Category Archives: imagine this world

Your life is an art project. Imperfect and chaotic.

Posted on May 21, 2012 | 1 Comment

I have this theory that our lives are in the hands of eighth graders.

It’s not a pleasant thought. Don’t I know it. But I can already see their sticky fingers and scrunched eyebrows and scrutinizing choices over where, oh where do I place this next piece of fabric?

Picture yourself as a square of fabric. Or a newspaper clipping. A painting from the antique shop downtown. Anything, really, that holds your heart upon its color palette and marks your soul with the sort of thing that made businessmen long ago stumble over the word Brand.

You are a brand. In the form of a fabric square. Held in the hands of an awkward eighth grader. Musing over his or her next decision in art class during fourth period, stomach churning because it’s almost lunchtime but somebody’s got to make a decision about your life.

Somebody’s got to mark the bland canvas, the wooden sphere, that holds each of us together. Binds us in its mess of mistakes and disasters and catastrophes and triumphs, though it often feels like triumphs are set back by all the umphs heading toward failure.

It often feels like it’d be easier to wait until after lunchtime before making a decision about where to place yourself on that canvas. What corner of the sphere should you papier-mâché your square of fabric?

Because once it escapes the fingertips of that eighth grader and superglues itself to a place, it feels like Losing Something. Like Permanent. Like Oh No, Why Oh Why Did I Let Myself Do That?

But if it’s any consolation—and maybe, quite frankly, it isn’t—there are thirty eighth graders in that classroom. Each with a new sphere or canvas, depending on whether they follow the logic that the earth is round or flat. Depending on whether or not they are Travelers and Explorers or Inhabitants and Dwellers.

And unless two of them push their art desks together and collaborate on creating you a habitat, a place to call Home, you’ll have thirty different answers to that question of Where Do I Belong? And What Do I Do Next?

Because your life is an art project. Imperfect and chaotic. And always starting over if necessary.

A little bit like that art classroom the seconds before the bell rings and seats squeak against the tile floor and the hallway fills with faces that have seen much different places.

Places that are given no discussion, like the closet of their bedrooms, parents’ voices coming up through the air vent at their toes. Like the speckled bathtub, when even a thirty-minute shower feels much too short.

There are places we go to get free and places we go to get away. And hopefully, you’ll find yourself in a classroom with thirty eighth graders where more than half of them wish to set you on street corners and rooftops and the crust of the world, ocean water kissing your toes.

But if not, you just get yourself down to Michael’s and buy a new canvas. Layer a new sphere. Cut a couple more scraps of newspaper or magazine articles or bits of cotton from the t-shirts of your childhood t-ball teams.

And begin again.

And again.

And again.

Until you land your nomadic self somewhere you’re proud of.

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You deserve eyes that see playhouses in office stores and lessons in the way she fixes her coffee.

Posted on April 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

The checkout line at Staples taught me all I ever needed to stay afloat.

At nine and seven, my sister and I played Goldilocks in the desk chair section, spinning in circles on tall-backed leather monsters and flimsy neon plastic seats.

We thought success was a matter of buying the right equipment, the perfect pens, the most comfortable chair, the most prestigious ream of paper.

And in some ways, we were right.

We’d line up behind my dad in the checkout aisle, scanning the treasures at our level—neon arrowhead erasers and jars of hard pretzels and bags of Swedish fish.

But for some reason, our eyes always landed right on the lifesavers.

The minute we learned that—that lifesavers were something you found in the middle of all the world’s structure—something small and safe clicked inside us.

We’d ride home, pocketing those suckers in our cheeks for sometime later. And thirteen years later, I am pulling that lesson back out for that Later.

It’s the reason I keep writing.

Yes, yes, there you are. Fingertips tracing the black on white words that are really only a series of one’s and zero’s. Really only a watered-down version of the beautiful ideas dancing around in my mind and pirouetting through the Staples aisles with my little sister.

Because what happens between Thursday and Monday and Thursday again is something quite magical. Sometime I’ve taken for granted for far too many weeks.

That the minute we start scouring the world for some lifesavers, some lessons to hoard in the backseat of our father’s favorite car, the one he someday sends us to the DMV with, we learn that they are all waiting for us.

Stamped with price tags and flashy promises about being So Good You Won’t Want To Put Them Down.

