A Matter of Choice

I’m a writer, it’s a holiday. Obligation states I acknowledge the day. Carrying on…

I have spent the last three years following a progression in terms of Valentine’s Day – a year of singleness followed by a year of year of dating followed by a year of being engaged. Despite the fact that I spent one year without romantic attachment and this year was spent with my husband-to-be, I haven’t really monitored distinct differences in the days or how I was affected by them. I know that this year I had plans, but the overall feeling of the day itself is no different.

For me, that really speaks to the nature of love, not some silly holiday.

I have always felt loved. I have not always felt like I deserved it, but that’s where grace comes in.

A slightly younger and more cynical me wrote this about Valentine’s Day four years ago:

“Love” – it doesn’t exist. Sure, we can claim it’s the “reason for the season” and give all our affection to the one we “love” the most. But what happens when Valentine’s Day is our only excuse? The rest of the year we ignore the needs and emotions of others, but as long as we buy those carnations on Valentine’s Day, our lack of love the rest of the year is pardoned with a standing ovation.

Don’t get me wrong, handing out flowers every day of the year won’t make every day a day for valentines, but we should keep that same mindset. Why only have one day to love people?”

Apparently, I was a bit of a linguist as well:

“Besides, we don’t know what love means anymore. People date, throwing “love” out in the open and two weeks later break up and feel like life isn’t worth living. Uttering a simple word will not change emotions or expressions, and our overuse only proves we are ignorant to what it truly means: “Strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties” and “unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another”.

Love doesn’t have to be a romantic, swooning overdrive of the soul. But we use it like we use any other word: without thought and without understanding. Too often we use it, thinking we know what it means and how it feels, but we are almost always wrong. Love is not an emotion: it’s a state of the heart. True love, not the fluff that we lace into so many conversations, is not shallow, stingy or simplistic. Love is nowhere near that tingling we get in our stomachs when our adored person of choice comes down the hall. Love is the soul-deep affection and compassion for others that cannot be replaced, cannot be formulated no matter how influenced your brain is by it. True love lives for others, and not itself. Love is forgiving. Love is selfless. Love has been destroyed by society.”

I don’t think I would stitch that last statement onto a pillow – my heavy-handedness stemmed from singleness, teen angst and frustration at people with heads as empty as flower pots. Despite my hyperbole, however, there is a lot of truth in that statement. Love has been stained by societal expectations and its new understanding influenced by the media. TV shows for anyone over the age of thirteen frequently offer the idea that love is synonymous with sex and that love is as easy to return, lose, or exchange as any sweater from the Gap. In terms of what we know from popular culture (and seeing as culture is a societal construct), Love can be defined in three ways:

1. Love is a living thing that, if not fed and watered and influenced by the proper measures of attention and care, will die and cannot be resurrected – no choices, only consequences. When it’s gone, we replace it with another living thing and the cycle continues until we finally bite the dust.

2. Love is a state of being, just like “fatigue” or “hunger”. There are periods of life when people are “in love”, but that time fades and we can fulfill its needs through various outlets including sex, gifts and shallow material offerings.

3. Love is a mirage. Marriages today are like jobs – fifty years ago, a man worked the same job all his life and then retired. Today, if a man is lucky, he stays at the same company for ten years before being laid off or becoming bored with his prospects. Love is really just an illusion but doesn’t actually exist. It’s a placeholder for whatever better thing will come along.

Who wants to be in a steady, consistent, monogamous relationship when there’s so much love to find in the world? Who wants to be trapped with only one option? In the words of Peter Pan, “Forever is an awfully long time.”

True love is not a trap or a cage.

Love does not inhibit and it does not deny. Love never fails.

Love is not a status or an incurably diseased organism or a worn-out idea. Love is a choice. Love IS a state of the heart. You choose to love someone. Love only dies because people willingly let it die – they stop tending it, they have no desire to nurture it, and after all the care they poured into it in the beginning, they try and seek the easy way out. Worse than just letting love die is letting it die because attentions were drawn elsewhere. There were “better things” and “better opportunities” that came up, and the previous object of affection was a mistake or a misstep.

I choose to love, even when there are no guaranteed rewards for my actions or promise of reciprocation. I love because I am called by God to love, because I am made to love, because I cannot deny it or escape it. Love does not die of its own free will as love is not a living thing by its own will – it is a symbiote, surviving in unity with a human host, given in perfect example by God who created it.

