and deep thought that give me hope for the future.

If you have a favorite quote, I'd love to read it! Post it in Comments. 

Mutterings from the Cesspool of Reality

I find I don't mind middle age so much. I like the freedom that comes with children growing older. I like that we middle folks find it easier to toss aside the facade than we used to, that we seem to have grown more comfortable with the definition we have evolved for ourselves. I feel strong, involved (when I want to be), aware of connections in life around me in a way that I could not have been as a younger woman.

What gives me less joy is the fact that somehow in these middle years we give in to reality. We mature, we apply our experience to our vision of life. We work through our relationships and share our epiphanies with our friends who also struggle with making sense of their own lives. The challenges of raising children and growing a marriage hit us broadside in these middle years, more often than not, and sometimes we reel from the blow. Like most folks, I find a measure of comfort in realizing that my marriage is actually better than most, that the struggles we occasionally face as a family barely hit the Trials and Tribuations charts.

And yet, as I talk with friends and family, as I read blogs and even celebrity interviews, it seems that in our wisdom and maturity we give up on our dreams. Most kids fall way short of the brilliance promised in the proverbial Christmas letter. All marriages struggle. Gwyneth Paltrow reflected the collective middle-age marital wisdom in an interview recently. In that interview, she reported that her father said once that he and his wife have stayed together all these years because they never both wanted to get divorced at the same time. The reality is that most couples fight at least occasionally. The reality is that most professionals fail to find deep satisfaction in their careers. The reality is that few people reach the dreams that propelled them forward in their 20s.

Well, you know what? Reality stinks. The fact is that my dreams DID propel me forward. Reality carries nothing even akin to the motivating power of dreams. In fact, comforting as it may be in a low moment to realize that my failure to reach that far away star simply means I join the rest of humanity on the ground, I happen to like the stars. The view from the lofty heights (or even the view on the way up to the lofty heights I may never reach) awes and inspires me way more than the view from the stable rocks and well-worn dusty paths of reality.

So thank you very much for the wisdom and the camaraderie here on the ground. I appreciate the clarity, and I see the logic. Truly I do. But until I hit another low point, I think I'm going to go back to assuming that the universe has something grand in store if I can only fly high enough.

Pausing in Bethany

Bethany (from historyfish.net)

Every spring, much of the Christian world celebrates Passion Week, commemorating the events of each day in the last week of the Savior's life. Regarding one day in that week, we know almost nothing. Two days before his death, Jesus returned to the village of Bethany, and for a whole day the scriptures fall silent. We can assume with some confidence that He spent that day quietly with his close friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus. With them, as with almost no one else, Jesus could relax, could find solace, could step aside from the world that clamored either for His healing touch or for His blood.

In the midst of events of eternal significance, Jesus more than once paused in Bethany. He ate dinner with friends. We know He wept with them. I like to think He laughed with them, as well, and perhaps told stories of His travels or listened to their thoughts and dreams. They served each other, walked together, almost certainly enjoyed moments of peaceful, companionable silence.

Recently, I spent a weekend getaway with three friends. While we hardly save the world, we do each lead lives of eternal significance. We build marriages, raise children or siblings, heal bodies and spirits, teach youth, create. Sometimes we feel the weight of our worlds resting heavily on our shoulders, and sometimes we feel tiny and insignificant.

The weekend passed comfortably, easily, like slipping into a favorite pair of pajamas and sipping a cup of hot chocolate on a lazy afternoon. Our hostess possesses an uncanny ability to create a sense of peace with carefully arranged furniture and art, and that peace pervaded the hours. We made meals together, chatting over the kitchen counter while ate. We lounged on the sofa and laughed about our lives. We played at the park like my daughter and her friends (though without the cartwheels), browsed through local art stores, took silly photos, basked in moments of silence, and even played with makeup. We did nothing worthy of note to anyone but ourselves, and we ignored schedules.

