Category Archives: realized dreams

Standing in a wild ocean life

15 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by in nursing, realized dreams, the wilderness

≈ 34 Comments

I am not a warm beach person.

I’m not a sun tanning, flip-flops with a cup of iced lemonade, fun in the sun, let’s just have a party here and play beach volley ball for the rest of the day type of person.

I’m a cold beach person.

I like my life the best when the icy spray whips a bit hard on the cheeks and you have to pull on a sweater and wear sturdy shoes because the rocks are sharp.

It is then I feel the most alive.

I like my ocean mixed with a little wildness. Actually, a lot of wildness.

And I like my life the exact same way.

I never want to get to the place were my biggest worry is what I’m going to make for Sunday potluck or if the scrapbook party I planned on Thursday is too much on the schedule, you know, with prayer meeting and getting spring cleaning done.

I never want my life to be totally comfortable.

I want more. I want more like the gospel is more of men in ragged clothes than starched collars and more of camels going through needles than systematic theology.

I want wind that is bigger than little me and great blue waves that I can barely stand up against and grey mist that reminds me I can’t do life on my own and sharp rocks that show where I am walking is where most people decided to take the detour.

It is then when I feel most alive.

I want to live a cold ocean life wherever I am. 

Yes, the 2000 dollar car repair bill bites the cheeks and the lack of sleep whips at the body and the cold, the real winter cold, is finally making my teeth chatter when I step outside. Yes, I feel like I am very little and very underqualified for almost everything I am doing.

30 hours of being a bona fide prison guard in one weekend is a little new for a 21-year old menno chick.

 Running around all week straddling nurse, medical driver, receptionist, babysitter, and wood-chopper leaves aching, swollen feet by friday night.

And I have another 12 hour night shift just starting. This time as a security guard at the clinic.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I am standing in a wild ocean life because it is then I feel the most alive.

What makes you feel more alive than anything else?

Ice, needles, and bannock

01 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by in laughter, nursing, realized dreams, slate falls, the wilderness

≈ 8 Comments

Is it possible to change so much in three weeks? Because, you know, if my heart had a mirror I don’t know if I would recognize it.

And it seems strange, because this is not new to me—this cold, this bannock, this sound of a bush plane, these BP cuffs and insulin needles.

I arrived it Slate Falls, Ontario on March 15th, with 2000km and three hours of icy logging roads behind me.

Hours after I got here the community lost power and that night I threw up all over a strangers maroon carpet. By morning my stomach had been turned inside out. The next day, lying weak under the covers, I felt very alone and knew there was no going back, and cried and then laughed.

I’m glad there was no going back, even though the chicken in me whimpered, curled up there in the chilly bedroom.

This just feels so right.

I can’t even tell you why.

Except that when I stand in the dawn light, and see the lake stretching white, white, and the wood smoke laying across the pines, held low by the icy air, I can breathe deep.

And everyone laughs—the kids when they wiggle my crooked nose and the adults when I trip over things and spill tea all over the floor and try to speak Ojibway or take their blood pressure.  And I can join them.

Working at the clinic has been like discovering a part of me I lost. Through the urban healthcare education I had begun to wonder how my earthy soul was going to survive the 0800 meds, the white walls, and the schedule, schedule, schedule of unit life.

This, this is what I wanted when I started my first semester.

 When treating patients is more than following a Doctors order and a Kardex and you chat with them about their fish nets, and your assessment skills are suddenly your lifeline.

I love treating a child for an ear infection one day, giving him a ride to school the next, and drinking tea with his grandma two days later.

 I love having a tiny gravel airstrip be the focus of planning your day. When is the plane coming? Who is on it? Who is leaving? What blood work/mail/packages do we need to send out?  I love meeting it, standing in the cold with my moose hide mitts, waiting for the red mail bag.

 Most of my friends ask about loneliness and the isolation.
 
 Yes, there are moments when I would love to talk or hang out with my friends in the south. I get horrible late hours of feeling like I dropped off the face of the earth and no one cares.

 

 But I am surrounded by people. People who make me laugh as well as want to cry.
 
 I think one of my biggest struggles is actually being able to just get away and be alone–which is why I haven’t had the time to blog or tell all my stories.
 
There has been no time for writing—because there has been too much living.
 
Even now I am holding a squirming baby, watching moose dumplings bubble, drinking Red Rose, and typing with two fingers.
 
 From where winter still is,
 
I thank you friends for caring.
 
 I need to run. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

What I haven’t said but should

15 Saturday Jan 2011

Posted by in life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, unreasonable hope

≈ 7 Comments

The calendars were thrown away and the new year came and, just like always, I did not think about the old until the new was firmly tacked up on the wall.

Too typical.

I don’t want to share everything about 2010. Just one thing. The one I have not written about yet and that will probably help what I’ve written in the past to make more sense. I don’t like posts that seem depressing, which is why I’ve skipped this one. But it isn’t really depressing, despite being about depression. Its really about hope and joy and lots of laughter. I promise.

Its the one thing that made last year blare out–like a roman candle exploding before you step back.

Years are like firecrackers.

 Some singe the eyebrows. None go off exactly alike.

This one burned deeper and the lights at the end lit up the sky.

In the middle of the cold winter, January of last year, a darkness exploded, which it can, and covered my faith and my moments in fog and I go back to the black ink in my old journal because it tells me more than I remember myself.

About the terror that I felt when it first came, how fragile I felt, and how I couldn’t talk myself out of it. It tells me that I was so tired I felt I could not move some mornings and how I wept because, earlier, I had written in the early light of January

 “I will not turn. I will not flee the barrenness. I will face it, reach out and finger the dry sand….letting it bite my eyes and dry my mouth. No other lovers…no wine to lift the spirit. Only God”

And suddenly the barrenness was reality. The barreness of doubt and anger and a heart broken. And God seems more than light years away. And I didn’t know why it had come now, when I felt more shattered than ever before.

And never before had I reached bottom so bad, and never, especially, without any reason as to why. Which is what drove me even deeper–because I had nothing to claim as a cause, therefore I couldn’t fix it.

And I tried to answer my own doubts within my own mind and my brain sizzled and crackled and left grey fog over everything.

And I lay on my bed and clung to the cross, not because it seemed to help, but because the rough wood did not candy coat the answers.

And then I remember, on my own, how people prayed and prayed and how one day the enemy pressed so close that fear was the air, and I was too tired to fight.

And I saw myself, lying broken in a black field, laying limp,and closer and closer came the enemy and I could not get up. Weak, I turned my head from him and saw an army behind me, and the faces were beautiful with friendship, and I knew them all.

I managed to keep up with the semester, with the help of those who loved, and then, slowly, like the spring, I pushed out of the dark shadow.

I called friends, and jogged, and bought flowers and learned to let go of my need to figure everything out. I drank sunsets like jasmine tea and ate mountains like Oreo ice-cream.

I learned to let go of my frantic desire to know  the purpose for the whys. I told myself did not need to see or to reason out a purpose in order to have hope.

And I learned I was more sin-crusted than I imagined. 

There were months filled with picking up the pieces in prayer and learning to breathe faith again–

–and letting go

 Then came the sunrise I wrote about here, and suddenly the heart cracked wider than I knew it could be, and the darkness only made the coming of the light more tangible and fierce in its beauty.

The cracking kept letting in more hope.

And I still smile, remembering one dark night, as I drove home from work in the warm moonlight, how I laughed tears of wonder, and cried joy out loud, because the theory I clung to in the darkness was no longer just a theory.

It is one thing to believe hope comes for those that touch ashes and taste barrenness–it is quite another to feel it deep.

And if the darkness lacked answers, the hope that imploded in on it was all the more unreasonable. And it was the not the hope that changed me. It was the burning and splintering that healed me.

 

I still don’t know what caused those months of sudden blackness. I don’t know why doubts clouded faith.  Maybe I’ll never know.

But I do know that through it I discovered how deep my pride ran and a lifelong frantic need to control how others saw me.

This past year, has been for me, a loss of answers. Not much makes sense to me anymore.

But I’m closer to being okay with that now.

And I have never felt joy like I have the last 10 months since.

For girls only

28 Tuesday Dec 2010

Posted by in creating, realized dreams

≈ 7 Comments

If you are a guy I am, of course, laughing at you. Rest assured there is nothing especially scandalous in the following post. I am simply showing my gender bias by assuming you will not be interested in what follows.

For quite a while I have longed for a red room. I’ve had two pink rooms, two white rooms, a green room,  a blue room–lovely all of them, but I wanted something warm and cozy and textured. For a while my room was painted tan with red accents. Then, this fall, my friend Elizabeth came up to visit  and I decided it was time to finally remodel my little space. We painted the walls and bookshelves and sorted my mountains of books and shoved furniture around like gorillas.

And, whadda ya know, I FINALLY have pictures!

It’s not fancy. Or even that hip or artsy. But it is really and truly me–me in that it fits me or I fit it or we fit together.

There are red flowers on the walls and my owls peer down so chubby and alert.

 There is a chair for reading and big red pillows filled with hope

 

 There is lots of room on the walls for my ever odd assortment of pictures and words.

And there is lots of pottery and nature come in.

And there is texture

And there is a spot for an old whiskey bottle and more pottery

And more texture.

 

 

 

It’s awkward and  mismatched and little cluttered

–just like me.

 

A bitter experiment

04 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by in journaling, life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, unreasonable hope

≈ 1 Comment

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It may sound simplistic, but it kept me wrapped tight around truth when I wanted to let go.

It was not my idea, of course. Sheesh, I’m twenty. I can’t speak a word of understanding life and even begin to sound like I know what I’m talking about. Forget it. There are still years and years of dreadful wading through my own immaturity until I can sit, like she did, and know what to say.

 I met with her to ask for help. Wisdom to point out the path of healing out of the fear and anger and brokenness that I knew was there. I remember the way the light from the window make the tears on her cheeks glisten and how, just like Christ’s pain helps me see my worth, so her tears let me know I wasn’t completely bonkers.

I remember my exact words, asking her, desperate, “What do I do with this? How, how do I let pain be felt and tasted yet still move forward into hope?

Practical. I wanted something to use in everyday life. A way of not deadening the longings, without letting them deaden me.

“Do you journal?” she asked.

Laugher with a touch of bitterness.

“If wouldn’t be for my journal…..”

So she gave me the experiment.

Everyday write the longings, she told me. And then after they are written and the sin-crusted woman inside you knows what she wants to do with them. Then—then write out what you decide to do with them instead.

Taking her advice I started. In black ink they scarred the pages—lies, longings, pain, and anger. Out of the darkness inside they raced out and overwhelmed my hand and often my words slanted longer and wider as I wrote with more emotion.Then after the storm was scribbled, came the decision.

“Yes, this is how I feel, but today, today I’m going to take this pain and…..”

Then the decision was also written in black and so it spoke back. Loud. Firm.

For over a year I tried it.

Pain. Longings. Anger. Frustration. Decision to reach for hope.

Now, a year into the experiment, the struggles still remain, but the bitterness has left in the light of the hope. The hope fills up the page now. And the pain is only the black ink that makes the hope seem more whole, more complete.

It was a simple experiment, from a wise woman.


 

When you want to run into the wild

20 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by in 3 am moments, books, canoeing, life dirt, realized dreams, the wilderness, unreasonable hope

≈ 1 Comment

Of my Top Four Passions—

Christ,

People,

Travel,

and Wilderness

—the first and second always trump the third and fourth.

I feel the tension deeper sometimes, like now, when fall blazes and swirls yellow leaves around cattail skeletons.

The best of all seasons never lasts long enough, at least here in Canada. It’s the texture in the drying out and dying of everything that makes it so haunting. I’ve never been able to fully absorb fall before it disappears underneath the snow and ice of northern winters.

