Kitchen Interrupted

 Paul and I just took these two out of the oven. The Fort Collins house smells like apple crumb and peach strawberry wrapped up in butter pastry. They are for an all-church gathering tonight, a dessert potluck followed by a town hall-style meeting where the congregation will get to practice listening and talking honestly about hard stuff. They’ll probably need patience and maybe even some of the forgiveness we’ve been talking about all through Lent.

I’ve been feeling a little bit like this these days — surrounded by so much sweetness on so many levels, while doing some sticky, risky inner business. Turns out no one can put pressure on me like I can put on myself. Turns out, left to my own devices, I will cower before the inner voice demanding I immediately become THE perfect

studentwifehomesteadermentorpedestrianhousekeeperdriverneighborfriendfamilymermeberchristianperson.

Turns out, trying to keep up with all the requirements I put on myself is really exhausting. Yet it is also highly addictive, so about the time I think I’ve “given up” trying to keep my own life under control, I find another area that needs just a little bit of fixing. Then another. And another. Until I’m flattened and overwhelmed, angry and ashamed.

Hence the sticky, risky inner business: deep breath, honest assessment, good cry, grace and good humor. Begin again.

Homemade sweets and challenging conversations. Beautiful life and inner crud. Just more of the fits and starts of this season. The mountain weather plays along, dropping snow one day and warming up to 65 sunny degrees the next. The only way to go forward is to commit to the transition, the ups and downs. The only way through is to welcome the mud.

And then there’s our house in Westcliffe, still its own glorious mess, still in the process of being reclaimed as Home. The last few days we spent down there, we crossed the point of no return in the kitchen. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but we’re committed to finding out!

Take a peek: 

How about you? What are the contrasts in your life these days? Where is Spring breaking in, all messy and pretty?

 

Hubris and Humility

The word around these parts is “rebuild.”  And it’s inspiring, much of the time.  People who have made their homes in high mountain canyons, because they have sought refuge, solitude, and a taste of freedom – they’re not going to let anyone take that dream away from them.  And even though this kind of disaster isn’t supposed to come around very often, they’ll spit into the wind and try it again.

Here’s what troubles me, though.  There are over 200 miles of roads in these Rocky Mountains that were actually damaged to the point that they cannot be used, or absolutely swept away, along with millions of tons of rock and gravel and reinforced concrete that lay under them.  There are some 150 bridges, I’ve heard unofficially, that will have to be rebuilt.  These were built based upon what was learned from the last horrible floods of 1976, when a flash flood shot down the Big Thompson Canyon and killed a lot of people in a very short, few minutes.  The bridges, roads, and the support underneath these roads were all, or most, built with the Big Thompson flood clearly in view.  They were built to withstand another Big Thompson flood.  And I have some sense that they might have been able to do just that.  Only this flood was bigger.  It was not expected that there would be another flood bigger than the one in 1976 for at least 100 years, when bridges are in need of replacement, I guess.  So, they built these to withstand anything shy of the 1976 tragedy.  But people are calling this flood a “1000 year flood.”

What troubles me is that when I talk to engineers about whether there is a limit to what engineering can do, whether there might be storms that NO AMOUNT OF ENGINEERING and construction might be able to withstand, I am not getting any answers.  It’s almost as if those of us molded by Modernity have so ingrained in us the illusion that the human being is the center of the universe, and that our right and ability is to bring creation to heel, and that we will always find a solution no matter what the problem, that we will always triumph in the end. . . we are so infected by this disease that when, a mere 37 years after what people called the most horrible flood in western history, and after the very best science knew to do to protect that same strip of turf from it ever happening again, the roads and man-made walls were torn and tossed away like beach toys, we assume there is no limit to what we can control and overcome.

What I wish I was hearing is a good dose of humility and honesty.  We may have to build bridges that we cannot guarantee beyond certain limits of creation forces.  We may not be able to afford 150 top of the line, state of the art bridges that might survive a next catastrophe at the cost of billions of dollars; and they might not. We obviously have no clue when the next one will take place. I think everyone’s too afraid to say it out loud, because it goes against the way we’ve been taught to respond to catastrophes.  That is, “We’re in control!  We’ll get it right the next time.”  And that’s why much of the finger pointing at global warming as the real culprit in all of this alarms me, too.  This may indeed be related to the usage of fossil fuels, and we may have the ability to put a dent in how that is impacting the globe.  But the frightening thing to me is that that very  drive feeds in all of us the same lie that we have far more control than we actually do.

