dying of admiration:

The NYT started a photo blog. I am swooning. Check it out at lens.blogs.nyt.com

Something I Have Realized [Part 1]

I measure growth in pain. When my thoughts rest on the last eight months, a voice inside asks “Molly, what have you done? What are you worth? Wasting away. Eight months of your able-bodied-life---stagnant, useless.” I beat myself up. I want to grow, stretch. For some reason, as I have grown into my adult self, I have adopted this assumption that I am growing only when I am aching. Pain and making it through the pain whether it emotional (loneliness, broken hearted) or academic (constantly revised theses and tough questions without real answers) or physical (competing in races and sweating in hot yoga) has become my measure of accomplishment, worth. Why has this happened? Why do I look at this last eight months and think “useless….” just because it has been relatively comfortable, in fact, almost “painless”?

I have learned two entire new fields of work and adjusted somewhat accurately. I have learned how to budget while saving for both long and short term. I have been to Alaska, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Buffalo, Monroe, WI, Columbus, IN, LA and San Diego, NYC, Milwaukee, and upstate NY, and I am on my way to both New Orleans and India and planning a trip to Moab, UT and potentially South Africa. I have applied for fellowships in NYC and abroad and attended 90% of my brother’s varsity soccer games. I have become remarkably closer with my 2 year old cousin and rekindled my high school crush. That crush and I have been actively involved in both of our families and I have sold crafts at a craft fair with my mama. I have applied for a credit card and made my first ‘alumni donation.’ I have gotten to work at 7:30AM most mornings and navigated what it means to work in the Executive branch of the government. I’ve sent out book queries and baked banana bread. I ran a half marathon and made friends with every Jimmy Vs regular. I’ve sold wire trees like a real artist and ate at Taco Trucks all over town with my brother. I don’t know; I don’t need to go on. The point of this is that the last eight months have been nothing of a waste, but my mind refuses to acknowledge that because they have lacked any obscene amount of anguish.

I want to practice appreciating myself. Allowing myself to be alive without hurting. To find meaning in my accomplishments. This is an unfinished thought, as I understand what this speaks to and how this applies more universally I will elaborate.

Questions to consider in the meantime:

What constitutes growth? Do we always have to be growing? Is growth always linear? Can I grown backwards or cyclically? Is that growth ‘good’? Am I living it right?

things i love today:

1. Apples.
2. The NPR iphone app. [You can stream any station in the nation. What?! I am swooning over the Minnesota Iron Range's Friday morning breakfast show.]
3. Sunshine on the bridge out my office window.
4. Learning about the food under my nose. [If you are in Columbus, Ohio and looking for an amazing Ohio-grown breakfast try Skillet in the German Village. Phenomenal.]
5. This poster of the Beers of the World [below]. Before viewing, please close your eyes and imagine the world's most conflict-dense regions. Open your eyes and super-impose your mental map over this one:I almost fell over laughing when Charlie and I saw this poster at the book loft and made the beer-conflict correlation.

my thankyou note to marquette:

Last spring I spent most of my empty moments thinking about what the last four years had been. This was both destructive and purifying. In the end, I wrote a very long thank you letter to Marquette. The kind of thank you that says "It hurt to hear that, but I think it was worth it." Today, I spent some time rereading what I spent four years fighting with. Here are a few pieces of my letter:

iphone photo office love:

office supplies + valentines day + hidden cameras

I come from a family full of women who craft. This fact is on my Top 10 Blessings list.

Since the beginning of my memory, my mother has created (and encouraged me to create) fabulous Valentine's Day cards. In my Westerville home, the most critical component of Valentine's Day is the hand made card. Each year, my mom pulls out a tin full of crinkled tinfoil candy wrappers, torn-out magazine graphics, and scraps of heart themed wrapping paper, and almost obligatorily we settle into a night of card making. In my collegiate absence, she even sent me a packet of supplies to do my yearly duty.

Valentine's day cards are for friends, family, bus drivers, school secretaries, sometimes loves, but mostly the usual crew. They are for the people we forget to shower with love when wrapped up in our usual routines. They are for the people who help us live our every-days. My mother never emphasized the lovey-dovey of Valentine's Day (or much else) during our yearly preparation. I should remember to thank her for that. In her home, Valentine's-Card-Love is much deeper than stuffed animals and chocolate; it is a habitual love, a love of the mundane.

In a crafty (no pun intended...) way, my mother taught me that real love has a routine element; real love continues when the butterflies and fireworks wear off. To really love is to practice treating those in your life with respect and compassion, to remember to thank them and tell them how important they are to your life. My mom's Valentine's Day cards are just that, they are a simple "Thank you. I am grateful and I am here with you and because of you."

This Valentine's Day, go ahead and send some over-the-top admiration or turn up the Miles Davis, but also, remember to send some love to the people who make your life a little easier each day. Here is a peak at what I am sending out this year [Please excuse the horrible white balance. Remember that post about living like a vagabond? These are taken with my iphone because my Canon is at another one of my 600 homes]:

a glimpse inside.

these are some images from my journals this year:

The Third Read.

I don't know how long I can do this, he said. I think the universe has different plans for me & we sat there in silence & I thought to myself that this is the thing we all come to & this is the thing we all fight & if we are lucky enough to lose, our lives become beautiful with mystery again & I sat there silent because that is not something that can be said.

