a woman of strength and softness

a friend of mine shared this poem with me when i was in malawi a few years ago. i scribbled it down in my journal then only to reread it this week. i think it's so beautiful and had to share it.

A Woman of Strength and Softness

Surrendered heart, not surrendered identity

a strength to be reckoned with

She does not demand respect

but you want to give it to her

Her presence invites you to rest

in fact she is like a tree

holding forth nurturing branches

not a spiderweb, trapping you for her soul food

Her vulnerability is so lovely

you cannot keep your soul out of hers

She is marked by genuine kindness

of one who has already forgiven you

for how you will fail her

She exudes the kind of strength

that trusts and waits and suffers

as unto God's purposes, not her own

She lays her own life down

like a lamb, not a dog

Her surrender flows from her love

not fear or desperation

Her surrender is a chosen thing

She lives in the vulnerability of her longing to be treasured

her longing to be known

her longing to be invited in

But she lets her disillusionment

tenderize, not toughen her heart

She does not hold the objects of her love captive

She does not make them pay

or tie them to her with guilt

or keep them in terror of her critical eye

But rather lets them fly free

Enjoying all the more the reunion

They get to choose to be with her

She lives at the mercy of no one

She is captive only to the Father

Thus she is free to love

Even if it means she loses

She chooses doing love over getting love.

Written by Lottie K. Hillard

The Impossible Dream

To dream the impossible dream

To fight the unbeatable foe

To bear with unbearable sorrow

To run where the brave dare not go

To right the un-rightable wrong

To be better far than you are

To try when your arms are too weary

The reach the unreachable star

This is my quest, to follow that star

No matter how hopeless,

No matter how far

To fight for the right

Without question or pause

To be willing to march into hell

For a heavenly cause

And I know if I'll only be true

To this glorious quest

That my heart will be peaceful and calm

When I'm laid to my rest

And the world would be better for this

That one man scorned and covered with scars

Still strove with his last ounce of courage

To reach the unreachable star

I was sitting in a coffee shop editing wedding photos and listening to Pandora this morning. Patty Griffin’s sweet and soulful voice was singing “top of the world” and at the song’s end came silence and then she continued on with “to dream the impossible dream”…

I felt my heart tug and I stopped, wondering why those words struck me so. Then I remembered that it was one of the songs that my Grandma would sing, just out of the blue or sometimes she would sing it to me over a voicemail on my birthday. It’s been a song that has woven itself into our relationship all these years. I’ve been hearing her sing those words since I was just a little girl. I don’t think I’ll hear her sing them again in this life. Dementia has taken her captive and she can scarcely remember anyone in our family. As I listened to those words, I’m taken back to a few years ago when I was visiting her in the nursing home and she kept telling me every other sentence how proud she was of me and how she loved me “to the max”. She was her sweet self, so full of joy and kindness. I took a bunch of hold-out pictures of us that day and we laughed and laughed at our own silliness. Then she walked over to the piano and played Impossible Dream and sang for me and it was so beautiful. I didn’t realize what a gift that day was. That was the last visit I had with the Grandma that I knew all these years. She’s different now and the disease has laid claim over her mind and body, but I am so glad I have that sweet day to remember her by.

I am a lyrics girl when it comes to music, so I was surprised that I had never really thought about the words to this song. Now, as I sit here reading the lyrics, I love the song even more. What a great life anthem; I may need to adopt this one as my own.

May we all dream the impossible dream.

quotage

"We are undefinable. We are shades of masculine and feminine looking for someone to bounce life off of, looking for someone to give when we need to receive, to receive when we need to give, and when it's done right both get done at the same time. Being to being, here let me hold that soul for you because you've been... drowning in labels for so long you've grown tired of survival. Here is a moment of bliss, a moment of aliveness. All day long I expend. I hold together, I lift up, I give out, and sometimes... I just take in." ~ Lauren Zuniga

I will not wait to love as best I can

"I will not wait to love as best I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is not a way to live, to wait to love." - David Eggers

I read this quote a while back and remember being taken aback like I had been smacked upside the head but was in a rush so I just jotted it on a piece of paper and shoved into a journal to remember to look at and reflect on later…then I forgot about it, until just recently when I decided I felt like writing again and found it in an old journal I hadn’t written in for ages. I unfolded the edges and read it again. And there it was again, that same smack upside the head.

