Weekend in Denver

Carrie Sawyer is one of the best people God ever deigned to put on the Earth. She has been a constant encouragement, joy, and fellow wild spirit, and so I jumped at the opportunity to visit her in her new home: Denver, CO. Enjoy some photos from the journey!

in a chair in the sky

I'm right now between two scheduled plane trips.  I've just returned from GLORIOUS Denver (pictures to follow!), and next Tuesday I'm headed down to South Carolina to visit my sister.

I have a conflicted relationship with airplanes. While I'm enormously grateful for the speed and relative reliability with which I can simply cross the world (!!!!), I'm thoroughly aware that at every moment we are breaking the laws of gravity. Not just breaking the laws, though--laughing at them.  Aware that they are ever and always at work, but content to allow the Navier-Stokes equations to get in the way.

So when I started to freak out on the way to Denver and Zach, my nice neighbor and a frequent air-traveler, tried to console me by saying that "the worst case scenario, Nicole, is that we land," I vehemently disagreed. Worst case scenario: we crash.  That is a possibility.  That can happen. It DOES happen.

Louis Black tells my story perfectly.

We are allowed to participate in the miracle of flight! Perhaps this is reading too much into my situation and fear, but I think a very Christian response is to at all times recognize the immense strides man has had to take to even understand the laws of nature, never mind supersede them with our scientific feats.

And that reality is even more believable when sitting five rows behind the pilot in nose-dive positioning.  MERCY.

up in the air

Above all else, I'm afraid of boredom. I'm afraid of being stuck. I'm not just wary of not being entertained--I'm well aware of how draining it is to be "on" one hundred percent of the time, and sometimes periods of retreat and refreshment and solace are entirely necessary.

But to succumb to ennui, while the world is awake and inviting and OPEN? While there is brokenness to fight and people to love and worlds by which to be taught? While there are mountains to climb and seas to swim in and friends to make and roads to run and fresh air to breathe?

Portrait of the notoriously super-social ENFP: believes in a bizarre cosmic whole; great deal of zany charm; disconcertingly spontaneous; short attention span; tends to get bored easily; incredibly intellectual-turned-captain wildchild; global learner


I want to forever rail against consolation, and not just philosophically. There is work to be done here. Now. There are systems to be assessed, and structural injustices to be understood.

And then there is personal sin. Not so small, but overlooked most of the time. Sometimes I really see interpersonal workings as pointless, when macro-level changes from policy and legislature and entrepreneurship are so much more inviting in their scope and promise. Things are meant to work together.

And we are to use who we are, not lie around lazily until some third party assigns us work, but to passionately and fully be ourselves.


How do we remain interested? Interesting?

Dear November

1. DENVER (and Carrie Sawyer)
2. Tango music
3. PEER freaking REVIEW
4. Day of Prayer
5. Thanksgiving in South Carolina
6. Candace's Basic Training graduation
7. Kant's Prolegomena
8. Chapel talk
9. Latin Easter Vigil

Augustinian restlessness

It was around this time last year that I was working on a presentation of C. S. Lewis' Perelandra, that great work on restlessness and homelessness and supernatural identity.

This article has come just in time.

FINALLY, cause to like Hume

"Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit and will severely punish by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher, but, amid all your philosophy, be still a man."

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section 1

new favorite

OHMYGOODNESS.