We Laughed Until We Cried

There's a new country song out by that name. Whenever I hear it, I think "I know something about that."

It was today, listening to Danya sing "If I Had a Million Dollars" in his funny soprano.

It was yesterday, when we all crowded round Danya's computer for afternoon break to watch "Star Wars According to a Three-Year-Old"

It was last month, and the three months before that, and the year before that, of grim determination mixed with tears mixed with exhaustion mixed with laughter, laughter, laughter. I thank Mama for it; it was she who taught us "When I have to laugh or cry, I prefer to laugh."

What centuries I have lived through in the last two and a half years! What lives I have glimpsed! What words I have read! And what brilliant, selfless, godly people I have worked beside, laughed and cried and ached and worshipped with, in that time! Beside them, I am nothing---I lack all wisdom and humility.

Recently I lifted up my head and all suddenly thought, "The Redesign project will be over in another year and a half." I realized that I do not want it to end so soon.

Lately I have been discouraged. For a month past I have fought the feeling that all my efforts are no use and that I can only fail, because I really know so little about how to do what I am trying to do. But thanks be to God, He has been reminding me of the joy that I have had in this work, and that, after all, it wasn't my choice. It was His. If this is how He wants to use me, who am I to say "What are you doing?"

Farewell, weariness. I don't know you. Welcome, joy!---a thousand times welcome back to my heart! I have missed you, sky-lark of my soul. What Father's love do you bring me? What passionate adoration have you come to kindle in me? What juice of the fruits of the Tree of Life have you brought in the diamond bottle hanging from your neck?

Ah, beloved reader, I was never happy til I knew what love was, and I am never unhappy til I forget it. But though I fall into nightmares time and time again, always He wakens me with singing, and I recognize His greeting again. Do you know what that greeting is? It is beauty, my dear, and the heart of it is truth, and the effect of it is goodness, and the radiance of it is what I breathe to myself when I say "joy!"

April! Happy month! Be all the more silver-golden, green lady, for my joy. Teach the trees to dance the gladness of my heart, and I'll give thee thanks for it---for my heart must speak by any and all means. Beautiful world, I have a secret. Can you guess?

He loves me.

And that being so, I live between laughter and tears of joy.

Ship of Dreams

I used to spend hours writing stories. Now I spend days, weeks, and months, writing about stories (and poems and plays). I'm not complaining---I love my job, and I believe that if I ever have the opportunity to write imaginative literature, what I have learned will give me more resources than many writers ever have.

But for now, there isn't much time for the imagination. Instead I try to make time for a few minutes outside each day at the mailbox, and an hour at the gym, and a date with my sisters. The three brothers who were my favorite playmates now have households of their own; one sister is in college; the baby of our family enters college (God willing) this fall. I want every moment I can have with them, because the moments are increasingly few. Time to dream and write "my stuff" is, by comparison, of little importance.

Ah, but April is an enchanted month, most difficult to ignore. On nights like this one, with the memory of late afternoon sun still on my skin (I spent a few hours doing my research outside---a rare but wonderful treat), I remember how often I used to catch hold of a silver rope and swing aboard my ship of dreams. Then there was no harbor-sitting! Then it was "Hoist sail!" and "Yonder the horizon, my good ship! Bring me that sun!"

Recently I took out my stories and looked them over. Most of the best ones were begun just after I was saved, in my mid-teens. There is a story called Outremer, about the Crusades. What a project I mean to make of that, someday! I have another, Mountains of Spice, about culture clash, Christianity, and roleplaying fantasy games. One of my favorites is Lebannen. It is the story of a girl who dances with ogres and sincerely believes that she is her own goddess.

There are others. The House in Sorrow Glen is about twelve generations of cursed lovers, and about the nature of true and false love. Kallipolis, named for Plato's Republic, is about an ideal society that isn't really ideal. Luceaferul deals with the matter of a Romanian poem by the same name, about a star who falls in love with a human princess, except that he cannot love, because he has no heart. That story is about learning to trust God.

We Six, the first of a projected series on our family, chronicles the two most idyllic years of my childhood, which were spent in a hundred-year-old farmhouse overlooking the Shenendoah Valley. The Logical Conclusion, a scribble really, is about euthanasia and other problems of our modern society.

And then of course there is Prodesse and Delecta, the most sweeping project I have ever planned for myself, which addresses nothing less than everything human and divine, in the form of an allegorical story about a boy who cares only for the mind and soul, and a girl who loves nothing but the pleasures of heart and body---at first.

Sometimes I take these out, and look them over. While putting them away, I smile a little. "Not yet," I say to myself. If even a third of them were ever fully realized as I imagine they could be, then truly Someone would have given me the sun, and my ship might sit in harbor... except that, of course, it wouldn't. For I shall always be dreaming.

But there are dreams and dreams, my dear. Some dreams are fretful, complaining, full of "if only" and "I wish." That sort of dream can kill your soul. Yet there is also the dream that says "and when" instead of "if only"; it says "I know" or "I expect" instead of "I wish." Those dreams put heart back into you, and it is those that I love best to chase in my yacht, the Daydream.

So, if I never write a single one of those books, or even achieve my present task of building a solid literary studies program, I shall only have lost the sun that I like to chase sometimes. A sun, after all---what is that? Are there not a million others to catch, as when one hunts in a forest that is well stocked with deer? I earnestly seek suns, because they are good to have, but I know and expect to leave their forests of the night, in which they glide and twinkle, and at last turn my prow homeward towards an endless day---but a day unlit by suns.

Where sky and water meet, and where the waves grow sweet... the utter east. Doubt not to find there all you seek. For there, gentle reader, is the "I know," the proper end of all my dreams. There are white shores, and---I believe---green valleys. There is uncreated Light.