I returned home rejuvenated, grateful for my life and grateful, as well, for the friendships that ground me and add color and depth to that life. Because sometimes, pausing in Bethany carries its own eternal significance.

Side by Side

My children turn 7, 13, 18, and 23 this year. The youngest lost her third tooth last week. Son #3 recently gained bragging rights as the tallest family member living at home. Son #2 might suffer an ego blast at the need to look up to his younger brother, except for the fact that, like many teenage boys on the brink of adulthood, he is immortal, invincible and untouchable. Meanwhile, I continue to marvel at the fact that while I was distracted by football games and report cards, Son #1 grew into a man. This year I will exactly double his age, and that milestone has me glancing backward at my own life, setting it side by side with the lives of my children.

Juliana in 1st grade

Kristina in 1st grade

At seven, like Kristina, I looked forward to the end of first grade and the beginning of another glorious summer. It was 1974, and I attended Stewart Elementary School in Yankton, South Dakota. Every schoolday morning I walked down the alley behind our house to the school. It was a 5-minute walk, and back in the old days I made that 5-minute walk again at noon to go home for lunch--except on taco days. I loved the greasy, hardshell tacos, just as I loved playing on the bars at recess or those wonderful days when the P.E. teacher brought out the parachute and we made a "mushroom" or played popcorn with gym balls. On Sundays we attended church in a rented chapel in one of the buildings on the Yankton College campus. It was at church that I met my best friend of that period, Jenny West. She lived a half hour away, in Vermilion, but church formed the centerpiece of our lives and besides, our mothers were friends. With my neighborhood friends, I organized clubs in the schoolyard or played across the street from my house at Fantle Memorial Park. We climbed trees and played make believe for hours on end. All the while, I looked up to my older sister. She seemed impossibly grown up, finishing her first year of middle school and playing violin. While Daddy taught English at the college, Mother taught piano lessons in our living room, and I drove her crazy trying to chat with her students. I think of that now when Kristina interrupts my own music lessons.

Jared in 7th grade

Juliana in 7th grade

By the time I turned 13, we had left the Midwest and traveled south. Like Jared, I enjoyed seventh grade. With the other kids in my suburban neighborhood, I boarded a bus every morning to travel downtown to Capitol Heights Junior High, an imposing three-story school with considerably more diversity than the early days up north in South Dakota. We had lived in Montgomery, Alabama for nearly two years by then, and I loved my time there. I lived and breathed ballet that year (1980), dancing with the Montgomery Civic Ballet. It was my second year with the company, and I began to land some good roles. Outside of the studio, I had good friends in the neighborhood and at school, but my lasting memories are those of my best friends: Miriam Henderson and Cathy Brett. We took turns hosting sleepovers, made sugar muffins and flour tortillas, worked on Young Women's projects together at church, played in the ditch behind my house, rode our bikes on the paths through the woods, giggled about our sisters' dates and checked out the cute boys at the Friday evening baseball games down the street. Rather to our surprise, the end of seventh grade brought an end to the trio, as I moved to Kentucky, and Cathy abruptly moved to California within a week of each other. Fortunately, we have connected periodically through the decades since then, and I still count those two among my short list of lifelong friends.

Alec as a senior

Juliana as a senior

Another five years took me from Montgomery to Frankfort, Kentucky and on to Mesa, Arizona. Looking back on the spring of 1985, I can empathize with Alec's current case of senioritis. Like Alec, I took a mid-winter trip to Utah State to check out campus and came home energized about the excitement of college life. Like Alec, I tried to keep my mind sufficiently focused to prepare for Advanced Placement exams. Dates with college boys distracted my focus, as did my plans to leave home as soon as the ink dried on my diploma. I loved the opportunities available to me in a metropolitan area, but I hated the desert. I had secured a summer job near Yellowstone National Park and could not wait to head to the mountains and live on my own. In the meantime, I enjoyed the chance to see my cousins in the halls of Mountain View High School, and I worked with a great group of kids on the LDS Seminary Council. I spent occasional afternoons pretending elegance in the ritzy stores and cafes in Scotsdale, and I relaxed in the pine woods near my grandparents' cabin up in Strawberry. I owned life, and everything felt possible.