I pray that fifty years from now, people will ask me how we ever did it, how we ever managed to stay in love this long. I hope that even then, I will look over at Matt and squeeze his hand and be able to quote Isaac from The Fault in Our Stars:

Some days, it wasn’t easy.
“But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway”

No matter what happens, I will choose to keep the promise anyway.
That’s some of the very most we can do in this short life.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Growing Up with Harry Potter

– a reflection of my childhood –

Fiery spells, dragons, witches, wizards, one Dark Lord. The Boy Who Lived. Castles crafted from magic and stone, creatures kept secret from the Muggle world. All of these elements held us captive as we stepped, one foot at a time, through a literary portal into the world of Harry Potter.

I remember the first time I held one of the books in my hand. It was fourth grade and the first two books were out on shelves. I brought it home because it fascinated me, all my friends were reading them and I flew through good books like the Concorde. My parents met my interest in the books with uncertainty. The Christian reviewing world had not done the books any favors by panning them completely without giving them a fair chance. One example lies in this review from World Magazine of the first three books – even though you can’t view the whole article, the first paragraph is laughable; bad things happening for no reason, wrongly marked as the modern successors to Chronicles of Narnia… The same issue of inherent evil lies in both works. The bad is brought by greed, lust for power and no concern for the sanctity of life and love. According to the Christian community, these books were pure evil, bent on driving children to Wicca or some other such cult. Somehow, what Dungeons and Dragons hadn’t succeeded at for decades was suddenly deemed possible by a few innocent children’s books.

Despite all the warnings against these “monstrosities”, my mother read the first one before me and was completely entranced. Enchanted, you might say. The spell of Harry Potter had been cast.

I began to read through the books with my parent’s permission and encouragement. When I first set my fingers to opening these books, it was 2001. I was eleven and was walking hand in hand with children my age, I in this non-magical, non-textual world. They were learning at Hogwarts and  I in Solon Schools. I felt no draw to the Dark Arts, but walked in step with my magical friends Harry, Ron and Hermione. Because of their shining and unmistakable fight for good, I looked to the light.

I watched as they learned their lessons and battled the difficulties in their young lives, and I in turn battled mine. We were both uncovering the most important lessons in life at the same pace – the importance of true friendship, the weight of unconditional love, and that revenge does not solve our problems. We fell in love together, we had heartbreak. We struggled through classes, they in Potions and me in math. As literary characters, they were written to be on a whole different plane of existence while still being able to relate to – and oh, how they were.

I finished and started new years in school and saw new birthdays, and Hogwart’s Key Three continued to grow and fight the impending evil in their fantastical world. When the Dark Lord returned, I felt the weight of darkness that Harry must be facing and an unavoidable sadness at the characters who were lost. I knew that this was not the purely feel-good series that I had known at first, but I kept reading. In a sense, I was growing up with these kids. I knew their pains, I knew their joys. It was experiencing a different culture – we have different expectations, gifts and experiences, but at the root of it, we understand each other. A child in Australia and a child in Solon, Ohio can both understand the frustration and awkwardness of puberty – Muggles and the Wizarding World are no different. J.K Rowling gave these characters, all of them, such spirit and such clarity in their emotions and their development. I knew their teenage angst, I felt their awkward social slips. Especially being a Christian who is always fighting against sin in her life, I could even relate to their struggle to ward off Evil. We shared all of this, and we shared sleepless nights as they pondered their quest and I read on.

My favorite pastime was preparing for and attending the new book releases with my friends like Adrianne and Rachel. It was like the fluttering anticipation of a new school year. I was going to be reunited with my friends, my heroes, and I was going to follow them on their continuing journey. They needed me and I needed them. We needed each other. We fell in love and bonded with new characters one at a time: Sirius Black, Lupin, Alistair Moody, Tonks. We even fell in love with some bad guys, but the bad guys I loved were not so bad in the end.

Cracking open the brand-new book on the night of its release, I would always enthusiastically dive into the prologue, catching up with Harry at Privet Drive, sharing his hatred of how poorly Dudley treated him, silently singing him Happy Birthday. But all was not well – darkness crept closer, and I stood by Harry as he faced it full on, making foolish mistakes in passion that I would have done as well. Run by his emotions and confused as to his purpose, he and I were linked in this lack of understanding ourselves, and we both figured through it. Piece by piece, our lives came together. I would never be in the position that Harry would face, but I could at least cheer him on and try to understand his ordeal.

