Is the world just falling down around my ankles or what?

While people in Japan are suffering on the tailwinds of a tsunami and on the brink of a nuclear crisis, the kid in my adolescent development class was praying for the basketball team to play well in their first March Madness game.

I didn’t say amen.

I wish it was that simple to show my non-support for all the other things that are exploding in the world.

While Women’s Services is providing incredible events like ones with Alex Boye that bring tears to your eyes and change your life, the BYU homepage sports this newsworthy bit: “Vote for Your Favorite Jimmer Signs”—which is great news, because we don’t have enough people running around campus wearing his T-shirt or his jersey or his face.

No complaints about basketball. No complaints about Jimmer. No complaints that we rally around great talent and great fun.

Just a complaint that we do it at the expense of greater things.

Did you see the Daily Universe front page all about planning your wedding? Have you seen the insane amount of blogs that have thousands of followers for no reason other than that they post other people’s pretty pictures full of anorexic models draped in .2 oz of fabric? Have you been irked by the number of things/groups/companies/people trying to get you to “like” them on facebook?

Have you been annoyed at the amount of time-wasting crap for which we pay hundreds of dollars to spend our precious mortal probation in isolation?

Me too.

No complaints about weddings, pretty pictures, blogs, or technology. Just an aching for depth.

For reading real books, not electronic ones. I don’t care how lightweight it is.

For spending real time with your loved ones, not something with an ‘i’ in front of it.

For good old fashioned fun without a TV.

Without Jimmer.

For bodies that run and bike and camp and vacation and canoe!

Without a couch.

For soulful singing that’s going to happen behind Dance Ensemble tonight and tomorrow night, if you want to come hear me. I’ve got something to say.

boxes.

On Thursday nights we stay with my Grandpa. We drive over in our pajamas and pillows and sweatpants, and there he is on the couch with the TV blaring, wearing no pants (He hates wearing pants, and when you’re 93 you can do whatever you want about pants. Finally.)

We say hello and he always calls me Brooke Darling. We help him to his walker. Then we fill up two liter pop bottles with hot water to go in Grandpa’s bed. He’s had hot bottles in his bed for as long as I can remember—even on the one night in the summer when I was nine and my family spent the night and the house was so boiling hot we all woke up and put cold, wet rags on our foreheads. Grandpa and Grandma snoozed away with the covers pulled up to their chins and the hot bottles cozying up their legs.

After the hot bottles are done we sleep while Grandpa sleeps, with a little camera by our bed so we can see if he needs anything. He doesn’t, usually. I think he just likes knowing we’re there. We listen to him talk in his sleep, occasionally snore. Then, we wake up and go to our regular lives.

Ever since my grandma died he’s been gathering the house into boxes. The old books, blueprints, model airplanes, and a bunch of one-of-a-kind things, like the chair massage pad, his American flag robe, and his collection of baseball hats. Probably he would call them caps?

My Grandpa loves the city of Kanab. He aches to live there. So he’s going to. For two months at least, and then, who knows.

It feels very sad to see all the boxes. It feels so arbitrary and cold—my grandparents and all their stuff breathed life into that house. Grandma’s chair by the bay window is gone. Grandpa’s plans to save the political universe are stashed away.

Unknowingly, we compass ourselves around things that seem very permanent, like our families and how they act. Like where our grandparents live and the things we will see when we visit. Like the family reunions that happen once every three years. Like the way the sun is supposed to rise in the morning.

The boxes just make me feel like the proverbial rug of stability is yanking itself out from under me.

getting your act together.

Women’s Chorus has been a drag lately. Sister Applonie has been barking at us about our intonation, our blend (for good reason), and I’ve been standing there with my arms crossed uppit-ily blocking everyone and why can’t all these people just get their act together.

Today, we sang Psalm 96, arranged by a young composer man who I assume went to BYU at some point and dreamed of being associated with Jean Applonie like every other reasonable human being does at one point or another. It was hard to learn. Because it changes meter, like, every other measure. For serious. Today we sang it all the way through, and there in the Madsen Recital Hall where I have stood every day, being uppity and arms-crossed, I bawled.

Music making me cry is no new sitch. There was a magical period where it happened literally every single day. But today, my barriers to God got broken down. They were ashes at my feet and I just kicked them behind me, away out into the air and down to the center of the earth to be absorbed by boiling bubbles of magna.

And He was there inside me. He was enveloping me in familiar wooshes of chills and wonder and beauty and just shouting in the most loving way: I’M HERE! EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE OKAY! DIDN’T YOU KNOW I WOULD COME BACK LIKE THIS?

 

Maybe I didn’t tell you,

I’ve been in a rut lately. I’ve been a rolling snowball of negative karma shwooshing through every element of my life. I’ve been selfish and sniveling and pretty rotten all around—so today, this song was nothing short of a miracle for my soul.

Just don’t stop doing the things you know are good for you. Not just like eating your veggies and sleeping, but the things you know are vital to your vitals. Writing. Reading wonderful words. Listening to the loveliest, most beautiful music. Uplifting yourself.

