Rooted to Rise

Maybe it’s because I moved a lot as a kid–I’m talking five cities in my first decade. Maybe it’s because I’m an only child, and I’ve learned to expect constant entertainment. Maybe expiring quickly is just a character flaw: I seek serendipity over stability, whimsy over work, daydreams over doldrums.

But to say I fit the millennial stereotype of always going, never staying wouldn’t do justice to my DNA–I’m a master of zipping through zip codes. So it probably won’t surprise you that after ten years in Minneapolis, a city I love (with one tiny hiccup of a detour in Texas), I up and left. Two months ago, my family and I made a cross-country move for my dream job in a city that just happens to be somehow warmer and cheaper than Minnesota. But let’s not talk about why I left or where I went. I want to talk about staying, because that’s where the real story is.

People like me are good at leaving; the “let’s get up and go while we can/you only live once/Minneapolis will still be here when I get back” comes a little too easily. The the real risk is in the staying. So, in varying degrees, I had been plotting this move for years. First, it was Seattle, where my in-laws moved after I got married. Next, it was San Francisco and Austin, where our good friends and good coffee lived. I even considered a jaunt over to small-town Wisconsin, where I grew up, with student-loan payoff as an excuse. Really, whatever city looked good on Instagram that day was the next destination.

My unstable relationship to place is no surprise to me, since historically, the same has been true of my human relationships. But through the confines of marriage and mothering, I’ve learned a few things about staying, and more than that, about loving. Even when it takes work.

As a new mom, I haphazardly resigned to the slight possibility of postponing my whimsy in favor of offering my son a stable childhood (he’s lucky, right?). So we found a house on a street that felt like Narnia. We joined a church community that felt like home. We got to know the servers at our neighborhood restaurants. Little by little, year by year for almost three years, I grew some roots. I learned how to have a home.

Finally, I had let a city romance me, and like any love does, it messed up all my paradigms. What was once a launching pad for my future adventures became a home. Nights down the street at Tracy’s Saloon with a baby in one arm and a margarita in the other became my upgraded version of excitement. A quick jaunt to Northeast Minneapolis became a little escape when I needed a change of scenery. Baristas at Peace Coffee who knew my name and my order added an exciting sense of rhythm to my week. Familiar became my new normal, and I kind of loved it.

15390947801_a764a2bb13_oSo when I was offered a writing job across the country, I knew what I needed to do. I didn’t wrestle with the same doubts as I once did. I said yes to a life change that would affect me and my family profoundly. Because moving wasn’t about fixing my life anymore. It wasn’t about my next round of entertainment. It wasn’t about running away. Because really, how could I have run away from home when I had never let myself have a home in the first place?

Minneapolis, I’ve left you, but you will forever be my home and my soft place to land. My backdrop for finding out, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, that the best kind of adventure isn’t uprooting, but staying put and learning to love something and let it love you. And most of all, you’ll always be the soil where I grew into the brightest, most beautiful version of myself–because without roots, what flower can blossom?

* * * * *

aw9EpOYxNtQ_5wD5vr8XWXzPa6Iro_jnVEzyv2-XODAAshley Abramson’s natural habitat is any combination of words and people. By day, she crafts content for a creative agency, and by night, she writes stories for blogs like Huffington Post and RELEVANT. She, her husband, and their toddler son make their home in Redding, CA, but you can find her online at ashleyabramson.com.

Flower photo by Halocastle in Creative Commons

 

In Defense of Wanderlust

Standing at the peak, the wind whipping my hair across my cheeks, I close my eyes and tilt my face to the sun. I stretch out my arms and turn up my palms and breathe. I open my eyes and try to absorb the techni-colored panorama of jagged, white mountain peaks, emerald pastures and shimmering diamond lakes reflecting back the exact impossible blue of the New Zealand sky and I think, Heaven looks like this.

I sit on the back of a scooter, hands gripping the waist of the twelve-year-old boy who is my driver as we zip down the jungle roads to a breakfast of green leaf pancakes with palm sugar. We dodge a rooster strutting cockily across the road and I can’t stop smiling from ear to ear because heaven feels like the wind blowing past my face as we bump over potholes, winding our way through the Balinese jungle.

In Canterbury Cathedral I kneel, dappled by colored light from the stained glass windows and thinking about Augustine and about Thomas Becket, crouching on these very stones, heart pounding as he waits, pleading with God to spare his life. I inhale and imagine Becket in heaven, smelling the aroma of this same sweet incense in the throne room of the Most High God.

