Both of my windows are looking out on gorgeous flowering trees right now. Despite the fact that it is bizarrely cold here, spring truly has arrived.

I am sorry for my absence. It turns out that life is not always easy to bottle up, classify, and set on a shelf for scrutinization. Because of this, and because said life has been incredibly busy, blogging of all kinds has had to take a back seat of late. But I am still here.

Today was one of those days. The kind of day where it was sunny outside but foggy in my head; where every glance at my piles of laundry and scatters of papers was not a reason to take action, but instead a reason to furrow my brow and feel sorry for myself. It was the kind of day where every single molehill, no matter how tiny, seemed like an everest-sized mountain to climb.

And I have oh-so-many molehills.

That’s the problem with these kind of days; they find me when I need them least. This is, has been, and I fear will continue to be my pattern for dealing with life. I roar ahead full throttle on projects that I care about until the details of my life come knocking at my door and my to-do list grows too long—and then I shut down. I can’t answer emails, I can’t work on photos, I can hardly bear to lift my head off the pillow in the morning. Wake me up when life is easy, please.

It doesn’t work, of course. This perverse determination to procrastinate is not the least bit relaxing; it gives me chills and makes me nauseous and feels like a hundred-pound weight on my shoulders. Please, Lord, hurry up and make life easy.

I won’t pretend for a moment that I’m proud of this behavior. It is sick and wrong and irresponsible. (If only correctly labeling it as such made it easier to stop.) But the sick, wrong, irresponsible truth is that my broken spirit often reaches this point of desperation; the point at which doing nothing seems so incredibly much easier than doing something.

And it’s at that point that I realize how much I need help; how much I’m not going to crawl my way out of this canyon on my own—little, tiny, powerless, human me.

Thankfully, we tiny, powerless humans are not alone. Which is good, because I don’t know if you noticed, but life doesn’t really get easy. But even though it’s not easy, it’s time… time for me to pull myself out of this mire of self-pity and sloth, brush myself off, and keep moving forward.

Please, Lord, help me keep moving forward.

One of my good friends (and fellow Gutenberg students) has described summer as a “pit-stop on the highway of life”—a time to relax, refuel…. and just sit there. Going nowhere.

Mind you, take my friend’s words with a grain of salt—he despises summer with rarely-seen fervor. But this year, I think he has a point.

I know it’s an odd sentiment from someone whose summer has been characterized by ceaseless activity, but I, too, have felt “paused” since the middle of June. Partly, I know, this is due to the unsettledness of my worldly possessions—one look at my bedroom floor, piled three layers deep with clean (or dirty; who can tell?) clothes, reveals the story of a girl who is perching, not nesting.

Another contributing factor is the absence of friends who became dear to me over the course of the school year. This is the first time I’ve had to deal with class- and house-mates leaving me for the summer, and I can’t say I like it.

But more than the practical realities of far-away friends or a messy room, something else is not quite right… something in the air at Gutenberg that is as hard to pinpoint as it is conspicuously absent from my summer.

It can’t be simply the absurd level of busy-ness that my life reached last school year, because between working at my anonymous retail location, shooting and editing four weddings, and trying to get my fledgling photography business off the ground, I’ve been rivaling that level all summer.

There is a qualitative difference, I’ve decided, between my activities at Gutenberg last year and those I’ve occupied myself with this summer. My summer undertakings have all locked my focus squarely on this temporal existence of ours. They’re fun, they’re challenging, they’re engaging—but they leave me weighted to the ground—engulfed by daily matters and completely oblivious to bigger, greater goings on.

Thankfully, Gutenberg does not hesitate to jackhammer away the kind of cement shoes I’ve been pouring myself all summer—eternal importance is peeking through the very weave of its curriculum. One cannot put themselves through the readings and discussions and interactions at Gutenberg without asking themselves what this whole “life” thing is all about—about what’s really, truly important. My soul is beginning to yearn for this atmosphere of fumbling and frank exploration.

My parents and I stopped by Gutenberg tonight as we were running errands, and we took the opportunity to check out the room I will be living in come fall. This tiny room, which I have longed to live in since I was ten years old (a story for another post, perhaps), has been tickling the back of my mind all summer—a tantalizing reminder of the school year that lies ahead. But not until tonight, as we measured for curtains and a desk, did the reality of the coming year really hit me.

Suddenly, that amorphous feeling of Gutenberg nostalgia solidified into four walls, a ceiling and a floor—this room would be my Gutenberg. This is where I would read, and laugh, and cry, and have my mind blown in ways I can’t even imagine. It was all real. We were coming back for another year. And I couldn’t have been happier.

