Fruit

"I am forty, and it is different. Suddenly in midpassage

I come into myself. I leaf

gigantically. An empire yields 

unexpectedly: cities, summer forests;

satrapies, horses.

A solitude: an enormity.

Thank God."

It is Difficult to Speak of the Night - Jack Gilbert

What cities and summer forests await you? What seeds are longing to leaf gigantically? (Writing prompt taken from The Isolation Journals Substack written by Suleika Jaouad) 

I can never think of leaves without thinking of Beth Moore's Chasing Vines. Moore recounts a trip to Italy in which she learns the conditions needed to produce a grape harvest. "The grapes love the rocky soil" says the Italian farmer. Without rocks in the soil, the vines will produce big, beautiful leaves, and almost no fruit. It is only when they feel like they are on the cusp of death combatting the rocks that they are able to produce the fruit they were created to bear. 

In light of this reading, leaves have become anathema to me in recent years. I don't want to be all style, with alluring leaves and no substance. The fruit is what matters. So if you'll allow me to alter the metaphor slightly, I'll tell you where I'm longing for fruit to grow, starting, aptly enough, with food. 

*****

My body has borne the burden of dissatisfaction harshly in the last year. I lost weight, yes, but the way in which I achieved this was unhealthy at best, punitive at worst. On some days, I counted calories like a Friends actress; on others I ate every sugary thing I could find in my pantry. Switching between states of ravenousness and overindulgence, I lost sight of satiety, forgetting what it was like to eat what my body needed and sometimes craved, nothing more or less. 

With the way some of my days are unfolding at the moment, I still seek to ease the ache of a hard day with cookies or hunger. But as I settle into better routines (eating breakfast every morning, having healthy snacks on hand for when I come home and crash on the couch), I am hopeful that my relationship with food will change for the better. 

As anyone who has struggled in this area knows, malformed eating habits are only the surface features of a much deeper problem. The more pressing reality is, I feel ill at ease in my body. I thought that once I hit my goal weight, things would magically get better. Approximately seventeen thousand books on the subject would assure me that that's not the case, but in an uncharacteristically optimistic move, I had hoped I could be the exception. 

The act of looking at my figure in the mirror elicits anxiety, dissatisfaction, disgust. Could be better is the warmest thing I might have to say. Friends have noticed the weight loss, family members have exclaimed over it. But my body is not yet in an ideal state, and it frightens me to think about how much weight I would have to lose to fit the slender ideal my mind conjures; the one who lacks curves and whose thighs have diminished to Bambi-like proportions. 

My best friend, S, often asks me what Jesus would say about the things I think about myself. I experience a jolt of surprise every time, because, truth be told, the thought hasn't crossed my mind. Jesus has much holier things to be dealing with than the nausea that sometimes rises when I think about my body. S's question fills me with an ache. Could it be true that Jesus cares about my body and how I inhabit it? I can think of Bible verses and books that would confirm this to be the case, but I want that knowledge to leave my head and filter into my thighs. Head knowledge won't cure me, an embodied awareness, will. 

*****

In the past few months, I've also become aware of a growing longing for adventure, specifically to France. Cooped up in the front bedroom of my grandmother's house over the summer, I typed "Paris, 1 month" into AirBnB and let myself imagine the possibilities that such an excursion could bring. Croissants, cafés, art, writing, walking cobblestoned streets until my tired feet can carry me no further. The idea of such a trip momentarily numbed me to my cloistered and humid reality in Ipoh. 

Of course, financing such a trip is no small matter, nor is hoisting my French up to a level where Parisians wouldn't scoff at me. Yet, despite everything, I've begun to hope that it might not just be a fevered fantasy, but could, with effort, become another embodied reality. I am enjoying reading une Psaume and a portion of Matthieu each day in French, reacquainting myself with the passé simple and delighting in new words as I go. I recap my day to myself each day in French on the drive home, searching my brain for the right words and enjoying the sensation of occasionally relocating them. I have booked an intensive French course at my local l'Alliance Française pendant les vacances, and am hopeful that I can sit and pass an exam and have a formal qualification under my belt by the end of the year. 

I fell in love with the French language at thirteen, sitting in a sparsely decorated room on the second floor of my girls' high school. I had never intended to progress beyond the junior years, but each year, the sensation of expanding my mind with this beautiful old language and wrapping my tongue around its increasingly familiar sounds proved too much to resist. I was hungry for more, toujours curieuse, as my favourite teacher once told me. I want the seeds of love and hard work sown in my adolescence to bear fruit in adulthood, sustaining me on adventures to the French-speaking world. 

*****

This morning I've been thinking about the phrase "bald desire". I cannot remember where I encountered it, but it has proved memorable amongst the glut of of good words I have consumed recently. Baldness can be momentarily hidden with a cap or beanie, but once these accoutrements have been removed, a bald head glistens for all to see, announcing itself whether its owner wants it to or not. 

I have a bald desire for love and marriage. For a long time, I've tried to disguise this with various metaphorical hats, but recently, the hats have come off and I am confronted with a desire that has remained unchanged, despite my attempts to hide it from myself, others, and God. I sensed a whisper from God this week to tell him what I desire. This provoked tears, because of course it did, but also the tiniest bit of courage to take him up on his offer and whisper back, I want this. I want date nights and a held hand and looks from across the room. I want to encourage and affirm and be encouraged and affirmed back. I want to walk in the way of Jesus with someone who has committed to doing the same, and has committed himself to me. 

So often in the past when I've felt a seed of desire starting to grow, I've quashed it, pulling it out of fertile ground to lie in the sun and die. I was convinced that only heartache came of letting that grow and pre-emptively cut myself off from experiencing the pain I was always so sure waited around the corner. These days, I am longing to allow desire to grow and diminish in its natural cycles, and not those of my own making. More than that, though, I am looking to cultivate hope and stay connected to its source. 

In his farewell discourse, Jesus tells his disciples that the key to bearing much fruit is to abide - remain - in him, as he abides in us. Abiding is about so much more than bearing fruit, but the fruit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control - is so good, and so needed for any sort of longevity in the Christian life. 

I can't abide on my own. It is God who keeps me abiding, and his body - that flawed, flailing institution called the church and the flawed, flailing local expression I am a part of - who will encourage me to keep clinging when I'd rather let go. So as I find myself in rocky terrain in these areas and more, I'll keep fighting to abide by the grace of God and the encouragement of friends, hoping, praying, knowing that one day soon I'll see fruit.