It has become even harder since moving south into the city.

Life is ironic. Ironic in a funny, aching way.

I have talked to so many girls who just love the city. Girls who think living in the city would be a dream come true. They love the people, the bustle, the color, and the millions of adorable shops and stores hidden everywhere. And, truly, I have become more like those girls the last four years. I do love my city. I do love the people. And there is something to be said about being able to ride the street car to your favorite used bookstore, tucked beside a convenient little coffee shop. Yet, if it wouldn’t be for The Call, I would not be here.

No way.

It is worth it, yes. A million times over.

But it still aches.

Because my “dream” life, if only orchestrated by me, is very different.

I cannot, and never have, describe to you the feeling of  coming alive that happens when I paddle a canoe or sit by a camp fire. Its as close as I ever get to what C.S. Lewis describes as what he thinks heaven will be like. A sudden, clear,  “Ahhh, so this is where I have always belonged. Now everything makes sense”  kind of emotion.

It is moss and tall white birches and blankets of tangy pine needles. It’s fierce red leaves and silence and the call of a whippoorwill. Its bare rock and paddles and a cedar strip canoe. It’s the smell of wood smoke and the sound of a snow machine, and the way the snow squeaks when its cold.

I love it. I have always loved it. I have never grown bored of paddling, or hiking a ridge, or sitting quietly by a lake.

I mean, what I would absolutely love, would be one of these.

 

 Pretty much like this on the inside

 With these

 

And my dream—a cedar strip canoe

 

Crazy, eh?

I choose to belive though, that by Grace and a Greater Plan I can be more than content while still carrying my longings honestly.

———————————————————————————-

And if you love the wilds too, here are three great reads to take you there.

   Nahanni Trailhead: A year in the northern wilderness

 

 

 

 

   Wilderness Wife 

 

 

 

  The Spell of the Yukon. (Poetry)

The leaving of burdens

20 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by in life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, silly fears, unreasonable hope

≈ 7 Comments

There is so much to write about. Too much to write. My pen doesn’t move fast enough across my journal these days–and still my brain races to the next thing and I scratch out and scribble in my haste.

I’m home.

I have this strange new, never-felt-ever-before hope and contentment, yet can’t shake a strange reflective mental-churning of the last months.

And all the while still struggling with trust and wistfulness and questions.

Recently I received an email from a close friend with an attachment icon blinking on the subject line. I read..

“….Long, long ago we were both in Virginia. You were…. walking across a field, and there was a tree nearby where people had piled their stuff, and I thought it would make a lovely picture: the princess wanders through the field, leaving her burdens behind…or something…”

The attachment was this picture.

What held me was not so much the picture itself, but the “leaving her burdens behind”.

Those words caught the straggled ends of my thoughts and gathered them into meaning and something my heart recognized.

For that is what these last two years have been—a leaving of burdens. Not physical or relational burdens. Burdens of sin and wounds and lies. Burdens I never knew were there until they began to catch on the thorns and I was snagged, helpless, unless I laid them down. Divine thorns, I think.

A year ago this week, a woman who had looked deeper than most and who cared enough to ask questions, sent me a letter. Not all of what she said, I was ready to hear. But, like He does, God used her words. And at the end when she wrote…

“Whatever happens… in the future does not need to destroy you…you are responsible for your own choices. I am your greatest cheerleader believing in God and your heart as a woman …knowing that the path toward healing will include pain and hard choices on your part…”

…I heard Him. Heard her. And little by little stopped playing safe and nice like I had for so long.

I used to think that all my burdens were wounds—hurts that I carried around like unhealed scars. Indeed yes, some of them were and still are. But I am learning that somehow, somewhere along the way, I’ve made my wounds a bigger issue than my sin. Wounds only exist because of sin, because of someone’s rebellion against God. Sin creates wounds, wounds do not create sin, like I always imagined. And, suddenly, I couldn’t blame my sin on my wounds anymore. My wounds made me want to hide and in the hiding I rebelled against the One who said “my grace is sufficient for thee” and the burdens piled up over a lifetime.

