Snowflakes fall like velvet...

I am sitting down and writing this during an extremely rare occurance: a snow day at NYU.

NYU, for the record, never closes. Yesterday we got an e-mail from the Vice President for Public Safety, saying, "I have been at NYU for 13 years and we rarely close." From what I've heard, the last time NYU closed was 9/11.

But, after going to my first class today, we found out we'd be closed for the rest of the day, so now I'm back in the safety of my dorm room, very glad I still got to have Design, but also grateful for the unexpected interruption. I think the primary joy in snow days isn't the "I don't have to go to class!" bit, but is instead the phenomenon of having our lives halted by a force we cannot control. And yes, I think there's a joy in that. I actually quite love this kind of weather... I hate being out in it, but for me it's a continual reminder of God's presence and sovreignty. It reminds me of the summer, the mountain weather--how it would be sunny and then, BOOM, pouring down rain. And you could grumble about it, but it's a fact of life, so you might as well embrace it. I remember walking to the first staff craft night, wearing a t-shirt and a cheap tux shirt over it, and when I was halfway there, it started raining buckets. There was nothing I could do, so I just said, "BRING IT."

So now I am home with some leftover chicken 'n' dumplin's. Nothing like warm chicken 'n' dumplin's on a cold day.

I'm going through a mini-crisis. Perhaps it isn't really a crisis, but it's that a lot is changing and shifting and I've been trying desperately to explain it, but I've seriously started about four blog entries about it and it hasn't been working so far. Here's what I have:

• I am as calm this semester as I was in the mountains this summer. I am also as afraid as I was last semester. This is an incredibly strange combination of emotions, creating a weird tremor.
• I realized that I've always associated calmness with passivity and lack of passion, whereas I feel just as passionate as ever but with a kind of energy that is rather foreign to me.
• I am resisting entering "the real world", not because it scares me (it actually doesn't... yet), but because while I understand it, it doesn't make sense to me.
• I bristle at the idea that I am defined by what I do (like, my profession, not my actions). This is in direct opposition to my mantra of "I am what I do" (from Sunday in the Park with George) that I lived by in high school. While externally I do want to work as a director, designer, voice person, etc., internally I want to be a nun.
• The idea of being in a relationship with another person seems incredibly alien to me, as my relationship with God grows and strengthened. I am excited for this Sunday, February 14th, because it's Transfiguration Sunday.
• I just wrote a paper outlining a theater piece that now I want to create/do, which says that Song of Songs and Job are actually different sides of the same thing (the all-consuming fire of divine love). I'm not going to post it here, but if you want to read it, let me know.
• There's a Hindu belief that there are four stages of life. The first three (student, marriage, retirement) must happen in chronological order. The fourth stage can be entered at any time. The fourth stage is the stage where you renounce the world and shave your head and become a wandering monk, and that's the only stage I'm interested in.
• One of my teachers observed that a lot of things that the world considers strange but come naturally to me are things that are historically associated with religious/spiritual practices. Often, I'm rather unaware that there IS historical spiritual significance to them and I still link them to a kind of religious devotion. (the obvious example is shaving my head). He also visited the monastery at the base of Mount Sinai over break and said, "The presence of God was so strong I thought, 'Man, if Colleen was here, she'd never leave.'"
• I am frustrated at modern psychology explaining everything away until it has no more significance than a strange neurosis of the brain. It's like when people dismiss Artaud because "he's crazy", when I think that's all the more reason to listen to him. Joan of Arc would not be allowed to exist in today's world.
• God did not turn his back on man, man turned his back on God.
• Mystical experiences exist, and would exist more if we allowed them to. (I will not say much more about this or detail the specifics of this belief in a public forum, but feel free to ask me personally.)
• I do take some comfort in the fact that Peter had trouble walking on water even in times when those kinds of experiences would have been much more accepted than they are now. (I just now remembered that I wrote a monologue one year when I was a conferee at Montreat from Peter's perspective about that moment. Appropriate.)

I realize that all the shifts that I am undergoing right now are actually precisely what I have been aiming for as I have worked to live a God-centered life. They're just so outside what I am used to that they are more jarring than I expected.