Hubris is a dangerous thing in all of us.  We think more highly of ourselves than we ought.  After I hear too much of that attitude, I seek out a meeting I attend regularly around here where the issue is the mess they have made of their lives because of pride, and the answer is the currency of humility by which they have seen their lives returned to happiness, joy and freedom.

Right-Sized

When I arrived in Austin, Texas, 26 and 1/2 months ago, the state was in the worst drought since the early 50’s, and certainly the first one that involved the staggering (and burgeoning) population of Texas today.  Austinites apologized profusely for the horrible conditions, telling me that it was far worse than most of them had ever seen – in hopes, I suspect, that I would love Austin in spite of the drought.  One thing I remember from that summer was one rain shower that fell in late July 2011, lasting perhaps 5 minutes.  I did not see another drop of rain until the blessing of a rain pulse coming through in mid September, I believe.  Another thing I remember from that summer was that I was powerless to change the weather, as we suffered through 90 days with temperatures over 100 degrees.

Fast forward to this last week.   When Nicole and I arrived here in Fort Collins, CO on Labor Day, the state had had some relief from drought with some timely thunderstorms and systems this summer.  But everyone nonetheless spoke of the drought cycle that the state has been in for years now, and how concerned people are about the need for timely rains and snowpack this coming winter.  On Monday, we became aware that the 95 degree days were about to shift, as rain came into the picture.  The forecast was for a full week of clouds and rain, pulsing through the days and nights.  And they were exactly right – only no one seemed to grasp the volume of rain that would come down.  It was (and still is) breathtaking, especially for Central Texans who have often gone to bed in the last 2 years, pleading for rainstorms to put us to sleep.  At this point, the calculation is that the amount of rain that has come down, if it had been in inches of snow, would be the equivalent of over 12 feet of snow.  Today the flooding is so severe that no one can drive from Fort Collins to Denver.  Every bridge between here and there is compromised.  It is, as they are saying, a “100 year flood.”

 

Two opposite experiences, totally contradictory.  Except for one thing – in both situations, we experience our utter powerlessness.

One of the great truths which Nicole and I sit with this day is the step which begins each of our days – to admit our powerlessness to do almost anything we pretended all our lives that we had within our power.  Drought and floods remind us that we are not God, and that we are grateful – not only that such things require a wisdom and intelligence and power far beyond ours to be able to manage or direct or redeem – but also that we are relieved from the horrible pressure of trying to control or cure, or feeling the responsibility that we have caused most of what occupies our world.  We are given a reprieve today from playing God, and it is the greatest lesson from creation that I can imagine.

And so, though I have no power whatsoever to cause this to happen, I will pray that God will give Central Texas, indeed, all of Texas, the refreshment of the rains that it needs.

Moving In

So. We’ve just completed our big move. Since I’d begun packing up my apartment in late June, it seems we have been swimming in boxes. What I had proudly been thinking of as our “simple” households turned out to be physically and emotionally exhausting to combine, load, haul, unload, unpack and organize.

The final push to put away the few clothes, books, files and pie-making tools we brought to the already-furnished home we’re renting in Fort Collins turned out to almost be my undoing. We were at the end of our energy and sick-to-death of boxes. Where had all of this stuff come from anyway? When we took a break to go get our new coffee grinder, I walked into a store full of housewares and immediately felt sick to my stomach. All I could see on the shelves were thousands of things that someday – somewhere — would have to be moved.

Moving is exciting. I love the sense of starting fresh, discovering new places, opening up to new possibilities. But my worst moments in this move have come when there was so much movement I couldn’t take it in and I couldn’t make it stop. When my patience had worn thin and there was still a bedlam of clothes lying around, when too many boxes were labeled “misc.” and had to be dragged between rooms, what I wanted more than anything was some safe, stable corner of predictability and sameness. I ached for simplicity and stillness.

Decades ago, an artist neighbor told me, “you gotta have a good chaos going before any order can grow out of it.” Our chaos of bubble wrap and strapping tape crested and gave way to new organized cupboards and closets. I can find the cinnamon and that pair of hand-knit socks again. But I will never be able to stop change, never control the pace of loss or gain. Everything moves and keeps moving.

Still.

I believe simplicity is possible anyway. I believe sustained stability can unroll from the inside out.

And now that all our things are unpacked, I want to give my full attention to unpacking the truth about living a quiet life. I want to move so deep into simplicity of soul that I never have to load up and move again, no matter how many times my address may change.