Never more so than this year have I realized how fallen and sin-crusted I am. How good and perfect and sweet I tried to be, and how dishonest and sinful the shell was.

There was so much in me that needed to be crushed.

How much needs to be crushed still.

How many burdens still clank around, and how the sin still creeps in everyday.

And yet, now, there is hope for being gentle since what she said, I think, is true. One can be unhidden—because hurt is reality, but nothing has the power to destroy the heart that rests in being forgiven.

And as broken and fallen as I now see myself to be, I have more hope.

If He can forgive my hiding and hold my shattered pieces together than He is big enough to take the control from my fists and I don’t need to fall apart.

And so here is to a God who forgives, and lifts burdens, and gives unreasonable hope.

Truly He is the reason.

Truly He is good.

Truly He IS.

Summers end

01 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by in canoeing, friends, laughter, life dirt, realized dreams, the wilderness, unreasonable hope

≈ 2 Comments

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”- Wind in the Willows

And so summer ends. 

With the sun glinting off wet paddles and dancing through the waves and the laughter and the eyes of good friends.

How perfect for it to end on the water, in a canoe—where I always feel more alive than anywhere else. How perfect that it ended with friends, on the water, in a canoe.

The water gurgled, and we tipped canoes, and jumped into the river to float lazily in the sunshine, and looked for the best way through the rapids.

We laughed at Krispie’s distressed expression as her canoe found the rocks like a magnet finds a nail, and at Johan as he traumatized our fellow campers with his striking rendition of a donkey, and at the way it took three men to make a pot of coffee.

The girls looked like flopping hippos all weekend as we tried to climb back into the canoes, while the guys seemed to always jump back in with an easy elegance.

We jumped off rocks into the river bruising our knees on submerged rocks, and then argued as to why some hit bottom and some didn’t.

We sat around our camp fire and talked and told lame jokes and insulted each other.

We cut up huge piles of carrots and peppers and ate with appetites only the water can create, feeling like we had never had tastier food.

And always when we looked around we were surrounded by friends, and the sparkles in their eyes.

Its the Complete. Perfect.

End to the summer.

The summer that came at first like glimmer of warm hope.

 I looked at it, distrustful of its reality after a winter of barrenness. After a darkness where I couldn’t see more than a candles light in front of my clumsy feet. And I walked and stumbled in the darkness, some nights laying where I fell in front of the enemy and felt doubt like waves, icy cold lap at my face. When all I could do was raise my head enough to look behind me and see others fighting on my behalf, and then lay it down again. Limp. Limp from clinging frantically to the cross, clinging to nail scared hands, cling to the crazy idea that hope somehow would come from that bareness.

I had no idea how crazy true that theory was.

The summer that blossomed in to a miracle of freedom.

The summer that took Esta from the way she was and turned a lifetime of lies inside out, upside-down, and opened up a whole new world she never dreamed was there.

It came softly at first, until the sunrise that dawned after a night of clenched fist, and I watched it from the porch and suddenly saw the truth and stepped into the freedom that He offered. Stepped into unreasonable hope that was so overwhelming, it didn’t seem possible.

He gave me the desire to laugh for no reason at all, and I did.

And when we feel like our insides are blow apart, they often are, and the healing of them is the paradox of love and an empty tomb and unspeakable joy.

Life is beautiful. Painful, messy, beautiful.

I dance in freedom I never dreamed

And I cry tears of thanks for a worth

I never thought I would own

And I have more worship in my heart

Than I know what to do with

Overflowing with gratefulness

For a heart given the gift

Of brokenness.

It been a lifetime in coming.

“All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.” -Wind in the Willows 

Touching God

31 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in 3 am moments, life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, silly fears, the wilderness, unreasonable hope

≈ 4 Comments

 The mug is warm and I curl my stiff fingers around the smooth ceramic, holding in the heat with my skin. I lift my head. My hair catches, tugging, fighting icy wind. I feel it—the wind—feel it twirl around my neatly pinned hair and brush along my scalp. My toes curl, burrowing in the pine needles. Their points, dulled by decay, swollen with dew, dance under my weight, tickling my feet. The rain falls, wet on my cheeks.

