Ties That Bind

We all have cords coming from our hearts. Some ends attach to people and others to places. Dreams and memories anchor other cords. These cords wary in thickness, strength and healthiness. When we leave a place or people we love, the cords stretch tugging painfully on the heart. In cases of unexpected, unprepared leavings the cords may snap leaving us a little less anchored and a little more torn. Over time the strained cords of the heart may stretch until they break. Some unravel slowly until the person or place slips from our awareness. Some people's cords are thin and snap easily causing aches but no great pains and no great joys. Others form strong thick cords that function like an artery to the heart. When severed these wounds can cause a person to bleed out unwilling, unable to live without that connection. At times snapped or frayed cords can be tied back together but the knots slip and unravel easily.
The heart strings trained or broken by distance and time are different from those severed by death, loos or tragedy. The cords broken by time thin out over the years. The strength supplied by them fades. The memory of the person or place grows fuzzy around the edges. It is harder to dredge up memories of his face or the sound of her voice. One day the bond breaks sometimes unnoticed for quite some time. The cords pulled taut by distance tug painfully at the heart as the road slips behind us and familiar places flash by. The discomfort grows until waving relatives blurr into the scenery, the town dwindles, and the plane takes off.
Countless times I have left people and places behind. I have watched friends leave more times than I care to remember. I hold the strings of my heart loosely. They are strong able to bear up under great distances and many years. I don't let them grow too big or provide too much emotional sustenance so that when they break the pain is minimal. As I write this I'm sitting in the Buffalo airport waiting to board my flight to Atlanta and from Atlanta back home to Salt Lake City. My ties holding me there start to slacken. I will sleep in my bed, yell at my roommate's cats, and tell of my vacation. The ties binding me to Western New York tighten, tugging at my heart. I see these cords thinning. Several will break soon. I see it. I dread it. It makes the goodbye harder this time around. Good friends of mine are retiring and moving closer to grand kids. Those ties will shift to a new location removing another tie I have to a place. The house they live in is my home. The place I could count on a bed, excellent dinner and tea while watching HGTV. That house is a refuge to me a place of love and acceptance. I said good bye to that house, consciously weakening the rope attached to it. I probably will not be able to call it home again. The places I know so intimately will change over time. Old buildings will be torn down and new ones built. The Subway becomes a Burger King and all the familiar faces disappear. My attachment begins to break until one day the cord anchoring me to Western New York is that of memory, a bittersweet remembrance of what was.
One decision is left for you and I when our ties that bind break, snap, fray, dissolve. Do we grow a new vein and invest in new people and places or do we wrap the broken ties of our life around us, cocooning ourselves from the pain and attachments of life? The choice lies before us risk pain to gain affection, strength, support, belonging- life or insulate, ignore and hide with all our cords attached to broken dreams and fading memories until our hearts wither from lack of affection. Which will you choose?

Home is Where the Heart is.

Home is where the heart is. This adage is so well known that it seems to lose its meaning. It is thrown out casually in conversation, it implies depth, but seems to mean very little. The concept of home is abstract and means different things to different people. For me home is a fluid thing. I travel a lot and have lived in many places. Home can be the apartment I live in. Maybe the place I grew up is home. The place I went to college is my first home apart from my family. I call any hotel, room, or tent my home when I sleep and have my stuff there. My heart is many places that are not home to me. I have friends who live all across the United States and scattered over the world. Part of my heart is with them, but my home sure isn't.
Yesterday I took two flights and drove an hour and half to arrive in Houghton, New York. Through out my journey my excitement grew. Memories of the time I spent in college played through my mind. I thought about where I call home. I have three homes. My first home is the house and city where I spent nine of my developing years. Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico is my childhood home. My parents still live there. I dream about going back to my house and walking through it, looking at the familiar books and paintings. Sometimes I long to sit in the side yard and read a book or bounce a basket ball. I remember what it was like to walk to the corner and take the bus downtown where I met my friends. We would spend the morning walking around, have coffee at a little cafe and lunch on the town square. I think of my school which is partly in a basement and partly on the top floors of buildings, with the bright blue pillars in the auditorium. My heart yearns to be back, to remember. Oaxaca is my home. 
My second home is Houghton, New York. I arrived at the Buffalo airport where two strangers met me, helped me use the pay phone and drove me out in the middle of no where to a beautiful campus. They dropped me off at my dorm. I went home for Christmas and did a study abroad in Fiji. Sometimes my friends invited me to their homes on breaks, but for the next four years I lived in Houghton. I spent all my summers working at a camp. I grew close to several families in the area. Sometimes I spent breaks with them, often times I showed up for dinner hoping to be fed. Besides academic learning, I began differentiating myself from my parents. I began discovering who Kristin is and what she likes. None of my friends knew my family. It was just me. I learned to do things for myself and paid some bills. I did my homework without my parents having to ask me and sometimes I studied for test. Houghton is a peaceful place. A place where I can think clearer and relax more, it is my home.
I currently live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have lived here now for four years and I've lived four different apartments and have had five roommates. I'm working for my eighth company and a year and half into my Masters degree. I have an active group of friends in my church. This is where I live. When I leave to go some place I experience the satisfied feeling of arriving home. I like walking through my house and looking at everything. I breathe deeply of the dry air. This place, too, is home.
Where is my home? I don't know it all depends on your definition and what the intent of the question is. I don't really belong in any of my homes. There is one place I know I belong, it also is my home, but I have never been there. Heaven is my ultimate home and sometimes my heart yearns to go there. What a strange thing home is. It can mean so many different things. I think instead of home being where the heart is; I think home is where your heart finds peace.