On a mountain in Peru a whole village of Quechuan people, dressed in layers of wool in all the colors of the rainbow, sing a song about their beloved mountain, Huascaran. They sing in high-pitched nasal tones a song that sounds like some combination of zydeco and a tribal wail. The sound is harsh and grating to my ears and yet I can’t help thinking that this is what heaven sounds like – a great cacophony of sound.

In an old Communist youth camp beside the mighty Volga River hours north of Moscow, I tuck a room full of 9-year-old orphan boys into bed. I hug Dema’s freckly face to my chest and kiss the top of his head and think, The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. “Spokie-Nokie,” I say, and turn out the light.

* * * * *

Once, a few years into our marriage, my husband and I had an argument about travel. We had hoped to take a trip, but car problems and taxes and medical bills had strained our very limited resources. It seemed like a trip was out of the question and I was profoundly disappointed. At some point during the conversation Jonathan said to me, “I know you’re disappointed, but there will be other opportunities in the future. I don’t understand why you are so incredibly upset.”

And I said (as dramatically as it sounds), “Because this is the purpose of my life!”

And he said, “You can’t be serious. You basically just told me your life’s purpose is to take vacations.”

What I couldn’t articulate in that moment was that traveling is a deeply spiritual experience for me. Traveling moves me to worship in a way that nothing else does.

What does it mean that the mountains melt like wax in the presence of the Lord until you’ve stood at the top of a great and glorious mountain?

What does it mean that all of man’s accomplishments are like filthy rags beside God’s splendor until you’ve seen the Sistine Chapel or stood on the Great Wall of China?

Why does it matter that God is a father to the fatherless if you’ve never known the orphan?

How can you understand what it means that God holds the whole world in the span of his hand if you’ve never been outside your hometown?

What does it mean that heaven is filled with people from every tribe and tongue and nation if you’ve only known people from your own?

“The whole earth is filled with His glory,” cry the angels. I want my life to be about seeing and spreading that glory, even to the ends of the Earth.

new-zealand

* * * * *

Bio PictureAuthor Bio: “In Defense of Wanderlust” was written by Lily Ellyn Dunn. Lily was born and raised in South Louisiana, went to college in Illinois, started working in North Carolina, and currently lives with her husband in South Korea where she is a teacher by day, a writer by night, and an ice cream connoisseur all the time. Lily blogs about life, faith, and everyday grace at http://lilyellyn.com. Find her on Twitter @lilyellyn

New Zealand photo credit to Jonathan Dunn

 

Pioneer Blood

Home was dusty. Home smelled like cows. Home was New Mexico.

I grew up in one of those small towns where everybody knows your name. Several generations of my family have called this area in the middle of nowhere “home,” even back when it was just a train stop in the desert. I’ve been enthusiastically greeted by people who have known not only me, but my mom since she was in diapers. Six degrees of separation? No one needs that many to find someone you grew up with, dated or are related to. There is a tangible connection between neighbors when anything exciting happens: a new restaurant opens, someone famous wanders through or a school board meeting takes a dramatic turn. There is a sense of unity as we participate in the same traditions as our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents before us, even rituals as simple as dressing in purple to support high school sports every game day.

sunThere’s nothing quite like the community of a small town to build a runway for a dreamer to fly, however. Like my pioneer ancestors before me, I heard the call of the unknown and unexplored. Home was far too confining. I ached with it.

Home then became Baylor, a Baptist university in the middle of Texas. Home was green and gold. Home was red brick and late nights and racing to beat newspaper deadlines.

At this Christian journalism school, I learned to investigate everything. My identity. My relationships. My world. My Bible. If faith is a prism, college threw the light in a different way. I learned a group of people can become your family and then, when their season is done, leave you haunted by their impact. I learned healing can come through quick prayer, but it can also come through years of pain and doctors and hard-earned revelations. I learned a home you choose, even a temporary one, can be a sanctuary. I learned running away from home doesn’t mean your problems stay behind. I discovered belonging and calling and true freedom that isn’t tied to a place, but a Truth.

But college was a training ground, a preparation for the next season yet to come, and in the middle of all this searching for both freedom and belonging, I stumbled upon still another home. I studied abroad at Oxford and found England to feel more home-like than anything I knew. I had studied their history, their culture and the great literature of this little island. Walking down those ancient streets and experiencing Britain for myself was like falling in love – terrifying in its vast newness while welcoming me in as if I had always belonged there. A completely foreign place and culture, and yet, I fit. A puzzle piece snapping into place. It was like nowhere else in my life of traveling and exploring. The loneliness of being far away was nothing new – in fact, it was far sweeter – because I have known the loneliness of being out of place in the midst of familiarity. Out of the two, I’d take the loneliness of adventure any day.

