I Miss The Mountains

Tonight, I made rotini with marinara sauce. If I'd've added some chicken breast cooked in olive oil and garlic, it would have been just like one of my randomly nice Montreat lunches after a morning shift.

This past weekend I saw a show and in one moment, one of the actors pulled out a guitar and started sitting and playing and I wanted, more than anything, to be back on a porch with half of summer staff crowded around people playing guitar.

I don't even know what was the trigger in church on Sunday, but I wanted to throw a pot so badly. (On the wheel, that is.)

The invitations for the Montreat Summer Staff Reunion are out, and I cannot go. It starts two days after I get my wisdom teeth removed, so I will be on medication that makes me even more unsafe behind the wheel. And possibly miserable. It breaks my heart that I won't be there.

It's not that I'm unhappy here or anything. I had a wonderful rehearsal that at times had me rolling on the floor in hysterical laughter tonight. It's that when you fall so deeply in love with places and the people in them, there's always a part of you that misses them. I missed PHTS at Montreat and I miss Montreat at PHTS.

What joy it is to have places worth missing!

I am desperately working to hold on to what I learned this summer. We get so caught up in our own little worlds here. I'm keeping my spiritual life up, which was one of my challenges coming into this year... but my personal life has slipped aside. I've never been known for having a lot of a personal life to begin with, especially being as introverted as I am, but I had one this summer, even if I was significantly less social than most. (social life =/= personal life) Just the act of making myself food tonight instead of grabbing something on the go was renewing, and there is such value to not working all the time (and I think for me specifically there are significant health benefits). I'll see what I can do about that for the rest of this semester, and make more adjustments for next semester. It's always about learning how to balance.

Through all of this God's voice is clearer than it ever has been, both internally in my heart and mind and externally from the lips of others. There are too many coincidences for them not to be miracles. There is such a joy in listening. I am waiting with baited breath for what I will hear tomorrow.

I feel like I'm being very abstract right now. More will become clear later, after Tongues is over and is in the post-mortem stage, when the semester is more behind me. It's hard to figure out all I need to figure out to formulate a solid post as I'm still within it. A lot is working. A lot if shifting. All of it is moving forward.