Choosing to wake up every day inspired.

So even when these things seem blank and bland, keep raising your hand to participate. Uncross your arms, and God will be there one day.

Then you feel sheepish for not trusting that He would infuse Himself into your life strong and big again.

Today, I’m choosing to be inspired.

the empty chair

I felt inspired to write today,

until I remembered that my grandma died last week and my words are all stuck up, globbed in grief and steeped in sorrow, like all the composite bad stuff of my life got conglomerated into one big ball and broken open by this event.

I’m still going to try to get something out, because all this stuff is important right now. Not in five years when all of it is past, but right smack dab in the middle of things when tears are fresh.

Her 90th birthday would have been in just a week. She was so frail and old and really, we all told ourselves that death for this woman would have been a blessing a long time ago.

So why doesn’t that make things easy?

She had a stroke on Monday morning: bleeding into her brain, not a candidate for surgery. 30% of people with this type of stroke? They die within a couple weeks. 40%, within three months. But that’s just normal-person statistic; not 90-year-old-my-grandmother statistic.

“I can’t think of anyone on this earth more precious than her,” my mom said. It’s true; this lady was full of sugar but genuinely sweet compliments every time you saw her—a hundred rounds of “I love you!” and, “you’re marvelous!” Every time I would wake up with her in the night and help her to the bathroom, seven exclamations of, “you’re wonderful!” would spill from her mouth.

We passed the people in scrubs, the gift shop where you can buy stuffed animals and balloons, the hallways with giant posters of friendly looking doctor men.

And there she was, in the hospital, dying in the arms of those children she raised—the last of which, my dear mother.

By the time we made it, she was already gone; we were too late.

Seeing her body, I felt so immediately that she wasn’t there anymore. It was so arbitrary—a cheek, a shoulder, a mouth—not my grandma. I had this wonderful image of her as a younger woman—her spirit gliding and hopping around the room; I felt so happy that she was free!! The wounds and hard things of life wouldn’t hold her for one second longer. If air could be classified like this, the air in that hospital room was peaceful. It was sad. The air was heavy but it knew what had just happened, in all the glory of the reality of the Plan of Salvation.

Inside the air filled with all those things, my brother and I talked to her. We talked to the spirit we knew was close as we held the empty body, both sobbing and hugging our mother, who now has no mother of her own in this world.

Grandma, do you remember the time you made the kids walk all the way to Ream’s when milk was on sale? Dad asks.

We laugh through our crying because when I was four and Garrett was six and Grandma was seventy something she babysat us and we walked what felt like eighteen hundred miles to the grocery store and fumbled back with jugs of on-sale milk. She was not one of those plump, baking grandmas who sits around all day. She knew about sales and coupons and hard work and sewing and God and raising twelve kids. She knew about walking when you had no car and getting through tough times. She was strong and smart but kept her sweetness all the time.

We said our goodbyes and there was hugging that was essential for healing, crying that was essential for understanding.

Together—me, my brother, my dad, my mom and my husband—we walked out of the room forever,

past the mortician and the white boards with bright dry-erase marker.

 

On the way out there was a picture of a house and a porch and a chair—an empty chair. It felt perfect to accompany that moment.

You go, grandma. You can get off your porch and leave your house and go home.

Her dementia was severe and getting worse; she was adamant the last time I was there that she had to wake up and get ready for school. She’d wash her face at least four times a night because she couldn’t remember that she’d already done it. She’s slept with two liter pop bottles filled with water in her bed for as long as I can remember, and ate brown rice for breakfast every day for probably all of those ninety years.

All of that seems like such a distant memory, faded into some fabric—mashed up with all the other things I knew of this incredible lady.

I want to know her for real.

I want to know her independent of life in an old, decaying body, laced with the frailties of mortality.

I want to know that gliding, hopping spirit.

It’s so indescribably wonderful to know I will.

Because someday I, too, will be a hopping spirit inside an old, decaying body. I’m excited for the day to come—the day when I get to get up out of my porch chair, too!

and go home.

Surprise, surprise!

Remember the surprise that was happening yesterday?

Me too.

After gospel choir he picks me up and we kiss because we love each other a lot. I put on the iPod, he drives. We bypass the game traffic and soon, we’re on a foggy road that feels like it’s suspended in midair—I love this road, because, we went on part of our honeymoon to the place it leads to.

“Park City!” I shout.

This surprise is my 8-month-early birthday present.

YEah.

We wind up the road and wind up at Park City High school, where we take a bus that is free to a part of Main Street I’ve never seen before. The cold is biting my face and feet off but I’m giddy and 14. Or 5.

I really, really love surprises.

Especially ones as well kept as this one.

But we’ve brought my expired license (agh!) and get to ride the bus back to our car and get my paper one that’s real and come back to wait in line.

It’s just starting to dawn on me that I need to be 21 to go into this place and there are sketchy peeps creepin all around, smoking and swearing.

