On seasons

I love the changing of seasons. It is one of my favorite things about life on this earth. Now, occasionally I complain about it being too hot or too cold, or the year flying by too soon, but we all do. Don't we?

It's hard for me to explain why I love it so much, but I do know why, so allow me to attempt. I love the change of seasons because I love the parallel to life. Things never stay the same for very long, for better or for worse. And there is always a bit of both in everything. The sunburns and the peace of summer both give way to the pumpkin spice and sometimes bitter cold of fall. I think 3 months is just about perfect for a season, because it takes us that long to get used to and tired of it. Now, if you life in California, you may not fully grasp this because it's always warm, but where I live it gets pretty hot in summer and very cold in winter, and we really have 4 distinct seasons. I've lived here all my life and always experienced this joy. Summer is here! Time for swimming and sun and playing outside in tank tops. And it's beautiful, but eventually we start to crave sweaters and welcome the cold with open, soft arms. I especially love fall because I have an October birthday. It makes the halloween month that much more special. My whole life, October has been this great preperation for mine and my sister's birthdays. They were inexorably linked to halloween. We would get bat birthday cakes and look at fake skeletons with intense enthusiasm. The whole world knew we liked those things, and trotted them out for our pleasure once a year. I still love halloween, and I wonder if I might love it less if this had not been my experience. There's a sense of nostalgia for me that is very strong, even though I have never been trick or treating and didn't start celebrating halloween until a few years ago.

This is why I love holidays. I think that holidays in themselves are wonderful, I like halloween as a celebration of life, death, candy and costuming. I like Christmas as a celebration of love and saving grace. But more so than the percieved reaons for why we celebrate holidays, I love them as a consistent celebration of life and seasons. We celebrate halloween and thanksgiving every fall. And it gives us a fixed point to look towards, and a reason to enjoy that season. Same with Christmas. I find every holiday is a good reason to look back on the year prior, and what has changed and what's the same. I'm not suggesting an introspective trick-or-treat so much as observing what I think most of us already do; “I can't believe it's october again already! It's been a whole year. Last time we...”. I love that. I love that we have these posts we can come to and reevaluate every few months.

I love celebrating the constants and the change. Here's what I mean. Every year we celebrate Easter. But every year there are slight differences. We wake up a little earlier or later. We have grown. We have changed. We tell different jokes. It's a similar experience and we get the joy of familiarity, but we get to experience it over and over in new ways. I love that. I love that humanity is so enamored with tradition. It can give us a constant when everything is in flux. A couple of years ago, my family didn't get a christmas tree. My mom had surgery and my sister was sick and we just couldn't make it happen. A couple of weeks before Christmas, my boyfriend's family gave us an extra fake tree and trimmings that they had around. And we were overjoyed! It wasn't the same, it wasn't how it normally was, but having a tree, a silly pagan-based traditon, made everything feel that much more okay.

Holidays, and seasons, are a beautiful thread that we can trace back through our lives. This summer was rainy, and wonderful, and there weren't floods like last year. Praise God. There weren't fires like the year before. Praise God!

I learned recently that the way we move through space, as a planet (which always gives me a sense of identity. We're all in this together, everyone on earth has earth in common.), is different than just ellipses around the sun. The sun, the whole system, is itself moving. So we move in sort of a vortex. Which for some reason absolutely thrills me as a life metaphor. Yes, we're back where we were in relation to the sun, one year ago. But we are in a new place entirely because of the vortex shape. We are somewhere that the earth hasn't been before. Where we haven't been before. And it's all familiar, same house same sun, but it's all new. New day. New life. New experiences. Every day is a neverending balance between the new and the familiar.

I love that.  

The only part of slaughterhouse-five worth reading.

"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed."

A new start.

I'm very interested in writing lately. A dear friend of mine is in basic training, and my letters to her have been gushing with all the words I want to get out. I'm interested in my current writings, and my old angst. There are some things I am quite done with looking at, but some things still intrigue me. One of my old blogs (not coincidentally, the one I don't have the URL to), and some of my old journals, I would like to look at again. The rest, I appreciate the presence of.

My old, ratty composition book is one I never re-read. My handwriting at the time was absolutely atrocious, and it covers a span of my life that I don't like to remember the nitty-gritty of. I like to hold it in my hands and remember, but I don't like to decipher my hyrogliphics only to find silly angst over one boy or another, or blow-by-blow justifications for relationships that I now am more than happy to accurately label as toxic.

An excerpt, from journal C.

"My love for photography has lately been stifled by T constantly telling me that R is better than me. Ok, so I care. But I don't want him talking about it all the time. It's like he just wants to prove himself right, and how I feel just doesn't matter. I feel like I don't matter personally to anyone. I wonder if princess Diana felt this way. ... I feel this connection with her, like her life and mine are somehow intermixed. Call me crazy..."

I will, thanks. For starters, I know for a fact that my friends were not hounding me with harsh words about how other people were better than me. The reality is that I was so deeply jealous of R, because she has immense talent, and that pricked me right in the insecurity. My reaction, as you might expect from a 13 year old girl, was to talk at great length about how much she sucked. T just dared to stand up for someone I was unjustly criticizing.

I was extremely shocked by my "connection to princess diana". I knew, and know, next to nothing about princess Diana. I think she was talked about in the Princess Diaries series and that's what convinced me that I liked her. What fascinates me about this is that I didn't have even a month where I was genuinely interested in Princess Di. This deep observation of mine probably stuck around for a couple of days.


The next page includes a shamefully bad logical argument for the existence of God. I don't know who I was trying to prove myself to, but I used the word "thus" every couple of sentences, to make giant logical leaps. I was also surprised to note that I wrote this a couple of months before I actually became a Christian. And at the time of writing it, I thought that I was one. Which is frankly a frightening notion. Most of my life I just parroted back what I had been told and walked the way I thought i was supposed to, without any actual life/heart change or any actual faith. I certainly felt the presence of God, and I believed God existed, but I didn't get it at the time. It's a small disadvantage of growing up in the church, I suppose.

It's so strange and beautiful to me, to sit in the same corner where I wrote in this very book 7 over years ago. Honestly, I can't believe that I was 13 7 years ago. Seven years. That's an awfully long time. I wonder who I thought I would be at almost-20 when I was 13. I have a few guesses.

Strangely, I would definitely have said married. To my boyfriend at the time, of course. All I've ever really wanted was a domestic life, and I wanted to hop on that train as soon as possible. Getting married at 18, I probably would have expected to be pregnant by now. Certainly moved out with my husband. I would have expected to get my license right on my 16th birthday, to have a fabulous sweet 16 party. I would still be tight with my best friends.

None of those things happened, obviously. I'm kind of horrified by my lack of foresight. Even at the age of 16, even at the age of 18, I wanted to get married ASAP. At 15 or so I was obsessed with wanting a baby. At fifteen I couldn't take care of myself, and I shudder to think of having a five year old right now. I didn't get my license until I was almost 19, I didn't have enough friends to really have a birthday party when I was 16, and as for friendships, that's its own rats nest. Suffice it to say that things are not how I would have anticipated or hoped, and I couldn't be happier about that.

As for marriage, I still want it, and soon, but I have a much more practical view of it all now. I will probably be married five years from now, which all at once sounds terrifying and wonderful. There are nights where I wish I was already there, and there are times when I want to cling to this stage of my life. I feel like i've experienced enough of real life and relationships that I know both what I want and that I don't want it quite yet.