Maps: discovering the minute and grasping the breadth

I move fairly often. Each time I settle into a new place my room takes on a slightly different look. In this apartment my theme is maps. I love maps. Even as a kid I remember studying a map of California. I read the names of places. I looked at the highways wriggling like veins over the state. The topography fascinated me. I liked seeing where the mountains pushed up in rigid triangles and where lakes dotted the state. Several years ago I bought a three map set from Costco. The first is a standard map of the United States. It shows major roads and some geographical features. It is brightly colored with large squarish states in the west and smaller squiggly border states in the east. It is familiar. I can trace the path of at least four cross country trips on it, recalling fondly what we ate where and what historical sight we just had to see. I remember the Dairy Queen someplace along the Kansas portion of  I-70 where we stopped on a summer long road trip and my dad bought us all a treat. Years later when driving through Kansas I drove through a little town that I'm sure is the same one. This map represents my country.

The second map is one of North America. This one broadens my view of the world. I see how country lines are arbitrary and the Rocky Mountains that start way up north in Canada leave a distinct ridge all the way down through Mexico. Everything east of the Rockies looks so flat, like flour leveled with the back of a knife. I think about the Bay of Biscay. It looks so large that it might be able to swallow all of Texas. Mexico is the odd country of the large countries in North America. It is quite a bit smaller than both its northern cousins. It's relatively narrow and hooks up to one side. Mexico looks like the tail of a mermaid. Even further south are the small countries of Central America. These tend to blur together on the map, yet each one is distinct. The countries trail down and meet South America.
The third map, which is probably my favorite, is the world map. I always hang this one up some place in my house. Sometimes I stick pins in it to show all the places I've been to. I can look at it for hours wondering about different places, dreaming about where I want to go next. It shows a world of diversity where each country has its unique shape and is home to people that have a separate identity from all others. Huge land masses cocooned by masses of water and islands that look like they will be swallowed up speak of exciting places and new things to see. At the bottom of the map are the flags of the world. I wonder about flags, how do you come up with a flag for a nation. Who decides what it should look like. Some flags are quite unique where as others follow a similar theme of stripes. Red is a dominate color amongst the flags. If I had my own country what colors would I pick for my flag? How would I make mine cooler than the rest?
These maps are my happy companions. I can spend large amounts of time just looking at them and speculating. along with my maps, I have mementos hung that I brought home from various places. I have three banana leaf pictures from South Africa of a lion, an elephant and a village. I have two bird feathers framed from Costa Rica. The blue one has a toucan painted in astonishing detail. The orange one has a monkey. There is a painting of the Santo Domingo church in Oaxaca, Mexico that my sister did for me. I took a picture when I was 17 in a little coffee shop overlooking the church. I always liked that picture. I asked my sister to paint it for me. There are other places I have traveled that aren't represented on my walls, but I fondly remember each one when I look at my maps. I anticipate where I might end up next. I look forward to whatever adventures lie before me. Until then I will look at my maps and dream.

Have some cheese with your wine

My birthday was last week and my parents sent me a present through the mail. It arrived last Tuesday in a styrofoam cold box inside a regular shipping box. Opening the lid, I found four kinds of gourmet cheese. I love cheese. I like trying new things. I said to myself, what am I going to do with all this cheese? Wine goes well with cheese. However, wine and cheese by myself or just with my roommate although fun, didn't quite seem to be enough for the occasion. So what did I do, I did the modern equivalent of writing out invitations, addressing envelopes and sending them out; I sent an evite over facebook to my girlfriends.
I had a great time getting read for my party. Something about wine and cheese creates a feeling of sophistication. I am not all that sophisticated. So what do I do? I went to the dollar store to purchase clear plastic serving trays, little wine glasses, and tiny plates. I also got a plastic red table cloth and sesame street napkins. The smell of baking brownies greeted me when I got home. Pleased with my elegant plastic purchases, I showed them to my roommate. In turn, my roommate described to me her brownies that she made without flour. We set up our living room and went through all of our Cd's to find the five that carried an elegant air. We ended up with classical music, Sarah Brightman, and Frank Sinatra.
Finally our guests began to arrive, bringing wine, cheeses, crackers, and fruit. We ended up with six different types of cheeses including: French Gruyere, French sheep cheese (etorki), Canadian red leaf cheddar, Chocolate goat cheese from Wisconsin, no women Cajun cheese, and Havarti. There was a spinach artichoke dip to die for. In wines we had a French Bordeaux, Chardonnay, and pink truck Zinfandel. With our tiny plastic plates and put together wine glasses, we chatted and laughed. We discussed extensively the illusive flavors in wine that others seem to taste that we can never find. I had a great time. So next time I get fancy cheeses you just might get an invitation to share them with me and drink some wine.