Harry’s sixth year was the middle of my time in high school. Love was in the air and I suffered my first heartbreak. Hermione and I shared furious tears and when Ginny and Harry finally figured out their feelings, I rejoiced.  Amid the haze of love was a continuing pressing dark as Voldemort became stronger, and Harry and I began to learn together that life is not fair and that adulthood can spring on us far faster than we think we’re ready for it. But we learned that we have to grow into it, sometimes quickly. We learned that maturity must be understood before it can be implemented in our lives. We learned that people die, almost never when we expect and often too soon. We learned that the plan is much bigger than our understanding but that we all have some part to play. We learned that little tasks must be accomplished to get closer to achieving the grand goal. We learned that hardship does not let up to give us reprieve. It is not always present, but it does not run on our schedule.  We learned that people, our heroes, are not above the grasp of death or failure or sin. Magic does not mean immortal.

Finally, we reached the final chapter of our time together. I was at camp and my magical friends were also about to embark for the wilderness. They were forbidden to be seen in the magical world and I had to put them away at camp. They were to remain in hiding in both worlds.  Hunted by Voldemort and determined to crush him, the trio ran through the woods, forsaking their final year at Hogwarts. I ran through the woods chasing eleven year olds and prepared for my senior year of high school. It was a time of parting, sacrifice and sadness. But, over all of the shadows, it was also a time of happiness, of completion, of closure. So many truths came to light in their lives and mine. We said goodbye to friends and loved ones, some erased from our lives and others left behind. We felt physical and emotional pains and were crippled by the unexpected. I read by flashlight on a hill and raced with them through their adventure and felt the sting of loss and the global sigh of relief at their victory. We cried and we laughed and we missed the lost. We said much we didn’t mean. We buried the dead and clarified the mysteries and forgave the mistakes of the past.

And even when it was all over, we still had the upcoming movies to finish us out.

I grew up with those versions of our characters too. We all grew together and now we all have to part. Watching the final movie with my mother, a part of me felt my heart break as I watched this whole decade come to life on screen. I watched and followed these kids as they grew up, embodying the souls I’d come to bond with and love over the years. Christopher Columbus made no mistake in those casting choices – it is him that I thank for his wonderful casting. He gave Harry Potter life. He gave them heart. And when it all came to a close, I cried. I sobbed at the unrealized love of Severus Snape, at the falling of so many beloved people, at how far we all had come, at the realization that this was it. A chapter of my life has been closed, and now it is time, in a sense, to move on.

It takes a great author to write great characters. It takes great readers to love these characters as their own friends. It also takes a great reader to be able to know when something has come to and end. Rather than mourn the ending of one of the best adolescent series to ever be written, I rejoice that I got to be a part of this Harry Potter generation. I aged and matured and learned with these characters, one step at a time. I watched as Neville blossomed from awkward, ridiculed, bumbling child to a brave and fearless man, destroyer of the final Horcrux. I hated and pitied Draco Malfoy as he fought himself and the true state of his heart to decide whether he was to follow duty or morality. I mourned the deaths of Dumbledore, of Snape, of Lupin and Tonks and George and Dobby and Hedwig and Moody and Sirius. I rejoiced at the death of the Dark Lord.  As I said, it takes a great author to craft such wonderful,believable characters, good and evil, who will remain immortal in those pages. J.K Rowling, thank you.

Thank you for allowing me to grow up with these characters – my friends.
Thank you for helping me discover who I was through them.
Thank you for a childhood filled with joy, fear and magical wonder.
Thank you for giving me a world that I can and will pass on to my children in the years to come.

And to my friends in the world of Harry Potter,
to Harry and Hermione and Ron and all the rest,

I will not grieve the end of a childhood and the end of your adventure. I am starting and continuing my own life adventures, many of which I started while spending time with you. I am gazing at the horizon of my life and I can’t wait to reach it like you have.

I will not grieve the end. In a sense, this will never be the end.

Every time I read those books, we shall meet again.

Not What Was Expected – Trust Falls

After thinking about my reprieve from the past couple of weeks, I’ll save reflections for next week.

This week, I need to take a retrospective pause.

I don’t know what lies ahead for me.

So much is left up in the air and in God’s control. I don’t know when our house will sell, I don’t know where I’ll work after college and I don’t know when I’ll get married. I’m not sure where I’ll be in five years, or who I’ll be with or how I’ll be earning my day-to-day bread.

I don’t know where my friends or loved ones will be. I haven’t a clue if I’ll ever see some people again or meet others for the first time. I’m caught in such a void of uncertainty that some days, I’m not even quite sure what I was meant to do. I know the things I love and I know the people I love and I know where I’d like to be, but I don’t know any of these things in permanence.