You won’t want to relinquish control on these gems of ideas that are just waiting the minute you look for them. The minute you train your brain to find the answers in the crevices between concrete slabs and the puckers in leather-backed chairs.

I hope you learn this lesson like you memorize the flavors of those lifesavers. Don’t you worry about getting greedy when you can’t choose between Wint-O-Green and Pep-O-Mint. Because you deserve both.

You deserve to know that lifesavers have been pushing themselves into our lives since 1912, when we realized the Titanic wasn’t resurfacing. That problems weren’t waltzing toward trash cans. That you deserve the feeling you get when everything makes sense.

You deserve one hand in each lesson, one lifesaver draped over each arm. You deserve eyes that see playhouses in office supply stores and lessons in the way she fixes her coffee.

That’s what this blog has brought me every single week. I cannot walk this world blind to the beauty lurking right here, right now, right at the end caps of the Staples shelves.

I hope you find it, too.

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Posted in imagine this world, writing

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Postage Stamps & Papers In Red Radio Flyer Wagons

Posted on April 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

At seven years old, she traveled our quarter-mile neighborhood with printed articles from the Encarta 97 CD-ROM.

She towed a red Radio Flyer wagon with a thick black metal handle, the stapled papers stuck together and flying about whenever the wagon rocketed down the hill.

She went from door to door like that, asking our neighbors if somebody might buy an article for a school project or some light reading over breakfast. When asked why she was doing this, she only hrumphed and blew her straight bangs out of her eyes and told them what’d happened.

She’d knocked her mother’s favorite vase to the ground, running into the end table atop which it sat. And now, she was 70 dollars in the red, trying to figure out how she might pay for her mistake.

It has become one of those stories, the ones we carry with ourselves when we forget where we came from and wonder how we’ll ever maintain that same level of ownership over our mistakes. How we’ll rectify situations gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Now, that wagon sits in our shed, collecting dust and termite holes and spider webs. The CD-ROM has long been tossed in favor of Wikipedia’s instant answers.

Now, she has learned to Google her problems before ever stepping foot onto that white concrete and trudging up the slow, lazy incline behind our house.

And so have we. So have I. So have you.

We have mastered the art of the non-apology, the half-hearted I’m Sorrys that sprinkle themselves liberally atop everyone else’s payback sundaes. We double the scoop size, ask for extra whipped cream, beg for a little more hot fudge.

But never, oh never, do we mark out thank-you notes for the ones who forgave us. Never do we spend six hours selling words, even if they are someone else’s words, to make our thankfulness more clear.

For twenty-two years, I could write you a thank-you note, but it wouldn’t be for you so much as Anyone, Anyone At All who asked for one.

And then, this winter, I learned. I started small, with the people I knew I could write to, the ones who were long overdue. And then it grew harder. The ones I’d been avoiding, the ones I knew deserved it but couldn’t find the words.

I did not write a hundred or two hundred or three thousand. But I wrote twenty-three. And those twenty-three people made my heart swell with their gratitude. They were my life-changers, my world-shakers, my biggest supporters.

And yet I had met only a handful of them face-to-face. Had shaken only a few of their hands. Had cried on several shoulders.

What a beautiful world we live in, where we can scour Wikipedia for every answer and never have to cart a wagon full of paper around in apology. What a sad world we live in, where we never have to write a real thank-you note.

The world needs more of them. Hannah Katy will tell you that. And so will hundreds of others. Hundreds who have felt the tears streaming down their faces when they get a letter in return. Who have spent half the afternoon sobbing over the kindness of someone they haven’t hugged in far too long.

If you are searching for your answer, your moment of gratitude, it is this—a pen and a piece of paper and a postage stamp.

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Posted in Change Makers, growing up, imagine this world, love letters to young girls

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These are my Backpack Words.

Posted on April 12, 2012 | 8 Comments

I’d like to tell you my therapist never had any Backpack Words for me.

There was nothing worth stuffing into my backpack like those pamphlets with smiling children on the covers in waiting rooms.

I’d like to tell you those four months I spent carting my baggage up two flights of stairs wasn’t worth it. Because I know you are looking for an excuse. I know we are all looking for an excuse.

If I had it my way, I’d tell you none of it stuck with me. But something did.

Something small and measly and terrifyingly accurate, to be honest.

She said Happy People spread themselves out, so that when one puzzle piece falls out from underneath them, they can leapfrog onto a new one.

