Summer Reading List

For me summer has always meant books upon books. When I was young, my mom and I used to bring our red, radio flyer wagon to the library and fill it up with books. It always felt so magical to me; a place full of books where I could get as many as I wanted for free and a season that felt like an endless amount of time to read them all. Most summers my family would travel to Lake Tahoe and to the Sierra Nevadas to go backpacking or camping, this is where the majority of my summer reading was done. Either on the dock by the beautiful and big Lake Tahoe, or in the tent in some amazing mountains filled with peaks and meadows. Summer has always been for books and mountains, and even though now I have the freedom to read all year long (perks of graduating from college!), the summer is still the most inspiring time to delve into the pages of a book. Here is a list on what I plan on reading this summer:

Fiction

(Left) Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. This is my favorite book of all time. I read this book every summer and it always changes me. Summer is not summer without Jem, Scout, Boo Radley, and Atticus. (Right) Paula Coelho's The Alchemist. I am a little late on reading this book, I believe it was very popular in the 90's. I am currently reading this right now and it is helping me find direction during a season of having no clue what my "Personal Legend" is. 

 (Left) Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This has been on my list for a while and I hope to finally get around to reading it this summer (Right) Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being. My mom recommended this book to me. It is a story of two women connected from Japan and the San Juan Islands here in Washington. I am always a sucker for books set in the Pacific Northwest. 

 (Left) Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Once again, I am a sucker for books set in the Pacific Northwest, specifically Seattle. (Right) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. I just finished this book. It is about a old man who walks across England, it was so beautiful!

 (Left) Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins. I don't know much about this book except that everyone seems to love it. So I guess I better read it. (Right) Anita Diamant's The Red Tent. A fictional take on the life of women during biblical times. I have always been curious what it must have been like to be "unclean" for 12 weeks out of the year, and what the red tent was really like.

Non-Fiction

(Left) Alys Fowler's Garden Anywhere. I picked up this book from the library last week and I am learning all about container gardening, how to make your own compost, and thrifty foraging. We plan on starting our own little garden this summer. (Right) Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. Ah! A book on how to write from one of my favorite writers! 

 (Left) Poems by Wendell Berry. I have never read Wendell Berry before but I have heard wonderful things. I need more poetry in my life. (Right) Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy. I read this book about three years ago and it taught me so much about love, loss, and Christ. I first read this book when Mike and I started dating and it was so beautiful. Please ditch the cheesy dating books and read this. I will never forget the quote "Love is like a glass of water in the middle of the night." I want to reread this one before our wedding this summer. 

 (Left) Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. I am currently trying to understand what art means to me in my life. I have always felt that I had some sort of "artist" heart in me, but not in any sort of traditional way. I guess I believe life is a blank canvas and how we live is our art. Plus Madeleine L'Engle knows her stuff. (Right) Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God. I read her book Still two summer ago and it shaped my faith in many ways. I am excited to read more of her work. 

Well there you go, I better get to reading!

Weekend Away

This past week was an unpredictable and heartbreaking one. I lost one of my jobs (which was a bittersweet situation) and then there was the horrible tragedy that happened at Mike and I's alma mater, SPU. I won't say much on the subject because right now words are failing me. Perhaps another time I will write about it, but for now the event is a little too fresh. Mike and I had been planning to visit friends in Port Townsend, WA and it was perfect timing; the trip was so refreshing and rejuvenating. 

 We stopped at an awesome nursery on the way and got some seedlings for our future garden!

Downtown Port Townsend. This place is amazing!

 Mike and his friend Sam. They are a pair of goons, in the best way possible. 

 They took us to what they called "The Ends of the Earth"

 We climbed down the cliff side on a rope and walked along the beach hunting for sea glass

 Capturing light during golden hour

 Sam and Aubrey live in the most amazing little spot. They rent a portion of the house on the right and it is surrounded by a community garden and an amazing yurt. Their landlords are gracious enough to share the yurt with Sam and Aubrey.

 The moment I walked into their yard I was in heaven

 Our little home for the weekend. Mike and I now have dreams of building one of our own. 

Exploring Fort Warden State Park.

I was such a lovely weekend full of exploring, friends, laughter, good food, games, and relaxation. Mike and I are going to keep Port Townsend on our list of places we could live in the future. 