All I’m looking for is a little security. Some sign that the future isn’t determined by Bob Dylan lyrics. I’m just asking for some sort of waystone that I can rest at, feeling the soft summer sun and knowing that some definite answers ahead of me. I don’t want all the answers, I don’t even want to see the future in all its Encarta Encyclopedia detail. I just want a glimmer that soon, things could be set. Things could be as they will be until I die. Most people wish this but they never see it. I doubt I will either.  The problem lies in that my future is held in the hands of my protector, my suitor, and our Creator. My future lies in the economy, the government, my college and my global neighbors. So much of my future lies in the hands of others, and I can only try and pry their fingers apart to see the sparkle of light within.

I have keys to my future. I can determine which jobs to look for and hobbies to take up. I can determine the foods that I eat and will continue to lose weight through Weight Watchers. I will go where my family goes until someday, hopefully sooner than my poor, longing mind can imagine, I have a family of my own. I can decide which movies to watch and when to go to bed – and I can also determine when to get up and walk and sit and speak.

I don’t need to be long-winded to know what I feel. And I know this isn’t what you expected. Maybe it’s because of my lack of sleep or my lack of food or the fact that I’ve been working at the same table in the Solon Panera for over four hours without moving. Whatever the cause may be, my heart just isn’t in my writing this week. It’s not fair to you to be trapped with my insecurities, but occasionally the blogger must make the judgement call about what should be shared and what wants to be shared.

I’m taking the initiative to share myself with you. I want to share my uncertainties, my desires, my hopes with you.

I want to trust you.

That’s what this all comes down to – trust. I trust my parents when they say they will love me and provide for me, regardless of where we may have to uproot to. I trust Matt when he tells me he wants to marry me and it waiting for the right time to ask me to be his forever. I trust my friends when they say they’ll be there, I trust my college to prepare me for the world beyond myself. Above all else, I trust God that He holds me, my future, my soul in His hands at all times, for eternity. I trust He knows what is best, and will convey that knowing to all those involved. In His times and in His hands, when all else fails, this I will still have for certain.

I know that trusting people can lead to pain and heartbreak. I know trust can be hard, painful and shaky. I know it can be gained and lost. Trust is like patience – both must be learned and had and will have consequences. Both hold great reward.

I find that when I confront my thoughts of trust, I am weak. I am impatient. I am selfish. It’s about me and the fact that I deserve to know. I deserve to have all the facts that you do, to be on the same. Doesn’t that defeat the very idea of trust? That we put our resources, our effort, or lives into the responsibility of others? We still must take responsibility, but we must trust if we ever want to find rest.

Trust includes forgiveness. Trust includes love. Trust means being prepared to make a leap without looking over the edge. Trust does not mean foolish or foolhardy agreement and surrender. But it does mean a sense of surrender – knowing and accepting that you can’t do this alone.

It means falling back into the arms of love and knowing they will catch you.
It means tripping into a blind darkness of uncertainty and knowing a light will be there to guide.

Lord, you have given me this opportunity for patience. Lord, help me to truly trust you and those you have put in my life.

I long so frantically for time to pass a little faster.
The deepest yearnings of my heart paint utopian images in my head of how I pray everything will be.
I’m walking multiple paths with multiple people, but only one sits in the middle with one other traveler walking  by my side.

I’m longing and hoping and praying, and over all of that, I trust.

Let me savor the time I have now rather than long for that which has not yet come.

But please, let it come soon.

I’ve never been very good at waiting.

You Can’t Go Back From Here

Weight Watchers has begun to change my life.

It starts with the little things – choosing carrots instead of chips, peppers and cucumber on my salad in place of croutons.

Then, the effect starts to spread. I begin to weigh the balance between a sandwich or a cup of vegetable soup. Carbs and fats are more important than sweet with salty, but both are important. Before I realize it, the change has integrated itself into every moment of my eating experience. I start to savor the flavors of my food from the first bite to the last, eating slower to enjoy my meal, watching the pounds I’ve been dreading start to slowly slim off.

Instead of just pulling food from the fridge and eating, I sit and read while I enjoy some fruit salad and a cup of coffee as the summer sun starts to break through the leafy veil over my window. I begin to really believe that everything I eat has an effect on my health and my attitude. I feel lighter, fresher, free.

I pulled my bike out of the garage this evening to enjoy a ride in the cool evening and work off the few extra points from my pad thai. It hasn’t been this cool since April. The entire day was delicate, soft and pale. The sky was unbroken by clouds and a calm, temperate wind pervaded the stuffy house. There was a rest from the rain and the beating sun. In a way, it was a reprieve that came without us realizing how much we really needed it.

