Author: Bethany

23Sep

City Mouse

The sun is warm and expansive today after a week of dishrag rain, and swallows are flirting in the treetop just outside the window. My bedroom looks down over an enormous park where cylists are riding in ellipses, the local soccer team is running drills, and circus tents swoop turquoise and white like some exotic taffy. Dan’s office is just on the other side of a second park; I can see the bar where he goes for mid-day espressos in tiny glass cups. On the opposite hilltop, our city’s ancient epicenter sprawls like a cat, the afternoon reflecting off its walls in shades of terra cotta and wheat. The view is breathtaking.

And the wonderful impossibility of this September is that I am finally starting to feel connected to this place. It’s due to a combination of factors, not the least of which is our new house. We moved from an impersonal apartment building in the suburbs to a three-family home in a vibrant little neighborhood, and the inclusive nature of community is working its magic on me. I love chatting with our downstairs neighbors as they cook supper, bumping into friends while walking Natalie to school, getting to know the Napoletan boyfriend and girlfriend who own the pizzeria down the street, buying vegetables and fresh flowers at the open market every Wednesday morning.

Not that community doesn’t come with its annoying moments. For instance, the woman at the pharmacy who schedules our medical appointments is insatiably curious about the nature of our ailments and the unfamiliar details on our personal documents, and discusses them loudly enough that the deaf great-grandfather in the foot care section can follow along. And then there is our next-door neighbor, a friend’s “crazy great aunt” (his words) who likes to ambush the girls and I just as we step inside our front gate and talk for fifteen increasingly uncomfortable minutes about her childraising theories. Both ladies have good intentions, I know, but… well, encounters with them stretch the limits of my politeness. (Probably a good thing to have stretched, in the long run.)

Crazy great aunts aside, I really do love feeling like a legitimate part of society. Beyond finding my neighborhood niche, I’m also doing my best to expand along with our home front. I finally started teaching English to some friends (once the initial paralyzing nervousness wears off, I really do love it), and we’ve been having company over so often that my head is spinning. My heart is full though. We’ve spent a very long year and a half with closed doors, and it’s liberating to open them wide, to invite people to be part of our lives again.

Of course, the country mouse in me wants to scamper back to my cricket noises and single-person hovel. Socializing comes about as naturally to me as tanning and geography; as long as I had access to a library and broadband, I would happily live out the rest of my days as a hermit. But something deep inside me knows it would wither without relationships, so I’m finding the courage to be social—a bit more every day—and as reward? The first delicious taste of belonging.

Find the courage - September 2009

15Sep

A Signature Faith

Faith and I have hit a rough patch lately. It’s only the five zillionth time or so that I’ve found myself alternately doubting God and storming against him; my inner teenager is determined to become a proper heathen, I think. In these times when my thoughts about religion smolder and char, the Bible reacts like gasoline, every word going up in an angry blaze. (I’m a joy to have at church, can you tell?) And anyway, I’ve never bought into Sola Scriptura for the same reason that I don’t believe Fox News when it claims to be the only unbiased channel—conflict of interest and all. I just cannot bring myself to blindly trust a source alleging to be the only truth.

So I sift through experience and impressions, listen to my instincts, taste the air for clues. I don’t have God’s character figured out, but I have to trust at least this: that he left his imprint on creation, that some remote corner of me bears his signature. And when I tune out theology altogether, I can almost start to make it out.

The first belief I find inked onto my heart is heaven. Doctrinally, the subject has always made me feel homesick and even miserable—hard golden streets and individual mansions in the sky for God’s groupies. No, no, no, my soul whispers. You were made for trees, whole unscarred forests of trees, and waterfalls and snowcapped mountains at sunrise. You were made to climb inside of symphonies and breathe art. And the puzzle pieces lock together in my mind: the moments I find myself on the cusp of pure creative energy… the healing, cleansing effects of beauty… this drive for more, always more out of life… the profound sensation that this world is broken… These compel me more than decades of sermons could that we were meant for eternity.

The other thing I can’t help believing, no matter how I feel about God, is Jesus. Maybe this makes no sense considering the Bible and I aren’t on speaking terms, but everything he said and did resonates so strongly with me and has so little to do odious churchy representations of him that I feel I must have always known him. I believe in him, not because I was told to (which only makes me want to go vandalize something), but because he wasn’t repulsed by doubt or greed or prostitution or shame or immaturity or nakedness or insanity. Because his commitment to world peace and soul-honesty would have offended many of the uppity religious personas today who profess to follow him. Because he drew people’s perspectives away from materialism and perfectionism toward extravagant generosity and fierce acceptance. Because he was radically different from anyone’s expectations and had love strong enough to forgive the people who butchered him.

The idea of heaven is counterintuitive to our five senses, and a kick-ass Jesus is counterintuitive to our religious traditions, and somehow, this helps convince me that they are true. And if these two things are the shape of God’s signature, then this helps convince me that faith is worth every minute of struggle.

12Sep

Soaring

“It’s that time of year,
Leave all our hopelessnesses aside,
If just for a little while;
Tears stop right here.”
~ Imogen Heap

Grandma fulfilling her life-long dream

My grandma passed away this morning in her sleep, just a few months shy of her 90th birthday. I nodded and mm hmmed matter-of-factly during the phone call like I had been expecting it, but in reality, I just didn’t know how else to react. I feel oddly disconnected here, as if grief politely stays on its own continent.

