Renewal

Love your enemies and look upon them with kind eyes.

Listening to Martin's sermon from last week on the Christ Church Santa Fe site, always a great moment to press pause and meditate on the message.

a lovely grind

I am grateful to receive many blessings.

For one, November marked the beginning of a new adventure--my first full-time, professional job. With a giggle of hope and the trick of fate, I was given an opportunity to work for a growing coffee company in Austin, Texas. It wasn't enough that the job would be the best possible use of my degree in entrepreneurship--every day I use the knowledge I received in innovation, marketing, finance, accounting, etc. etc.-- but the job also happens to be for one of the kindest families I have ever met.

Since it is an incredibly small company, my two twentysomething co-workers and I have embarked on what I like to call "the entrepreneurial experiment," which I will explain in a minute. Its 2009/2010, and as with most businesses, saving money is a critical key to survival. Therefore, rather than hiring one employee with exceptional experience (the 5-10 years most job postings require nowadays) our boss took on recent college grads who have the desire, freedom, and flexibility to bring about success. My only hope is that we can prove him right.

The best part about starting the job is that the product is great. Throughout college I feared a sales job where I would have to push something I had no feelings for. Luckily, all it took was my first taste of Fara Coffee (black--naturally) and I was in love. To learn more about this delicious coffee, check out the website at www.faracafe.com. On the site you can find information about our incredible history, who carries our coffee, as well as opportunities to buy online.

We also encourage you to become more involved and stay up to date!

You can be our fan on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fara-Coffee/193199751193?ref=sgm

Also follow my "tweets" on Twitter twitter.com/FaraCoffee

Clearly I'm loving Austin and my new job--let me know if you have any recommendations or want to try some Fara Coffee!!

So I missed a few days.

Mostly having to do with the fateful "blue screen of death" that arrived on my laptop thursday evening. I admired my tech-genius brother's recommendation to check out the advice for self-repair via youtube and google . . . but after a dizzying hour at the library, I began to think that perhaps people are computer science majors for a reason, and I shouldn't mess things up worse than they already are. whew.

Now my library computer is threatening to time me out . . . so unless I return this evening to update, it may be another few days before I begin writing frequently. excuses. excuses.

You know when there’s that book you’ve been meaning to read or a movie you’ve been meaning to see but never quite got around to it due to some semi-subconscious effort to wait for the “right moment?”

Well for me that book was emily giffin’s love the one you’re with.

And now is that moment.

Thank you . . . I’m sorry . . . I’ll always love you. They were all true—and still are—but were better left unsaid, just as I decided never to confess how close I came to losing everything. Instead, I hold that day deep within myself, as a reminder that love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together.
-emily giffin

Reading this book helped me find a better grasp on the many dynamics of relationships, the ups -the downs – the blahs – and most importantly the uncertainty, excitement & curiosity that comes with the other one.

“But maybe that’s what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.”

The whole thing reminds me on one of the phrases taped on my mother’s desk:

Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? –Arab proverb

“I think of how life takes unexpected twists and turns, sometimes through sheer happenstance—sometimes through calculated decisions. In the end, it can all be called fate, but to me, it is more a matter of faith.”

And I hope to keep that faith. To keep believing in love. That although it comes and goes—ebbing and flowing like the tide on a new england beach—love brings such joy to our lives that it is important to relish every moment.

my new goal is to write everyday, in order to improve my writing abilities and become a more reliable person.

perhaps this seems frivolous, but it is something important.

besides, how else can I be documenting a journey without sharing the details?

-random thought-
sometimes I find where I’m living so ridiculous it makes me chuckle while driving in the car.
Not only am I in the home of the:
worlds largest county fair
largest waterpark
wurstfest (sausage & beer festival)
but also to the largest number of inebriated floating toobers per square foot.

However, I am soon to realize my attraction to places culturally rich and slightly off-the-wall
considering my closest family and friends
burned a fifty foot tall puppet to the ground this past Thursday
no doubt surrounded by a sweet smelling smoke and people of all ethnicities shouting “Que Viva.”

What a world.

Just finished Life of Pi by Yann Martel, beautiful story.

Loved a number of aspects of this novel, particularly the shout out to swimming, tribute to faith, and glorification of the power of a great tale.

As a lifelong competitive swimmer (who was more fond of practice than competition until my final year), I felt Martel beautifully described the glory of being a swimmer. “Swimming instruction, which in time became swimming practice, was grueling, but there was the deep pleasure of doing a stroke with increasing ease and speed, over and over, till hypnosis practically, the water turning from molten lead to liquid light.” The joy of this feeling.

Next time I am in Paris I have to check out the Piscine Molitor. Sounds incredible.

I enjoy how young Pi seeks out and conforms to three very different religions at once. Reminds me of my bic days. My favorite of his descriptions includes “Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.” That is what I love, that it seeks out the right now and being the best you can right now, loving your neighbor, your enemy, and your God. Pi’s love for God and stories kept him alive during those frightful days overseas, and it can keep us alive every day.

And in summary, to examine the ever powerful Chapter 21 & 22. To avoid the “glum contentment that characterizes my life” I agree that it is important to take part in “the better story” and belong to “an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love . . .”