- Brian Andreas, storypeople.com

I opened my iphone-email in bed sleepy eyed on Sunday morning. I browsed aimlessly, not actually intending on ingesting anything; checking my inbox more for the element of surprise and the comfort of contact. I flipped through to an email from my room mate, travel companion, and same-brain best friend, Christina. She had sent me a link to the Brian Andreas quote above. I am a long time Andreas reader. I skimmed the quote casually assuming I would be familiar with this carefully crafted prose. I was not and on the second read the imagery of that conversation began to sink in. I sat staring, blurry, contact-less eyed, into my boyfriend's bedroom. My heart ached. Does that happen to you? Literally ached.

It takes the Christinas in the world to send us these Sunday morning notes; the ones that in a paragraph can sum up an entire friendship, five years of wandering, all of our journals, so many 2 AM conversations, the confusion.

I closed my inbox and swept away that uncertain space in me. I rolled out from under the comforter and rose to a fresh cup of coffee and Sports Center's Super Bowl Pregame. It's not that this isn't right, it's that it is a part of something bigger. It's a piece of the puzzle, not the whole image. My day went on as it would.

I read the quote again as I sat down at my desk this morning. The third read; almost always the most honest. Read slowly, Andreas has the ability to paint an entire scene with four word sentences. He pulls us into our own experiences, building the bones of a memory for us to flesh out. His work, often about the experiences we may have thought isolated us, exposes the commonality of our intimate fears, desires, and triumphs. This story is certainly that; my fear and my desire. It is striking to be reminded that others feel this as well; a yearning, a certainty of a call. It's the same theme as the 'Life of Pi' quote again, "a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose."

But is this a thing that we all come to? Is this a thing that we all fight? And why? Why are we fighting? If, as Andreas suggests, a part of us all yearns to follow the universe's plans for us, why don't we support that? I am not sure if I am describing this as I wish to. I suppose I wonder why we all fight the mystery. Why are we more comforted by strict, premeditated agendas for ourselves? And even further, why do we discount each other's hunches, feelings, instincts?

I assume that I veer towards my whims too often. I feel like I follow that hold on my instincts too much for the people around me. I think I wear my mom, my brother, my best friends, my boyfriend out. I'm irrational, I'm "Oh Molly, what now?" and a shaking head. I begin to believe that its true: planning, agendas, linear progressions, those are what lead to the mystery. But that simply is false. The mystery, the divinity, is found at our core not in our planner. The people around me love me, I don't ever mean to discount that, I am extremely extremely lucky to have the web of support that I do. I live in a spider's Taj Mahal. But sometimes I wonder how much we have forgotten about the mystery? All of us, we discount the divinity within us. Following our gut usually doesn't make sense. Our instincts don't always save money, and our 'I just have a feeling' certainly isn't concerned with our resume. It seems that that little voice is not in line with this world---because it isn't. That voice is of another world, calling us into something greater than ourselves and isn't that the idea after all?

Some days it is difficult to reconcile our voice with our logic. Luckily, they are not always in contradiction, but when they are prioritizing is necessary. I am not suggesting that we should all feed every whim and fancy; in fact I would suggest actually the opposite. I think we need to learn to listen to our voice, to listen close enough to differentiate the divine from the mundane. I am not sure if the universe is calling us to eat ice cream every evening, but it is calling us to something; listen for that. Because when we do, maybe "our lives become beautiful with mystery again."

things from the stove top:

My boyfriend made coffee on the stove top this morning in this device: And he used these to concoct beer in a barrel in his living room:
All of a sudden I am feeling like playing 'Oregon Trail,' and I like it.

In the theme of nest building:

When I do settle I would like to include this piece in my home:

White Hickory Branch Chandelier found at Collier West in Columbus.
I don't know if I have ever seen anything at this store that I don't love.


In my new nest, I would love to create in the kitchen while wearing: The Braid of Braid Necklace by Bario Neal.

Being Present in Ohio.

Recently I have felt like a bird without a nest. This past year has been transitory for me; a state that I have never mastered. I have been back and forth between my parent's home, my family cabin, my boyfriend's apartment, and my sublet-ed bedroom. I feel like I am living out of a backpack and a really roomy purse. Its not the travel toiletry bag that I mind so much, its more the underlying uncertainty. Where will I be next month? What do I want to be doing? Is what I'm doing now what I was made for? Am I wasting my time?

My boyfriend and I have been talking recently about settling; an inevitable theme of 20-something relationships I fear. What is the 5 year outlook? Is this realistic? He has reminded me of a self-destructive habit I have developed. I think that often I decide in my mind that I am going somewhere else, moving on, breaking free, and thus don't allow myself to take advantage of where I am. I have known this about myself for a few years; but I never expected it to happen in my childhood home, Columbus. But as my boyfriend has pointed out, with so much focus on the future; on my travels, on my anticipated move, I have completely neglected the music, art, movies, and happy hours all around me. I throw in the towel and hold out to be happy once I've made it "there," wherever that is.

I havn't taken time to create a space for myself here, now, where I am. Oh to be present, I think this might be a lifelong theme.

two places that i have always loved:

head in the grass, sun on my cheeks, music in the air:

feet flopping, heart jumping, the back of my brothers head for the seventeenth summer: