Visitors and Poets

This morning, blinking sleep from my eyes at 6:30am, I said goodbye to my mom and sister who had come for a long weekend visit. Now all that remains of their time here is an air mattress waiting to be deflated and a handful of extra groceries (including four jars of peanut butter). I enjoyed having them to visit; it gave me an excuse to do some sightseeing. I find that despite my proximity to our nation's capitol, I don't take advantage of its many cultural and intellectual offerings as often as I should. With them I visited the Holocaust museum--a sobering, but excellent exhibit-- and revisited the Natural History museum.

Here's some pictures from their visit:

Mom and Loren got a chance to meet Jake

Riding the Metro

Mom likes it that there is a Calder statue in DC like there is in Grand Rapids, although she says this one looks like Shelob

Duemler girls together

Now the apartment is once again quiet; after three weekends of visitors in a row, the silence is almost unsettling. Realizing I hadn't updated my blog in a while, I spent some time looking over my journal entries since my last post and over some of my reflections on the beginning of a new year. As we are making our way into March, I'm realizing how much has happened in a year. A year ago at this time I was hearing back from grad schools and trying to decide where to spend the next few years of my life. A lot has happened since then and I've gone through some large changes; most of which I'm very happy with. I can say with confidence that God has been very very good to me.

One extra curricular book I've read this year is  Red Bird, a collection of poems by Mary Oliver. I found it very delightful, but also haunting. Oliver deftly interweaves an awareness of death and the joy of life  through the lens of the natural world which remains for me a powerful system of images. It reminds me of the walks I would take when younger through the woods behind my parents' house: pleased as I was just to be alive for a moment in that rapidly eroding and suburbanly tamed, small, sliver of nature, it was here that the peaceful melancholy that marks my memories of childhood most clearly overtook me. It was a place for both solitude and communion with God and his world. Through Oliver's poems I recapture as an adult most completely that bit of who I am:

Red Bird Explains Himself

"Yes, I was the brilliance floating over the snow
and I was the song in the sumer leaves, but this was
only the first trick
I had hold of among my other mythologies,
for I also knew obedience: bringing sticks to the nest,
food to the young, kisses to my bride

But don't stop there, stay with me: listen

If I was the song that entered your heart
then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed,
and thus wilderness bloomed there, with all its
followers: gardeners, lovers, people who weep
for the death of rivers.

And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body. Do you understand? for truly the body needs
a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable
beauty of heaven
where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart."