Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

beauty

Belonging

Driving home from work one day, I passed two vehicles from our local fire company. While I was stopped at the stop sign, I waved to the driver of the fire truck, a man we attend church with, and I was struck with this sense of feeling like I belonged. There we were, two people of thousands in the community, and our paths crossed and we acknowledged each other.

Two days earlier, our family made a spontaneous decision to go out to eat after church because it was Veterans Day and some local restaurants were offering free meals to veterans. I had just finished a weeks-long eating experiment so we hadn’t been out much, and we like to treat my husband to freebies like this for his service in Iraq a lifetime ago. My family slid into the booth and I went to the bathroom and on the way back, I recognized one of the servers.

“What are you doing here?” she asked at the same time I said, “Are you serving my family?” She had just walked away from our booth. We both were left shaking our heads because although we see each other often during the week as co-workers (she’s a student teacher), obviously we didn’t expect to bump into each other outside of the school where we spend so much time.

The day before that, I saw a friend at an event our sons were both participating in. We mostly interact online and only see each other occasionally in person. Our kids attend different school districts, so this, too, felt like belonging.

I used to think things like this were no big deal. In fact, I expected to run into people wherever I went. (Maybe you are wondering why I am making such a big deal out of this.) But that was when I lived in the town where I grew up. The town where my parents grew up and my grandparents had lived for almost the entirety of their married life. In my hometown, it is unusual to not see someone you know when you’re out at a restaurant or running errands. The town is smaller than the one in which I currently live, which may be a factor, but I’m not ruling out the family connections as important in this equation.

Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash

This all got me thinking about how little work I had to do to be accepted in the town where I was born. I belonged to a family and just by knowing my last name, people who were practically strangers could determine where and to whom I belonged. When you can trace multiple generations back, you get a free pass for belonging.

How different it is when you move to a new place. We have lived in Pennsylvania for 10 years now, working on our 6th year in our current community. This is how long the work of belonging sometimes takes, and I will be the first to admit that we are bad at it.

When you weren’t born in a place and you don’t have generations to trace back and no one can correctly pronounce your last name, you begin to build barriers around your heart almost without trying. (At least I did. Maybe you are different.) Every cultural reference you don’t understand, every butchering of your name, every way you look and sound different–they all become the bricks you use to wall yourself off from the ones who belong. And you ask yourself a lot of questions about how to belong.

And “will I ever belong?”

Sometimes you even convince yourself you’ll never belong so you stop trying. Instead, you do everything you can to convince people you’re so different and weird that you could never belong anyway, with the secret hope they’ll agree and reject you. (Spoiler alert: the “you” in this story is “me.”)

But your kids will make friends and you will know all the teachers at the school and you’ll find jobs that you love with good people and some of your best friends will live a short drive away. And you’ll start to see people you know when you’re out in public and not just at major events like the Christmas tree lighting or school or church events where almost all of the people you know get together. You’ll find out your kids go to school with the daughter of one of the librarians at the main branch downtown. And when you attend a prayer vigil, you will see a friend you haven’t seen in a long time.

Your world will suddenly feel smaller and bigger all at the same time. You will start to feel something like belonging.

You will know the backroads, the best pizza places,  the names of your neighbors, and the first place to call when you need a good deal on an appliance. You will start to care about things like local government and building projects in your neighborhood.

When at first you felt like a seedling vulnerable to uprooting at the slightest wind, you now feel like a tree with a sturdy trunk and deeper roots, one that could survive a gale.

—

There’s something else about belonging, though. Something I can’t quite put words to or hold in my hand. While I feel more belonging to this place and the people around me, I can’t explain my current obsession with this song which complicates my sense of belonging.

There are still times that I feel like I belong nowhere. Or maybe what I mean is that I belong everywhere. And to everyone. My allegiances and loyalties cannot be neatly packed into one box, and maybe we’re never supposed to fit neatly into a box anyway. As much as I feel a part of things, there are still parts of me I hold back in certain circles, for fear of rejection. (I am a complicated human, sometimes wishing for rejection, sometimes fearing it.)

If you came here looking for the perfect answer about how to belong, then I’ve disappointed you because I don’t have it. I barely have imperfect answers.

All I can say is that sometimes belonging seems like it takes no work but that’s probably because others have done the hard work before you. When I think about my hometown, I think about the work of building relationships my grandparents did before I was a twinkle in anyone’s eyes. I think about the work my parents did in staying in their hometown. Staying is its own kind of hard work.

And if belonging seems an impossible dream, give it time and know that it takes work, but even those are no guarantee. Some circles will never be cracked open to new people. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other circles waiting to welcome you.

So, let me ask: where do you belong?

Broken and Whole

I came home crying from work one day last week. This is not something I make a habit of but it’s been a stressful few weeks with more stressful weeks to come, and I was fed some misinformation by someone whose intentions were good but whose word I should not have trusted. This was the kind of ugly cry sobbing that scared even me because I couldn’t control it. Thankfully it was a day my husband was home when I got there and I could get it all out of my system in a safe place and way.

For weeks now, I have felt strong and capable, convinced that whatever life has to throw at me will not break me. I have said these words in my head, “This will not break me.” And it is stunning to hear my inner voice say something so definitive. I have convinced even myself that whatever “this” is, it will not break me. I used to be the girl who thought any small criticism was the end of the world, any deviation from the plan a disaster. (Confession: I’m still sometimes that girl.)

So. Many. Things. are wearing me down right now, but I no longer feel like my house–in this case my mind,  my will, my spirit–is made of straw or sticks. It is a fortified house of bricks, a shelter from the blustery wind outside.

This will not break me, I say to myself, and I live as though it is true.

—

Part of this newfound strength and resolve has to do with my diet, i.e, the food I’m putting into my body.