I’ve been riding my bike around this area since I was old enough to go out on my own. When I was younger, I stayed in the drive, riding up to the mailbox and back down around the storm drain. If I felt brave, I’d let my bike tire bump down over the curb to the street when there was no traffic – no sidewalks in our part of Solon back then.

As a teenager, I was permitted to leave the safety of the drive and the view of the porch windows and bike to the church on the corner. I would swoop and spin around the parking lot full speed until the sky began to fade to purple light, and then I’d bike home. On dry days, I would wheeze and heave my bike to the top of Cannon hill and come flying down through Hidden Lakes, scattering geese and pressing the grass between our house and our backyard neighbors. Splattered with mud from the ditch in the property line, I’d roll the bike back in the garage just as Mom rang the bell for dinner.

High school gave me a whole new set of liberties. On early mornings I’d kick my tennis shoes out from under the bed, fill a fresh water bottle and bike the four miles to the high school, racing the sun down SOM Center Road, past the rock wall and apartments and frenzied parents in their Sedans. The smell of exhaust and coffee and hot asphalt was the joy of morning, and at school I’d roll my bike into Mr. Kramer’s back room. At the end of the day, we’d part ways and I’d start the long trek through town and walk part of the huge hill that had aided my descent to get to class on time. Of course, there was no rush home, just small lungs and afternoon heat.

College weighed me down a bit, even with my bike on campus. So I’ve started riding again. Today began as a simple start up the hill to Lewis Elementary. Then I caught a second wind and kept pushing on to Clarendon Drive. Even though I’ve known this area my whole life, I never knew these roads looped around each other. I discovered new paths and new faces and a whole new jungle of deep green, overhanging oaks and maples. The smell of cool, damp grass, wood burning in a bonfire pit, the quiet murmurs of suburbanites out in the unseasonably chilly June night… I have missed these things. New York has many beauties and many joys, but my heart is here. I love the curve of development sidewalks, the occasional bark of  a dog or pattering of feet on an after-dinner stroll. The traffic on the main roads begins to slow after seven o’clock and there is a whole new world to the north of the city. The air is fresher and the evening sky clearer, despite the light pollution that chokes out the stars.

I let my legs pedal me to my old childhood haunts – the elementary school, now tiny and flat against calf-deep field grass.  The broken parking lot, the yellow slides, woodchips and the chalky United States on the black top. I weave in and out of the tether ball poles and give wide berth to the little girl and her mother on the swings. Somewhere in the aging building is a lone custodian, pushing a dry mop and moving the rack of lost-and-found coats to the cafeteria. He’s been in this place so much longer than I have, and how small the building must seem to him after so many nights of sweeping…

My ears and fingers have started to get cold, a wonderful fact for Ohio in June. It’s time to move on as I’m losing my light, and I cut through to the church next door. My tires run the length of the parking lot where we used to play tennis, now cut off and replanted with grass. The spot where he and I sat in the thunderstorm and wept, he angry at me not trusting him and me furious that I was right all along.

I stop at the arbor benches and enter the woods, walking slowly along the Stations of the Cross. I’m walking to “Exile Vilify” by the Nationals and missing you ever so much, each step a reminder of the ones we’d be taking hand in hand if you were here. Each step gives me a reason to think of why I love you.

The song ends and I’m back out of the shade of the canopy into a golden sky. A single jet trail cuts the whisper of paling blue  and catches the fiery remains of daylight, gilding it gold. I find the beat of the tune by Joe Taylor and I weave my way towards the hill and home. There’s almost no need for any movement from my legs, the hill knows what I want. I’ve earned the free ride down 1,200 feet to my house. The elevation was worth crushing my lungs on the way up, and the more I take this route the easier it always gets.

Back in the house, I pour a glass of ice water with sweet lime and miss my brother in Pennsylvania, remembering his attempts to teach me to dance and sharing what’s he learned about true manhood.

I walk past the stairs where the one I love came up for breakfast less than a week ago. I miss you there, and a few steps further where you made a heart with your hands and sent me to bed.

I make the final trek up to my room, take off my shoes and enjoy the lush of new carpet underfoot and the crisp twist of night air pushing through the window screens. The walls are now green instead of pink, the bed now between the open windows and the closet empty and organized. All is almost in its proper place.

Except for you, as you are so far away. Soon, we’ll fix that.

I left the house for Weight Watchers, and came back for you.

There really is no going back from here. It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change.

It only starts with food – and ends with one soul parting the air of a June evening in a corner of Ohio.

I work for myself, I work for my future and I work for all of this. All of this that I love.

That alone can shed the weight off a heavy heart.

(c) HEYanega 2011