Needed Rest

Once I was seated on the plane during my first leg of the trip, it didn't take me long to pull out a book to read.  I had been looking forward to that moment for two months.  Well, I would have been looking forward to it if I'd had the time.  I was so intensely busy I even let my dishes go and only washed them when I really needed to.  Most of the rest of the house stayed picked up. 

Do you remember me talking about the rocks in the jar?  It's a good thing I dumped out that jar before working on publishing the books because there is no way I would have been able to continue juggling everything, including this blog, and ready the books for printing at the same time.  My two poetry books are beautiful.  Through the work of Emily on the cover art and Janelle on the design, they look fantastic.  The insides too, have been redone, cleaned up, added to, and even a tad rewritten.  Christine's book is completely new so I had to lay it out, work with her on cover design, and we worked on all the edits.  It was a very intense two months of work.  Well worth it, but not a pace I can readily sustain for a long period of time.

By the time I gave the woman my ticket and carried my bags onto the plane, I was done, 110% done.  Not just done as in the books were at the printers being printed up, which they are, but emotionally and physically spent several times over.  I have had an image in my head of myself all dry and cracked, bleeding and parched.  Before I truly settled into my book, I talked to God about it and had the sense he was taking me here for awhile so he could rub some of that healing balm into my soul, that he would minister to me over and over again as only many repeated applications of balm would heal me. 

As I've said in other places, printing one book takes over your life--three are insane.  So now I am here in Indiana to rest.  Brie, the woman next to me on the plane, after hearing where I was going and for how long, was speechless for a second and then exclaimed, "Why?!"  But Richmond is a very pleasant town and a great place for me to rest and relax.  There isn't a lot of big things to go see so I can spend much of my time reading books I neither have to write nor edit.  Heaven.  I can write if I want, attend seminary classes if I want, spend time with friends, and cuddle a cat named Chub in what has quickly become my favorite house.  At this moment his head is resting on my elbow (Carole and he just came to a good compromise on who got that particular seat on the couch--they're sharing it.)

Yesterday I spent at Quaker Hill cuddled up on a couch downstairs reading a book about who really killed Humpty Dumpty when he fell off that wall.  Thinking about it, I realized I felt so raw, I needed to escape into a book as a kind of protective layering.  That and a lovely walk through the woods was exactly what I needed.  Today I spent at Earlham School of Religion.  It was really nice to meet some of the community there and see some of my friends who attend.

So thank you for hanging in here and still reading after this long break.  I really do appreciate it.  Now that the books are off to the printers, I will have a lot more time to write.  When I get home which won't be until late next week, I'll post pictures of the new covers.

I pray you too, are all finding the rest you need.

The Flight from the Underworld

"I'm sorry folks, but..."  We heard a version of that several times on the second leg of my trip.  At first it was a mechanical repair, then it was our co-pilot being over his allotted hours, then having to run some diagnostics.  All in all, we spent about four hours waiting in our plane on the tarmac at the airport.  At one point, they had driven the plane to another gate to let the co-pilot off and wait for a new one and while we waited, they let us all off for fifteen minutes.  That's when one of the staff got on the microphone and said, "I know it's been a flight from the underworld for you all tonight..."  (Halloween no less.)

As far as I went, I was only concerned that it was going to be a very late night for the woman picking me up.  Other than that, I didn't mind too much.  Between being stuck overnight in Chicago once and having experienced Kenya travel myself and through the stories of others, I had other things to compare the flight to than ones that always left on time.  On top of that, I had no connection to make, I had been assigned a window seat in the emergency row with lots of leg room, a very nice and interesting young woman named Brie was my seat partner with an empty seat between us where we could spread out our stuff, and her delightful and funny mother and brother were sitting on the other side of the aisle.  All in all, I actually enjoyed it.  It was one of those moments when I got to decide what kind of attitude I was going to have.  I could be upbeat and laugh, or I could be grumpy and impatient.  Either way, we were going to be sitting there on the tarmac for the same amount of time.  I chose to laugh.

We laughed when they came over the intercom to tell us they were giving us each a voucher but didn't tell us what it was because my neighbors and I then came up with all kinds of things it could be: a free soda on our next flight or a dollar off our next purchase being our favorites.  We laughed again when the baby started making runs for the main door via crawling down the aisle at full speed with it's mother hurrying along behind to catch him.  We wanted to time him to see how long it would take him to get there or find another baby and hold races.  We laughed some more after leaving the gate again and then waiting, again, on the tarmac, without the pilot coming on to tell us why.  We figured he was too afraid to tell us what was going on after all the hours we had already waited so we entertained ourselves by coming up with all the possibilities of what could be causing our delay.  A new crew or new pilot being our top guesses.

There were some passengers who were rather irate by the end.  I can understand that.  I would have been far more upset myself if I had to be somewhere at a certain time or had a connection to  make that I would have certainly missed.  That's when the test of a good attitude really comes into play.  But as I didn't, I was fine and now I have some kind of voucher to use and since I love to travel, any help in paying for that is appreciated.  In the end, it's true what they say, "Good things come to those who wait."  Thank you God for a safe flight here.