My comfort by day, and my song in the night

I don't really like meeting for church at 1 pm. It's soooo late (especially on Fast Sundays. Ah.).

But one of the perks of meeting late (and of living in Utah) is that you can go to things like "Music and the Spoken Word" in the Tabernacle on Temple Square.

So that's what I did with some friends today.

[Look at that sky. A perfectly blue September sky.]

I hadn't listened to "Music and the Spoken Word" for awhile (and it had been ages since I had gone up to a broadcast), and it was a beautiful, refreshing experience. 

They sang "My Song in the Night," and I was just enraptured with its beauty. It just was--it was just perfect. 

So yes. There can be some good things about meeting for church at 1 pm. 

(I mean, I still stand by my argument that 9 am is better than 1 pm. But whatever.) 

Rise and Shout

. . . this just in.

You know it's big when Bronco celebrates like that.

Welcome back, college football. I've missed you.

Where are they now, those women who stared from the mirror?

Part of packing up my life/organizing my room as I get ready for Oxford means that I find a lot of old notebooks and journals. I have too many of them. But the thing is, I'm not one a person who just collects pretty notebooks. I use them. All of them. Every single page.

I'm a writer. It's what I do.

My journals are . . . how do I describe them? They are similar to my blog posts, but they are more personal. I know that the more skeptical among you are saying, "Really, Meg? Because this blog can get pretty darn up-close and personal sometimes." I know that it can. Frankly, that's how I prefer it. I like to be as genuine as I can be without being overbearing. I have a way that I portray myself online, and for right now, I'm good with that--even if it does mean that I am more personal than some people would be comfortable with.

But, even though my blog posts can verge on the diary-esque at times, I hope that my thoughts and experiences are useful to people. I write with an audience in mind--and that audience includes both friends and family members who tell me that they enjoy reading my blog and myself, honestly. I try to write things that I would enjoy reading if they were on someone else's blog.  

Anyway. My journals are much more personal than these blog posts. They include many more names, feelings, angst, dreams, hopes, etc. than I would ever feel comfortable sending into the vast universe of the Internet.

My journals are also full of more self-reflection than these blog posts.

Last night, I finished up a journal that I started about nine months ago. I always have this sense of melancholy accomplishment when I finish a journal. I also have this ritual I do--I like to look back and see how I have changed, what I have learned, and what I hope to improve about myself. It's part of the narrative I write about myself, I suppose. I want my narrative to be one full of growth and change, hope and redemption. (See this article in The Atlantic for a more-detailed analysis of this idea of how we shape our narratives--I think it's fascinating.)

When I write my journal posts, I am limited--I only have the understanding of what I experienced that day or that week . . . I can't see what the future holds. But when I look back on my old journal posts, I am an omniscient reader.

I know exactly what grade I will get on that essay, how that first date will go, or what graduate school program I will choose.

And I know how I have changed--for better or for worse--from those days before.

Often I laugh out loud when reading past journal entries. I laugh at how silly I am or how melodramatic. Sometimes I cry. I cry for the pain that my previous self experienced or inflicted on others. Sometimes I am impressed by the wisdom of a February 7th or April 16th Megan. Yet reading the entries from February 9th or April 28th help me realize how easily I forget. It's a cycle of epiphanies and amnesia, bitterness and healing, pride and humility, hard hearts and soft souls.

That's part of the story of the last nine months. That cycle. The give-and-take. Hope, despair, grief, healing, pain, joy, expectations, cynicism, anger, love . . . they are all a part of me. We can't choose what life or others throw at us. But we can choose what to do with our circumstances. Hard hearts can soften. Moments of struggle bring the greatest growth. And I can choose to be an agent and claim a space of choice.

Perhaps one of the biggest lessons I've learned this summer is that the cure to our maladies (particularly grief and heartbreak) rarely--if ever--come in some dramatic package. Rather, it is by doing the little things step-by-step and choosing to keep moving forward that we make it. Peace and healing take time. But they come. If we are searching, moving forward, and trying to reach out to others, healing comes. That I believe.

It is also impossible (and unhealthy) to try to make things the way they were before. We learn from the past, but we don't live there. As Elder Jeffrey R. Holland says, "We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences but not the ashes. And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we have experienced, then we look ahead, we remember that faith is always pointed toward the future."

Last September, I fell in love with a song from the musical Ragtime. It's called "Back to Before," and it is sung at a critical junction in a character's development. It is a moment of self-realization . . . and disillusionment. Listen to it--it will be worth your time, I promise.


[I'm also including a link here, just in case the video is taken away.]

