Did you hear that? It was a huge sigh of relief. Order is finally being restored to our little cottage in wake of our mold issues, and after a nine day stretch at work which I concluded this evening, I have FOUR days off to spend with my sweetheart as we celebrate the first anniversary of our wedding (this Saturday, already). And so, because I am ready to get down to the business of putting our house back in order and then relaxing, I have just a short post for you tonight.

I wanted to share one of my favorite photos, which I have never posted here:

(view larger)

I took this almost two and a half years ago, during a season of transition and re-evaluation in the middle of my Gutenberg career. (It was, actually, just before Gil and I started getting to know each other. Hmmm.)

Those familiar with this walk will have recognized it immediately, but that red, pointed-roofed building in the background is the school I called home for four years, and that wonderful gnarled-wood fence in the foreground belonged to a Jewish family who lived down the street from it. That family recently moved (and they took their fence with them), and soon Gutenberg students may not live in that red brick building either. Time clips along, and people and their belongings move in and out of these places we call home.

Yesterday we drove by a building in which our church met when I was a little girl. I’ve driven by this building often, and not often thought about it. But yesterday I happened to catch a glimpse in one of the windows, and suddenly I could smell the carpet on the staircase—I could taste the nerves as I waited backstage for my part in a children’s play—I could feel the weight of those red hymnals on my lap and the pride I felt at raising my voice in song (more clearly and beautifully than anyone else’s, I hoped). Years melted in that glance.

This photo, that experience, and the effort Gil and I have been putting into making our current home home, have left me with half-baked, percolating thoughts about home, and what it means, and these strange ties that we have to buildings and objects in this life. We can’t, after all, take it with us—and yet spaces have this strange power to bottle up our memories within their walls and hand them back to us when we come back to them.

Anyway. Half-baked, as I said. Do with them what you will. And please feel free to add any of your own thoughts (baked or otherwise)—I look forward to hearing them.

Last night and this morning I read through all of the public posts I have made to date on Lylium.org.

“What an incredibly egotistical thing to do,” you’re saying—and you are probably right. But I have been doing a lot of thinking about the past lately, and the fact is we can learn a lot about ourselves and how far we have (or have not) come by reading things we have written. Also, since I spend the majority of my days wandering through life with blinders on, being bitter and uptight about inconsequential things as if I have no idea what is really important, it is helpful to remember that at a few points in my life, for however many nano-seconds, I apparently had a grasp on reality. And that, Lord willing, I might accomplish this again at some points in the future.

This post does have another point, and I will get to it, but for those of you who have nothing better to do, here are a few of my favorite posts that I unearthed:

More Serious:

• What I Could Have Said
• Midnight Michelangelo
• Watching the Hourglass
• Please Take Note
• Fuelling Up
• Sorted
• Twenty-something

More Funny:

• Someday I Hope To Be That Skilled
• Another Episode in the Chronicles of Erin’s Continuing Humiliation
• Gas Station Anxiety Claims Another Victim
• Returning to Our Roots
• They Should Pay Me For Ideas Like This

Anyway, besides the soul-searching and all that, reading through my archives also reminded me of a humbling truth: through the years I have been writing this blog (five now, if you’re counting), I have been gifted with a number of extraordinary readers who took their time and attention and gave some of it to ME. And reading back through the comments I received, I was honestly floored by how encouraging, uplifting, and helpful many of them were. Those readers, many of whom I didn’t “know,” gave me gifts by writing those comments.

Now, I know, I’ve been a little “La, la, I’m just writing for me, and it doesn’t matter if anyone listens or understands it, so I’ll just post cryptic photos and titles” over the last few years. And I still think there is a certain amount of wisdom in that approach—I can’t be all things to all people, and if I start taking readers into account in the wrong way while I am writing, I start feeling crippled or anxious about what they’ll think. (I believe I mentioned this phenomenon before.) However. The fact is that I have decided to post these things on the internet, and the only point in doing so is that someone else might read them. That is my goal, and so the knowledge that people are reading should, and does, bring me joy.

So now that I’ve gotten that off my chest—you all know, probably, what this post is about. I don’t know how many of you are out there, but I would love to know who you are. No, really, YOU, you person who just randomly surfed on to this website for the first time and may never return. Or you, who have been with me from the beginning, and I already know you’re reading (Hi, Mom!)—you should leave a comment too. And you, everyone in between: I want to hear from you!

If I don’t know you, tell me a bit about yourself. Where are you from? What’s on your mind? How did you find this site and when?

If I do know you, tell me how you’re doing. What did you do today? If we haven’t talked for a while, what have you been up to?

And, if you’re planning on sticking around, I’d love to hear: What kinds of posts are you most interested in seeing on Lylium.org in the future? Any burning questions you’d like me to answer? I may or may not follow your suggestions, but I will definitely listen.

Thanks for your time and attention, whoever you are… I look forward to finding out.

(Press play: just some lovely music to go with photos of a lovely musician.)

Once upon a time, I used to take pictures of people. It’s a practice I’d like to get back into. I’d also like to begin sharing some favorites I’ve re-discovered (and in some cases, re-processed) from past sessions that have never yet seen the light of day on this blog.

These portraits are of my dear friend Mckenzie, who asked me to take photos for her junior cello recital. We drove out to a nearby ranch/orchard one sunny spring afternoon two years ago.

I always regretted not posting any of these photos, because the light and the greenery and the colors were all playing together perfectly that day. And Mckenzie (and her music) shone beautifully, too.

Much has happened in each of our lives since we took these photos; in many ways, they do feel like they belong to a past life. But it was a chapter worth remembering, I think, and I am grateful for people like Mckenzie, who gave me the opportunity to capture a tiny bit of what made it special.

Yesterday we drove my friend Molly up to the Portland airport, where with a quick hug and a “love you, see you soon” (we were running a bit late, as per my usual), she disappeared into the terminal and presumably caught her plane back to Maryland. Gil and I went on to “adventure” a bit in Portland—we visited some good friends and ate at an absolutely delicious Paleo diner, among other things—but on the way home I had time to reflect on my visit with Molly.

I have been blessed with a number of amazing friends—friends with whom I feel confident that I share a view of what is most important in this world, with whom I can trust everything from my silliest whims to my most serious fears—and I treasure each and every one of them because each of them has witnessed an important part of my growth as a person, and each of them has left their own unique, indelible stamp on my psyche. I honestly can’t imagine my life without any one of these girls. And Molly is one of them.

Molly and I entered each others’ lives at a Gutenberg “Freshman Tea” one Sunday afternoon now almost five years ago. I’d like to tell you that we had a magical “friends at first sight” connection and that our relationship was smooth sailing from there until she was my Maid of Honor, but the truth is more like this: I latched on to her right from the beginning of our Gutenberg career—latched really being the appropriate word. Molly was the first of my friends to give me a real lesson on boundaries in a friendship; namely, her boundaries, and how I was blatantly unaware of them. Not a very pretty picture, is it? But it’s the truth, and the sometimes-ugly truth of our stories is often also where the beauty lies—because, though it so easily could have been, that confrontation was not the end of our friendship. We both adjusted, and grew, and we came back together as slightly stronger friends.

Also of particular significance to our relationship was the year that we decided to be roommates—our junior year of Gutenberg. We approached the idea with appropriate caution, I think, given our history; but I, at least, couldn’t help feeling a bit giddy about how cute we were going to make our room, how wonderful life was going to be, etc. (This is the way it goes when I approach a new living situation: the ways in which I believe it will improve my life know no bounds.) But reality, as it always does, interceded. We did, in fact, have a great time decorating our room. (It was amazing, if I do say so myself. I’ll have to post pictures of it sometime.) But it didn’t take too long for us to realize, individually, that we were stressed up to our eyeballs by the other person; by our communication, by our lack of communication, by our assumptions, by our fears and worries and annoyances. We got to the point where, in a lot of ways, it would have been easiest to give up on our relationship—to remain cordial roommates but not really friends.

But that is not what we did. Somehow, miraculously, we both resolved in ourselves that we were going to make this thing work, and we opened up. We took emotional risks and resolved things that desperately needed to be resolved. We dug deep enough to build real trust between the two of us—something which I don’t think had ever really been present before.

I thought about all this as Gil drove us home down I-5 last night and the sunset-lit fields flashed by my window. And I thought about how now, on this visit, even though we hadn’t seen each other for almost a year, being with Molly was as easy as breathing—how she and I have both grown and deepened and settled into our own skins, and how that has only made our friendship richer. I also thought about how having a friend like Molly is pretty much one of greatest blessings you could ask for in this life and how our friendship never would have come about without a lot of hard work.

Hard work is not something any of us tend to seek out, especially in our relationships. We would much rather take the easy way out—not admit that we were wrong, not apologize for hurting the other person, not open up about our fears and concerns. So I am thankful for reminders, like my friendship with Molly, that if, by the grace of God, you can make the choice to work hard, there are great rewards to be reaped.

(I wrote this post a few weeks ago but never published it. I’m still in the throes of writing my thesis, but there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel. And it is getting closer. I’ll let you know when I surface.)

I’ve had the same bedspread since I was 14. That is going to change this summer, for obvious reasons, but for now I am still camouflaged by my bed when I sit on it in jeans.

Which makes me think of… (it doesn’t really, but I’m trying to somehow tie this post together) Anna Karenina. I finished it just in time for the discussion we had on Wednesday, and I do not think that anything I have read has affected me as strongly since The Deathly Hallows. (If you are tempted to laugh at that, please re-read the entire Harry Potter series and then get back to me. But that is a different discussion altogether.) The novel is incredibly rich, and I highly recommend it; please do not be scared of its 940 pages. Even if you take a year to read it, which I almost did, I think you will find it worthwhile.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the book is Tolstoy’s incredible grasp of the way people work. I found myself in every character he wrote, because no matter how evil and selfish some of the choices that the characters made were, Tolstoy refused to “villainize” any character–he showed their thought processes in such a way that it honestly left me wondering whether I would not make the same choice in their situation. This is the danger of all our evil; it is so easy to convince ourselves that it is good.

Song for today: