revolution and smallness

Remember when I said I was going to write in this journal once a week? Me too. Although I am apologetic that that is not happening, it means that life is settling down into that natural, everyday chaos that results in having things to do on the weekend, places to see, and people to be with, gifts beyond measure to my nomad heart. I currently reside in that friendship phase where my desire to be in community is overriding my desire to rest (although, being in community is it's own kind of special soul-rest), and I have taken to responding to every invitation I receive with a resounding "YES!" Because of that, by the time tomorrow is over I will have gone out to dinner, gone to a different friend's house for pizza and a movie, got lunch with friends, dinner and a youth production of Elf with a different friend, and have brunch and a movie with my coworkers. Crazy? Maybe so. But the ebb of loneliness that has been aching in my heart is fading the farther into the year we get, so I refuse to complain.

And with those invitations, we usher out October, a month that, while typically lovely and autumnal, seemed to stretch on for weeks and weeks. More than once, I had panic moments re: planning for next year. I'm thinking about graduate school for acting, and I think I've decided I want to go at some point, but I just cannot decided when. The long, thirty-one days of October were spent researching different programs (and only finding about two that seem like places I'd want to go), talking to people I trust... and yet, here we are and I am having such a hard time committing. It also made writing this blog feel like a waste of time because there was much else I should be doing, which is another reason I haven't written in awhile. But enough about that; I'm exhausted of thinking about it and that's not what I want to write about today.

November, on the other hand, ushered in by a traditional pumpkin carving, has flown by so far. It's already the eleventh. Ten days until I go home for Thanksgiving, one month until I turn twenty-three. Can you believe it? I'm not sure why the time suddenly sped up; be it the fact that I've already begun to listen to Christmas music (Silver Bells, by She&Him is currently playing- I'm seeing them in LESS THAN A MONTH as a birthday present to myself),  or that I've been cooking out the wazoo, or that it finally feels like fall in San Jose, or the fact that routine is starting to be a savior.

The ebb and flow of daily life, the settling in, the weekly behavior patterns that we complain about but would be remiss without. Daily liturgies. Wake up, make tea, drive to work and listen to Harry Potter (I'm through book four!), prep for after school, go to class, eat lunch, go to class, tutor, drive to the gym, drive home, make dinner, eat dinner, do something soul enriching, do abdominal work out, make tea, journal, sleep. Repeat.

Perhaps the most delightful of the routines though, is the "no-plans Saturday." Sleep in, eat a delicious breakfast (I've figured out how to make over-easy eggs and I'm in deep love), go to the gym, go to the market and grocery shop at Costco and Trader Joe's (my most favorite activity in the world), clean up, make a fancy dinner (yesterday I made a butternut squash and caramelized onion galette), do laundry, play piano, and watch a movie.

Gloriously magical.Yesterday, movie of choice was Julie & Julia, a completely delightful film by Nora Ephron starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, with Stanley Tucci, that's about cooking and blogging and finding joy and flavor in a life that seems mundane. And EXCUSE ME WHY IN THE WORLD DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS MOVIE? It was like biopic of Julia Child meets You've Got Mail, witty and hilarious and romantic in the sweetest of ways, a movie that begs you to be creative and impulsive. It was one of those movies where you watch it and think "oh my gosh this movie is for me." There's this one scene in the movie where Julie Powell, played by Amy Adams, a thirty-year-old woman unsatisfied with her job who decides to cook her way through Julia Child's cookbook, has just stuffed a chicken full of cream cheese and other things and she drops it and it splats all over the floor and she is so overwhelmed that she just bursts into tears in this colossal meltdown and I've never related so hard to anything in my life. Amy Adams renews my deep desire to be an actress (similar to the effect Lily James has on me), Meryl's Julia Child begs me to cook something delicious or at least grocery shop, and the whole thing awakens the writer in me. After finishing the movie at 11:39 pm, I marched straight onto Amazon.com and purchased the book the movie was based on (my own impulsive decision) and switched off the light.

I was then overwhelmed by a usual bout of insomnia, a disease I have been plagued with since my earliest days of pubescence. (If you, too, suffer from insomnia, I have many remedies to recommend: believe me, I have tried them all). There was a part of my life where my mother refused to let me watch movies before bed because I could never sleep after I finished them. Sad to say, not much has changed. I recently have decided this is because stories are vital to my being as a human and I take them very seriously, so when a story is really good and true and thought provoking, sleeping is impossible- this happened last week with the movie Lion as well. My brain is awake and I am living in the story in my head, replaying the especially compelling bits, wishing to talk about it for days.

