Keith and I were up in Indiana this weekend and as we were driving it suddenly struck me that we had been there, driving, exactly one year ago. It all came back so vividly, the shorn, golden tilt of farmed hillsides, the black shadows stretching further east, away from the setting sun and the few shards of copper leaves that rimmed the trees.
Last year we were there, driving all around Southern Indiana with red rimmed eyes and sore limbs from sleeping on cots and the air mattress, caught up in the agony of looking for houses. We were set loose, adrift. Behind us we towed most of our earthly possessions, my car stuffed to the brim with things like a vacuum and a rolled up rug.
I thought again about how it felt to set out from Colorado, to head East across the state into the flatland, everything around us brown, tawny and still, the grass lands and the rolling hills mirroring the endless sky above.
It is so frightening to leave home behind and head out into the unknown. But exhilarating too, as though one were taking one's life directly into hand, picking up the reins, and staking out a future.
If we knew what the future had in store, I don't think we'd ever find the courage to walk into it. I keep waking up, as it were, into a greater understanding of life's inherent difficulty, or imperfection. It's no longer traumatizing to realize how much suffering life holds, I don't rebel against it or hide from it as I use to.
Instead, I feel this sense of peace. I feel like a tree that's lost limbs, been partially burned, but has its roots deep into the earth and its branches all spread to the sky. God calls us into life not because life is perfect and not because we are perfect, but because we are meant to grow.
We don't have to grovel or punish ourselves or push ourselves. We don't have to shy away from our failures and imperfections. We can simply trust that life will call us out deeper, because that is it's nature, that is the nature of God, to encourage growth, to bring us out further and further into the light.
That is what He has been doing in my life of late. Of this whole year, in fact. This whole year has been one of intense, sometimes down right agonizing growth. I've been called to grow up in a whole new way. And I did not want to.
I did not want to give up my illusions, the beautiful fantasy. I was incredible angry that this is the life God calls us to, one of suffering. Why would God do that to us, to any of us? It isn't fair, it wasn't right. We strive and strive and strive and yet get knocked down again.
Now I see the beauty in what's real. I understand in a whole new way that suffering is inevitable. "Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering," Carl Jung has said. And the human spirit longs to be healthy, no matter how much legitimate suffering that may require.
Last year, when I looked ahead, I took for granted that at this point, by this time, I would certainly be either pregnant or the mother of an infant. I did not grant any weight to the idea that neither might be true. I just projected this longing into the future, maybe as a way to guard myself from the truth, the truth that none of us knows what the future will look like.
We were up in Indiana to intercept a truck being delivered to Keith's brother on the same day that his wife was in the hospital delivering their second girl, and while he was still two weeks away from returning from deployment.
I walked into the house and saw on the table a breast pump and in the living room a bassinet, newly constructed, standing silent witness to what was happening in a hospital right then. I felt incredibly juvenile and gauche, I felt like a small girl that has her nose to the window of some lovely, warm room that she knows she will never be invited into, a whole experience that will never be a part of her life.
I feel like those fields, rough corn stubble making a golden haze across a shallow valley, half in the sun and half in shadow, but quiet and still. I feel inside me a reassuring weight, a strong ballast; God calls me into life to grow. He calls me out from the things of childhood into adulthood, not because life is safe, but because my spirit longs to expand through the suffering into what is real. It's what I was created to express, I am a living expression of the nature of God; that nature that creates and pours forth life and redeems the dark.
