one month, plus some.

People say wedding days are perfect, and that is because they are right. I have never been to a not-perfect wedding ever, and in my case I imagined perfect and then found it to be actually even more perfecter times ten. Not only was I getting married (!), but our closest family and dearest of dear friends crossed continents to come and there was sunshine all over the South Downs and lunch in the library and croquet on the lawn and it was in so many ways ridiculous as well as being exactly right. The trouble is that these are facts and details and things, and they are important things but not the essential thing, which is the something deeper that still thrums through my marrow in ways that have not been written yet in fugitive words that slip through my fingers in life's liminal spaces; taking the stairs down to the design department, waiting for the bus to slow at your outstretched hand, the breath between soul-borne bone-shaking laughter over something already entirely forgotten. It is like I have searched happiness of all its synonyms and found language outdone. Words as I have known them no longer hold their weight.

So instead I am looking for new words, and in the interim I will say this straightforwardly: I married John William Morgan in the London Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at high noon on the eighth of June and it is to this day and counting the very best thing I have ever, ever done or will do.

 

all photography : dean govier

a letter from London, long overdue.

I am in a plane and I am a prayer. That was my first sentence. Every sinew of self stretched to silent supplication. The beginning of the essay about the time I moved to London, that one time I packed a suitcase, a carry-on, and two ziplocs of trail mix and moved not just across the country but out of it. I was going to be scared and second-guessing, I was going to make evident my insanity but perhaps eventually arrive at some small understanding, conclude with a quiet sentence in favor of strength. It might have been really something.  

Instead, I am in a plane and I am a prayer of irrepressible hallelujah. This is my first sentence. To be fair, round one of the flight was mostly foreboding—from Salt Lake City to Chicago I watched clouds collect like an inverted tundra beneath our wings, mottled, thick, and frozen. At one point I felt compelled to recite The Wasteland, Unreal City,/under the brown fog of a winter dawn. But even I had to admit that was too dramatic. And the woman next to me seemed concerned. Talking to oneself. Generally worrisome. 

But I am in a plane and I am every cell singing impetuous praise, and I can't tell you exactly why or where it is coming from except to explain that sometimes answers arrive only after you have accepted the question, and as my triple seven lifts up over the Windy City it seems to me that this is Heaven's version of a hearty high-five. The sun setting behind us has painted clouds the color of the Renaissance, and the Sistine sky rolls from gilded rose into deep purpled blue. One particularly painterly thunderhead flat-bottoms like a mushroom cloud and it is not sinister but somehow holy and I find myself wanting Wordsworth to write this, remembering that he already has. Trailing clouds of glory. Intimations of immortality. I watch the sun set until I can see only stars. 

There are still things to worry about. I do not know where I am living, I haven't fully finished enrollment at the university, I don't know when I will next talk to John or what exactly to declare as my intended purpose for entry on the customs card the stewardess hands to me with the tonic water I requested. I can't sleep on planes. I can't sleep unless I am lying down and it is dark and it is completely quiet, and on planes I am 0 for 3. I have a lot of time to think about what I've done. There is another hour of asphyxiating anxiety in the early morning, when I choose to focus on the shadows between the stars rather than count out the constellations. But I force myself to close my eyes and fall into fitful half-dreams and when I wake up it is proper morning and below me the sun has tipped over the edge of the world and the river lights up like liquid gold, spinning into the heart of a city that has my whole life spoken to me like home. Have you ever seen A Room with a View? Joy! Beauty! Love! From above, every building, each street, every turn of the Thames declaring the eternal yes.

__________________________________

All of this was six weeks ago. I found a flat. I'm more than a month into my masters program and in the thick of theses and thinking. I talk to John more than most people would assume necessary but is somehow not ever enough for me. And while I still can't tell you that I know exactly my ultimate purpose in being here (on the card I settled with "study;" this might prove the most pertinent way to define my daily walk, though I meant it more innocently then), I can say that this morning I woke up happy, that there are few things more whole and holy than knowing you are in the right place at the right time.

ma soeur le missionnaire.

Exactly one week ago today my sister Olivia embarked on an eighteen-month assignment to serve as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the France Paris Mission. We'll be posting her weekly reports home over on her blog, and I think you should read it not only because she is my best friend and I'm biased, but because she's also one of the wisest women I know. Her capacity for soul-swelling insight has been a refuge to me my whole life long, a constant reserve of bon mot and savoir faire that never fails to shape and move me. The people of Paris are the luckiest. 

The whole year and a half thing can some mornings feel far too long and more than I'd like, but I'm glad and grateful for this weekly dose of wisdom that is if anything only magnified by her work and calling. 

http://soeur-rhondeau.blogspot.com

On Sunday I went to watch  talk that Elder Bednar gave entitled The Character of Christ. He said that the defining element of Christ's character is that in the midst of struggle, while most people would turn in, Christ turns out. He turns out in compassion and love even when things are tough. This is now going to be a lifetime goal for me—to turn out, when we have the tendency to want to turn in. To help others and focus on the good. Learning about Christ and how to be like him is such a privilege and I need to remember that and really take what I have learned and make it real. Life is all about turning—changing, and turning to goodness and truth and God in order to become better, so that we can better love others.

FAVORITE BOOK: 

I'll read anything by a Russian, dead ones especially. Sure, some people write prettier. Most at least write far more succinctly. But when it comes to raw humanity—that scope of life from gore to glory—there's no comparison.

Thirty years before The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky was arrested together with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle and sentenced to death. After eight months in prison, Dostoevsky was taken out to what he thought would be his execution—only to have the order reprieved at the very last second, blindfolds already tightened, guns at the ready. Instead, Dostoevsky was assigned to four years of hard labor in Siberia, and in a later letter to his brother described the day's turn of events and his new sentence. He wrote what I often feel after reading his writing:

Brother, I'm not depressed and haven't lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter—this is what life is, herein lies the task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered my flesh and blood . . . Never until now have such rich and healthy stores of spiritual life throbbed in me.

I loved Dostoevsky first for his words (one commentator remarked that The Brothers Karamazov "seems to have swallowed a small library"). I still love those words, but more now for what they combine to mean: I love Dostoevsky for his grace and his hope, his understanding of both the redemptive quality to suffering and the incomparable experience of life despite all the darkness and doubt and the downright depravity. Like I said, raw humanity. No one does it better.