brown paper packages tied up with string...

breathe...

advent! SO exciting!

the campbells have been getting into the christmas spirit! oh, yes, would you expect any less? i have tried out baking christmas cookies with a friend, done a christmas craft night, made our christmas cards, gone into the city with friends to see the rockefeller christmas tree, finished our christmas shopping, bought our own tree and hung the paper snowflakes. and we have also been just hanging out in a city we love a lot as frequently as we can. i included some pics. (the peta coyne bird installation shots are for kirsta...)

:)

i love this season. i am trying to celebrate more intentionally and deeply what this season is about. the divine hours has a special advent devotion each day....love the divine hours.

and i cannot WAIT to celebrate with friends and family in two short weeks! seriously SO exciting. can hardly contain it!!

so love, peace and joy be yours this christmas season!!! almost there....

ok.

so sometimes you have to realize that you might not turn out to be a world-changing revolutionary.

or someone who can speak ten languages, or who discovers how to access the fourth dimension, or something.

or maybe you can't even do half of the things in life that you dream of doing.

which can be kind of disheartening if you are that person, the one that wishes you were a revolutionary.

i think i might be coming upon a new direction in my life. i mean, my direction is always for my king, but i mean something seems to be brewing lately about what i will be doing or how i will be doing "it".

(on a side note, i am learning how to knit 3-D objects. FINALLY. and i did a drawing that i put in an open show that is going to be in soho in two weeks at artists space gallery. anyone can be in the show, and i am one of those anyones. i think more galleries should be that way. no more of this "you can and you can't" stuff, right? we might need some of that, but because of the lack thereof this time i'm included!)

maybe i won't be a revolutionary (which i might dream of for a LONG time to come), but i pray i am who i was made to be. i pray i don't get caught up in this world's hoopla too much, and that i keep my eyes on what is important and real, and act with integrity and purpose. even if that means i cannot be the one who learns how to travel in the fourth dimension, i'll be who i am supposed to be, right? and i have to remember that that's better anyways.

thankful.

here are some pictures from brian's show, jimmy, random chinese man in the park in chinatown, and the kids are our friends ruth and blake's twins isaiah and leorah...

i am thankful. for my husband and our gift of a companionship and marriage. for our friends and family and little new jersey apartment. for my breath and life and gifts and dreams and failures (though those are sometimes the hardest to see the silver lining in, right?...)

millions live on less than a dollar a day. and millions more on only $2. women and girls all over the world have no opportunity of education, and here i am with an education, and on top of that a job and health and love and life...and i am remembering to be thankful, which i want to remember with more intimacy, depth and frequency.

on another note, i asked my kids today to name the things they are most thankful for. here's what they said:

leila - "my family", samantha -" my teacher, family and house", willem- "pumpkin pie", sophia - "room and bed", matthew-"closing my eyes at night-time", alex -'knights with swords and superman", brayden- "chicken nuggets and bunk beds". priceless.

changed the name of my blog. i am thinking about beyond the "now" but not in the same ways i have in the past. i am pretty fully in the "here" in most senses. i am certainly physically "here" and mentally more "here" than anywhere else. i am one of those people that is usually not "here". i usually struggle to be in the moment. that is one thing that is currently being changed in me (yay, finally...!). i mean, as much as something can be changed in the last year, which i think is a lot, but maybe i am young and naive....probably, right?

but instead of most always being beyond "now", i am here and now, maybe later, too.

birthday fun and halloween.

The first two pictures are from my preschool's halloween party.

The last three are from a bike ride in princeton brian planned for my bday. :)

so many thoughts.

i am a thinker. and i would like to think a do-er as well. but i am definitely one who thinks a lot.(i often think that i think too much...and would like to dream a bit more)

lately i have been thinking about what i want to be when i grow up. i have been growing up for awhile, but can't seem to figure out just what i want to do.

do i want to spend my time creating music and art? why, yes. of course.

do i want to love on children? (hopefully my own someday as well as other peoples) completely yes.

do i want to live in a culture other than my own, and learn another language? i certainly think i do.

do i want to teach and learn for the rest of my life? how can i be the best wife, friend and servant possible and do all of these things? certainly not by my own strength. i fail miserably every time i try to do it that way...

i am ok with thinking a lot. as long i don't over-do the thinking. and i pray that i become as much of a do-er as i am a thinker.

