kitchen table. tea and toast.

Bundled up with a bit of snow left outside my window, I sit at the kitchen table. Alone. I’m still buzzing from the flurry that was my day. In an attempt to recollect my calm, I’ve made a steaming mug of tea and toasted a slice of homemade bread with my very own apple butter lathered on top. Dessert.

The days run out quickly as there is more dark than light this season. Winter is here. Pretty sure we’ve already gotten more snow than in full seasons prior. Eight inches could be an understatement; I didn’t get out the ruler. Actually, I don’t have a ruler.

(Regularly I walk the tightrope of living simply and being prideful about living simply. Hence, I almost deleted my sentence about not having a ruler.)

Life, my life, is in a constant state of change. That seems a bit ironic, I know, but completely truthful. Just when I think I’m rolling into a season that I’ve done before, that will give me more rest than the previous one, something shifts. Some outside force (not usually to be reckoned with) mixes up my life again. I hope I can always be, and come across as, grateful for these seasons, no matter how surprising or challenging they may be. Just as I breathe a sigh of relief that my fall filled with traveling to unfamiliar places filled with unfamiliar people is over, I realize I’m only sleeping my own bed for three weeks before I leave again. I’ll be headed to spend the Holidays with family back east.

For all of the abovementioned travel, I am unquestionably thankful. Getting to travel to faraway cities and states in order to build relationships with people as I introduce them to the organization for which I work, is quite spectacular. Conversation is most rich when it’s filled with passion, and I get that. After a long chat with someone hearing about their lives and sharing with them the opportunities that I believe could offer them even more growth, I am energized. Sure, after a week of those conversations interspersed with not-so-passionate conversations, I’m stinking tired. I wake early to carry my weary bones to the airport and unlike in the past, I hardly say a word to anyone I meet along the way. By that time I’m ready for rest. Ready for the comfort of a bed with month-old sheets and a hand-me-down couch. And quiet.

As far as the travel I’m about to do, it’s hard to explain my feelings towards it. I’m eagerly awaiting time spent with seldom-seen family… tossing little cousins in the air, cooking with aunts in the kitchen, joking around and drinking a bit too much with uncles and cousins-turned-friends after the kids go to bed, and most of all long mornings at the kitchen table with my folks.

Thankfully, even though the house isn’t the same, the kitchen table hasn’t changed. It’s the same kitchen table where we grew up having dinner at every night, blew out countless (well, I guess if I tried hard enough) birthday candles with friends and family gathered around, hid underneath when you couldn’t think of a better spot for hide-and-go-seek, did homework at until you cried because you just didn’t understand, and laughed, a lot.

Back to the point at hand, before I reminisced about our kitchen table… I’ll be spending two weeks back east for the Holidays. These are two of the three weeks I usually spend there each year. It seems like such a small amount of time when I put it into words. Yet, I recognize that I have a family here as well; as I’ve mentioned before, I have a home here too. There are people that I’d like to share more of this season with, families that have loved me really well, friends that have invested in me and visa versa. It’s a beautiful pull to have. With all of that being said, I know I will want to freeze time and stay longer once I get there.

Kathleen Norris has taken over a large percentage of my reading these past few months.

To quote Norris, “I have learned to trust the processes that take time, to value change that is not sudden or ill-considered but grows out of the ground of experience. Such change is properly defined as conversion, a word that at its roots connotes not a change of essence but of perspective, as turning round; turning back to or returning; turning one’s attention to.”

Followed by the ever-inspiring T.S. Eliot, “The end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

Perspective. If anything changes more frequently than our perspective I’d like to become more aware of that thing. If I allow myself to venture down this road, I realize that my perspective changes with every experience I encounter. My perspective on God changes every time I read scripture and allow it to brew thoughts, during each service I attend and seek meaning and truth from the words being spoken, through conversation about life choices and direction with friends, when I see something or someone in a different light than I had before. My perspective on relationships changes every time I engage in one, whether it be new, old, challenging, exciting, scary, uplifting, draining, uncomfortable, passionate, fulfilling, confusing, what have you, because it’s real. And the next time I embark on that journey with someone, my perspective will be different than it was the time before, because of my experience, because of what I learned.

One frustrating thing… I’ll never fully understand someone else’s perspective. No matter how well I know them, no matter how open and honestly they share, it’s like trying to get behind someone’s eyes. Like trying to see the world through the lens that has been molded throughout their lifetime. It’s a bit disappointing. I treasure relationships. I enjoy investing in people that I care about, and being invest in by them. I have to remind myself that I will never fully know the inner-workings and the hidden perspective that has been so delicately woven into every ounce of their being. Hm. Will I ever fully know that of myself?

one of the stunning perspectives from Dewey Point