Someday my ship of dreams will be done indeed with harbor-sitting. But don't bring me the horizon. Don't bring me a sun.

Bring me home.

The Office -- Season 7: "Dumber than a Box of Hair"

“Are you a careful bouquet or a wild cluster?” – David to Christy, after reading the latest quote list
“It really depends on the day.” – Christy

“I think you’re a careful bouquet” – Dana on IM to Christy, after seeing the latest batch of quotes.
“Really? I think you’re one too. Let’s get all wild clustery, just to break things up.” – Christy, referencing the “wild cluster” that is the opposite of the “careful bouquet.”
“Yes, let's! I'm breaking out wildly into writing assignments at the moment.” – Dana

“Mom, are you a careful bouquet or a wild cluster?” – Christy
“Neither; I defy analogistic definitions.” – Mom
“I know what I am.” – David
“David, don’t tempt me.” – Mom

“Everybody around here is asking whether everybody else is a careful bouquet or a wild cluster. Care to comment on your own state?” – Christy to Peter, on IM
“I am most likely a leaf of skunk cabbage, which is generally unwanted except occasionally to play an elaborate prank on the world.” – Peter

Lauren, reading a Church History book, spontaneously exclaims: “It’s just so sad! Every single stinking person in this book dies!”

“Okay, I’m going to be dating myself here, but…” – Mom
“Um… ‘dating yourself?’” – Lauren
::bursts of laughter::
“No, not like that! I mean, I’m showing how old I am.” – Mom
“Oh!” – Lauren

"I'm so close to being proud of myself...and yet so far" - Juli, while doing HTML programming

“Oh look at me and my bad self closing my quotation marks…” – Juli

“I’m going to name one of my children, ‘Marjorie’s chocolate chip cookies’” – David, speaking in appreciation of his sister’s baking skills
“I don’t think your child will appreciate that…. Oh, they’re still down here!” – Amy on David’s comment (and Marjorie’s cookies).

“Where is he?” – David, experiencing networking problems and looking for Dad
“He went to see his [new] fish, like a proud father.” – Marjorie
“He needs to be the proud father of the network” – David

“A stick figure has become one of my role models!” – David

“I’m wondering where my script is…” – Lauren
“That’s better than wondering where your gods are” – Christy, referencing Laban
“That’s what Schliermacher is asking” – Brittainy, editing curriculum

“That’s dumber than a box of hair.” – Mom
“Which isn’t dumb to a bird that wants to build a nest.” – Lauren

“He [my husband] just doesn’t get how much fun it is to obsess over curriculum. It so beats housework!” – From a mom on our forum

“Have you met Yvonne? Beautiful? Yea high? Blonde? Likes profit?” – Juli to Christy

Tolkien and the Splintered Heart

I have few splinterings of heart. Most splinters in my life involve the soul (sin vs. righteousness) or the mind (too many to name here). But my heart, usually, is unified. Where I love, I love completely, and likewise for hate, and likewise for aversion, disgust, admiration, etc.

There are two matters, however, concerning which my heart is split right down the middle. One is Spanish, and we won't go there in this post (it all has to do with one wonderful and one traumatic childhood experience, which between them have left me simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the language). The other is Tolkien.

My relationship with Tolkien began late, which is perhaps part of the problem. My brothers, of course, being my father's sons, had all read the entire tetralogy and the Silmarillion by the time they were each thirteen or fourteen. I, being averse to reading things "just because all Christian kids are supposed to love them," and deeming them moreover "boys' books," and finally being quite content with Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, didn't pick up Tolkien until I was sixteen.

At which point, of course, I promptly fell in love with them. How could I not? I devoured the tetralogy in two or three weeks of every-spare-minute reading, though I could never quite bring myself to read the Silmarillion. I distinctly recall sitting on the family staircase one day, crying over the end of The Return of the King. I was completely hooked. Tolkien had my whole heart. Later, when I was eighteen, I even learned the Tengwar script that my brothers had long since mastered (Nate also knows dwarvish) and modified it for my own purpose. I can still write fluently in that alphabet, given an hour or two of practice to get back in shape.

But then I went to COLLEGE. Doom. The problem was, you see, that everybody around me revered Tolkien. They didn't love him; they practically worshiped him, and it didn't help at all that the movies were coming out at the time. To me, all this was a huge turn-off. So for three or four years I turned an increasingly deaf ear to the Tolkien rhapsodies, discussions, and arguments, discovering at the same time that Tolkien's characters are... well, at the time I called them one-dimensional, though I have since learned to revise that opinion in light of the right and conventional and necessary nature of epic heroes. But at the time they seemed one-dimensional; I branded them "one-dimensional" in my mind; and, believing that I had found a reason to dislike Tolkien, I put him from my admiration.

Unfortunately, in matters such as these (though not in others), I find it difficult to completely disengage my affections once they have been truly won. Also, after more than two years of studying and writing about world literature, I am now in a much better position to understand Tolkien's goals, the magnificence of his achievement, and the proper way to understand his characters (that is, from an epic perspective). My heart has been wistful about Tolkien for some time, sternly though I have admonished it to forget, and now I find all at once that I have no good reasons any more to turn away from loving him. No college mates now din his wonders into my ears; I am better trained and therefore more alive than ever to those same wonders; and, truth have it, I never did fully disentangle him from my affections.

BUT, I have in the interim acquired a solid four-years habit, a mental wall between myself and the tetralogy, which splinters my heart right down the middle. And thus I don't know whether the half that belongs to Tolkien will ever be able to reunite with the half that has turned from him...

April!

Most magnificent, most lovely April! Hail, O Lady of green silk and sharp onion scent; hail Queen of growing things; we welcome back your rule!