Snapshots of Cumberland: A Proposal

Sorry for taking the entire month of June off from blogging.

I'm back!

This post could be poetic, romantic, humorous, or vague.

I'm just typing.

Cam took me on an impromptu day trip to Cumberland Island four weeks ago. 

Or so I thought.

I'm so glad that I snagged so many shots of the little details of that time and place, because I'm told that most people forget anything that was said or happened of the day they got engaged.

There were beautiful twisty live oaks like I remembered. 

We'd climbed on them when we were 14, speaking about our hearts for the first time, opening them for the first time, knowing for the first time.  

A fluffy, cloud-filled and sunny sky on a day miraculously sandwiched inside of a week's worth of hurricane rains.    

 The ruins of Dungeness and the Park Ranger who made Cam pretend to be a Native American chief.

 A quick picnic lunch as we plot our trajectory across the island.  

I have no idea that had I reached into the other bag, I would of grabbed hold of the socks wrapping the secret.

 A hike that turned into a trek that turned into a nervous trot, that I would not allow to turn into a full-out jog down the beach, consulting our watches as Cam says, "We have to get back to Dungeness!"

 The turn we should have taken that would have trimmed out travel time.

My confusion and naiveté regarding Cam's sudden passion for a spot half-way across the island.

 The field where Cam told me I was beautiful, and I told him I that I loved him.

 The many things that happened in between that field and this little box: the baby colt, the four hundred year old trees, the bended knee, and my numb, exhausted, joy.  

 The ring that is practically perfect in every way, a piece of treasured history, and a genuine surprise.

 The stories he unraveled of how he'd prepared for this day, asked my parents permission, and sneakily carved into my calendar this special day like the jewelry box he'd been carving for months.  

The absolutely overwhelming sensations of calm and rightness.

The sparkling new word fiancée, glittering like my ring, and the joy of hearing it from my father's mouth for the first time.  

Remember Harpy

For our final project in Sculpture, we were given a carving assignment. 

Carving is quite the undertaking: you have to wrap your brain around the restriction of using only subtractive measures because once you chisel a chunk away, you cannot put it back.

For Remember Harpy, I wanted a visual reminder to myself of what I can be at my darkest.

As a woman, I can choose to be a swan, a songbird, or a harpy.

Swan: captivating, elegant, and vain.

Songbird: lovely and adding something beautiful to the world.

Or harpy.

There is a long piece of history about the harpy:

In Greek mythology, the three harpies, or furies, were bird-women who were sent to torture and carry victims to Tartarus. 

Some sources say harpies originated as beautiful women who were warped into beasts.   

Since their appearance in mythology, they have cropped up in artwork in a variety of forms: sometimes beautiful, sometimes disfigured, and always evil.

Harpy

They appeared again in Dante's Alighieri's Inferno in the forest of punishment for self-murderes.  

Suicides were encased in trees and harpies ate their leaves.    

Engraving by Gustave Doré

The word "harpy" as an adjective is used by the character Benedick regarding the lady Beatrice in Shakespeare's play, Much Ado About Nothing.

He begs the prince to give him any range of unpleasant tasks to complete rather than "hold three word's conference with this harpy."

Where since I think it has evolved to its current conotation: a cold, shrewish, nagging woman.

Synonyms for harpy on dictionary.com include:

battle axe, dragon lady, shrew, gorgon, carper, critic, fault-finder, nitpicker, scold, and belittler. 

This harpy is a vice I have been battling intentionally this year.

She always resided in my breast, only unfurling her wings in my most extreme moments of selfishness and indignation, as poor Cam recoiled from my talons.  

Women, consider: how often do you nag?

How often do you consider yourself mistreated, abused, or unloved?

How often do you expect others to interpret your roiling emotions and fickle intentions?

How often do you give yourself the benefit of the doubt, but do not extend this simple courtesy to others?  

I am speaking from hindsight, here.  

I have bested harpy many times over the past year.

You see, when her wings unfurl, I can sense her coming.

When I feel irrationally angry, misused, or unappreciated, I know she is on the way.

So I fight her with gratitude, prayers for understanding, and the simple words: 

"My feelings are selfish and illogical right now."

In my sculpture I wanted to depict a woman skeletal, yet beautiful.  

Her muscles are pulled taut, forcing themselves into wings, leaving her powerless.  

As women, sometimes we hate our voices as we dispel acid on our victims--we feel helpless as we hear out mother's nagging coming from our own lips, and yet we plow on to make ourselves feel justified.

Harpy is a ship headed for destruction, imprisoned by her own vices, and she looks on in horror with gaping maw.  

Praying Hands: Be still and know that I am God

I am greeting you from the belly of my final's week. 

I have been tinkering with the idea of prayer, worship, journaling, meditation, and art--

and how I can go about communicating those things using bleeding color and ephemera on brown paper.  

For my final in Life Drawing I knew I wanted to do something with hands; 

I had so enjoyed the hand section of my Engineer with Coffee Pot piece.  

My solution was to complete a diptych on hands in prayer.  

I stalked about the Theta Xi house, pouncing on different brothers and asking them how they prayed.