But I wasn’t meant to stay in Britain, not just now anyway, though I’ve been back and will always keep returning, no matter how short the stay.

So now home is a busy suburb in Alabama. Home is a church in a warehouse. Home is mixing up the words “friends” and “family” because here, all are welcome.

Home is a quiet apartment, where the clock can sometimes tick loud in the dark and the battle for joy is tangibly present. But I’ve long since found home to be unrestrained to a physical location. Home is a journey, a path that meanders and crisscrosses and exists in several places at once. A hometown, a homecoming, a home-like feeling, a home address… all of these are simultaneous and equally valid, though still ultimately lacking.

I never really understood this enduring homesickness until I read it described by C.S. Lewis:

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

Though I cannot see it yet, I know the reason I’ll always be searching, a wanderlust girl with pioneer blood. I have yet to make it Home.

*   *   *   *   *   

jenna“Pioneer Blood” was written by Jenna DeWitt. Jenna is the managing editor of MORF Magazine, a resource for youth ministers, mentors and parents of teenagers. She has a bachelor’s in journalism from Baylor University, where she edited a bunch of student publications, became a fan of C.S. Lewis and drank Dr Pepper floats with Blue Bell ice cream like a true Texan. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, though if you ask her where home is, she will tell you “it’s complicated.” You can find her on Twitter @jenna_dewitt and on Tumblr at jennadewitt.tumblr.com.

 

 

Searching for a Home, Via Alaska (Part 1)

I know I’ll make it back
One of these days…
Where the cups are cracked and hooked
Above the sink
And a cracked door moon
Says I haven’t gone too far
– “Via Chicago,” Wilco

What is it that proves so timelessly compelling about an unknown place – and especially the distant, the faraway – the Not Here Where I Am Right Now? Maybe there’s an anthropological study or psychological classification for this phenomenon. Perhaps Lonely Planet or Rick Steeves have a term that adequately summarizes our thirst for going someplace thoroughly unfamiliar, for getting a little lost, for stumbling through a foreign anywhere with only a select handful of phrases, and eating whatever seems most intriguing or unlike the foods found in the places we’re from. “Wanderlust, dummy,” you could say, but that’s not what I’m getting at – or, it’s not only that. Wanderlust, to me, feels too temporal, too casual to properly describe the specific longing I’m describing. What do I call that spirit that comes to life when I’m huffing away on the Stairmaster at Planet Fitness and Anthony Bourdain is on TV sipping a steaming liquid from a delicate ceramic cup, or eating meat or cheese from a place where everyone’s skin is darker than his? In those moments, I want to know those people and that place, but I also know the likelihood of deeply or intimately doing so is highly unlikely.

I’m curious on one hand because I’ve recently become worried, wondering if I, over the past twenty years, unwittingly traveled and “adventured” myself into a corner. Rather, in making a lot of my life one fascinating backdrop or living experience swiftly following another, I now find myself at a bewildering impasse: This year marks my tenth as an Alaskan resident, which means I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else save for my state of origin, Pennsylvania. And despite an active engagement in Alaska over the course of that decade, I still find myself feeling oddly far-flung,JJBoutofplace a bit adrift, “a stranger in a strange land,” and frequently out of place in a location that my two sons – both born and in love with their lives here – fully consider and embrace as home.

Under my love of the wildly unknown and the thrill instilled by journeying to new places, I’m now finding another form of longing, and in recent years it’s proven a deeper, heavier pull than the passions that lured me towards a tireless series of fascinating locations and situations in previous decades. In simplest terms, I think mine proves a longing that all of us to one degree or another carry for “home.” And yet, I worry that naming it as such reduces it to a pouty, Dorothy Gale-by-way-of-Judy Garland type of pining. Either way, however, it’s perplexing that I would experience these conflicted feelings while occupying the same location on Earth where my children feel so utterly present and at home.sam and matt

Meanwhile, “home” doesn’t often seem a very “sexy” or hot topic to bridge in conversation. It’s not a subject that gets many people excited, unless you’re discussing the purchase of an actual, physical “house,” or watching a cable reality show where a couple’s house is about to be remodeled or transformed from Ordinary into a palatial estate. Otherwise, it’s probably not a topic that will really charge a conversation the way “travel” or living abroad do when you’re trying to make friends or identify yourself among new acquaintances at a party. Where we’ve been and what we’ve done or seen tells others something significant about who we are (or, who we think we are) in a way that trying to discuss remaining still or feeling content rarely, if ever, will.

