Old Cold, New Cronies

I've been attempting to write an essay explaining my fascination with yoga for days. It's coming verrrrrrrry sloooooooowly. Like most things I do. I have half a post written on that too.

February is when the relief of January begins to wear off and I start to fantasize about being outside. About five times in the last two days, I've nearly bolted out the door and made a beeline for the woods, hoping to be far enough away from my house before noticing the tiny, tiny temperature that I'd just say to hell with having circulation in my appendages! and stay out for a while. Then, I check to see just how tiny the temperature is. Then, I remember that I have to teach -μι verbs this week. Then I decide, defeated, to stay in and study. I feel like a bug trapped between two window panes, the hermetically sealed kind, and my little bug-lungs are feeling taxed in the low-oxygen environment (do bugs have lungs?). Don't ask how I managed to get my little bug-self trapped between two hermetically sealed window panes. Just get me out of here!!!

Here is the news from Amyland:

Kevin and I have joined a fellowship group. The people are all in our church and all around our age (ish). Unlike all the other small groups at our church, we meet every Sunday, eat a full meal together, hang out for about 4 hours, and won't stop meeting in the summer. (Does anyone else feel frustrated and empty and faked out when you're told "Be in a small group so you can have community!" but you only see the people twice a month and you're expected to stop meeting for 25% of the year, and when you are together all you do is study the Bible rather than talking and engaging in each other's lives?) An integral part of the evening is reading a bedtime story to the hosts' two-year-old son and high-fiving him all the way to bed. So cool.

It feels good to be part of a group. But it's hard to0, on many levels. First of all, making new friends can be an abyss of stressed-outedness for me, especially when those new friends clearly do not share many of my passions, and so I must hold so much of myself inside. But then, isn't that always the case in being-together? I have to remind myself that it is me, really; I'm the one who has a harder time than most at holding myself in. I grab one wayward strand and another whips free in the wind. A tame tongue I have not, nor a tame heart.

Second, I don't love any of these people yet, not in the way I love my loved ones anyway. And so, I wish the people I loved were there. If all goes according to hope, this will change, and they will be new loved ones, and I'll be just as happy with my new loved ones as I am with my less-new and old loved ones.

And third, as usual, my husband and I seem to be the only egalitarian feminist progressive granola-heads in the bunch. Alas. One would think I'd suck it up and get used to this state of affairs after nearly seven years in Indiana. After all, conservatives are people too, and can be kind, compassionate, thoughtful people. Between universal–health care protests anyway. I know, not all conservatives are scrooges. But the scrooges rob me of faith in the whole lot.

And so I hope we will be mutually refreshed and sharpened. I'm always saying that I want my life to be marked by love for the not-like-me. I do hope this becomes that. I need more people in my life to love.

And um. I guess that's all that's new in Amyland. I didn't sleep well last night, so my thoughts are garbled. Please pray for a warmish, dryish day to defer my demise. If I don't see a bird soon, I may develop a twitch.