(and i am REALLY thinking about obama becoming our president. only 6 more days...)

some of my favorite things

just thinking about some things from this past summer and fall. (and i looked at allie's blog this morning, and she had the same entry..weird...people get on the same wave-length curing this season i think. it must be that death, birth, renewal thing, right?)

oh, and by the way we are doing well. we have lots'o'visitors lately (which has been so fun!) and teaching is going well for both brian and myself. our household convos are surely interesting.

(example: brian, "i showed my class today slides of robert smithson, and we talked about their reactions to thinking that his moving dirt into a large spiral within a lake and taking a photo of it was drawing or not." me, "our theme this week was fall harvest and i hid nuts all over the room and the kids had to act like squirrels and find and bury the nuts for the winter. but it ended up that many forgot why they were finding the nuts in the first place and either wanted the ones their friends' had found, or were trying to eat the nuts whole (until we quickly cracked them open) or just lost interest completely...")

totally silly, right?  i do feel thankful that we are keeping in touch with both worlds of thought and experience! which might be hard to do if we had other circumstances...

my favorite season.

fall is my absolute favorite.

i love everything about it. the weather, the colors, the food...

brian and i talk about how it is interesting that leaves and weather are so beautiful (the most beautiful, in my opinion) right before they die. how that's what fall is; things dying to give way to new life later in the year. but everything seems so utterly different than what i think something dying would be like. yet, every year i am astounded with the things that happen all around me. and i could look at it as nature just running it's course, but it's so much more than that to me.

we have been here two months.  two whole months. 

i was thinking the other day about friends that live abroad, and the processes they have to go through to adjust. (we aren't really going through those same processes living in new jersey, of course. which  i am reminded of all the time... how different it would be moving cross culturally then moving to new jersey...) but we are still adjusting. only two months. seems like way longer most of the time.  but now it's fall and i cannot believe all that has happened already.

i feel like we are sifting through this huge pile of golden wheat. that we are, much of the time, getting somewhere and really sorting through the good and the bad. that we are growing and learning. that we are seeing things in a new way, and there are so many new gifts that we are given each day through the process. the wheat (as it were) is so useful and can be so interesting to look at. but can be so heavy and overwhelming (when it's in a pile, especially)...

so learning how to focus on the pieces that are in front is still where i am at. and really figuring out how to best use those here and now will take me awhile i think. but hopefully not too much of awhile...

oh, and above are pics of NYC and my school.

things in our sight lately

it feels like i don't have enough time anymore.

my first conclusion is that i am not used to working full-time, which cannot be the case, as i have been doing such for four years now...but i just am not fully adjusted to my new schedule. (i think brian agrees)

it has been a really busy couple of weeks. i have learned the following:

1. new jersey drivers will always honk at and yell at you unless you have a tri-state area license plate...so there will be lots more to come of that for us.

2. it's expensive to live in new jersey. you are close to MANY things, but they all cost money.

3. you can interrupt as many times as you want in a conversation with someone from new jersey, to relate or show that you are listening (which they also do to you). i have found this to be sometimes fun and sometimes jarring in a conversation.

4. you shouldn't drop your phone in yogurt the same week your husband's phone's battery dies. you will not have an easy time communicating with the people you love and miss with no phone.

the above pictures are from: the beach, a library at georgetown we visited while visiting our friends michelle and joel and also a basilica there that is really welcoming to internationals at catholic university, a new pic of my polaroid wall i am pretty excited about, and a picture of brian's toy shelf he is really excited about.

love you and missing you friends and family.

where we lay our crowns.

so often i own the things i hope for. or am good at. or just things about me that make me who i am. i have been realizing lately all of the things that i wrap my identity up in, and how those things change or can so easily be taken out of context...

and mostly of how i need to lay my crowns, all of my hopes and dreams, all of the things i have been made to be or wish to be, at the feet of the king, and only at his feet. and how each time i take them away from there is a step (or a leap) away from all things good, all things full and right. 

so i am working on that. :)

and, by the way, i had a first full day of school today. it was a good day. :) i have a lot to learn, but i think i will be a good teacher. :) i have some pictures that i took of the kids, but they are polaroids, so i will have to scan them in. and brian and i went to the beach on labor day. it was awesome.  beach time in new jersey, who knew?

one other update that is also awesome, are the friends we have been meeting here. i get lonely pretty fast i have hence realized upon moving. within days of kirsta and kyle leaving (yea, probably right away) i was totally and utterly missing friends. and god is good (all the time, right? when will i trust that...) we met some. ALREADY. and they are better than i expected. the two we are closest to are also the closest in distance to us (they live a block away). their names are ruth and blake (and isaiah and leiorah their twins!) just a short story of how we met them (and there have been so many meetings like this! both in brian's grad program and outside of it! it sometimes seems like all of this was set-up for us beforehand...) 

