Reading the Fine Print

I love a lot of things about England. After spending three years in a schizophrenic culture I never fully understood, I find the similarities to home comforting. I know that it is a weird thing to say. I have a feeling it’s not something most American expats in London would say. They’ve never lived in Belgium.

But there are things that still baffle me about the English, as a recent trip to the grocery store proved. I wanted to buy some rice cakes (no comment on my food choices, please). I scanned the shelves for the lightly salted ones I like, but there were none to be found. After looking around for a few minutes, I found something I hadn’t seen before: SAVOURY rice cakes. I was thinking salty, with a little seasoning. Perfect.

Unfortunately for me, I have never been good at reading the fine print. Remember those tests you took in elementary school, where the teacher told you to read through the entire test and then fill it out? I was one of the kids who started filling in the answers immediately – before getting to the end, where there are instructions that tell you to simply put your pencil down and not answer a single question …

So it wasn’t until I got home and had my first bite of a “savoury” rice cake that I realized something was wrong. It wasn’t until I had a bitter aftertaste in my mouth that I read: Our delicious Wholegrain Rice Cakes are simply made with organically grown wholegrain brown rice puffed into a light texture and coated in yeast extract … Um. Excuse me?

That’s right. Yeast extract. Lovingly known here – and detested the world round – as Marmite.

I am sorry, England. I love your accents (at least the ones I can understand). I love your humor (Excuse me, your humour). I love your literature. I love your music. I love your art and poetry. I love your TV and I even mostly love your food. But I cannot understand for the life of me WHY you would put yeast extract on anything. And I hate to say it, but I really don’t care to ever know either. Sorry. It’s true.

On the other hand, at least I can read the packaging.

On Courage

There is this man I see some mornings on my way to work. Sometimes he is crossing the square next to St. Paul’s. Today he was walking up Ludgate Hill.

It’s hard not to notice him. He is hunched over. His back and his legs are crooked and every step is a deliberate act. His arms swing like a runner’s in the middle of a sprint. Walking to work seems like it might be the toughest thing he does all day.

And what struck me today as I saw him struggle up the street is that he chooses to do it. Every day. He chooses the harder way. And it is courageous. The simple act of walking.

It is easy to believe that to be brave we have to do big things. But I sometimes imagine that it is actually in our smallest, everyday acts that we choose courageous lives.

I have been struggling lately with how to really love. With what it means to be a light in the darkness. And I think that too comes in the small, everyday acts.

I mostly feel like a failure. My heart and my mind, like that man’s body, can be pretty crooked.

The thing is: I am going to screw up. I’m going to get it wrong. I’m going to fail. I’m going to fall flat on my face. And I think that might actually be right where I’m supposed to be. Because that is where grace – which, let’s be honest, is the only way I’m ever going to be able to truly love – is able to start its work.

So I pray for the courage to keep choosing the harder way, even knowing I will fail. Because I also know that it will also be the better way.

True Colors

OK. I’ll admit it. I’m a sucker for pop culture.

I used to, I confess, look a bit down on it. Thought of myself as something of an intellect, I suppose. I remember huffing at my roommates’ US Weekly – before I would somehow strangely find it in my hands … But now the truth’s out in the open.

My latest obsession is Glee, which came about because of a hiatus in my other obsession, Gossip Girl (And yes, I think there might actually be a chance that I’m a 13-year-old girl.)

While I’m sure you in the U.S. have been watching for ages, Glee only landed in the U.K. recently and the minute I heard “Don’t Stop Believin’," I was hooked. Who wouldn’t be after hearing the theme song of karaoke bars around the world?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a bit of a snob about music. But the thing I’ve come to appreciate in my relatively old age is entertainment for entertainment’s sake. I used to believe that a movie or a TV show weren’t worth my time if they weren’t thought provoking. Now, like John Sullivan in Sullivan’s Travels, I’ve realized that there are enough hard things in this world. Sometimes you just need to laugh.

What surprises me so often about pop culture, though, is how it will show me some truth I’d forgotten. Like last week’s Glee, when they sang "True Colors" at the end of the show – and it was somehow something I needed to hear. That who I am is unique and precious. Leave it to Cyndi Lauper.

That’s also the thing about God that surprises me. How he can use even a pop song to reach me exactly where I’m at.

The Good Fight

I got home last night from a week of family, sunshine, good food and gelato in Italy. It was a much-needed respite from my everyday life.

And while Tuscany this time of year is still a bit brown, green was cropping up everywhere – as my sister’s terrible allergies could attest. It was wonderful to watch the countryside and cities come alive, and to live a different sort of life for a little while.

Lately it seems that I’ve been just going through the motions of each day without really taking into account what makes them up, which I suppose is how we mostly go through life – especially during stressful or busy seasons.

But Italy woke me up. And if I’m honest, I think God had been trying to wake me up even before then. To the fact that I should be soaking in life more. Paying attention to the people and situations around me. Paying attention to the things that matter.