Since I know that you most likely did not listen to it (although if you did, kudos to you--it's beautiful, isn't it?), here are the lyrics:

"There was a time our happiness seemed never-ending
I was so sure that where we were heading was right. 
Life was a road, so certain and straight and unbending
Our little road with never a crossroad in sight. 

Back in the days when we spoke in civilized voices 
Women in white and sturdy young men at the oar. 
Back in the days when I let you make all my choices . . .
We can never go back to before. 

There was a time my feet were so solidly planted
You'd sail away while I turned my back to the sea. 
I was content, a princess asleep and enchanted 
If I had dreams then I let you dream them for me. 

Back in the days when everything seemed so much clearer
Women in white who knew what their lives held in store
Where are they now, those women who stared from the mirror? 
We can never go back to before. 

There are people out there unafraid of revealing 
That they might have a feeling or they might have been wrong. 
There are people out there unafraid to feel sorrow, unafraid of tomorrow, 
unafraid to be weak . . . unafraid to be strong! 

There was a time when you were the person in motion 
I was your wife, it never occurred to want more. 
You were my sky, my moon, and my stars and my ocean . . .
We can never go back to before. We can never go back to before! 

I think that we all have multiple times in our lives when we have those startling paradigm shifts: we realize that life can never go back to the way it was before. Our "little roads with never a crossroad in sight" suddenly become tortuous. We realize that there are many winding roads with multiple crossroads . . . and we are forced to make difficult decisions. Decisions where we both lose and gain.

We wake up from our enchanted sleep and find that we have been been living someone else's dreams instead of living our own lives with purpose and fulfillment. Those "women in white who knew what their lives had in store" and who seemed to have all the answers fade from the foreground; their images become blurry and clouded from doubt and disillusionment. Life as before can never be the same.

But in those moments, instead of wallowing in self-pity--or even allowing ourselves to be paralyzed by shock--we need to choose action over cynicism or fear. We choose to move forward in faith, even while we grieve (or rejoice, depending on the context) for what was lost. We can choose to be "unafraid to be weak, unafraid to be strong." To live deliberately. To realize that doubt and disillusionment are parts of life--of growing up--but that doesn't mean we have to stay in those valleys.

We can claim our agency. And re-claim it time and again when life tries to swallow us whole.

Fight for our happiness.

As I was re-reading a few of my past journal entries, I came across one that I had written after a "we can never go back to before" moment. A paradigm shift, so to speak. And a deeper understanding as I wrestled through questions and struggles of my own. I hope you will indulge me as I share it hoping that these thoughts will be helpful for someone, somewhere:

"Where is the mercy? I think we all ask that--or we all will ask that--either cynically or out of despair at some point in our lives. Where is the mercy? Where is the mercy in the history of a world that is full of plague, war, rape, slavery, and oppression? Where is the mercy in our own lives? Our own lives which are also full of sorrow, disappointment, despair, and loss? Where is the justice? Where is the compassion? And where is the mercy? [. . .]

"Sometimes we wonder where God is, or why God "did" or "didn't" do something. But often, God doesn't do anything. Not in the sense that He's not there or that He doesn't care. But in the sense that He doesn't take away our agency. He allows us to make stupid decisions. So that we can learn. So that His justice can come to pass.

"I mean, God could send an angel with a flaming sword to stop every bad thing from happening--every genocide, every stock market crash, every war. He doesn't stop every break-up, every broken arm, every sickness.

"He could. And don't get me wrong--sometimes He does. Sometimes He does. But most of the time, He lets us choose. And our mistakes hurt others. And others' choices hurt us. He is the God who weeps. Who weeps because we hurt each other. Who weeps because we choose ourselves over Him. Who weeps because He loves us. But who loves us enough that He doesn't and will not take our agency away.

"So there has to be something powerful about agency--so powerful--that God will not take it away from us . . . that He will not force us. But that He will guide, direct, persuade, and ultimately weep--mindful of us and mindful that this use of our agency is the only way we can learn. It is the only way we can progress. Desiring and choosing the Lord's way helps us become like Him. But we have to really want it. He wants to know if we really want it. What are the desires of our hearts? Shto ty hochesh? What do you want?"

We can never go back to before. But we can move forward. We can choose to claim our agency and be the leading ladies and heroes of our own stories.

Agents to act instead of being acted upon.

A Place of Love and Beauty

"And ye are to be taught from on high. Sanctify yourselves and ye shall be endowed with power, that ye may give even as I have spoken." -- Doctrine and Covenants 43:16 

"For the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light is Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ." -- Doctrine and Covenants 84:45

Last Friday I had the incredible honor and opportunity to attend the temple with my dear friend Madison. Madi has decided to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has been called to serve in the Romania Bucharest Mission.