we went to visit a church,  thought it was ok, were walking out, a guy walks up to us and starts talking. turns out he is a professor at rutgers (we find out later through our new friend blake that this guy, whose name is dean, is one of the most renowned living philosophers in the world today! he teaches at rugters, and is one of the heads of the doctorate program there) and he, his wife tammi and their kids take us to lunch. at which we find out that he also collects punk and jazz records (like over 4000 records, people. we have been to their house and seen them. brian was in HEAVEN. drinking bourbon and listening to records with dean. couldn't be more perfect) AND he collects comic books...so wait, lets get this all in one sentence. the first person we meet at church in new jersey is a philosophy professor who collects punk and jazz records, and comic books, who loves jesus and his family...and he kind of looks like neil young and john lennon. amazing. so anyway, dean and tammi take us to get some thai food, and then after a fun lunch, ask us if we would like to meet some people in our neighborhood. to which we of course say "yes please. we have no friends here. " and they say, " there is a couple that moved a block away from you last night, and we were going over to say hi. do you want to come, too?" so we went over un-announced with people we had just met two hours before to met other people we didn't know who had just moved the night before, who were named ruth and blake.  and now we're friends. and they are truly wonderful.

good story, huh?

clouds of hope.

i have gotten SO much new music lately and it's pretty fantastic. those of you who like my mix cds, beware...

i also have been listening to some denison witmer tunes the past week a lot. his music holds a lot of memories for me (most of them have kirsta in them!) from a long time ago...but good stuff nonetheless. "...you were waving flags that bare the colors of your love i didn't know. orange is for the vineyards, blue is for the rivers. green goes like a hillside covered now. white is not surrender despite what you've been told, it's clouds of hope. that fall on you now. save you now..." good stuff. :)

on another note, some quotes from my kids the past week:

-"miss lorah your hair doesn't look like hair, it looks like a helmet. why?"

-"where are your earrings from? where are you from? where is your family? where is ohio? is ohio in the sky?"

-"train conductors won't take people on the trains who throw woodchips, right miss lorah? (as you can tell i was trying to clear up a fight of woodchips...)

and it's only been a couple of days of working. awesome. :)

at the top are some of pics of brian in his new studio, of the jersey shore and NYC (one thing is for sure. being this close to one of the best cities in the whole world is so amazing.) and a pic of our dear friends april and jay when visited us!

more later!

"if you knew Time as well i as i do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it..."

just so i don't waste time, i decided to start a blog. 

plus we moved far away...

and i needed some new ways to process...

and finally give some details to the brave few who have the time to read them...(oh the days of the ohio office job...i had so much time to read blogs...)

we are now moved. i have enclosed some pics of our apartment. we are adjusting. brian starts school in a week, and i start working in a week as well (i am going to be teaching art, reading, math and science to three-year olds...! holy-crap! i am totally in the dark, going to be learning everything anew...how did that happen...?) let's just say, we do circle-time everyday where we sing "good morning to you, good morning to you, we are all in our places with sun-shiney faces" and then the kids go around the circle and say how they are doing, and many of them answer "my name is ____, and i am super-duper happy today!" wonderful. how can i get caught up in my insecurities when i have kids around me everyday singing about sunshine and totally full of happiness? god is good. :) i will have many stories from school, i am sure.

brian is super excited to start school. he's going to be amazing. this program is just awesome and we have already been meeting some of the other grad students (and brian is already becoming fast friends with everyone, no surprise there right? he's quite a charmer i must say.)he is already getting so many ideas for his artwork, and i have been more encouraged to work on my stuff, too. which is a good thing.  it is so cool to see him entering into a place where he will really thrive and grow. i can't wait to see what he makes. :)

and i am overall in flux. but excited. :) just in process...those of you who have moved to a completely new place can relate, i'm sure. :) one minute i will feel totally stoked and think i am adjusting quite well, then an hour later i will be confused and longing for familiarity.  but these are all normal feelings i am told, and will continue to grow and change. so i have some hope in that. :)

anyways, i could be blogging a lot or a little in the future. we will just have to find out! but there have already been happenings in the areas of culture (lots of it here in jersey, people. all kinds and that i LOVE), new friends, church and growth/vision in our life. and it's only been three and a half weeks.

but a full and wild (and so unlike what we have experienced before) three weeks.

onward we go!