The first adventure

December always makes me nostalgic, and last night I pulled an old journal off my shelf. In it are the annals of my freshman year of college, and I have decided to post an entry from that journal--an account of a trip some friends and I took after our first Honors party. It was the sort of journey that might not seem important to an observer, but it radically changed my understanding of life and community. Ten years later, the prose seems a little too precious and poetical, but I can't fault my 19-year-old too self too much for affected language: every flute and flourish was a sign of how deeply I was falling in love with new friends and with the idea that home could be a place where adventures happen. 

December 8, 2002

How wonderfully blessed I am! Last night as Keith, Mark, Rachel, Emily and I left the Honors House (it was about 11:30, after the Christmas party), I sat in the street to better see the stars, which were glinting as though polished by the chilling air. Someone said, "We should go to the mountains and see the stars there." Rachel, always eager to make dreams reality, asked, "Whose car are we taking?" "We can take mine," Keith offered.

And then, unbelievably, beautifully, we were on our way. No one wanted to hesitate or discuss, lest some sober voice kill our momentum. At first, Emily was reluctant, heeding her keen concern for being prepared, but we prevailed, and she joined us.

Even before we came to the mountains we were giddy, heddy [sic] with one another's company. Sevierville, Gatlinburg were dreaming in electric color -- when the road rose along a ridge and we stopped to look down into its valley, it looked like a field sown with seeds of light, or a shimmering lode in the dark wall of a mine. There too I saw a tree spangled with stars instead of leaves, just the image I think Wordsworth must have known when he wrote, "Shine, poet, in thy place, and be content."

Driving on, we entered the parkway through the Great Smoky Mountain National Forest, our headlights following the road like two needles embroidering a dark cloth with bright, serpentine stitches. High enough now for snow--the child's joy in seeing a season's first snow never diminishes. Hands numb from icy caresses, eyes wide in the clean darkness, ears turned to a hidden river, shouting for joy in its coursing, completely unselfconscious. Even the pain of warming as we drove onward was rich to me.

The final lookout on the parkway was most amazing. It hinted of large beauty to be shown in daytime, but in the darkness the magnificence of the earth was draped, serving only as our foundation for turning to the sky. So much was visible, so many stars who are not preeminent, but vital. Andromeda, the Ursae, and the Pleiades were revealed, and we even saw the soft ribbon of our galaxy....There were shooting stars as well, some briefly precious, and one like a long drop of melted silver.

By this time Emily was glad she had sacrificed scruples for spontaneity. [...] All night I was so full of love and thankfulness to God. We returned at five this morning, but none of us were sleepy in church, even with only three hours of sleep. I think we were still too thrilled by our adventure. Thank you, God, for laughter, and hugs, [...] for cappuccino at four am and safety home. For shooting stars and silent nights....holy nights.

Why I haven't sold my dulcimer

Ten years ago,  my English 101 professor, Dr. L, told our class that instead of our regular classroom, our last class before Thanksgiving would be meet in the Appalachian Center, a beautiful old house on the Carson-Newman College campus. "I'll bring my guitar," Dr. L said, "Billy can bring his djembe, and Bethany will bring her dulcimer. Instead of rushing through another essay, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving with music."

We made a funny ensemble -- one guitarist, one drummer, a damsel with a dulcimer, and a dozen Baptist-college freshmen. We sang hymns, mostly: "Blest Be the Tie that Binds," "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," "For the Beauty of the Earth," "Amazing Grace," and others. I missed more than a few notes, but in the chorus of voices and drum-beats and guitar-strings, my mistakes didn't ruin the song or lead anyone astray. I remembered all my high-school years in choir, the delight of letting my single voice dwell in a much greater sound than I could produce alone.

Unfortunately, that Thanksgiving sing-along was a unique event. My friends and I did plenty of singing in college--especially on long road trips--but in the years since I have hardly played at all.

I always look back on that first college semester fondly, for it was full of so many things I spent my adolescence praying for: rigorous academics, adventures in the mountains, a group of friends, and, of course, sing-alongs. I do not exaggerate to say that in stepping onto campus at eighteen, I found myself in the sort of place I thought only existed in my daydreams. For a short time, my dulcimer was part of that ponderous and lovely incarnation.

Indeed, for most of the time I have owned my dulcimer, I have felt more guilt than enthusiasm when I think about it. Once every year or two I will buy a new book of music to prod me to practice, but these resolutions haven't lasted long. I like music, and sang in choirs for years, but my other pursuits--writing, knitting, baking--not only bring more immediate gratification, but also come more easily to me.

