Some reflections

I’ve been making bread since I was about eleven years old. My age has since doubled but still every time I knead the dough and set it aside to rise there’s a question in my mind as to what will really happen. When I come back an hour later and uncover the dough to find it doubled in size it’s always with some of the same eleven-year-old wonder I had the first time I tried my hand at baking.
I’m waiting for dough to rise. In about forty-five minutes I’ll go back to the kitchen and say a little prayer before I take the towel off the bowl and look inside. I thought a lot about faith today. Maybe faith isn’t so much the assurance that the dough will rise. Maybe it’s the mixing and the kneading that happen before. I’ve learned quite a few things in these tumultuous last couple of years of mine and one of the “biggies” is the knowledge that a loving Heavenly Father isn’t going to deprive us of the chance to walk out into the dark sometimes. He’s going to take off our training wheels, knowing full well that we might fall. And faith means dealing with it. I guess that lesson I’ve learned is this: faith means not knowing all the answers, and dealing with it.
Some of the Elders on the mission were so sure they’d become CEO’s and senators because “the Lord never forgets His returned missionaries.” Well, that’s certainly true but a mission doesn’t come with that sort of severance package. Life is going to suck sometimes, and the expectation that we’ll be coddled and protected from the crap the world is ready to throw at us is setting us up for a world of trouble.
Not that I’m unhappy, or that I feel like I haven’t been enormously blessed. However, I do not expect that life will always be a piece of cake. I’ll take it as it comes, but I’m sure things won’t always be as easy as they are now. And that’s life, right?
So we can have peace, we can have comfort, and we can have an assurance that all will work out. But it takes a while for the dough to rise.
PS: I was tempted to call this blog “Every hour I knead thee” just so I could imagine the groans and eye rolls (and screams and gouging out of eyes, depending on how well you know me…). But now I get to imagine it all anyway.

And now a poem...

In conjunction with my last post, here's a poem I wrote for my Creative Writing class last week about on of the simple joys of being alone. (No, not loneliness, just being alone.) Oh, and PS, I'm not a poet.

Friday night

I might have heard myself chewing
if I hadn’t topped off
that silent space in my living room
with songs and the sounds of familiar dialogue. If I hadn’t
left the window open –

I might have shared, and let a slice or three
introduce themselves to a hungry new acquaintance
while I watched, hungrier still.

I would have closed the box and
let it hide while I talked to someone at the door.
No, he isn’t home. …If there was
someone at the door. Someone to follow
the delivery man. Yes, it’s all for me.

I wouldn’t have lied, or said tonight was not a bully,
if anyone had asked. But if I wanted
someone here, another hand, another mouth,
Could I have another slice?
I might have gone through names or thought
of extra large and more grabbing hands.

If someone came
and asked for me, I could have made room
on the couch that was too big for two
and opened up the box full of dinner getting cold.
I could invade the couch and
settle there for one night.

I can hear voices through the window
and I eat another slice, or three.

Hopeless

I used to be more romantic. I only have to look back a couple years (or is it a couple months?) to find a time when Saturday nights were full of amorous possibilities and bouquets of flowers at the grocery store made me imagine who I could give them to. Now I walk past said flowers and wonder why they put them out by the checkout where they’ll be withered and brown by the end of the day. And I spend plenty of Saturday nights catching up on homework or working on some writing project or another.
I wonder sometimes what caused this change. It was after coming home from my mission, but before starting this semester. I’m pretty sure it was after I broke up with my last girlfriend. But was it before I went to London? Or after I started writing the play about the failed marriage? And where exactly can I fit in my recent run-in with a few dating nightmares you thought only happened in the first half of a chick flick? But really, trying to pin down a specific incident or cause would be futile. The fact is, I am no longer the hopeless romantic of yesterday.
“Hopeless romantic.” What does that even mean? I never thought “hopeless” was a positive term except, perhaps, in this context. But how can we account for that? I Googled “hopeless romantic” and came up with an entry in the Urban Dictionary that said this:
“This person is in love with love. They believe in fairy tales and love. They're not to be confused as stalkers or creepy because that's not what a hopeless romantic is. All hopeless romantics are idealists, the sentimental dreamers, the imaginative and the fanciful when you get to know them. They often live with rose-colored glasses on. They make love look like an art form with all the romantic things they do for their special someone.”
The funny thing? Hopeless romantics seem to have a lot more hope than the rest of us. I scoff at love songs and wonder sometimes if there is a someone for everyone. But the romantics believe that anything is possible. Their dream girl is just around the next corner…okay, the next corner. Okay, any corner now. Me? I’m beyond that. In my extensive life experience of twenty-two years, I have at least learned that anything worth having doesn’t come easily. Anyone who thinks that it does is, well, hopeless.
That must be it. The hopeless romantics didn’t coin the phrase themselves. People like me did. My roommate called me a “skeptical romantic.” I certainly still have faith in the power of love (thank you Huey Lewis) but I take it with a grain of salt. Or a pinch of salt. Or a tablespoon, depending on the day. But I wouldn’t say I’m hopeless. I wonder sometimes if I would want to trade two feet firmly planted for the ability to fly again. Even with the potential hazard of the inevitable crash and burn. (How’s that for hopeless?) But I’ll stay where I am for now. And who knows? That dream girl around the corner might just change my mind.