In Orvieto, we stayed in a little bed and breakfast that was, as my dad would say, a Mary Poppins kind of a place – practically perfect in ever way. In Cinque Terre, my sister and I went on a hike along a mountainous path overlooking the sea. The freshness of the air alone restored me. In Siena, we stayed at an old nunnery that overlooked the city and woke up to see the duomo bathed in light. In Rome, the warmth and beauty of the days and food more than made up for the mobs of people we encountered almost everywhere we went.

It’s really hard to slow down when you’re back in reality, though. To not always wish away my time – if only I were back in Italy, in New York or if only I had such and such a life or were with so and so.

It is easy, in a way, to miss things – even when you choose to live far away. It is much harder to live a life in the present, much harder to choose the important thing – or to see the important thing for that matter – when the urgent is frantically calling you. That’s the battle, I suppose, of our modern life. (And, I suspect, of the ancient life too.)

After a week (mostly) away from the madding crowd, I feel ready again to fight.

One Hand on the Escape Latch

I hit a wall today at work. I just felt like I couldn’t care any more or work any harder. Which might have something to do with the long hours and weeks I’ve put in lately. Or the levels of stress at the office, where it feels like any small shift will cause the duct tape to unravel and things will start falling apart.

The good thing is that these moments tend to hit when I have one hand on the escape latch. I’m leaving on a weeklong Italian holiday Saturday with my mom and sister – two of my favorite people in the world in one of my favorite countries.

I know that most of the things that are weighing on me now will be waiting for me when I get back, but there is something to be said for coming back to the battle rested and with a fresh perspective.

My dad always says that when you feel like I did today, it’s best to just go to sleep and everything will look better in the morning. I wonder if it would be OK to nap at work?

Becoming

The organic grocery store in my neighborhood has started carrying blood oranges from Spain. They are so delicious I can hardly stop myself at one.

It amazes me how dark they get. I grew up only on plain oranges, maybe the occasional clementine. And while they turn a lovely shade of orange, I love the dark, juicy red of a ripe blood orange. It is somehow more delightful. It somehow tastes better, even though my colleague told me today as I offered her a precious sliver that it tastes just like any other orange.

The thing that hit me as I sat last night eating yet another blood orange was how the most recent batch I’d bought were so much darker than the last ones. Which got me thinking about the process of ripening, which led my always over-analytical mind to the idea of becoming.

I have for a long time now been slightly obsessed with the idea of becoming and have found great comfort in it. It probably stems in part from my perfectionist tendencies.

I like processes. I don’t often like what they feel like when you’re in the middle of them, but I like to know that I am a work in progress. There is a lot of hope in that. It’s what I connect to in modern art, which is so often about the process. It’s about the making of something – and the triumph that innately stems from a simple act of creation.

I love this idea of becoming because it is about grace in the end. I am critical of myself to a fault, always thinking that who I am is not enough. But if I am in process, if I am becoming, then these things are only a part of my refining.

I do believe that we are supposed to love who we are, as we are. And I am, slowly, growing more comfortable in my own skin. But there are moments when I need the hope of more, moments when it’s good to remember that I am still in process.

Hope Springs

After a seemingly endless cold and dark winter, the sun has been shining in London for almost a week now. It is still cold, but there are glimpses of spring.

I love the changing of the seasons, especially this one. I find the winters hard to bear, the lack of sunlight in particular. You go to work in the dark, come home in the dark. And even during daylight, the sun is often hidden under a heavy layer of grey.

But for the last week or so, it has been light when I come out of the tube at 6.45 a.m. And I feel a shift in my heart. I think it is hope. That soon I will be able to shed my winter blues along with my winter coat, and put both away in the closet for another nine months. That life will be blooming around me in a few weeks time. The leaves on trees will fill out their skeleton frames. Flowers will break through the soil.

I have been ready for spring for several months now, with my heart filled every now and again with a deep longing for sunshine and warmth. But it was hard at times in the depths of February to believe it would ever come. It had been so cold and so grey for so long.

It is amazing how brief an appearance from the sun it takes to renew hope, to restore a little bit of joy, to move us out from under the clouds of despair.

I know there will be dark days again, but I am thankful today for the sun and these glimmers of spring, of hope, that will get me through them.

There Is Only the Trying

Two summers ago, before I moved to London, I visited the city and found myself – as I often do – at the modern art museum. The Tate had a Cy Twombly exhibit, and as I walked through the rooms, I fell a little bit in love.

One particular print, “The Wilder Shores of Love,” stuck with me.

I have never been one for the beach. If you took one look at my pale skin, you’d understand why. But I do have a thing for the ocean. And I’ve had some important moments in my life sitting with the water lapping at my toes.

Moments when I saw “the more” I am always searching for. Moments when I realized that everything I have known is only the shoreline of love – love of friends, of family, but most importantly of God. Moments when I knew that, if I were brave enough – and I prayed I was brave enough, I would walk out a bit further each day into the ocean depths.

Which is a bit what this blog is about.

I’m not a brave person in general. I’m a writer, but I find it hard to find the courage to really write. I’m shy and reserved. And even the ladybugs that infiltrate my flat in the fall freak me out. But, as my favorite poet T.S. Eliot says: For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.