She didn’t want me making any one thing my world. And at the time, that upset me. Even now, that’s hard to swallow.

If you tell a passionate girl she’s going to have to pull the blinders off and ease her grip on the reins, she’s going to tug harder. Look closer. Press the mute button.

She’s not going to want someone challenging her. Who does?

That girl is still inside me. She’s not squeezing reigns so much anymore as learning to master juggling and backpacks and feeling heavy & light.

She is learning to love everything she loves, but always more than One Thing.

She isn’t spreading thin so much as widening a road, paved with the words in her backpack.

You’ll find her there, Out There, in that space of land nobody dares walk. The space we’ve given up one. She carries her backpack full of words, each a necessary foundation.

She walks in the center of two yellow lines—between too much baggage and cutting ties with everyone, everything.

And she is waiting for you to meet her halfway at a rest stop in Topeka. At a gas station in St. Louis.

She will start here, with the words her therapist gave her. And you will start there, with the ones your Mama tucked next to your peanut butter & jelly sandwich.

And in the middle, when you meet, you can share a booth in a diner off the dirt road.  You can pull out your words, set them on the counter, and she hers.

You’ll keep what you need, toss what you don’t, and swap what you’re desperate to borrow right now. Until you meet again. Under different circumstances with different backpacks.

What are your backpack words?

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Posted in being yourself, growing up, imagine this world

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The Girl Jesus Asked To His Middle School Dance

Posted on April 9, 2012 | 2 Comments

I was raised hardcore Catholic.

No, not the girl in plaid pleated skirts with my button-down twisted in on itself. Not the rule-breaker, the line-walker or the daily devotionalist.

I glared at those who dared to enter the church doors like it was a semi-annual sale at Victoria’s Secret. Like we were selling something for them on those two days they packed into minivans and two-door sports cars and hauled hosts of kids, kids I’d never seen before, into the back pews just before mass began.

Imagine attending someone’s birth and funeral and nothing else. There is no way, I am sure, to know them.

They cannot tell you their stories or tap you on the shoulder as a timid toddler, grabbing hold of your heart so fiercely you forgot you didn’t want to let it go. They cannot coax you out of bed on a Sunday morning when you’d rather face the wall and count the stripes in the wallpaper.

Mostly, though, they cannot help you. Cannot ever be given a chance. Cannot ever be asked for that first dance in middle school with the beat thumping too loud for you to be sure you know what you just agreed to.

Now I know Jesus was not a hip hopper, a hipster kid, a pants-down-to-his-knees type. I know He didn’t call clichés into question or clique His way into the Perfect People Club.

If there had been a middle school dance, though, I am sure He would’ve at least attempted to ask some girl for one measly chance.

He was, after all, human for a time.

For as long—and longer than—some of us ever live. For a quest some of us dare to tackle—to etch our belief, aching in our chests, into someone else’s handprints.

And that little goal, albeit small, is something I can understand.

We coax our smaller selves into something bigger, scarier, newer. We rally our troops for something we believe in. We pound a path into the ground with our tapping feet and twirling toes.

I think Jesus was a dancer. A real crooner.

I think He knew the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you’re terrified someone won’t believe in the words spilling from your lips and stage-diving onto their eardrums. Knew the anxiety of Us versus Them lined up on opposite sides of the dimly-lit gymnasium.

Us, the Doers.

Them, the skeptics.

He was a little bit nervous, pushing glasses up the bridge of His nose, staring down at His two left feet. But He knew what He wanted. Knew where He was headed. Knew that someday He’d grow up and take this world by storm.

And you cannot help but wish you’d given those Doers a chance. Sashayed to the in-between and offered them a hand. Met them halfway.

Oh to have met them halfway. To have reached five fingers and two feet and a big bustling brain filled with ideas. To be the second Doer, the first Adopter, the first Believer.

Sometimes, it’s not the Doers we need most. It’s the Believers.

And my, oh my, do we have an army of those waiting for a Doer to sweep them off their feet. They are sitting in plastic folding chairs on the other side of your gymnasium, sipping punch and staining their lips red.

Among the red-stained lip smackers I’ve sat, fingers interlocked in my lap, itching to dance. Finally, I am standing up, pushing forward, sashaying into the center of the tiled floor. Letting this wild ride begin beneath someone else’s disco ball and a different artist’s techno beats.

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Posted in being yourself, Change Makers, college, growing up, imagine this world, religion

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