Around this house

Living in this little house has been such a joy. I have been spending a lot of time at home because my employment is pretty minimum right now (not ideal, but enjoying it while I can). My favorite spot is the dining room table, probably because it is one of the only "finished" rooms in the place. My morning routine on days I don't work has been wake up, make oatmeal and coffee, and then read and stare out the window for as long as possible; it's kind of great. The house still needs some key things, but I am content with what have and learning to make due. We are looking forward to making garden boxes, getting a couch, thrifting a few more chairs, building a bench and a desk, and purchasing a few rugs. 

Enjoying our couchless living room

I loved watching the rhododendron tree bloom, but I am not looking forward to picking up all the flowers off the ground.

The cottage was filled for the first time with friends to put our new grill to the test. We had pulled pork, grilled corn, watermelon, and cobbler. It was fantastic. 

I started working on the gallery wall. Our staircase is amazing and I am excited to add to this space as time goes on.

I've been devouring fresh berries and I finally put my goodwill pot to good use

Finds from our neighborhood's little free library 

I've been having way too much fun at the thrift store lately.  

Big Wide Streets

Its been over two months since I last updated this lovely little space on the interwebs. I have no apologies, no regrets, and feel no obligation to explain why, yet I desire to create a space where I have the freedom to do so. The past two months have been filled with big decisions, piles of boxes, visitors, family gatherings, birthdays, and acts of bravery.

With all that being said, I am back in Seattle now. I made the brave decision to quit. To quit a degree that I was months away from finishing. I finally started listening to my sleepless self, up at 3am baring all honesty "I don't want to do this, I don't think I ever did." I didn't pull up my boot straps and finish, I gave up and I quit. And it was so freeing. I was unhappy, and I chose to do the thing that would make me happy. I chose this degree out of fear, stuck with it out of fear, and tried to be as successful as possible out of fear. All the while I groaned and complained and had panic attacks and felt out of place. I was afraid of disappointing people but I soon learned that these people didn't exist and even if they did it didn't matter anymore. In the end I got a degree, but a simple one, that at one time wouldn't have met the high standards I set for myself.

You see, for 5 years I went through this lovely little thing called college. College was always an expectation for me, it was without question that I go and I truly wanted to be there and make something of myself. I have always been a good student and as much as I like to think I am a carefree person, I stressed out about getting a 4.0 throughout my entire education. I wanted to be educated and intelligent. I wanted to be compassionate and use my education to serve. All good things, all things I am grateful for. 

Where I went wrong was in the pressure and in the hustle. College was a messy place of uncertainty amidst so much pressure to be certain. I have been in school and working my ass off since 2009. Spring breaks were work, Christmas breaks were work, Summer breaks were for work and more practicum hours. "No breaks," I said, "I am not the girl who takes breaks from school." My education became this quest for a piece of paper that would eventually give me all the things I wanted in life. In the midst of all of this; of major changes, and transferring, and taking a ridiculous amount of units to get done on time, I got lost. I became miserable and impatient and angry. I wasn't happy in school, I didn't want to be studying what I was studying but I was good at it so what did it matter? I would be wasting my gifts right? But I hated what I was doing, I hated playing guitar, I hated singing in front of people, and most of all I hated the pressure. It was 4 years of wanting to be anywhere but school. I never took a stand and I never quit, until now.

I have quit, I have given up, and it was the best and bravest thing I have ever done. I was one credit short (well in this situation 1 credit meant 800 hours of an internship), and it was still the best decision I ever made. 

What led me to this decision? It was a culmination of many things, some tiny, some not so tiny. It was the restless nights, the constant anxiety, the teeth grinding, the accelerated heart rates, the impatience, my feelings of discontentment. It was the need to find unhealthy control in my life because I felt as if school ruled over me. I took whatever I could find to control and I abused it. I have been hurtful to people I love and hurtful to myself. I have manipulated myself and my relationships to fit a mold that I didn't even want, but I felt that I had to have.

But the freedom and the joy and the wonder of this situation is that I didn't have to finish, I made a choice to let go and say no.

I would much rather have this be a time where I chose to respect and love myself than hold out for a piece of paper that I didn't even want in the first place and receive credentials that I planned on not even using.

Now I sit here in a little cottage in the middle of the city, content with the uncertainty that lies ahead. This is a season of waiting, waiting on job interviews, waiting on getting married, waiting on hearing God's voice for my future. But I am enjoying it all. I am enjoying the walks through my new neighborhood; on its big,wide streets where it seems that trees and gardens fill every empty crevice. I am enjoying quiet mornings on the back porch; drinking my coffee slowly and soaking in words from beautiful books. I am feeling lighter than I have in years, perhaps lighter than ever. So here's to new beginnings and the unknown that lies ahead.  

