The light in my room

I bought a lamp for my new bedroom today. It's quaint and made to look like an old oil lamp, but it's electric and still cute.

I've been hesitant, ever since I left home for college - or maybe even since the day I understood that I would one day leave home to go to college - to really settle in to a place like it is my own, like I'm going to be there long enough to make it worth my while to do the work of settling in. I've resisted acquiring real furniture, or an exquisitely warm comforter, or anything that might make moving harder, as I've always imagined I would spend much of my life doing it.

I think of this as I consider spending eighteen dollars on a cute lamp that I'm not even sure works because I'm at a vintage store and the bulb is blown. I consider that maybe, at some point, everyone will go their own direction, even if that wasn't the original plan. Maybe I won't know who to follow, if anyone, and maybe there will be no one who could or would follow me. Maybe this extra thing will make it all the more difficult to pack up and move when changes happen, as they tend to do, and I'll just regret spending the money and becoming attached to it. Maybe maybe maybe, what if what if what if, ah cuss it all! Take a relational risk for once in you life and buy the D lamp!

I did.

And it works.

And Words are Futile Devices

I keep listening to this music that makes me long for something that I can't seem to identify. From my bedroom two nights ago, I listened to it play in the living room downstairs and even that muffle was almost too much. My heart ached and yearned and the only thing I could think of to do that would help quiet it was to knit.

And so I knit.

"We need sensuality, and we can get it from attentiveness to the world." Elizabeth Seward was quoted saying that in Zen and the Art of Knitting, a good book to read if you like to knit or if you wonder how in the world knitting could ease my longing. Melissa lent it to me.

I still don't quite know why I feel that way when I listen to those songs, or why knitting helps me feel a little saner. But thank you Mr. Stevens for writing amazing music. Thank you Ms. Seward for your precious words. Thank you Mrs. Sartin for helping me stitch.