I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to random things like writing papers and baking cookies. They always needed a little something extra; they were never quite right. The biggie of the bunch was love. To be able to love, I always thought, I needed a lot of work and I did and still do. I kept the thought in my head that if I can just fix this bad trait or this lack of trust or my fears, if I could just get my act together-then maybe I could love someone or someone could love me. If everything could be just so then…it could be great. The problem is, everything will never be just so. If everyone thought this way, nobody would ever love anybody. It would be a world without love, which is the saddest of all thoughts. Sure we may be not be the best at loving people, but it’s a process. All the great things in this life are a process; it’s like taking the long road, getting lost along the way but seeing so much more beauty in the meantime.

Recently, life and the circumstance at hand have me marinating on this whole idea of waiting to love. The thought I’ve kept coming back to over these past few weeks is that faith and love are a choice. We wake up every day and choose to love this person and this God. We arrange our lives in a way that will support them and grow those relationships. We strive to better them. But in the end, we’re human and flawed and we mess up and we make mistakes and we don’t love well. And in those moments, thank goodness for grace and forgiveness. We soak and sit in that grace. I love how Anne LaMott puts it, "I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us." We grow and learn and we wake up to another day and we try again, to love fully and well. It's a process we learn to embrace and fall into the rhythm of. We will never love perfectly, not even in the future. But we can love the best we can, knowing that we are imperfect and it will be ridiculously tough at times. We can acknowledge it for the process that is is, and we will be all the better for it in the end.

It is not a way to live, to wait to love.

trust

‎"how glorious the splendor of a human heart that trusts that it is loved." -b. manning

trust is one of those things in life that is so incredibly beautiful yet so impossible to quantify.

i hear it so often.

trust in the lord. trust me.

it's so easy to say and yet so hard to live.

it's so hard to trust when i can't see the road ahead.

it's so hard to trust when i don't know if the reward will outweigh the risk.

it's so hard to trust when i fear my heart will get broken.

yet,

somehow, in spite of the risk and the unknown

i choose to trust.

trust my intuition

trust that still small voice

trust that i am loved,

so dearly loved.

on love

"When you're in love, you can't stop smiling, yet you can't smile enough."

-My Aunt Cathy

On Saturday, my cousin Brian got married to Jennifer, the love of his life. I couldn't be happier for the two of them and their new life together. Brian is a smiley guy to begin with but he was just beaming and giddy all day.

In the car as we were driving back to the ferry, we were reflecting on the day and talking about how happy B was and my aunt out of nowhere and so nonchalantly rattles off this beautiful but true string of words. "When you're in love, you can't stop smiling, yet you can't smile enough."

I just like that, a lot.

perspective. perfectly so.

I was at work the other day, doing what i do, making coffee and joking around with the friendly faces I have come to love like family, when out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a little spider. I think I let out a little "eep" as it descended from the lamp right in front of my eyes. He was out of the way enough that I wouldn't touch him while serving customers and he didn't (to my knowledge) have the gusto to swing onto someone's date bar.

I kept glancing at him here and there to see what he was up to, and all I saw was him climbing up and then climbing down, walking over here and walking over there.

When the line ended and people had continued about their days, I leaned in close to the little guy and when I looked at a certain angle in a certain light, I caught a glimpse of a beautifully constructed web. Wow. I took a moment to be humbled and acknowledge the fact that in that past hour, I had served a few people some caffeine and some smiles while this little guy had been slaving away over a home and what a beautiful whimsical creation he made. I took in the moment, feeling like this little spider had taught me something, but I wasn't quite sure what.

There was so much going on. I was distracted. Even when I glanced at the spider, all I saw was the spider, not the incredible web around it. Spider webs are funny like that. Life is funny like that. The light had to shine just right for me to see it. But man, in that light that lit up the web just perfectly so, I could see all the little intricate patterns that fit together perfectly. It was like a symphony.

I'd like to think that if I had the chance to see my life in that same light that shines just perfectly so, that I would feel that same feeling of awe at the beautifully orchestrated symphony that is our lives. If only. Since I don't have the luxury of that perspective right now, I've decided to just live as if I did. Because, I do believe God is at work in every little intricate detail and I would be in complete and total awe if I had the eyes to see it all.