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Let me sing you a song of admiration for the people who share this city with me. They drive alternately too fast and too slow, vote utter morons into city government, and act as though “The Zags” are more important than feeding their families. And yet, how I love them, for they are unique and beautiful and oddly inspiring.
They take their goats for a walk in Riverside State Park along with their dogs.
They find their own private beaches along the Spokane River and create timeless moment of beauty.
They climb dangerous paths to take photos of wild osprey.
They stand proudly on the edge of a sheer cliff, posing and giggling and waving for complete strangers.
People of Spokane, I am proud to be one of you.
It is a strange and awkward place I find myself in these days. So much of my life feels utterly mundane. I am trapped in a timewarp between doctor’s visits and household chores, shuffling my schedule to accommodate a change in my job and calculating a tighter budget to compensate. I read blogs and magazine articles about women going off to retreats and participating in online workshops, and I feel a bit mopey. I haven’t got the money or the physical stamina for either. I am 26: it is not supposed to hurt this much to be alive, and I feel trapped in my ailing body. And yet I feel so brimful of creativity and dreams. I look at the wooden bowl that is slowly filling with bright stones made by these very hands, and it feels like me. Like the person I was before I got sick, the person I am slowly growing back into: sparkly and vibrant and expressive; small, but with aspirations far exceeding anything that might be expected of something so little. I will admit that I have had difficulty finding magic in the ordinary this week, something that has been my solace for years now, and yet I am finding poetry inside me of its own accord. I am laughing more these days, and more easily. After years of chasing desperately after happiness, I have found joy waiting for me just around the bend in the path. There will be hard days to come, I know, days when I doubt myself, God, and the people who love me. But those days will come farther and farther apart now; I believe I am healing, if not in body then in soul, and that will make all the difference in the world.
I have a beautiful decorative wooden bowl that I bought a year ago, when I believed that we would be buying a house. I planned to fill it with something pretty and artistic, although I didn’t know what, and put it on top of this wonderful robin’s-egg blue cabinet I bought at World Market to go in the new house. There is no new house, the cabinet occupies a corner of the dining room with the rest of the furniture that we have nowhere else to put, and that lovely bowl has been gathering dust atop the bookshelf for many months now, empty and forlorn.
And then, there has been this strange need growing inside of me lately… I don’t know where it has come from, but over the past few months, I have been wanting something small that I can carry around, hold in the palm of my hand until it soaks up the warmth of my skin. There is something oddly yet powerfully comforting in this idea, and gradually it has grown into something very important to me. But again, I had no idea what to do…
Recently, while in my craft room making ornaments, I discovered these little glass squares left over from a defunct project. I had never actually used them, and I mooned over that sad fact for a moment before returning to the art at hand. Sometime after midnight a few days later, inspiration struck me. And here is what I have come up with, both to fill the bowl on the bookshelf and as something to hold onto. They are pretty and artistic, comforting and inspiring. The photographs on the front are from my travels around the Pacific Northwest, the beauty I have found here, the things I have come to love.
On the back is a quote or verse, sometimes just a word, something I want to hold on to and remind myself of. At first, I thought they would all be single words that reflected facets of myself: poet, stargazer, artist, linguist, wanderer. And maybe I will make those someday, but for now this seems more fitting. I don’t need to label my illness into submission anymore; it is still present and often debilitating, but it no longer defines me. This is where I am:
We went through fire and through water;
but You brought us out to rich fulfillment.
~Psalms 66:12
And I think this is something I would like to share with others. We could all use a little something brightly-colored and heartfelt to hold onto, don’t you think? Ashirianma stones, I think I’ll call them. It means “God provides.”
How do you describe a weekend so perfect? I came home from Silver Valley with nearly 600 photos packed onto my overworked camera, little snapshots of our 6th anniversary that capture quiet moments, mountain vistas, the shape of our hearts. I couldn’t tell you what I loved best. Was it the random detour into Wolf Lodge Bay, where we discovered a tiny cove to go wading in?
Or perhaps the unexpected beauty of Mission Park, where we picnicked?
The gondola ride to the top of Silver Mountain, an absolutely dreamy 20 minutes of breathtaking vistas?
Wandering the crown of the mountain itself, breathing in pure air and watching evening creep across the world, shadowing each fold of land as the distant mountains fade to smoky blue?
Or the simplest thing of all: laying in the grass together on the slope of the mountain, with the sky spread out above us and the valleys and towns nestled beneath us, holding hands and saying nothing, letting our hearts speak for us with every breath.
