Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Down in the depths of my heart. Where?

I had a really nice conversation yesterday. The niceness may have been more related to my partner in conversation than the content of our discourse, but regardless, it's still a slice of time I have rewound and played over and over in my head in the hours since (even possibly at the neglect of more important subjects on which I should have been focusing my attention).

Every time an experience like this happens, the scripture that resonates in my head is "she treasured all these things in her heart." I have heard addresses delivered, usually by men, on what, exactly, this means. Mostly it boils down to the fact that she meditated on her experience. But, inasmuch as I understand the way she thought about events of particular meaning, a word as simple as meditated just seems so unsatisfactory. It falls short.

I think women meditate on things in a way that men will never be able to understand, just because of differences in the way we're wired. We take special moments and "treasure them up in our hearts." As Sarah Grace so eloquently put it, we decorate them. That's not to say we embellish the truth of what actually happened, but we contemplate with the knowledge that our feelings on the subject are unique to us alone. We remember the feeling as much as the event. We do not only replay memories, we nurture them and guard them, as if they were locked in a room to which only we have the key.

Maybe this is also why we can bring up memories at will (sometimes in an accusatory fashion, sorry guys) of which the unfortunate men in our lives seem to have no recollection.

But yesterday I felt like my heartstrings must have hummed with the same resonance as Mary's did in some far-gone century.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Posterchild for Scotch Guard

I never make it very far with coffee. At least some of it always ends up as a part of my wardrobe. Usually this is in the morning, and I am stuck with that awkward stain all day.

But it's totally worth it for the conversations I get to have over said coffee. My life is rich.

Thanks be to God.

"Come, come whoever you are.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come.
Come."
-Rumi