I settled on my friend Sahil's hands, and bullied Cam into sitting still for my second set of interlaced fingers.  

Since my Engineer piece, I've added metallic oil pastels and two different shades of brown paper.  

I would have preferred to work exclusively on brown kraft paper, but my teacher insisted.  

Praying Hands: Be still and know

Praying Hands: that I am God

Jacob's Dream

I broke into my new pastels for the first time last night.

Literally broke--you have to unwrap and snap them in two if you really mean business.

Crack! 

That's that.

As I patched in the shapes of the model's back,

I saw Jacob appear before me:

Awake, and puzzling over his miraculous dream. 

"Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it!"

Genesis 28:16

Breathe On Me Now

Tonight I could not shake the heaviness in my limbs, my utter inability to sketch.

I prayed at my easel, asking God to bless my work or not, whatever His will.  

That's the thing with creativity--you must call it, ask it to stake its claim--and like the Spirit, you have to wait and let it overtake you.

Like the violins quickening their pace in my heart as I am forced, frozen, to feel it filling, flooding, like the words to this song, like the spirit pouring over my taut shoulders, like the ink spilling down the neck of my final sketch...I ask Him to breathe.   

This Made Me Think of You

It might be due to what I hope to do for a living, 

but my favorite gifts are always unexpected and accompanied by the words, 

"This made me think of you."

My sweet sorority sister, Emily, surprised me with these two small journals.

She didn't know about my passion for Japanese prints.

She certainly didn't know that I was nearing the end of my Gratefulness Journal and needed a new one.  

No, she simply bought them for no other reason than:

"I saw them and said, Rachel will love these!"

What wonderful friends I have.  

If you are interested, the covers are by famous Japanese printmaker, Hokusai. 

Gratefulness Warm-Up

Gratefulness.

It stretches out the kinks in my warped, convoluted, and inward-bending thinking.

Like the warm up before the miles ahead, God has been reiterating my need to say thank you and count my blessings before coming to Him with my weariness and requests.  

The miles are not so long when I have said "Thank you," before beginning them.  

This verse has been my constant reminder and has been changing the color and transparency of my heart towards Him:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.  

Phillipians 4:6

I have been especially devoted to my prayer and thankfulness journal, and it has been my catalog of all the small events that have made my life into something lovely and glorifying to Him. 

When I remember that my life has a storyline, and more importantly, that I am not the heroine of this story, I begin to see the patterns in His plan for me woven into this story. 

I have more faith in the intentionality of his hand in my life and have more confidence in Him to ward off the fear of the chaotic, the seemingly random. 

I begin to feel myself stepping within His story, my footfalls matching the rhythm of his heartbeat, rather than the disjointed, uneven stumbling that I make on my own, fighting against the flow of His life for me.  

New Watch, New Radio, Steady Love

I may sound like a scratched cd, but over and over again I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the love God has given me in Cam.  

We're going on six and a half years right now, and still God reveals new ways to love, communicate, compromise and learn from one another.  

For Christmas this year, we exchanged watches.  

We both knew what the other was ordering, so we simply got too impatient and gave our gifts last weekend.   

Mine is a lovely brown and brass watch, stamped with bold, chrome numbering and with thick, contrasting stitching on the leather strap: Little Havana by TOKYObay.  

I love it so much and have worn it every day.

I purchased Cam an automatic skeleton watch by Kenneth Cole.  

What is interesting about his is that the movement of his arms charges the watch--also you can see straight through it to the inner mechanisms.  

My mechanical engineer loves it.  

In addition to a gorgeous watch, Cam sweetly purchased me a new radio for my car and installed it this weekend.

We spent two sleepy hours attempting to heat solder and taking apart my dash whilst listening to Sufjan Stevens and the rain plinking on the hood of my car. 

The majority of time Cam and I spend together is also spent in the company of friends, which we do intentionally.  

Alone time is more frugally spent, and far more precious.

We are the best team, and that afternoon was one of my favorites we've spent together in a long time.  

After installing the radio we wrapped up the quiet evening with brie, chocolate almond cake, and a pot of chai at our familiar favorite: Cafe Intermezzo.

---

Cam, your conversation, kisses, and steady presence break my heart anew every time we see each other.  

Thanks for the radio.  

The Crux of the Matter

This semester has had a curious duality to it.

I have found wells and wells of deep peace and understanding and nearness to the Lord, and have simultaneously suffered from ambivalence and despair related to school.  

In spite of my careful planning and organization, things are lost, dates are forgotten, creativity dries up and I am paralyzed with awful shame, because for the first time in a long time, I could care less.  

I feel like there is a buzzing fog smothering my thoughts and actions. 

In the space of one week I lost my phone more times than I can count, my keys twice (no driving for two days), my wallet once (no nothing for five) and generally stumbled through each day aimlessly.

However, I stumbled with such bright shining peace and security.

My hope does not come from my own success, and God was whispering this to me every day.    

I have seen so much fruit this week:

I have had beautiful conversations, thank yous, quiet times and the work I have made has been near to my heart.

Above is my current painting (I've abandoned Lady with an Ermine for the time being) of my schema of influences.  

