exposed, and set free.

I'm home.

So much happened this week. So much and hardly anything at all. It's just like everything else I write about: important because I make it sound important. By this I mean that if my life were a book narrated in any voice but my own, you probably wouldn't read it. Nothing really all that staggering or thrilling happens usually, but I try to write it like I see it. I see so much soul and metaphor in all of these things that happen around me, and I know that someone else must want to know about them, too.

Actually, I don't know that. I hope for it.

And I know I'm not the only one hoping to illuminate the so-called mundane world with splinters of inspiration.
How do I know? Because of you. You're here, aren't you? Reading is as noble as writing, only in a different way. You're committing your time, your eyes, your thoughts, to the exploration of someone else's ideas. You're setting down the other possibilities for this moment in your life and saying, silently, "I want to be a part of Annie Morning's world."

Well, you could say it out loud if you wanted. I don't recommend this.


Anyway. All of that leapt out of my fingers before I knew what else to do with it. I hope it is coherent. I do, however, have a good reason for having so many word tribes warring in my brain. This is all a part of an epic anecdote I shall relate to you....now.

So, camp. The rushiest way to quiet your soul known to man. All week you have this flock of people telling you that you must link yourself to God, you must experience the power of His Spirit, you must cling to His Presence above all else, and yet! They are also constantly telling you to get up before the sun, go to bed way too late, and scream and jump and flail your arms around for the whole day in between.* From experience, I know that these two realities lie in deep and confusing contrast with one another, making the whole camp process much more like doing spiritual algebra than taking any sort of vacation. It goes like this:

If n is equal to quiet times and b is greater than team spirit, how many times can Jimmy the sixth grader do the zipline in one day?

(The answer, of course, is undefined.)

All of this to say that I found it to be undeniably beneficial to my sanity and my spiritual equilibrium to get up early each morning and wander into some quiet gazebo on the lake to spend time alone with my God. These times, truly, were what kept me walking instead of stumbling through the week. One such morning, I was perching in the gazebo nearest to the edge of the lake (the least buggy, from what I could tell, which is why I had exchanged it for my regular spot) when, from nowhere, tragedy struck.

My journal, the physical representation of the last year-or-so of my life, leapt into the lake, and began to raft away.

Gasping, I froze for a fraction of a moment, then streamed out of the gazebo and into the mucky water to retrieve my runaway journal. Having rescued it, I surveyed the damage with unbelieving eyes. I was entirely rigid on the inside during the hundred-year walk back to the lodge. My hearts most intimate murmurings had been violated by the watery, smearing hands of Awanita Valley's lake. Quite truly, I was mortified. I had images of words, irreversibly melting down the pages, dancing around in my heart. I was sobbing on the inside, but with determination and resolve written on my face and in the steadiness of my hands. I was a surgeon. The patient would survive.

In the end, Miss Betsy, a friend/mom/counselor/journal ER nurse, became the heroine of the story. She steadied me with understanding words, and gave me hope that the damage could be limited to only minor scarring if we operated in time. So, we did. Carefully, softly, we laid out every individual page on the floor in the ping-pong room of the girl's lodge. Blow-dryers in hand, we saved the day, and my heart grew more confident with each fragile page made strong again. Now, as the journal sits re-bound in my room, even with new words written on the still-empty pages, I know the crisis was averted because of the love and companionship of someone who understood my pain, silly as it may have seemed.

She even let me cope with the grief of having the pages all scattered and separate by giving me her camera for a "creative ways to photograph an injured journal" photoshoot. It was wonderful. I lured three unsuspecting assistants into tossing the secrets of my soul through the open roof of a nearby gazebo, and smiled on the inside the whole time. My journal has so much more character for having been lifted out into the light of day. My words hold steady under the pressure of water and wind, and they are all pieces of my existence which I cannot bear to part with. Even the entries that made me wince internally, and wish that I could blame someone, anyone else for the fact that I wrote them. I must have all the pieces. One page leads to the next and the next and the next and the next...change one, you change them all. I see so much growth and movement in those words. I am so grateful to the one who helped me rescue them, and to the One who gives them to me to begin with.

Which sort of brings me to the original point which was that the reason I have so much to say is probably because I didn't have anywhere to put all these words for a couple of days. Obviously, I'm making up for it now.

So, this is long, and that's only one story. It's okay. It's a good tidbit of everything that happened. Once again, I could have summarized with "My journal fell in the lake. Miss Betsy helped me save it. I am glad."

But then you wouldn't really know me, would you?




*disclaimer: ok, so we wanted to. that's a minor clause.