When I make a reference, for example, to “when we (my then-wife and my boys) lived in Japan,” something sparkles in the listener’s eyes, or a smile swiftly dances across his or her face. I imagine they, like I used to do, entertain a swift, thrilling montage of koi ponds, teahouses, manicured gardens, and exquisitely designed pottery and luxurious foods. At one time I strongly identified with and entertained that same montage.

lantern

And yet, I highly doubt anyone recognizes by referencing “when we lived in Japan,” a part of me bristles inside. In fact, I sometimes feel sheepish sharing that we did – it feels rather like a misstep in the pace of a conversation. Nowadays, it’s almost as if I admit I lived there to a listener. There’s no romantic indulgence in revealing it, no bragging rights. Rather, a part of me goes a little limp inside. And oftentimes, saying I live in Alaska has felt this way, too. And I never imagined going into either of these situations that I would one day feel this way.

With Japan, I imagine a big part of this is that it’s the place where, over the course of a few days my sons’ mother and I briefly feared that our one-year-old might die. It’s also where his mom and I one year later realized and faced the hard cold truth and acknowledged aloud that our marriage was, in fact, dead.

Matt Hospital Japan

Rather than an exotic, storybook fantasy, our experience more closely resembled that of the characters in the film Babel, many of whom acutely wrestle with a 21st-century specific form of displacement and confusion related to being out of place, far flung from any idea or notion of home.

Babel

I was reminded of all of this the Tuesday before Thanksgiving a couple weeks ago, when my youngest, now six, received a visit from the latest flu monster currently making the rounds up here.

A friend had a week or so earlier invited us to dinner with his extended family at their log home in a town three hours north of Anchorage. I looked forward to fleeing the city for the holiday, but a restless night with a boy battling a 103F temperature in the mornings leading up to Thursday found me a little beside myself, brainstorming a possible “alternative” Thanksgiving if we were possibly stuck at home.

I had done very little shopping, which is to say none at all, aside from purchasing some odds and ends for the table of the friends’ home where we were intending to spend the holiday. I was definitely turkey-less, and I didn’t even have a single can of the gelatinous, can-shaped substance we call cranberries. I couldn’t help imagining that if Matt’s health dictated that we stay in Anchorage, this year would go down in my ten-year-old, Sam’s journal as the year we ate turkey club sandwiches at Denny’s.

In hindsight, I see that my panic was fueled by a clueless, single father’s blend of confusion and distress around both properly caring for a sick boy with the flu and a 103F fever, as well as having no grounded family traditions in place up here for possibly observing the holiday. The latter realization was compounded by the knowledge that we also have no immediate or extended relations anywhere nearby – nowhere, in fact, within a twelve-hour flight across the country. Which meant, too, that I had no family to call on for assistance for the Tylenol I was out of at 1am, or family to crash with on the holiday or to send Sam to if I were stuck home with Matt, on a holiday during which time we customarily celebrate and gratefully reflect on family and our ties that bind.

I’ve sat in a remote Japanese village after the orange harvest eating horse meat and drinking a clear liquor made from sweet potatoes that I’m sure must have shared chemical properties with space shuttle fuel, all while knowing only a handful of stock phrases you could pick up from watching Lost in Translation. sam russian marketI’ve drifted through a Russian village meat market and stood slack-jawed watching a toothless man butchering a pig – cigarette dangling from his mouth, no shirt or gloves – in a way that would no doubt cause reps from both OSHA and the FDA to collapse from aneurysms. I’ve lived five miles deep in the woods of New Hampshire without running water all winter. Stood thigh-high in steaming piles of horse manure twenty-one miles up a mountain in Oregon, holding only a shovel and longing for nothing more than to finish the job and return to my wood-heated cabin and books a stone’s throw away.

But nothing – I swear to you, nothing – in my life has felt more truly foreign or alien to me, honestly, than the terrain of single parenthood these last three years, and nowhere more so than in the helplessness that springs to life when the children are sick, or during the holidays when – minus the grounding of roots or traditions – I’ve wondered where to orient the three of us.

And don’t get me wrong – I do treasure the sum of my adventures. They make for rich memories, and mine’s proven an undeniably privileged way to spend one’s young adulthood. However, as I sat at my son’s bedside, anxiously scrolling WebMD.com on my laptop for advice on how to care for a child’s flu and fever that Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving, as he writhed and his breath scraped along his throat and through his nostrils, I also wondered about what I may have neglected or failed to consider during my years exploring distant places, gathering mostly only experiences in everywhere and anywhere entirely unfamiliar…

sam koi