Love is someone who, knowing it is your favorite sound, will pull over to let you listen to the wind through aspen leaves. Love is someone who thinks you are beautiful when you think you are ugly, who knows who you are and enjoys it, who will let you play with his curly hair and makes up funny songs. Love is someone who takes you far beyond your dreams.
hello, little one, fellow traveler
bright spirit caught between yellow horizons
petal to petal, pollen to honey
drink down the sunlight,
weave it to liquid gold
little flutter-heart, panicked wings
streak of orange, sunrise-bright
ceaseless frenzy of life
beat back the world,
open the door at its heart
Sometimes, things don’t go the way you plan them. Sometimes, this is a very good thing. On Saturday morning, we set out for the Colville Valley with the sole intent of picking huckleberries. We had a plan: take Flowery Trail Road up into the mountains, find small winding roads branching off of it, and go exploring. Huckleberries like high altitudes and shade, so we thought this was excellent plan. Apparently, we were wrong…
It soon ceased to matter. We drove from cloudy skies into sunlight, followed old logging trails that curved along the back of the mountain, and discovered the world waiting for us with open arms. I hiked down to this beautiful stream in my 
ridiculously inappropriate clogs, navigating fallen trees and gopher holes. Three small waterfalls poured into each other, but the bank was so snarled with branches that I couldn’t get any closer. Still, I returned to the car with pine needles and seeds clinging to my jeans, utterly satisfied. It’s been a long time since I felt good enough to venture off into the wilderness like that. Every mile revealed something new and unexpected, from the Indian paintbrush on the side of the road (which I haven’t seen since I left Texas) to the llamas that greeted us when we finally pulled into Chewelah.
In Colville, we grabbed a late lunch and went to visit Sean’s parents. They weren’t home–another thing that didn’t quite work out as planned, but again it worked out with surprisingly good results. I’ve never done much exploring on their property. Usually when we go there, it’s for a holiday or another family function, and we’re so busy doing things at the main house with everyone else that we don’t even wander past the garden. But there’s ten acres of land out there that held a working farm when Sean was growing up, and what’s left of it is fascinating. It is 
exactly the kind of thing I love so much, but don’t often get a chance to explore in such detail. Usually, I’m hanging out the car window snapping shots of collapsing shacks while we’re roaring down the highway at 60mph–or if I’m lucky, we pull in to a place so I can get a better photo, but I still have to do it quickly so that the property owner doesn’t grab his shotgun because we seem suspicious. And when I saw the old mattress springs leaning against the side of the barn, I just about died of joy. I really can’t explain this fascination with rusty old things, but there it is. 
In the old house, I found my brother-in-law’s jump boots from his military days, an old wood-burning stove, and a pile of interesting metal whatchamacallits, each with a spiffy little star stamped in the center. These things have history, they tell the stories of my husband’s family before I became part of it. This is where he came from, these buildings now sagging into ruin, this land cradled in the Colville Valley that formed the horizons of his childhood. And here I am, thousands of miles from the Texas hills in my blood, sprawled out on a gigantic trampoline beneath the same sky that covers all the world, uniting Washington and Texas and everything beyond, loving where I am now even as I think of Austin as home.
Last night’s storm has left in its wake a hint of autumn. Yesterday, Spokane was languishing in the heat, and today it is in the low 60’s, cool and crisp. Even as I upload photos of summer flowers, I am dreaming of autumn, my favorite season here. Trees laden with apples, trips to Green Bluff, pumpkins and all the bright, warm colors of the trees flaming around me… I could live in autumn forever. But I’m not ready to let go of summer yet, either. The days of summer are longer and slower, and no matter how busy my life is, summer remains a lazy, sun-drenched season. I’m all grown-up, but there’s still magic in a freezer full of Otter Pops, and a plain ham and cheese sandwich becomes extraordinary if eaten on a picnic. So even though the weather is teasing me into thoughts of the beauty to come, I am going to grab my ham sandwich and a pail, head off into the mountains to have a picnic and hunt for berries.
It feels indescribably good to spread my wings again. It’s funny how when I am not blogging, I think it is something that I can easily do without, then suddenly after months of silence, I come back for no discernible reason and realize that I’ve been missing it in some deep part of me. Blogging is different than any other writing I do, even the journal I keep. It is here that I slow down enough to wonder at all of the world’s beauty and let it sink into me. It is here that I make peace with myself, my mistakes and my poor health, and here that I grow beyond those things. So here I am… and it feels good.