Choose, fear or faith

I have been thinking about pathways and journeys recently. This is a short essay that I wrote several years ago about the choices we make in life. I was inspired by Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" and the Sermon on the Mounts description of the broad and narrow path.

Fear or Faith

9/12/09

We are all well acquainted with Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” We all realize that the fork in the road signifies choice and that the narrator “took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Allow me to use Frost’s poem to work out a choice we all must make again and again. What if one path represents living life based on faith in God and the other represents living in fear of anything and everything. I have most often chosen fear’s path. This path allows me to hide. I can hide from my emotions, from love, from forgiveness, from self discovery, from friendship, from commitment, from change, from life, and even from myself. I can hide from whatever it is I fear. The longer I follow fear’s path the greater my fears grow, the more power they hold over me, sending me fleeing faster down fear’s path.

            Unlike in Frost’s poem, however, I am presented with the fork in my path often, constantly. At any time I can choose to tread the path of faith. This path is scary and requires reliance on God for every step. Nothing is hidden. Everything is revealed. Light shines brightly to uncover secret thoughts, intimate desires, and petty selfishness; nothing more or less than the truth of who we are and our place in the world. The path of faith has a companion, Jesus. He walks by my side, picks me up when I fall, and converses with me. This path invites love, fellowship, trust, giving, and gratitude. There is no room for fear.

            The path of fear or the path of faith, the choice stands before you and me every moment of every day. Are we willing to give up all, to place our future, happiness, desires, thoughts, secrets, and yes our fears themselves into God’s hands or de we cling tightly refusing to trust, refusing to change? I believe that no one who has chosen the path of faith has regretted it, yet on the path of fear there is much regret and disappointment of those too afraid to live by faith. The path of faith necessitates great courage, unconditional love, and abundance of mercy, grace and patience. It takes strength perseverance. This path burns away the dross of our lives leaving pure gold. Through trial and fire those who chose the path of faith become the best of who they are. The longer one stays on the path of faith the more like Jesus one becomes. I often pick the path of fear. It is easier, but my mind and heart remain tormented, carrying burdens of guilt, unmet desires, loneliness, and fear – always fear. At times I pick the path of faith. Terrifying in its way because I am stripped of all defenses and I am left vulnerable. I am vulnerable, but not ashamed, clothed in love – unafraid. Each step based solely on faith.

            Something changes, a new challenge, a new choice, fear or faith. As in Frost’s poem those who choose the path of faith most often find “that [it] has made all the difference.” Few choose it, even fewer keep choosing it. It isn’t a path for the faint of heart, but those who persevere can say “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

"The road goes ever on and on..."

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

J. R. R. Tolkien

There is something about a path winding its way beyond the horizon that is irresistible to me. It does not matter where the path is, I always want to follow it. It might wind along a coastline with waves crashing against sandy beaches. The path may be shrouded by tall trees with heavy boughs. It may run straight through a field of wild flowers. Wherever the path is, it beckons my feet to follow it. I want to know where it goes even if it is only the other side of the mountain.

There is something about a path that allows me to think things over. While my feet wander along, my ears hear the sound of birds and the rustle of grass, and my eyes eagerly search for new things to see; I can think. My problems seem less important, somehow removed from me. I can ponder the questions that I do not have time to think about on a normal stress filled day. I feel a little bit sad when I reach the end of a path or have to turn around to go back. As I head away from the adventure bit by bit every day concerns settle back on my shoulders, like a pack that I always carry with me.

I love looking at pictures of paths. When I see them I want to know where they go. I imagine what is around the bend as the path curves off the side of a picture. A path stretching before me, represents freedom. Freedom from the normalcy of the regular day. Adventure. Discovery. Peace. This is what I find as I follow a dirt track through a forest or a rocky trail up a mountain. I hope you too can discover the joy of a path pulling you to discover new things.

World of Words

I am starting a new blog about writing. Never fear, I will continue writing on this one. This blog will have my general observations and anecdotes. My new blog will be all about writing. It is about things I learn along the way, my writing processes, and other such writing related material. You can find this one at kristinriggs.wordpress.com. I'm excited to begin this new phase in my journey to becoming a professional writer. This blog is still in the inception stage so it might take some time to take off. I would appreciate hearing any writing feedback you have or your own stories about writing. Thank you for following my blogs.