You might wonder, then, why I haven't simply sold the dulcimer and removed the object of so much guilt. I have enough interesting (even eccentric) hobbies that I don't need the dulcimer to keep me busy or provide a topic for dinner conversation. Even so, I cannot bring myself to give it up. That Thanksgiving sing-along still haunts me with hope--hope that one day my imperfect notes will find a home again within the singing of my friends.


Tonight I tuned my hammered dulcimer for the first time in years. Tomorrow I have a chance to meet with some new friends interested in playing music together, and although I am ashamed at how much I've forgotten, I'm hopeful. I may never be able to play as well as the musician in this video, but tonight, tuning my dulcimer was my of affirming that the world of late-November hymn-sings, the world of discourse-giving-way-music, the world of abandon-the-rushing-for-the beautiful, that this world exists in more than memory.

Home Sweet Homecoming

October 20. The window panes are cold. My fingers trace ridges and valleys across the dark glass, trying to remember the architecture of the mountains we saw yesterday. Tired and peaceful, I think that tonight could almost be a college night. After a long day on campus, we lingered over a late supper, and now I am working at the computer late at night, a marked-up manuscript on the desk beside me. Lauren and Charlie are just across the hall; Emily and Kevin could hear me if I called their names. Tomorrow we'll meet Eric at First Baptist for church, and Jeremy might join us for lunch afterward.

It could almost be home. The familiarity of this night, this place, is bewildering and consoling all at once because tonight is not, after all, a college night. We are all nearer twenty-eight than eighteen, and instead of a dorm, Kevin and Emily's house is our gathering place. Sharing a meal with these friends is no longer a common joy, but a rare event--it has been years since we were gathered around one table, and it may be years before it happens again. This is not home, but homecoming.

My dear friends Dave and Mandy live here in our college town, and on one wall of their living room, they have painted the words "Home is..." in large letters.  They and their friends have written other words and phrases to complete this sentence all around the wall, and Saturday was my turn. I contributed a curious line from George MacDonald's Lilith.  "Home," I wrote, "is ever so far away in the palm of your hand."

This is the paradox of homecoming. We return to a place and a time that was home, traveling across memory, miles, or both, but we know we have not come to stay.

 Walking in the shadows of familiar buildings on Saturday, I began to catalog all the friends I would need to see walking to the cafeteria, or perhaps headed towards the dorms, before I would feel that I had really come home. This was not mere nostalgia; I don't wish I were eighteen or twenty-two again, and I would not come home, even to my beloved college, to meet my friends unchanged. I want a more-than-Facebook vision of the people they have become, with real voices telling stories about work and ideas and families. I want hugs and handshakes and looking-in-the-eye. I imagined all these friends gathered around Kevin and Emily's dining room table, but even as I indulged in my fantasies of reunion, I could not ignore the distances that were keeping us apart.  For some of the friends who once made Carson-Newman home, finances, jobs, and miles prevented their pilgrimage to the east Tennessee foothills. And there are other kinds of distances that, I knew, would have followed even my dearest friends back to our alma mater.  We might gather, but there would be subjects tactfully avoided at dinner, questions left unasked as we recounted the recent news. Home, I often think, is ever so far away. 

I was prepared for these distances, braced against awkward conversations and tentative reunions. I had resigned myself to any number of tepid "remember whens?"  Instead, I spent all weekend overwhelmed to see the ways in which the virtues that first drew me to Carson-Newman had grown in the lives of my teachers and friends. As a high-school senior, I had my choice of full scholarships to several colleges and universities.  I chose Carson-Newman because everyone I met there invited me, in one way or another, to become the sort of person I longed to be. I was a shy, neurotic, self-absorbed teenager, and by the time I finished high school I was very nearly sick of myself. When I visited Carson-Newman, I met young men and women who were brilliant without pretension, kind without condescension, fun without stupidity. Their confidence, kindness, and service attracted me more than any number of brand-new residence halls or manicured flowerbeds. Returning as an alumna, I realized how remarkable and rare these virtues are. I came home, after all, to friends who plan October picnics of pumpkin stew and ginger tea; who wash up the supper dishes without being asked; who spend their days teaching high school students to love reading or math; who go out of their way to include others in a conversation; who stand up for their convictions about the environment; who train dancers; who raise children to love truth, beauty, and goodness. I came home to the faculty who inspired me to be a professor--wise, compassionate men and women who greet their students with eager questions and hugs after half a decade.