I have to admit: as far as pit-stops go, this summer’s been a pretty nice one (definitely one of those fancy gas stations that has really clean bathrooms). I have so much to be thankful for, and so little to really complain about. I know that. I do.

But even so, I hope you’ll understand me when I say: I’m ready to hit the road.

My roommate moved out today. She packed up her clothes and her books and the netting that hung above her bed; she put them in boxes and loaded them into the truck that carried her home—and with her, she took more than half the life away from our little basement room.

Her departure was a visceral reminder that my mind has been so focused on the details of this final and that paper that I have been totally oblivious to my first year of college slipping out from under my feet.

But here it goes—there it went. This time next week, I will be back on my growing-up end of town, spending time with my friend Savanna and processing photos and going to work at my anonymous retail location—and, most likely, I will be missing school.

I guess what I’m trying to say is—I need to appreciate what I have while I have it. Because as much as I would love to fast forward past my studying and my paper-writing, there’s so much in these days to appreciate: the lovely evening air that’s blowing in these windows; the familiar, beloved faces buried in their books just like me; even the pressure of having to make myself work—these moments are blessings. Life is thick with them, and they are thick with life.

And they are slipping by faster than I possibly could have imagined.

For weeks, I have longed for the sweet, sweet freedom that is spring break. While I was staying up all hours of the night writing papers and studying for finals, I imagined what it would be like to spend my time taking photographs and writing blog posts and cleaning my room and organizing my life and when I was tired just… going to bed!

And then reality hit.

You see, while a normal, sane person might look at a day like today—a day completely free of prearranged responsibilities—and say, “Hey! Today is my opportunity to do all kinds of things! I can get together with friends, I can write, I can draw, I can take care of projects that have been nagging me,” I took one look at today and said, “Too many options. Overwhelmed. Going back to bed.”

And that is how I found myself, after I returned from taking my roommate to the train station this morning, sleeping away half the afternoon. You could argue that I needed the sleep, but all the same, it left me feeling bitter at myself for wasting all that precious time.

One of the nice things about having a confining, crazy-making school schedule, I’ve discovered, is that it tends to crowd out all the ways you could be spending your time and focuses your attention on the task at hand: completing schoolwork. In that way, it actually removes responsibility. It also prevents you from sleeping through the whole day.

There I go again—eyeing that grass on the other side of the fence. Don’t worry… in a few weeks I’ll be longing for summer break.

… It wasn’t me, that’s for sure!

They say time flies when you’re having fun.

Apparently it also flies when you have so many responsibilities putting a vice grip on your skull that your eyeballs are in danger of popping out.

Of course, I’m sure that magical time when I will have magnificently fulfilled all of my responsibilities and am able to spend all my time cuddling in a cozy blanket with a warm cup of tea and surveying the wickedly-organized serenity that will characterize every aspect of my life from my sock drawer to my day planner is just around the corner, right?

RIGHT?

Ah, well. I have a vague notion that all of this is good for me, somehow. And by “all of this” I guess I mean “life,” because I honestly do not expect it to get any less hectic. But we’ll see.

Christmas has come and gone. We had a lovely little celebration with our family, from which I will eventually post pictures. In the meantime, please enjoy this column which I wrote for 20Below about Christmas. It was published in the paper today, and you can read it online. But I am also copying it into my blog so that it will be saved if that link ever breaks.

Here it is:

One night, when I was about 7 or 8, I sat in the back seat of our family car with my nose pressed against the cold glass. It was a long drive home, and I occupied myself by staring at the headlights of the oncoming cars, watching them creep closer and closer to our car until WHOOSH! they were gone behind us into the night.

Somehow, this reminded me of looking forward to something. You waited and watched as the special event crept ever closer, and then suddenly in the blink of an eye it was gone.

That is exactly how I experienced Christmas. Around Thanksgiving I would start to realize that my favorite holiday was right around the corner, waiting for me at the end of a torturously long month. As the big day approached, my parents and my brother and I would put up decorations, get a Christmas tree, watch our sputtering VHS tape full of cartoon Christmas specials, and count the days on our Advent calendar.

Finally, I would find myself lying in bed on Christmas Eve, clutching my comforter and squeezing my eyes shut, trying desperately to stop thinking about the next morning so it would just be here.

Christmas was simple back then. Our traditions were comfortingly familiar, year after year. It was never something to worry about it was only something to enjoy. But, like most things in life, Christmas has become more complicated as I have grown older.

Some of the complications are small: my older brother, who used to enforce our Christmas traditions like they were scripture, has moved out and become married. And while we love his wife and her family, watching him start to separate his traditions from ours is bittersweet.

