Cold Tangerines

Kelly loaned me her Shauna Niequist book, Cold Tangerines, and I finished it over the break this week.  Loved it!!  It was autobiographical short essays, but I love the way she writes and much of what she said resonated with me.  My spirit (the Holy Spirit inside me) is bursting with hope and joy, ready to celebrate my life and the fresh start I've been given and live each day to the fullest!  The following segments really stuck out to me, so I wanted to preserve them here:

On Friendship:
"Friendship is acting out God's love for people in tangible ways.  We were made to represent the love of God in each other's lives, so that each person we walk through life with has a more profound sense of God's love for them.  Friendship is an opportunity to act on God's behalf in the lives of the people that we're close to, reminding each other who God is... True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and it happens when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into the broken, fragile part of ourselves... We have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they'll leave.  But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship gives to us.  Friendship is about risk.  Love is about risk.  If we can control it and manage it and manufacture it, then it's something else, but if it's really love, really friendship, it's a little scary around the edges."

On Weight:
"What I wanted more than anything was to not have a body.  This body that I dragged around had been my enemy for so long and had betrayed me so deeply, over and over, by having the audacity to be fat.  I hated it, the particular and venomous way you hate someone you used to love, someone who was supposed to be on your side and wasn't, and who was in fact, fighting against you... I felt like my body was inaccurate in its representation of me, and that made me furious with it."

"For two decades, I believed that if I could just get this one thing under control, then the whole of my life would magically bloom like a perfect, lush flower... But what I found is that there is no such thing as skinny enough.  There is no magic number that can make you feel safe or protected or confident."

On Writing:
"I get stuck because I try to map out every dip and turn, try to write an ending, literally and figuratively, before a beginning even exists.  So I don't write, but with the energy that I could use on writing, I worry instead."

"Writing is about choosing the one narrow thing and following it as far as it will take me, instead of chasing all the snaps and crackles in my head."

"Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader, because of the art that you make.  Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul.  Please keep making art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable."

On Loss:
"Looking back, I can see much more clearly what was happening, what had gone bad without my realizing it, what I added to an already difficult situation.  If I had been savvier and more aware, I would have resigned sooner.  For a lot of reasons that I only understand now, I did the opposite: I tried and tried and tried to make something work that had stopped working a long time before I tried to salvage it.  And I left, in the end, because I had no other choice... What it felt like to me was heartbreak.  I felt like something unraveled around me.  I felt more vulnerable and powerless than I had in a decade.  I didn't recognize myself in the mirror... I lost it, whatever it is.  I lost that sense that I was okay, and that I would be okay again.  I lost all belief in my future.  I was sad and scared and ashamed.  Without knowing it, without intending to, I had shoved way too much of myself into my job, more than a job can possibly bear, and I set myself up to fall a terrible distance if something were ever to happen to that job.  And then, of course, it did.  I put all my eggs in the job basket, until it became impossibly heavy, and it broke... And it's not anyone's fault but my own.  It's my fault for trying to find a shortcut, knowing full well that true spiritual depth and actual confidence have no substitutes."

On Fragility:
"I wanted to be productive and useful and focused, and I turned into someone who was frazzled and scattered, and who could not bear the emotional weight of her own life, let alone someone else's.  I don't want to be that person.  And I'm ashamed that I let myself move so far from who I wanted to be... The bottom just falls out sometimes, and nobody is exempt.  Everything is not okay.  And one of the most sacred gifts we can offer before God is the willingness to make a bed on a couch or make a phone call or make a meal or make a sacrifice for someone we care about."

"But the only person who decided my life had turned to dust was me.  The only person who is still deeply troubled about what I've lost, even in the face of what I've gained, is me.  I would never have wanted it this way, but something bright and beautiful has been given to me, and I'm in grave danger of losing it, squandering it, becoming a person who cannot find the goodness that's right in front of her because of the sadness that she chooses to let obscure it... When you can invest yourself deeply and unremittingly in the life that surrounds you instead of declaring yourself out of the game once and for all because what's happened to you is too bad, too deep, too ugly for anyone to expect you to move on from, that's a good, rich place.  More often than not, there is something just past the heartbreak, just past the curse, just past the despair, and that thing is beautiful.  You don't want it to be beautiful, at first.  You want to stay in the pain and the blackness because it feels familiar, and because you're not done feeling victimized and smashed up. But one day you'll wake up surprised and humbled, staring at something you thought for sure was a curse and has revealed itself to be a blessing."

"I think babies really do make you believe in God.  They make you believe in God because there's something just beyond understanding about their freshness and fragility and their smell and their toes." :)

(Presh Missy K)

On Forgiveness:
"Crazy mad is always covering over hurt and fear, so if we're telling the whole truth here, she hurt me, and she made me feel scared.  And that's worse than just making me mad.  I felt small and scared and out of control, and I felt like my friend was making decision after decision to hurt me.  Every time I heard from her or about her, it hurt.  It was like there was sharp glass on her hands, and every time she got near me, she cut me, even if she swore she didn't mean to... I kept thinking about her, and the anger and venom were starting to feel familiar.  The pain has softened ever so slightly, but it still seems like she did something wrong.  How do I forgive someone who doesn't think she did anything wrong?  Or who doesn't care?  ...My friend is doing great, I think, but I stagger around in a fog of anger and clenched jaws and fists, waiting for a showdown that will never come and an apology that will never be offered.  So I let her off the hook... It was like a full-time job, forgiving her over and over, with each new angry thought or bad conversation, but it was good work... I keep letting her off the hook, because when I do, I can breathe again."

On Gratefulness:
"Thank you, God, for the things you heal, the things you redeem, the things you refuse to leave just as they have been for what seems like forever."

"Everything is interim.  Everything is a path or a preparation for the next thing, and we never know what the next thing is... I want to arrive.  I want to get to wherever I'm going and stay there.  That's why I was such a ferocious planner of my life.  But I'm learning to just keep moving, keep walking.  We won't arrive.  But we can become.  And that's the most hopeful thing I can think of.  Thank God I was wrong about everything I had planned.  Thank God we weren't on my schedule... Now when I think about the future, I try to write in pencil."

"I am thankful for the breaking of things that needed to be broken, that couldn't have been broken any other way, thankful for the severing that allowed me to fall all the way down to the center of my fear and look it in the face, thankful for being set free from something I didn't even know I was enslaved to.  There is a quality in my life that I sense now, like a rumbling bass line or thunder far away, and the only phrase I can find to capture it is that it is the feeling of having nothing to lose.  I have nothing left to lose.  Because I was embarrassed and ashamed in such a deep way, and to my surprise, I'm still here.  I'm happy in a new way, free in a new way."

"We held hands and thanked God for the darkness, and for the way the darkness had become light, and in that moment, we practiced thanksgiving... for the uncomplicated happiness of babies and friendships and food, and for the very complicated joys that come from loss, from failure, from reaching the bottom and pushing back up to the light!"

"I believe in a life of celebration.  I believe that the world we wake up to every day is filled to the brim with deep aching love, and also with hatred and sadness.  And I know which one of those I want to win in the end... I have to remind myself that it is good.  I have to create hope in my life, because there's something inside me that has radar for the bad parts of life.  I just don't want to live in only that reality.  Because there is another reality.  A better one.  Hope and redemption and change are real, and they're happening all around me... Life is painful, and we carry with us so much disappointment and heartbreak.  But I'm fighting to save some space inside me where I can create hope.  I can't live there in the disappointment anymore.  I've missed whole seasons of my life.  I look back and all I remember is pain... I wasted a lot of time wishing I was different.  I didn't love the gift of life because I was too busy being angry about the life I was given.  I wanted it to be different.  But being angry didn't change things.  It just wasted time.  Today is a gift.  And if we have tomorrow, tomorrow will be a gift.  It's rebellious in a way to choose joy, to choose to dance, to choose to love your life.  It's much easier and much more common to be miserable.  But I choose to do what I can do to create hope, to celebrate life, and the act of celebrating connects me back to that life I love...  Let's echo His words and let our lives speak those words:  It is good!"