Not arriving, just living

On change, beauty, and becoming hospitable to what is before me

When I moved back to Nashville in the summer of 2023, I told myself I’d see how things were going after two years, then decide what was next. I figured I’d give this place a fair try. I knew myself well enough to sense that only something pretty compelling could cause me to uproot myself again, although I was reluctant to admit it. I’ve spent my whole life orbiting this place as a childhood resident, as a visitor coming to see extended family, and as a regular returnee swooping in and out to see immediate family after they relocated back to middle Tennessee. I’ve shrugged off calling it home because I’ve lived two-thirds of my life in other regions of the US, and yet after all of that, this is still the place where the landscape feels most familiar.

I walk through the deciduous forests, absorbing the generous greens of summer, observing with undying curiosity the movements of the same white-tailed deer, squirrels, songbirds, and birds of prey that I’ve been watching my whole life. Woody vines drape themselves mysteriously up and down the outstretched arms of trees, a myriad of strands dipping in and out of sight below the leafy ceiling. It is strange that a place can get into your bones, and yet I feel so clearly the roots of my heart are attached to this place.

Radnor Lake State Park, Nashville, TN. Photo by the author.

In not too long, almost exactly two years after I began this season in Tennessee, I will move across the country again, this time with my husband, to Texas—a place that has occupied very little of my mind until it became apparent I would live there. Unlike the shift out of my previous home, this move is not precipitated by a series of upheavals that left me at the end of myself, but by the beginning of our newly minted love. Though life with Taylor is exactly what I want, I’m disoriented by yet another shift. Having lived many years in New England, the mountains of North Carolina, and the rolling hills of middle Tennessee, I am daunted by a flatter and more muted landscape, by the prospect of a long, hot summer. A place works upon a person, just as a person works upon a place, and I wonder how this next transplantation may get its fingers into me, for “everything wears its other down.”¹

In my teens and early twenties, I thought adults arrived at some invisible plateau where everything simply clicked and they just knew what was going on. I fooled myself several times in those years into believing I had things figured out, not just for a season, but for my life. In a sense, the shifts that prompted my move to Nashville dismantled those presuppositions. My delusions evaporated, and I began to wade through successive waves of complexity. I awoke as from a bad dream—painfully, gratefully, and realizing that life was wilder and stranger and riskier than I had presumed. There was space for decision and action, but space must also be made for the ebb and flow of what was out of my control, which was nearly everything. This realization both terrified and freed me simply to live, and live fully.

And yet, in this season, I find myself grappling with my lack of control—again. Life has come at me in unexpected bursts of deep pain and deep joy over the years, and I keep yearning for that moment where I “arrive.” As I’ve begun learning to ride the waves of life as they come—living into the present, paying attention to both desires and needs—I sense that I’m actually learning what it is to live by faith. Such living both scares and excites me because it is dependent upon my inability to know the future. Faith demands a type of hospitality to my own need that I am uncomfortable with, and yet it is in this place of insufficiency where I find myself most certain of who I am following. Yes, I am disoriented in the face of another move, and yet I keep finding that as I step off the edge of each cliff that appears, I land safely in the hand of God.

It is vision that I long for. I want eyes to see what is going on in front of me, to hear the steady whisper calling out, inviting my attention. A friend recently told me that she was trying to be curious in a multidimensional way about the discomforts of pregnancy, reminding herself that the ache of her hips signaled the way her body was creating space for new life, giving her a visceral reminder of the way she wanted to create space for her new baby in her life. I want to bring that same kind of curiosity to my own discomfort. The presence of grief over leaving one place illuminates that I have learned to live in and to love it, often in spite of myself. Change disrupts habits, forces growth in perspective, opens opportunities for expansion and resilience. I want to develop vision, the ability to see what is stirred up on the discomfort of the new. Just as salt and freshwater mix into a weirdly vibrant ecosystem in brackish coastal waters, so I want the mixture of the known and the unknown to swirl into a habitat that creates life within and around me.

It is a comfort to consider of the children of Israel trekking through the desert after they stood on the far side of the Red Sea, laden with second-hand artifacts of Egyptian culture and worship. To think of them being told to set up camp in the middle of nowhere and make something beautiful, to transform the pagan into the holy under the direction of the Holy Spirit, impresses the resilient wildness of belief upon me. How strange must it have been for the artisans, Oholiab and Bezalel, to set up shop in the shadow of Sinai, or for the weavers to pull out their looms in order to make absurdly sized tapestries in the middle of the desert.² The need for beauty does not come to a halt because we shift into survival mode. No, beauty—and worship—make it possible to survive. God did not wait until the Israelites made it to the Promised Land to push them towards the life-giving craft of worship. In a season of homelessness where the essentials of food and shelter made more sense to prioritize, he invited these people to invest in something that, to the modern mind, could seem inessential. They did it, and we’re still talking about it today.

How do I foster that kind of vision? I tend to want to organize the logistics of my life first, and only after that choose to give time and energy to any creative endeavors. How do I begin to see what is able to be transformed right in front of me, regardless of whether the circumstances seem to fit my ideal? As life keeps coming at me, one season of change after another, the idea of “arrival” becomes more of an illusion. How do I steward the life before me, cultivating it so that it wells up inside of and beyond me, valuing the beautiful, the “inessential”? How do I learn to welcome the space I’m in, recognizing that it is shaping me, and receiving it as it does so? That is the kind of vision I want.

The older I get, the more I find that life is less about arriving and more about living: taking wise risks, experimenting, being hospitable to fragility and creativity (both my own and that of others), loving the people in my path with kindness and courage, praying for wisdom, for vision. Marriage is a risk. So is moving. I’m not naïve enough to think that either will leave me unchanged. The forward roll of time is often what scares me most, but isn’t the mundane ticking of the clock the thing that also keeps hope alive? In the giving of ourselves to challenge and change and wonder and relationship, there is a sense that the giving becomes the receiving. May I have eyes to see, to receive, and the courage to truly live.

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Excerpt from "To Begin with, the Sweet Grass,"
by Mary Oliver

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It's more than bones.
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It's praising.
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life-- just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.

1. From “As Iron on Iron,” by Luci Shaw

2. See Exodus ch. 31-38