Once Upon a Blood Moon

Once upon a blood moon, a friend and I (after a fair amount of driving and one hike up the wrong mountain) laid on the slope beside a church parking lot near the Provo temple.

Testing out Insta's new Drunk filter. 5 stars!

I gently mutilated the soft grass between my fingernails and felt the hour crystallize into a time capsule as we speculated on how our lives would look by the next blood moon. (18 years, 2033, 43 years old.) It felt as though the Lord opened the shutters on my future and, til the stroke of midnight, I was allowed to peer through the window of possibilities ahead. Lying on the side of the road, I felt like I knew exactly what I wanted, and what He wanted, and that I was going to be really happy. I drove home that night feeling like I better understood: God is interminably, intensely good.

As of Blood Moon 2015, I like my life very much.

Turns out, all the rumors are true and the second year of law school is immensely superior to the first. I've recently experienced the intoxicating sense of empowerment that comes from owning one's own tools, as well as the unique sense of humility that comes when one is compelled to go buy a plunger on a Sunday. (Clogged kitchen sink, but no one at Smiths knew that.) I've accepted that part of me will never outgrow categorizing humans into two types of people--those who text with winky-face emojis and those who do not. I've thrown myself wholeheartedly into cultivating my Religious Christmas playlist, as one does now that Constitution Day has passed.

It strikes me as unfair that "settling" generally carries a negative connotation, that settling into seems a bit intertwined with settling for. Settled, I believe, is one of the nicest things a body can feel--secure and content and deeply connected.

Harvest moons come to settle us in for the literal and proverbial changing of seasons; they demonstrate "the wonders of His love" (the Sufjan version, if we're being specific.) My life feels full of the important things, and I am left with a deep and delighted wonder for mountains in fall and good relationships and Temple Thursdays. Still, still, still.