I just returned from a week-long waltz through Utrecht and Amsterdam and, two train union strikes notwithstanding, I feel deep-in-my-bones restored. Mornings spent writing, retiring early to bed in the evenings, quality time with two of my dearest friends, some quiet airplane crying, and tapping into my childlike energies are apparently solid ingredients for relished rest.
So far this year, something has always managed to go wrong when I attempt to bring my camera anywhere. This time, I forgot the detachable leather strap I use to sling it across my shoulders, so I didn’t end up using it at all. But I slipped out my phone to remember the things that gave my heart pause. In keeping with my “collector of fragments” identity (which maybe warrants its own post for the people newer to E’s life), here are a few such moments and their disjointed meditations.
Corners are the places tucked away, unobserved, that hold an entire space together. They’re the nooks nobody looks into until they’re foreboding, dusty with webs, coated with mystery. But have you ever stopped to notice the lines that slope from corners, the alcoves and eaves, the shadows that never fall the same way twice from top to bottom? A couple years ago, in Venice, a friend and I discovered she looks to the center of things and I to the edges. My back is always to a wall, my eyes to the outskirts of a room. I’m concerned with the framing of things—the bones.
In college, especially when rushing from Fischer Hall to BGH as fast as my blue Converse-d shoes could carry me (blue? seriously?), I developed a habit of looking at the ground because there were always such interesting things to be found there. I started a note on my phone: a Band-aid, the words “R U OK,” autumn leaves that all fell overnight during a storm. Since then, I’ve found yellow ducky stickers (twice!), many flossers and hair ties, a drawing of a horse, bird prints in now-dry concrete, a bright yellow fire hydrant surrounded by buttercups, a bright orange fire hydrant surrounded by weeds and giving a valiant impression of a pumpkin at the airport… I could go on. If I hadn’t been looking at the ground in Amsterdam, I would have missed the juxtaposition of bottle cap and glass shard, the sign telling me there was a bookstore ENTIRELY DEDICATED TO POETRY ARE YOU KIDDING, and a sweet Dutch orange cat in a church garden.
Again with the edges. I couldn’t tell you what else was in these rooms. I was so awed by the use of line, edge, light—the way old and new merged. Amsterdam felt overrun by the new along tourist streets, but creep into buildings and you’d find longstanding remains of what must not be lost. Even that cage on the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum atrium felt like a protest. The old cries out not to be forgotten while the new demands you be uncomfortable every once in a while. I could never say the same about technology, which pursues only comfort and expediency, but art? God, protect us.
i) Maybe someday I will wear a fancy dress in a fancy hotel with a fancy man and eat a fancy meal. ii) I craved pineapple for five days before venturing solo to the grocery store and purchasing a plastic pack of them in precut cubes. It felt redemptive to crave something that not so long ago signified my own undesirability. A quick Google search supplies mixed meanings for the fruit, and if you think hard enough, they’re all true. iii) Lately my heart has longed for fields, and I found myself unable to stop smiling as the train departed Amsterdam and rolled past meadows of sheep, sleep canals cutting through crops, and forests left untouched by human hands. Mostly it made me ache for England, but when am I ever not aching for England?
I’ve lived a good deal of my life with a scarcity mindset toward grace: Delight is in short supply, and don’t even get me started on love. God is proving this simply untrue. “Abundance!” was one of our most-used words during this week, and I’m discovering I love good, beautiful food—that there is nothing wrong and everything pleasing in taking the time to find the best whiskey sour (pictured, don’t argue), fresh pasta, and salmon eggs Benedict that doesn’t make your stomach hurt. It is sweet to set a table, to let your eyes feast first, to let the making and arranging and consuming of food and drink be an act of love. It is good to receive good things from the Lord.
Oh, and yes, I did get my Miffy (Nijntje) stuffy teehee.
With childlike joy,
E