Words: If my internship could talk 2/6

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28 Days

Every year I thank God for the shortness of February; its container of 28 days always breezes by and makes me utter "Is it March already?" "Are we really changing our clocks in a week?" "Is spring really only 21 days away?" I tend to hold my breath and close my eyes through February and early March, fixating on how every second lived is just one second closer to spring; I keep my head down until I know that when I look up I will see blossoms. This technique is not one that I would suggest and I am slowly trying to change and lift my eyes from the ground during this season, finding gratitude amidst great anticipation. Here are some snippets of life and gratitude from the past 28 days.

Sun filled offices. Snowy train rides. Fresh clementines. King Street Station. Breakfast at the best place on the planet. Bitter cold hikes before the snow hit. Many days spent in Seattle due to my car breaking down, but at least that meant many days with my man. Back to work. Back to working out. Choco-coconut oatmeal and a down comforter. Iced coffee and a cookie on an unseasonably warm and sunny February afternoon.

Hurricanes and Other Various Forms of Human Madness

In 6 months, I will walking down the aisle. I will become a wife to a wonderful man. Its all beautiful, it truly is. Yet, I find myself crying at night, and not tears of happiness, but tears of fear. I fear that I am not strong enough to give him the love he deserves, that I am not organized enough, not thin enough, not this and not that enough. I feel as if I haven't met the criteria of being a wife, and that if I don't, my marriage will fail. 

I know women who are strong, who are selfless, who are beautiful, who are organized, who are sane, who look great in bikinis, and who are so kind and selfless it's nauseating. These are the women that should be getting married. Not me. Not this “frizzy haired, can’t seem to keep her car clean, emotional mess" of a person. I am not wife material. I hate sewing, I hate DIY projects, I hate beauty products, and I refuse to wax hair off my body in places that seem absolutely ridiculous. I am strong-willed, feisty, selfish, and can be the biggest brat at times. I am insecure, body conscious, and really bad at forgiving.  I don’t pray and meditate on scripture everyday, I haven’t read a single book on marriage, and I have never done a Joyce Meyer bible study. I am currently making negative four dollars an hour and I have no clue what my future career will look like. I am unbalanced and confused and nowhere close to meeting my perceived criteria of being a wife. 

I am so far from perfection. I am so broken and messy and pretty much a disaster. 

But, I met a man two years ago in the middle of a hurricane, a season that was strong, bitter, and destructive. Since then the hurricane has passed, but he held on through the entire storm, even when I almost pulled his limbs off and let the floods run from our eyes until we were drowning. You see, he was in a hurricane as well, so we understood the feeling of ripping each other’s arms off and through it all we found the sweet relief of grace. The sweet relief of open arms despite one another’s imperfection and wrongdoings, we found Grace among the countless amounts of broken promises and hurtful words. The foundation of our relationship was built on Grace and perhaps that is why I am so far from perfection. This man, whom I love so deeply that it hurts, didn’t fall in love with perfection, but with grace. We fell in love while we falling down and it grew deeper every time we got back up again. We learned to love each other in the messiest parts of ourselves.

He fell in love with my inability to stay calm while he drives and with my tendency to make a mess of his room every time I come over. He has fallen in love with my crabbiness, with my tears, and with my inability to listen to anything he has to say when we are watching a movie.  And I too have fallen in love with his madness, with his impatience, with the way he would rather have plain peanut butter cookies than ones with chocolate chips. I have fallen in love with the way he will stop mid sentence to point out a car on the freeway and with his inability to remember a lot of things.

The thing is, I don’t need to be perfect before I get married. I don't need to be perfect, ever. And neither do you. In fact I would highly encourage imperfection before your wedding, because in reality, you will have plenty of imperfection for the rest of your life. As marriage reflects Christ love for us, remember that while we were imperfect little hurricanes, Christ loved us fully and gave up his life for us. That is my hope for us, that on our wedding day we will vow to love one another despite being unorganized and not waxing our awkward body hair; that we will encourage one another despite our crazy driving and crabbiness; and that we will hold one another despite the onset of hurricanes and other various forms of human madness; that the Love we know will weave us together and be our fountain of Grace, never running dry and always flowing over.