What’s more, my brother and his wife may be moving to another state next year, and I probably will have moved away from home. Next Christmas, our family’s landscape will be completely different. And even though these changes are good, they tug at the heartstrings of that little girl who loved sitting around the tree on Christmas morning with her family.

But some of the complications are more significant. I don’t know whether the world has really become sadder since I was little, or whether I am only now beginning to really see and understand it. I suspect it is the latter. In either case, many of my dearest friends and family have sadness and struggles in their lives—illness, family tensions, loneliness problems that will not magically disappear because of Christmas.

As a child, I heard about people who didn’t get excited about Christmas. They were the reason that the “Whos down in Who-ville” had to reach out to the Grinch—the reason that Tiny Tim had to melt Scrooge’s heart. But I never understood how anyone could actually feel that way.

Now, in light of our messy lives, and the changes and struggles that come at all of us throughout the year, I understand that we could all use some encouragement at Christmastime.

Of course, some things never change. I really do still enjoy Christmas I still love the decorations, the music, the times I get to spend with my family. And Christmas still feels like a car speeding past us in the night.

But now, with a few years of perspective, I can see that while Christmas is an exciting, wonderful time, it is not as simple as I used to believe. And now, more than ever, I appreciate the story of the baby born so long ago in Bethlehem. It is a story that should bring hope to us all, no matter what our Christmas looks like this year.

Because, as Linus put it, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

The following conversation was recorded INSIDE MY HEAD last night at approximately 12:30 am:

“Ummph. I can’t sleep. Why can’t I sleep? I’m tired. My room is dark. It’s quiet. I didn’t drink caffeine today. I’ve tried counting camera lenses that I want and everything. What’s the problem?”

The problem is probably that your hyperactive brain won’t shut down for the night. You should try rolling over to the side on which you normally sleep. Maybe it will get the hint.

*rolls over *

“AGH! The pain! In my abdomen! What was that? Why did it only hurt when I rolled over?? Am I dying???”

Uh oh, here it comes. Here comes the senseless worrying. The countless scenarios spun out past all probability. Please, let’s just avoid all of that and go to sleep.

“But, I mean, what could it be? It couldn’t be, like, my ribs poking into my heart, could it? I couldn’t be internally bleeding right now, could I? Or could I be… having a heart attack?”

No, that’s silly. Good grief, don’t let the darkness and your fatigue get the better of your common sense. You know everything seems scarier at night. It’s probably nothing, anyway. Remember that one time when you were like eight and you were in the shopping mall with your dad and brother and kept screaming, “My tummy hurts SOOOO bad! Dad, I feel AWFUL!” And he said back to you, “Erin, it’s probably just GAS.” Do you remember how that shut you up? Do you remember how crimson your face turned? Well, that is probably what is happening to you right now. So I recommend that you forget about it and go to sleep.

“I suppose you’re right. But, now that you’ve got me thinking about it… isn’t it scary to imagine all the little things that could go wrong in your body? I mean, if any one of the hundreds of tiny processes that sustain your body stop working, it could very easily cause a chain reaction leading to your death—or, at the very least, your severe discomfort.”

Oh please. Don’t start with that one again. You did enough of that in your Biology class.

“No, but really, think about it! There are so many things that could go wrong! How can you possibly just go on existing without trembling in fear?”

Hold on there. Don’t forget who’s controlling this whole operation: it’s not you, and it’s not nobody. It’s God, and He is a whole lot better at it than you ever could be. So if He says your body’s going to keep on working, it’s going to keep on working. And if He says it’s not going to, then it’s not going to. And remember, this world is not what it’s all about, anyway. Death and discomfort are not the worst things that can happen to you.

“Thanks. I needed that. Sorry for whining… the dark must have addled my brain.”

Told you so.

“Well, goodnight, then.”

Pleasant dreams.

*zzZZZZzzzzZZZZzzzz… *

I would like to think that I am a pretty great person.

I would like to imagine that people like me and that I am in many ways the pinnacle of God’s creation.

I don’t articulate that literally, of course… but, if I am to be brutally honest about it, that is the way I usually carry on my life.

But no matter how many right answers I give or how many smug, self-centered jokes I tell, I still manage to sometimes shove my foot so far down my throat that it is in danger of coming out my rear end.

It is then, in those moments of shocking clarity, when my balloon pops and comes plummeting back down to earth, that I realize I am just as capable of hurting other people as the people that I tend to judge as being hurtful. Turns out I’m really not so great after all—in fact, I am decidedly human.

And that is when I say, “God? Thanks, but… no thanks. I could use a little less ‘being humbled’ right now. It is seriously messing with my plans to be the awesomest person in existence.”

… Add that to the list of “prayers we don’t really want God to answer.”