All weekend I found myself wanting to hold on to everyone I met, literally to wrap my fingers around their wrists and to touch their faces. I want to be among these people, I thought. I want to live my life with their courage, grace, and kindness. I felt the same rush of hope and longing that led me to this school. This, I realized, is the reason for homecomings: not to retire from daily strife, not to escape into nostalgia, but to witness and remember what it takes to establish a home. It takes Emily's curiosity. Shannon's enthusiasm. Kevin's steadiness. Jeremy's thoughtfulness. Eric's fidelity. Lauren and Charlie's merry kindness. Dave and Mandy's creativity and convictions. Mari's courage. Mark's lovingkindness. Keith's wit. Rachel's compassion.

 As a student, I always cried at the end of each semester, and my flight back to Texas could have been one of those bittersweet journeys from one home to another. My heart was heavy as a thousand miles unfolded between me and Carson-Newman, but some of that heaviness came from the weight of gratitude. The home I have made in Texas owes so much to what I learned in college. I have no idea where my next home will be, but I will be proud if it, like Carson-Newman, is a place where people become more than they knew they could be. When we find such places, we do not always have the privilege of staying for long, but somehow, our true homes have a way of following us. Through faith, hope, and love, through friendship and imagination and determination, you may be startled to discover that home is in the palm of your hand.
   

Eric, me, Lauren, Charlie, and Kevin. Home sweet homecoming, indeed.

With Emily, fall 2005

With Emily, fall 2011

Abundant Lives: Come, Thou Fount (Part 1)

Come, thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; 

streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. 

Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above. 

Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it, mount of thy redeeming love. 

I began singingly almost facetiously, wondering if we were ever going to find the water we had driven so far to see. Technically, it was a mountain spring, not a “fount” that had inspired our trip, but as Rachel, Keith and I wandered through a graveyard in the Tennessee mountains, a hymn seemed the most appropriate mode for deciding which way to go next.  

One week earlier, my friends and I had attended a reading by the poet Jeff Daniel Marion at our college’s Appalachian Center.  First-semester freshmen, we were eager to attend any campus event, and our English Professor, Dr. Ernest Lee, had arranged the reading.   Mr. Marion shared several selections from his most recent book, Ebbing and Flowing Springs, and spoke about the actual Ebbing and Flowing Spring, near Rogersville, Tennessee, which had inspired the title poem.  I had loved poetry since I learned to read, but in all my adolescent sighing over “Tintern Abbey,” it had never occurred to me that poems could be connected to, or rooted in, actual places. I had always valued poems because they took me away from the uninteresting landscape of Terre Haute, Indiana, but here was a poet who drew his words from the land around him.  Rachel and Keith seemed struck by this, as well, and we decided that at our first chance, we would drive to Ebbing and Flowing Spring ourselves. 

We set out on a dark and misty day in late November, headed towards Rogersville, but we soon learned that poets, whatever their other verbal skills, cannot be counted upon for precise driving instructions.  Nevertheless, we enjoyed the drive; I was still very new to Tennessee and was fascinated by the winding roads, the twang of the voices at the gas station, and the way my companions, one from further east in the state, and one from the mountains of North Carolina, responded to the landscape.  As we drove further and further from our college town, whose foothills still seemed Alpine to me, Keith and Rachel would say, “Now we’re coming near the real mountains. Now I feel safe again.” 

  By the time we reached the gravel road and clearing where we were supposed to find the spring, twilight had passed into proper night.  The area was encircled in trees, but in the darkness we could not tell how large the clearing was. We peered through the windows of an old church, and read the inscriptions on the tombstones surrounding it, but we saw no sign of the spring house. For a time we stood apart, silently, each hearing the sound of rushing water, but unsure of its direction or source.  When a light rain began to fall, we linked arms and I began humming “Come Thou Fount.”  To my surprise, voices on either side of me began to sing along, each harmonizing with my melody.  

Aside from a few peers in my tiny home church, I had rarely met people my own age who knew hymns, yet here were two other teenagers who not only joined, but enriched, the songs that were most precious to me. All my ideas about what it meant to know a place or a person shifted: I was standing in the dark, on an unfamiliar mountain, with people I had known hardly three months, and yet I knew I was home. 

That night is my emblem for the home I found in college, a home I treasure not from nostalgia, but for the life it trained me to love, a life that challenges the isolation and petty ambitions of mainstream adulthood. In coming entries, I will write more about how my time at Carson-Newman challenged and deepened my understanding of home, relationships, community, and church. Tonight, however, I am content to dwell in this memory, and to invite you to join me there. 

We never did find the spring that night, but I think we might have stumbled upon the Fount.