For the last 30 days I’ve embarked on an experiment with food called Whole30. (If you aren’t familiar with the program it’s a 30-day elimination process for foods to help you reset your body and discover the effects certain foods have on you.) For 30 days, I have cut out sugar, dairy, legumes, and grains, and focused on eating high-quality meats, veggies and fruits along with good fats like avocados and olive and coconut oils. It was nerve-wracking at first and a little overwhelming to attempt but I made a plan and bought ingredients to have on hand in my house and a few days before my official start, I started thinking like I was doing a Whole30. I began the slow elimination of the temporarily forbidden foods.

Before this, my health was already improving. I had lost 12 pounds since the beginning of the year, partly due to having a job outside the home for the first time in almost 10 years and partly due to a commitment to running two to three times a week. But I needed to take this next step to reset my relationship with food and try to discover what exactly was causing me such distress.

I won’t chronicle everything about the month for you. Maybe at some point I’ll write more of it down, but at the end of these 30 days, I feel more amazing than I imagined I could. I happen to look good, too, in my own opinion, but it’s the feeling good part that has me convinced that some of the foods I’ve been eating are not doing me any favors.

I still don’t understand the mental shift that takes place when you change your eating habits and I’m about to enter the phase of the process where you reintroduce your body to the foods you eliminated, but no matter what the scale says or how my pants fit, I cannot deny the way I feel. Even in the midst of stress, I have not been paralyzed by anxiety. Even though I’m still sometimes impatient, I haven’t felt like exploding as much as I used to. I still get tired, but I don’t feel exhausted by the middle of the day. I feel too good to go back to how things were.

It’s called the Whole30, I think because of the nature of the foods you eat while doing it, but in my mind, this process has made me feel more whole, like I’m giving my whole self to my life now. And while I don’t consider myself to have arrived or finished the work of healing, the Whole30 has been like finding another piece to the puzzle of me. When I stripped away some of the comfort foods and crutches I’d relied on to see me through tough times, somehow I discovered that I was stronger than I knew, that I didn’t need those things to get me through.

It’s confidence building, and I’ve never had confidence in abundance, no matter what it seems like on the outside.

—

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

This is a line Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms. I’ve not read it, or if I have I don’t really remember it, but this quote is tossed around often and that last part sticks in my brain like a piece of food between teeth. The more I try to free it, the more stuck it becomes.

Strong at the broken places. I think I know what it means. I think maybe I’ve even experienced it. Or I am experiencing it now. If the quote ended there it would be inspiring and encouraging, but anyone who has read Hemingway or knows about his life knows that inspiring and encouraging are not really his jam. Which is why the next line makes a lot of sense, too.

“But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.”

Now A Farewell to Arms is a war novel, and I might have to pick up a copy just so I can find this line in the story and see if its meaning becomes any clearer, but I get it. Sort of. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe Hemingway himself didn’t understand it. I know all too well how it is to be a vessel for words. I can’t pinpoint the origin of many of the sentences I string together. I sit down to write one thing and something else entirely emerges. Maybe Hemingway knew this. He is the same man who said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

It is like that, sometimes, when I’m ready to let it, like bleeding my thoughts and feelings and observations onto the screen. It’s hardly ever about gratuitous attention. I release my thoughts so I know what I’m feeling, so I can make sense of the world. If you also take something from that, that is a bonus side effect.

I don’t know if Hemingway meant “broken places” as an actual physical location, like the site of a battle, or if he was meaning metaphorically, like the places inside of us that are broken, but I believe that experiencing brokenness can make us stronger.

—

There is a broken place in my heart. Not the literal one that pumps blood through my body but the one we talk about when we talk about spirit and emotions. A crack runs right through it. Probably more than one. The broken places are many. And they are mended.

There were days–and weeks, months, and years–when I was sure I would be broken beyond repair. When I thought the breaking would kill me.

In a way, it did. A part of me died, but even the broken places allowed some light to penetrate. Growth springs from cracked and broken all the time. Look at the trees whose stumps sprout with new branches. Look at the cracks in the sidewalk where flowers and grass and weeds push up, straining and striving for the light.

Photo by Abhishek Pawar on Unsplash

Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of light to convince you you’re not finished yet. Sometimes you’re broken and think you’ll always stay that way. But all the while you’re healing and you don’t even know it until one day instead of feeling like life is beating you down with every chance you get, you stare it right in the face and say, “Bring it.”

You are strong because of the broken places. Somehow the cracks have contributed to your strength. Maybe you could have been strong without them, but maybe you couldn’t. Maybe you needed the broken places to prove you couldn’t be broken forever. Or that you could be broken but you would survive it.

It is a weird thing to feel strength in your spirit when you know how weak you have been. It is almost like you are a different person. Or you had a dream about someone else’s life.

I think Hemingway is right that the world breaks everyone. We all have a breaking point, and maybe that changes based on the day. Maybe we are not always strong at the broken places or anywhere. But maybe we could be. Maybe we hope to be.

I wish I had a formula to tell you how, but all I have are years of life experience, much of which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. All I can say is if you think you can’t survive it–whatever “it” is–give it another day.

—

I don’t fully understand the relationship between broken and whole, how they can work together and how you can sometimes be both at the same time. I have known seasons of broken that I thought would never end and I’ve had glimpses of whole that I wished would endure, but what’s happening now is like an ebb and flow, like the tide coming in and out with regularity. I no longer believe I will only have one or the other but they will both be present, maybe in equal measure, maybe not. But I have hope that the broken won’t last forever and the whole will come, and I have confidence that the whole will be more than a fleeting glimpse.

This week I have felt them both. They both make up a part of me. They both contribute to my life.

I am broken but not destroyed. I am whole but not yet finished.