I think the thing that stuck out to me about this movie is what has been sticking out to me since I've been in San Jose, that I seem to keep writing about. The contentment. The being okay with where your life is, the willingness to risk, even if that risk is doing the ordinary thing instead of big life change thing. The seeing the abundance of life in the little things. The crying when you drop a chicken on the floor and the crying because how in the world can it be time to plan for next year again. And watching those phenomenal actor women portraying real life women who made the most of their ordinary lives compels me to do the same. The life change comes through small, ordinary moments of poaching an egg or reading a novel or pulling out the Beethoven sonata that has been untouched for weeks.

I think I've mentioned on the blog before, I am reading the most wonderful book (slowly, granted, but it's one of those books you can't rush through). It's called Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, by Tish Harrison Warren. I want to share two passages from the book that seem particularly related to this whole idea that I've been thinking about a lot:

First, in the chapter on seeing God through our food and eating as a worship experience (yes, this was a chapter in the book. It is FOR ME): "This moment of pause before my meal conditions me to learn to eat such things as are set before me, to receive the nourishment available in this day as a gift, whether it looks like extravagant abundance, painful suffering, or simply a boring bowl of leftovers... We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread. We wait on God to give us what we need to sustain us one more day. We acknowlege that there is far more wonder in this life of worship than we yet have eyes to see or stomachs to digest" (65, 67).

I could elaborate on this, but I couldn't explain it as well as Tish, so I'm going to trust your comprehensive abilities to understand why this idea is so revolutionary and fits right in there with this whole idea of being formed one day at a time. She elaborates more on this in the next chapter, on passing the peace and bringing shalom in the ordinary: "And yet we are also called to stability, to the daily grind of responsibility for those nearest us, to the challenge of a mundane, well-lived Christian life. 'Passing the peace' in every way we can, in the place and sphere to which God has called us, is neither a 'radical' practice nor an 'ordinary' practice; it is merely a Christian practice, one that each of us must inhabit daily" (84). This is everything, friends! And I am reminding myself this, as I feverishly type, my fingers not moving as fast as my thoughts. What might this world be like if we all sought to pass the peace not in revolutionary ways, but in our small, tiny interactions. If we started in our kitchens, with our family, cultivating moments of peace. Amidst the deep hurt that our country has faced even in the last two weeks, with mass shootings and wildfires raging and a political climate that runs on fear and hatred, we need the everyday routine, the everyday moments to be rich with a peace that passes understanding.And we can't do it without Jesus. Tish writes, "If we are ever peacemakers, it is not without a good deal of war in our hearts" (87). I think this is why I adore the advent season. The idea that Jesus knew, knows that we have war in our hearts- that we can't help the battle in there- so He came down to Earth, and then came down inside our bodies, to provide peace. So we could breathe and feel something other than fear. So we could live with each other and be vessels of the peace God has for the world.

This work, I am realizing, starts one little moment at a time. This goodness is seen in the land of the living, seen in my work at Overfelt High School. I know many of you have been praying- and thank you, deeply, for that- and walls are slowly being knocked down.  One of my most guarded students who is swiftly becoming one of my favorites, said to me that he doesn't call anyone his friend because "actions speak louder than words." He's been hurt badly by friends before, and is afraid to call anyone his friend- especially not best friend- because of that. But, as he ironically knows so well in his refusal to use those words, we often forget words are just as important. Although actions speak louder than words, words must accompany the actions. Words of peace and hope and gentleness and love, especially to those who don't hear it. Passing the peace through ordinary love, taking time to answer what feels like one hundred questions from a different student who never gets a place to ask them and just laugh together, doing a puzzle with another student who wants to sit quietly, for once, and talking with that student who a month ago refused to speak to me.

Peace must infiltrate our smallest interactions, our interactions, our routines. How difficult it is to remember this. I so want to go out and change the world and do creative things and tell big stories, but God is reminding me the thing that is so hard for me to swallow: life exists in the smallness. The world that feels small to you is the students' entire world. Big stories exist in little places, just like they do in big places.

"God can take ordinary things and, like fish and bread, bless them and multiply them," Tish writes. "He can make revolution stories out of smallness."

-alyssa