And I find comfort in the texture—in the touch. In feeling life slide, scratch, and brush its unique pattern beneath my skin. Solace. It’s the security of fingering, of gripping reality. This is here. This is real. All will be well. I can feel it.

As a small child I turned to touch for reassurance when I was sick. A stuffed doll,  a Lego block, or a icy freezy pop—I would always hold something. I still remember, closing my eyes, trying to memorize the creases in my hands while my eleven-year-old body fought off influenza. As long as I felt something I was anchored in the truth that my pain would pass.

Mom should know. As she reminds me, I could never walk through a store without touching everything in sight. “Look with your eyes Esta, not with your hands”. And she said it over and over.

Those who know me well would say I’m a touchy-feely sort of person. My personal bubble is very small—tiny—if in existence at all. I struggle to communicate with people if I’m not able to be close to them, face to face, or holding their hand.

I’ve received 20 years worth of gifts from my younger brother. Special, all of them. But none near so treasured as the night he caught me as I crumbled and sat, holding my sobbing head against his shoulder, while my heart fell apart and he offered me his sleeve for a tissue.

I experience life and hope and love though touch—through the feel of the wind, the rain, and the warmth of a handshake.

But sometimes I feel a bitterness creep in, because the Person who I want most to feel close to remains beyond my grasp.

I can’t touch God.

I can’t put my fingers in the nail prints like Thomas.

(Doubting Thomas is one of my kindred spirits)

 I’m horribly jealous of the woman who got to washed His feet with her tears and dry them with her hair.

And it seems the most infuriating thing in the universe sometimes.

Sure, I can stroke the smooth bark birch, cup my hands under the icy splash of mountain stream, and hold the hot, sticky fingers of a preschooler. But I can’t touch the One who made them. And while in my head I know full well that in touching his creation I am communicating with him, at 3 o’clock in the morning it still seems all terribly unfair.

But, recently, the bitterness has left.

Not because I’ve resigned myself to waiting until heaven, or have accepted the limitations of my fallen mortality, or otherwise made myself feel mature and spiritual.

But because something in Lamentations told me not to do any of them.

Awkwardly, very wobbly like, I’ve begun to ask to be able to feel more.

 And honestly, I know it’s the most obvious thing, but I’ve begun to realize that when it says “God is spirit”, that’s what it actually means.

And suddenly the unseen is not “unfelt” like I somehow believed, but felt even deeper than a mug of hot coffee. Actually felt.

In reality, it warms from the inside out.

Really, it really does. And it’s truer than really for real, and honestly serious, not even kidding.

So laugh all you want at me for finally realizing such a simple truth,

But to me its like discovering a whole new world.

A world where you can actually reach out and touch laughter, not just hear it.

 

meant to be

14 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by in friends, realized dreams

≈ 2 Comments

When I make my mug of tea this morning, I took it outside.

And I stood on my front porch and looked and looked.

 I saw mountains.

 All I heard was hundreds of birds and rustling leaves.

My heart fluttered.

Like that flutter you feel when you come over a hill to fast and see a police car waiting at the bottom, or the flutter when you’re falling in love.

That kind of flutter.

It was a strange sensation—It dawned on me.

I was meant to be standing on a little porch, in the mountains of Virginia. I was meant to be renting the little trailer with a girl named Emily Smucker this summer. I was meant to be starting a new job in an hour. Somehow, I didn’t miss God’s voice. Somehow my leap must have, by some miracle, been faith, not stupidity this time.

It was a very nice feeling.

This is our living room.

 It had lived up to my dream of a place filled with interesting people and conversations. Everything from whiskey to kissing has been vehemently discussed by our various visitors. Its like the most perfect little realization of a dream ever.

( My roommate, Emily, created a video of our first week. Your welcome to see it, but please forget how ditzy and blonde I appear)