Hello, Sweet Summer...

I miss Boone.

 I miss writing long, boring academic papers about things I'm insanely interested in while drinking cheerwine from CookOut.

I miss having 40 books checked out from the library.

I miss cool summer nights in the mountains with stars like nothing else.

I miss poking through junk shops on Main St.

I miss history and academia and not being looked at strangely when everything I think about relates in some way to history or anthropology.

Oh how life changes!

I am also looking forward to moving to a real, live grown up type apartment complex.

I'm looking forward to wearing heels more often and not tumbling down a mountain when I do.

I'm looking forward to learning to love the flatlands.

I'm looking forward to seeking and finding a new passion (and maybe a coninciding job!).

I'm looking forward to getting the drive to make art.

I am learning.

Thoughts from the road...

Winter hit Boone hard this year. Spring is just now peeking her head around the corner to see if its safe to come out. The roads are all pockmarked and whole swaths of trees are dead and fallen over, their root balls as tall as a grown person.

Jon Amos Comenius, the moravian archbishop who's name my high school inherited used to say that Nature is God's second book. He admonished people to notice the cyclicity of nature, and to use it as a textbook for life.

If there is any lesson I have learned, it is this. After every winter, not matter how hard, no matter how long...there is spring.

 Sometimes spring is a just little long in coming.

"I will change your world for you"

Plant your hopes. 

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone;

but if it dies,

 it produces much grain."

John 12:24

He is faithful.

Someone, a good while ago, told me that the Lord was going to return me to my childhood dreams. I was so far into the world of academia, I could not even remember what those dreams were.

So now, about a year later, with everything I held dear in college, gone, I am watching Little Women and remembering. I wanted to be Jo. I lived a childhood of grand dreams of far away places. I thought archaeology would take me there.

And it hasn't.

But there is still a book left in me to write, there is a still a loveable professor's hands to fill, there is still an echoing old house to fill with little boys. There are still adventures left.

Struggles

I have been dealing with emotional backlash from my horomones...and it makes me really frustrated with myself. I wish I was well. I wish my brain and its chemicals worked as they were designed.
I wish I knew if these little problems that I blow way out of proportion due to the anxiety and depression onslaught are going to become big issues in the future.
I wonder if I will every have confidence in a decision I make.

I am fighting an odd and difficult battle, and I'm frustrated.
I need a resolution.

....sorrow

My heart is heavy tonight. A friend of mine from when I was a very little girl died last week. He was murdered. Today I saw the police report, and a picture of the man who shot him. His funeral was yesterday...And I'm not even sure how to articulate my feelings. My heart is quite heavy...

When I first found out, it was a bit surreal. It just now hit home that this 23 year old boy...is gone.

traaaadition....TRADITION!

This year, as this is the first Christmas I am officially dating, I have been thinking about quirky family traditions, or Christmas traditions in general.
Jay's family always has a particular Christmas breakfast. In my family, we get pjs, and ornament for Christmas, as well as a toothbrush and an orange in our stockings. We aren't (still!) allowed out of our room (or my parents lock themselves in theirs) late on Christmas eve, as my parents set up all the gifts and stockings around the Christmas tree. For quite a few years, my sister and brother and I would all sleep in one room on Christmas Eve and watch one of the Star Wars (original trilogy only).

So anyways,
been learning about more Christmas traditions and thinking of some I really think are awesome

Like...the Christmas pickle, an ancient Teutonic? (German?) tradition in which a pickle ornament is hidden on the Christmas tree. The first kid to find one (on Christmas morning?)  gets a prize or an extra gift...or something. My aunt gave me a pickle ornament last year, might be fun to do someday.
My grandmother always had a bird on the tree cause it was supposed to bring good luck in the New Year, some cultures do this with spiders and spider webs!
I like it when people open pjs on Chrismas Eve too...but matching ones are a bit overboard...
As well, as, of course, reading the true Christmas story....


Anyways, those are my thoughts