I’m still 14 slash 5 though, so I don’t mind. Jared makes me take off my glasses so I can’t see the posters as we approach. The guy ID-ing me asks me all this questions because he thinks my picture doesn’t look like me. Silly man!

I realize: this is a bar.

 

We get up to the front (YES, THE FRONT. JUST REMEMBER THAT WE ARE IN THE FRONT ABOUT TO SEE SOMETHING THAT I LOVE EXTREMELY DEARLY) and stare at the empty stage to wait. 10 minutes, 20 minutes.

A girl behind me shouts out the name of my surprise: “I just can’t believe I’m here,” she gushes, “seeing LAURYN HILL!”

asdfjasfjdalfjd are you kidding me is this for realnoitcan’t be i just adfjajdiwi? i just screamed and shouted and thrust myself into jared’s arms and then i prompty burst into tears.

Those people didn’t care because they were already drunk, drunk, drunk.

See, Lauryn Hill is my favorite artist in ALL of time and space, tied with Aretha Franklin. Possibly a titch ahead.

FAVORITE. Okay so I guessed it was a concert and I was trying to think of anyone and everyone it could possibly be but not once did this lady cross my mind—maybe because, oh, she hasn’t come out with new music in like 10 years and she’s dropped off the face of the music planet.

BUT SHE WAS THERE LAST NIGHT. IN THAT BAR. AND SO WAS I.

Well, she wasn’t there for a while.

Three hours, to be exact. Three hours of standing in the squished crowd and enduring the security guard who was at least 7 feet tall and whose ponytail kept whipping me in the face. Also I was forced to touch his bum more times than I would like to count. Three hours of watching people whose lives I know absolutely nothing about drink themselves slamming drunk, plaster themselves all over any other person they could find. Three hours of waitresses in the most ridiculous getups waddle (it’s the only means of transportation when your skirt is skin tight and your heels are a hundred inches high) back and forth with shots of STUFF. Three hours of asking the security man, PLEASE WHEN DOES IT START? he had no idea every single time.

But after those three hours, SHE WAS THERE. In this ludicrous fur coat and seventy other layers and twenty five bangles on each arm and gargantuan earrings and Native American makeup. She was there! And she SANG! And she was amazing.

It was so amazing. I wanted more singing from her and less noise from the band and drunk folks but I just sat there with my mouth hanging open and didn’t even sing along.

See, I can describe what happened up until then. But when she started singing I just have to stop because I can’t put words to it other than AMAZING.

It was amazing.

 

We arrive home at three in the morning and I missed a bit of class but srsly? Once in a lifetime thing here. And that man, that beautiful, gorgeous man who made it happen? Well, dontcha know, he’s my husband. And we are married to each other and it is incredible because that’s who he is.

Gosh. What an adventure for a random Wednesday night in January.

I love Lauryn Hill.

I love my husband for taking me to her.

WHAAAAT is my life? Wonderful.

still fighting it.

How did I ever get by? Leaning into the wind, letting life take me where it wished? Now I feel this incredible sense of HUGEness—a strength. Not a bitter, battling the-world-is-out-to-get-me, but a simple knowledge that I will not be that person again. I will not be wishy-washy again.

I know what I want out of this life partially because I feel divinely encouraged…even commanded. Hey, Brooke: thou shalt not hide.

Letting myself be known means fighting against the natural current that would push me aside, leave a flaky facade devoid of soul. (And we know how I feel about that.)

The fighting mentality comes out unnecessarily, despite effort to let it be when that’s the right answer.

……………………………………………………………

December 15, 2010

I went through all this trouble to find a pen, tonight, so, this better be good.

My how I overuse commas.

Maybe I’m afraid to write what I want to say tonight. I think, I will get over it. I think I will get over it. I probably will.

So what’s the point of writing it down, giving a name to the faceless monster?

It does feel good to write again, to feel my hand cramp up again. It’s like, Natalie Goldberg says, meeting a very old, pleasant friend. Sometimes she is crinkled and lined and very old for real. Mostly, though, she’s slippery and mysterious and without form. Does she sing, dance? I only picture her simply existing. Taking up space, but with purpose. She still walks and runs and rollumps.

Rollumps. Wow.

It’s been far too long since I have let myself get lost in paper and ink. Far too long, even, since I have let myself get lost in iPod music, regular music, Brooke music—not drilling classical into my sullied brains for [an apparently insufficient number of] hours.

Why are there always slits of complete insanity in your otherwise perfectly fabricated, sewed-up life? They keep rearing their heads, teasing, taunting scratching at the door as if to say, Look what I can do!

Slits of complete insanity.

………………………………………………………………………………

People are so good at helping other people.

Just look here and you will know.

I sent one nice man an email and he posted it on his famous blog! I love him forever for this! He is my hero and I will kiss his feet if I ever meet him. Bob, you are an angel. You made me gasp out in a grateful cry because through this little thing you did for me I knew God was watching over my efforts to spread His love.

Wow.