It is illustrative and rebelliously simple, and I love painting it.  

I've sequestered myself in the side room of the studio where there is the most natural light and have meditated and painted.  

I have found so much peace in this painting, stippling in tiny creatures and little words that make up my heart, and I thank God for the time to be so near him.  

He was Ready to Follow

He was Ready to Follow

We are all carrying loads. 

Nothing is so exhausting as someone coming to you with problems and having to tell them,

“My life is a mess right now, too.”  

But His strength is made perfect in our weakness, and when I am my most waterlogged, I’m most peaceful.  

All I can do is heave my bruised body up off the ground to ease your broken bones---I may be black and blue but I will take you to light and healing.

Phillipians 4:6 To not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving make your requests known to God.

A Traveler's Diary: Choosing to Love

I am the peer assistant for a freshman seminar taught by my favorite professor.  

So far I have enjoyed getting to know and assisting the girls in my class.  

The professor, Mary Beth and I met up yesterday to chat about an activity we’d be demonstrating for our girls.  

Based on their assigned reader, Matched, we each brought an “artifact” to show to the class--the sole item we would keep from our heritage if we were living in the dystopian society of the novel.  Mary Beth brought a gorgeous crazy quilt that belonged to her great grandmother, and I brought my dad’s traveler’s diary, barely twenty years old.  

I selected the diary because within its contents are my father’s feelings and inner dialogue as he is courting my mother.  

Within this special book are my origins.  

The reason I love it so much is, as I have always said, that my parents are the ones who taught me how to love.  

How to choose to love.  

Within the pages I see my father’s choice not only to love my mother, though time, geographic distance, class, religion and a variety of other factors separated them, but his choice to love me, too.  

They have taught me to be a friend, they have taught me how to love Cam.  

I have found in life that love often begins with a flutter...like the uncontrollable flail of an infant’s arm...but once we have caught hold of that feeling we may begin to exercise it...to flex it and train it and make our love a strong, robust and usable thing, far less fragile than the random flailing of a newborn. 

We choose to love, and the choice makes our love grow stronger.  

Dear Publix...thank you for filling my bucket

Well, the first day of my junior year of college has come and nearly gone...the last light of day is waining, and I'm taking a few quiet moments to collect myself and fill my bucket.

"Filling your bucket" is a phrase that has been used frequently by the alpha gam household of late.  

On our leadership retreat for campus leaders, the counselor walked around offering lollipops from a bucket.

After we all happily accepted, she asked how many of us had taken candy.

Then she asked, "How many of you put something back into my bucket?"

After cricket noises, she went on to explain that we all have buckets of candy, the contents of which we are giving to people every day--and if we don't find out what things fill our bucket, then we will go empty.  

We then had to write down things that we would do intentionally to fill our buckets.

My list includes:

Quiet time and prayer every morning

Giving way to much business to Inman Perk coffee

Taking time to visit Cam and visit the guys

Creating

Working out
Family time

Sisterhood time

Thrift Shopping

The opening of this year is far more and less stressful than the last.  

This year I am Vice President Recruitment and should be up to my eyeballs in panic, but since I've been filling my bucket, I have more energy and control and have had far fewer weepy hours.

To fill my bucket today, I went to Publix and picked out a snack to perk me up throughout the week (Publix dried fruits, granola and espresso beans), went to Step Class, and am now indulging a few minutes to reflect and blog.

I hope this finds you well.

Sixth Anniversary Picnic

I've been bursting to spill about our anniversary plans, but I knew that pictures speak far louder than words and decided to wait until we finally went out for our picnic.

We munched happily in Piedmont park, while watching a man train his dogs.  

 Isn't it a beautiful set?

This year we decided that instead of getting each other gifts we would buy something together that we thought we'd really use.

We decorated these mason jars with paint pens--the great thing about these guys is that they seal in whatever you don't want to spill out into the basket!

We decided on a simple dinner, taking a leaf out of the Italian cookbook, we had gli affettati misti (assorted sliced meats) and cheeses.

Derwicious sourdough!

I wore Cam's favorite blue dress.

We finished with fresh, light and scrumptious chocolate dipped strawberries.

The Fox and the Bunny: Here's to 6 Years

Happy Anniversary, my love.  

Thank You and Goodbye

This summer has been so incredible.

I had an amazing job that widened my eyes and expanded my hopes and horizons.

I was offered so much more clarity as to what I want to pursue, and what brings me joy.

I learned how my brain, body and fount of inspiration work, and how to manipulate them so that I can work at peak productivity and peace.

I learned how to rest in God, and how to draw strength and boldness from Him.

Most of all, I learned that I do truly love to share---to teach.

My weekly tutorials bloomed of their own accord and turned into a stringed series of vignettes--people's lives that I dipped and poured into.  

I watched startled grins and shouts of triumph, I answered questions and sent others on missions of their own.  

The perfect bow to this summer was the black one wrapped around my dot-making paint brush--a gift from a grateful new friend, whom I look forward to continue teaching and learning from.

To all those who touched my life this summer through cups of tea, cooked meals and movie nights-- and who so humbly allowed me to teach them in turn--I love you and am so glad to call you my friends.