Devin

Juliana and Devin 1990

As the late 1980s flew by, I grew up (a bit), graduated from college and settled into the beginnings of a career and married life. Like Devin, at 23 I began to see glimpses of what I might make of a life that, up to that point, had mostly provided me time and space for adventure. I worked as a technical writer for a small software company in Logan, my first real job. We lived in a mobile home in the married student trailer park, and Brady tried valiantly to attend school, although the after-effects of a brain tumor and two brain surgeries impeded that process. That August, I gave birth to my firstborn.  When I returned to work a few weeks later, Brady and I tag-teamed the parenting duties. Devin was a nearly perfect baby, as all first babies should be, and I confidently planned out the next decade in my head. I would work while Brady finished college. We would move to some beautiful suburb and raise a beautiful family. I would teach Sunday School, earn accolades in graduate school, publish something besides computer manuals. Oh, how God must have chuckled at my feeble attempts to plan! And yet...for all of its twists and turns, God's version of my life has given me such magic and memories.

Resting Between Sets

I have spent my life with my eyes fixed on one goal or another, checking items off a myriad of lists line by line along the way. Those checks help me round out my sense of self, and the lure of unknown wonders around the next bend pulls me forward. I earned a degree, built a career or two, completed projects, lost the baby weight (finally), hiked mountains and conquered fears. Ah, but those milestones on the road to wonderful feel good!

Every once in a while, my current crop of goals grows stale. Life moves on to the next phase, and I find I require a new rhythm, new purpose. I study, ponder, try to match my heartbeat with the divine. Such was the case last fall, and over a few months I reached some surprising conclusions. Step back. Read. Breathe. Live in the present. Learn to radiate joy. And the hard one: defy logic and set aside the lofty goals for a time.

I embraced the plan initially. Learning to find joy, to accept life without the constant fight to make it fit my plan, felt incredibly liberating.

And then I stepped out of a rare mid-day bubble bath one afternoon and looked in the mirror in a moment of hormone-inspired introspective clarity. (Women, you know those moments.) "What a load of hooey!" I thought (in roughly those terms). "I have simply lowered my expectations of myself, of life. I have given up in defeat, thrown away the dream. I have become the lazy servant with his talent buried firmly in the sand." The thought pattern continued on with a fair amount of ranting and raving and glum expression, but that's pretty much the general theme. A quiet voice in a far corner of my brain reminded me that I had arrived at this path deliberately and under inspiration, but louder arguments drowned it out.

Winnie the Pooh has his favorite "Thotful Spot," a place made for "deciding what to do today." I have my own favorite thoughtful spots, and after a day of ranting and wallowing, I went to one of them. My mind wandered to one of my recurring goals that has impacted my life significantly over the past decade. I exercise religiously, and several days each week my regimen involves weight training. I love feeling strong, and I love the curve of a solid muscle. I thought about how those muscles grow. In simple terms, under the stress of pushing weight, the muscle tissue breaks down. It is in the recovery period (the rest in between sets, the good night of sleep) that the muscle rebuilds and grows.

Uncomfortable as it is to learn to define myself without the measuring stick of goals and accomplishments, this time of recovery is critical, and it will not last. This is a time to build strength and patience, to gather wisdom and grow faith. This is a time to hone insights, to cement good physical and spiritual habits, to nurture relationships. I still have a work to do, mountains to climb, loads to carry. Soon it will be time for the next set of reps, and I will need all of that strength and faith and insight when the time comes. For now, I will breathe, read, smile...and grow.

St. Louis Celebration

Brad at the Jewel Box, Forest Park

Just about 19 years ago, Brad and I drove to Washington, D.C. (or, more accurately, the LDS temple in Kensington, Maryland) to celebrate our marriage with our families and some close friends. We have all added a few wrinkles since that January day. We have also added a few children, a few addresses, a few jobs, a dog, hundreds of sunrises and sunsets, a little rain, and a few spectacular storms.

Butterfly House

In honor of all those years of more sunshine than storm, we decided to run away to St. Louis for the day. After all, we have lived in central Illinois for nearly four years now, and we have never explored what turns out to be a surprisingly charming city. The weather gods blessed us with a January thaw and sun. Consequently, after waving the kids off to school, we jumped in the car and headed south.

We intended to start our adventure at the Butterfly House in Chesterfield but arrived to find the site closed for the month. Feeling quite mellow and adaptable, we shrugged our shoulders, took a picture of a huge stone butterfly, and moved on to downtown St. Louis. More about butterflies next summer...

Mosaic detail

Next stop: the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, with 83,000 square feet of mosaic art created by twenty artists out of 41.5 million tesserae. (Yeah, I had to look that one up. Tesserae are the little squares of stone or glass that go into a mosaic.) Mosaic covers every bit of the massive ceilings and much of the walls, depicting Biblical scenes in the rich tones of over 8000 colors. The beauty of the scene certainly inspires awe, if not worship.

And awe inspires...hunger, apparently. Fortunately, the Cathedral Basilica lies in the heart of the upscale Central West End, close to the trendy restaurants and shops of Euclid Avenue. Hoping to infuse a bit of health into our day of play, we stopped in at OR Smoothie and Cafe for a lunch of organic, vegan yumminess, topped off with a couple of signature smoothies. I confess to stopping for a chocolate filled croissant when our after lunch stroll took us past the St. Louis Bread Company, but the guilt feelings faded quickly as the chocolate oozed over my fingers.

The Jewel Box in Forest Park

Pleasantly full, we turned our attention to nearby Forest Park. As we wound our way through the park, we stopped first at the Jewel Box, a charming Art Deco floral conservancy characterized by its unique cantilevered glass walls. The greenhouse is a popular wedding spot, and even without the colorful gardens that surround the building in warmer seasons, it offers a lovely retreat from city life. We had the flowers to ourselves for a few minutes, and we drank in the rich air of the lush indoor garden.

Little Dancer of 14 Years (Edgar Degas)

After a few turns of the park road, we passed by the St. Louis Zoo (packed with families enjoying a rare warm day in January) and drove up to the Art Museum. Through the feature exhibit, we watched the evolution of the masterpieces of Federico Barocci, then wandered through galleries of Impressionist, Realist, Asian and African art. I finally learned why in the world so many talented artists waste their time painting fruit, and I stood nose to nose with one of Degas' dancers. (The girl had an attitude! My kind of girl...) I even discovered a new addition to my list of favorite paintings: John Martin's "Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion." Art does good things for the soul.

We wound down with a little window shopping in Richmond Heights and stuffed ourselves with a late dinner at Maggianos Little Italy. Good conversation carried us home, and I crawled happily into bed just after midnight. What a glorious day!

Death Awaiting Epiphany

I avoid looking on death,
Averting my gaze and holding my breath
As I pedal past the raccoon, spread-eagle on the road,
Its innards outside,
A bewildered expression frozen on the bandit face
(or is it decomposition that makes the eyes so sad?).

Once I dressed a friend for burial,
A gathering of women tugging underclothes over a limp body,
Wiping body fluids that escaped out of the eye socket,
Rust-colored tears.
We laughed over shared memories,
Philosophized about resurrection and heaven,
as one must while handling the dead.
It was years before I could eat barbecue sauce
Without picturing those tears dripping toward a cold metal gurney,
A vision of death not quite ready for company.

I suppose decay, rather than death, repulses me
(or frightens?),
The unnatural tilt of a powerless neck,
An inner life left in disarray,
Rotting in the glare of an oblivious sun.

Body bereft of spirit,
Untidy emotion awaiting epiphany.