I am thrilled for her. Missions are life-changing, sacred experiences. I truly believe that they are a way that God shows His love for all of us--both for the ones serving and for those missionaries are called to serve and love.

I also believe that the temple endowment is a gift of God's love and knowledge to His children. It is something that He wants all of His children to receive. There is power which comes from making and keeping promises with God.

It was a sacred privilege to help prepare Madison for her first experience at the temple (although most of that preparation came on her own through her life and her thirst for light and truth). I am simply grateful that I was able to share this special day with her.

Truly, the temple is a place of love and beauty.

"And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you; and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things." -- Doctrine and Covenants 88:67 

Some thoughts on authenticity

I've been going through my iPhone photos recently, deleting pictures and making room for future shameless selfies.

Like these ones:

See what I mean? Shameless. I am incredibly vain.

But the thing is . . . although these pictures capture some form of my personality (mostly my vanity), they really are not what I look like. I mean, of course they are pictures of myself. But they are the best pictures I took after a few tries. And then they were edited, filtered, etc., to get just the right look I was going for.

Selfies are a twenty-first century art form.

(Oh man . . . what that says about our society is very revealing and quite sad.)

At the same time, I don't think there is anything necessarily wrong with wanting to make yourself look good. That's part of what social media is about, isn't it? We're branding ourselves. And we want that brand to be attractive.

We all have a desire to be remembered well. And I think most of us want others to think that we are attractive, clever, and put-together.

Most of humanity has had that desire before social media ever came along.

Take Anne Frank, for example. I think that a very revealing parts of her humanity comes through when she is quite honest about how she looks and how she wishes she looked. She has a picture in her diary and then a write-up to the side:

"This is a photo as I would wish myself to look all the time. Then I might have a chance to go to Hollywood. But I'm sorry to say that I usually look different these days." 

[via annefrank.org]

I think all of us have pictures of ourselves that we wish we looked like all of the time. We all have favorite pictures of ourselves or favorite time of life that we wish we could relive.

Below are some pictures of myself as I wish I could look all the time:

I took these selfies on a day I was feeling particularly pretty, confident, and happy, as the next picture shows:

[Sorry about the terrible lighting--my room is actually not a photography studio. Weird, I know.

But you can tell that I am happy from my eyes. You can always tell in the eyes.]

Here's a more picture where I look more natural and less make-uped . . . it's a more "real" picture of me (whatever that means), but I am still happy. Tired, but happy.

[Fun fact about Megan #43: I take selfies in the car when I am waiting/when I am bored. I also take selfies when I have new clothes. This is a new shirt and I felt happy wearing it. The end.]

These are the pictures--the ones where I am truly happy--are the moments and memories that I wish could last all the time. And photographs provide a way for those memories, those regrets, and those wishes to resurface.

At the same time, life is not picture-perfect. We have blemishes, we blink when the flash goes off, someone photobombs us, or we look and feel bloated on school picture day.

There are pictures of ourselves that we don't want anyone to see. Ones that we instantly "untag" ourselves from on Facebook. Selfies that never see the light of Instagram or SnapChat.

There are parts of ourselves that we don't want others to know about.

Honestly, there is a lot about ourselves that our 15 million friends on social media don't need to know about.

And I don't think that makes you any less genuine if you don't want to post about your latest break-up or your faith crisis or your sister's battle with cancer or anything that is too private and personal to share over the cold and unfeeling interwebs.

So the question is, how do we put our best foot forward while at the same time being authentic and "real"? We complain that the lives and pictures and posts people post on social media aren't "real." And you know what? They're not. At least, not entirely. They are what people want others to see. And part of that is real. But it's not every single waking hour of their lives. Honestly, that would be overwhelming and disturbing to know what went on inside of our friend's heads all of the time.

We need filters for what we say. (And for the pictures we post on Instagram, naturally).

But more than that, we need compassion. We need to be more willing to give others the benefit of the doubt with their posts, but also know that others will probably not give that same compassion to us.

I recently saw a quote by Thomas Merton that said, "Pride makes us artificial. Humility makes us real. And real is what makes us beautiful."

I think there's a lot of truth in that.

I need to think about it more.

. . . anyway, a lot of that was rambling. Basically, I'm still thinking about these things and this was a way to address the void and get my thoughts out.

But, if you have any opinions on this subject, let me know. I think this is an important issue and I would love to hear your thoughts.

Summer Reading

Summer is coming to an end/is over, depending on how you decide when fall begins (for some, it's the moment the bell rings on the first day of school, for others, the day after Labor Day, for the sun it's the Equinox . . .).

In any event, I've been doing a lot of reading this summer. I have almost permanently had a book at my side as an extra appendage. In fact, it got to a point that my family members knew my summer better than I did--or at least were willing to answer the "what did you do this summer" question for me. One time a kind person asked that oh-so-harmless small talk question.

Kind Person (to me): What have you been doing this summer?

Me: Uhhhhhhhh.

My sister Sarah: She's been doing a lot of reading.

Kind Person: Oh.

And the conversation usually ends there. I think they're expecting me to say some extraordinary thing like, "Oh, I hiked Mt. Kilimanjaro," or "Oh, I rafted down the Amazon." (Honestly, people, I'm quite boring. Sorry to disappoint.)

But the thing is, I've been quite happy with my reading list this summer and crossing off some works I've been meaning to read and then re-reading some of my favorites.

And since I have this insatiable need to share people what I learned, here are some of my favorite quotes from my summer reading. (I could do a blog post about each book I read this summer, but I read about fifty, and that might get tiresome . . . also, a lot of the books I read were historiographies for Oxford preparations, and I read a couple of books on economics to prove a point, but I digress.)

[My Book o' Quotes.] 

"There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made." --My Antonia, by Willa Cather 

"Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." --My Antonia

"Sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom." --My Antonia

"Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me." --My Antonia 

"Dostoevsky said once, 'There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.' These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom [the freedom to choose one's attitude] cannot be lost. It can be said they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom--which cannot be taken away--that makes life meaningful and purposeful." --Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl

"We had to learn ourselves [. . .] that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. [. . .] Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." --Man's Search for Meaning

"Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations." --Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted and be willing to face the consequences whatever they are. And if he is filled with fear he cannot do it. My great prayer is always for God to save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fears of the consequences for his personal life he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems which we confront in every age and every generation." --Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"Katie heard the story. 'It's come at last,' she thought, 'the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended that you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them--I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them.'" --A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

"So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?" --All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

"She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day." --Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

"What does the brain matter compared to the heart?" --Mrs. Dalloway 

"Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, how vivid, and cruel. One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own [. . .] was there anything so real as words?" --A Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

"Cynicism is nothing more than idealism gone sour." --That Ye May Believe, Neal A. Maxwell

"Even in the midst of deep and discouraging blackness we are to trust in the Lord in order to show that we are a 'friend of God' by being 'righteous in the dark.'" --That Ye May Believe 

"It takes intelligence and faith in order to make one's way through [the ambiguities of life]." --That Ye May Believe 

"Power comes from love. Achievement and ability come from love. We can try to do it on our own, or we can really achieve with the Savior--by accepting His love and being willing to love others in return." --Disciples, Cheiko Okazaki

"When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." --A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially." --A Farewell to Arms 

"But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for awhile, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories." --The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." --The Things They Carried 

"The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writing knowing guilt and sorrow. And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life." --The Things They Carried 

"Nabokov says that every great novel is a fairy tale. [. . .] But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need to give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by Fate." --Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

"Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors, and infidelities of life." --Reading Lolita in Tehran 

"Learn to fight for your happiness." --Reading Lolita in Tehran 

"To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared? [. . .] We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts, and feelings." --Reading Lolita in Tehran 

-If you were wondering, my top three books this summer were My Antonia, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reading Lolita in Tehran. I also loved anything I read by Neal A. Maxwell.-

Oxford (aka HOGWARTS) packing list

Part of going to Oxford means that you get a packing list eerily similar to one belonging to a 4th year Hogwarts student.

For example, did you know that I have to buy robes? Like, I have to wear black robes to events like matriculation and exams. 

Guys. 

I HAVE TO WEAR ROBES TO SCHOOL. I AM BASICALLY GOING TO HOGWARTS. 

And yes, I have now turned into that annoying American girl who will compare everything to Harry Potter. Sick of me yet? Too late? Oh well. Might as well embrace it. 

Besides school robes, I have to get fancy dresses for special events. Formal halls, balls, things like that. 

I've been on the hunt for the perfect dress. Because it's not every day a girl gets to go to an Oxford formal hall. 

And I found the dress the other day. 

It's perfect. It's golden-brown, classy, unique, feels like silk, but it is machine washable, baby.  

[Update: Here is the dress, since I neglected to post a picture of it last night. I may or may not be wearing it to church today. Because it's a new dress. And it's a new dress that makes me feel pretty. So even though there is no special occasion, I'm wearing the dress. Ha.] 

I feel like a Roman empress in it. 

Or like Hermione Granger going to the Yule Ball. Except my dress is gold instead of lilac. 

So, like I said. 

This is year 4 at Hogwarts. 

I am Hermione Granger. 

AND I AM GOING TO THE YULE BALL. 

Could life get any cooler? 

Probably not.