My memories of her flit in and out like animated Polaroids, grainy and mauve-tinted. We weren’t particularly close for many years—Granddad was the one with the root beer floats and sense of adventure while Grandma hovered nearby with a feather duster —but I knew she loved me. Beyond loving me, she approved of me in her gentle, pale pink way. My soul could flow free-form around her, a rare and deeply precious gift to my girlhood.

She gave me the best Christmas gift a ten-year-old girl could fathom: three colors of pastel eye shadow, a dark teal eyeliner, and the first glimmer of hope that my heart was worthy of a little glamor. She let me raid her closet and dress up as the socialite in my daydreams. She let me grow up at my own pace and didn’t question when I poured myself a coffee at age 15; she simply poured herself a matching mug and sat down with me to chat. She trusted me with family taboos and hurts, she asked me when she needed help, and she always cared. She cried the last time she hugged me goodbye.

Her soul was a bird, I think—fragile-boned and forever swooping between the vast weight of our atmosphere and heaven. As delicate as my grandma was, all vintage crystal and mist inside her skin, life couldn’t break her. Not that it didn’t try, but hardships were no match for that determined, devoted heart. In a childhood journal, I once wrote that I would be devastated if she died. Then, it was true. But now… I just want to cheer her on; gravity has lost its grip on my precious grandma, and she can finally soar.

9Sep

Optimism at its Stabbiest

Sometime last week, I tripped into a pothole—a deceptively deep one, maybe a rabbit hole in disguise—and it’s still too murky to see which direction is out. I’ve spent nearly every afternoon opening a blank document on my computer, staring at it, closing it, opening it again, cranking up Muse on my headphones, and thinking stabby thoughts. I’m hoping this is a sign of impending genius rather than just a depressingly generic slump. The one positive aspect of my creative mojo being replaced by a violent slug is that I can finally recognize this as temporary.

There was a day earlier this year so mindwrenchingly awful that I still can’t bring myself to write about it. It was the culmination of a jagged-edged winter colored with a sense of abandoment so vivid I couldn’t see anything else, and I lost my capacity to understand temporary. That was the line across which dying seemed less painful than living. Once deep became bottomless… well, it was hard to see the point in treading anymore.

So right now, despite an afternoon [unsuccessfully] stalking my creative energy with a garlic press and thinking in ferocious guitar riffs, I know it’s only a phase. This is what we here in Brain of Bethany call an accomplishment a miracle.

2Sep

When Life Hands You Sorrento Lemons…

I promised you a post about limoncello, oh, four months ago? And while I fully intended to write it the next day, my brain had other plans—not writing it, for example. My brain has since repented and would like to extend its sincerest apologies for making you wait so long. Without further ado, I give you…

How to make limoncello, crema di limoncello, and multiple weeks’ worth of messes in 11 easy steps!

~~~

Act I

Step 1: Make an impromptu getaway to the Amalfi Coast just when their luscious football-sized lemons are in season. Buy sixteen. Take immature pictures with them and try very hard not to think about whose college fund you just spent on a bag of fruit.

Size comparison with a banana

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31Aug

Colors Blend

“I hold everything that is—
sand, time, the tree of the rain,

everything is alive so that I can be alive:

without moving I can see it all…”
~ Pablo Neruda

I imagine myself creating collages from wisps of words and these late-summer colors that will flutter away too soon.

I imagine myself writing at the desk in my corner nook with the autumn-tinted curtains and the window overlooking the fig tree, maybe wearing glasses, certainly with a mug of something inspiring.

I imagine myself flowing with the energy that produces firm abdominals and freshly baked cinnamon rolls, open eyes before the first alarm and no snoozing.

I imagine myself hanging my personality on the line and letting the breeze smooth away the wrinkles.

I imagine myself dissolving the judgment I feel (or conjure) at church in a jar of full-strength understanding until the colors blend together and I realize nothing is going to explode.

I imagine myself floating away on a Nickel Creek song into the dragonfly blue with a cloud bank pillow and the sun playing grace notes on my eyelids.

I imagine myself drinking in the love around me with thirsty pores and watching the too-tired, upset-stomach, ­­­bad-mother days blossom into life more abundant.

Heather-scented smiles

29Aug

Libidinous Angels

Growing up, I was never particularly fond of my freckles, by which I mean I hated them with the fire of a thousand suns. On the best days, I looked like a baby, and on the worst—for instance, after a morning of the Texas sun spreading rash-like across my skin—I looked like a lobster with fleas. Of this I was sure. “How cute!” middle-aged women at church would croon. “Angel kisses!” Yeah, an assault by the heavenly hosts, I would think. Probably the same angels that watch me pee. (Religious dysfunction, anyone?)

I stopped caring so much in high school, probably about the time I delved into makeup and black underwear and figured out that I was not entirely repulsive to the opposite gender. I started seeing my face rather than a splatter of unfortunate pigmentation in the mirror. Even now, living in a country of olive-skinned goddesses, I’m content to adorn my angel kisses in SPF 700 and look like my pale luminous self.

That being said, I didn’t realize how much tension would unwind in my heart when we entered the United Kingdom the first week of our vacation. All around us were quilt-blocked pastures dotted with sheep, paths meandering around a gentle sea, and freckles. Nearly everyone at our campground had a sprinkling of soft brown flecks, which launched my self-esteem into a musical number with dancing candlesticks and a chorus of syncopated bluebirds. I felt like I belonged. Even more, I finally saw what those middle-aged women had been crooning about. Because libidinous angels or not, freckles are kind of cute. Possibly even on me.

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