A bright, morning light is gently coursing through the kitchen windows of a house that is surely yours.  The walls are country yellow, a sign that home is being made. The situation feels unwanted, but duly accepted. You are sitting at a blond, maple table, sipping a cup of tea.  Across from you is a young, sophisticated man twirling a pen across his fingers, contemplating what to write about you.  Both of you are relaxed and slouching just a bit with your right legs crossed over lefts.

As we enter our tenth year of friendship, this is the new picture of you in my head.  When I think of you, I no longer picture our sweet days pounding the life out of pianos in barely breathable practice rooms.  I no longer see us falling to the floor of an old chapel in fits of “I give up on this” laughter.  I don’t see my too-complicated gesturing ruining your shirt with the coffee I forgot I was holding.

I don’t get jealous of your uncanny, unexpected fashion sense.  I do not see that you have lost more weight than I since college.  (Nor does that fact upset me.) I no longer shake my head at your eccentricities.  I don’t picture wild hair or sweatpants.

I see you sleek and quiet–more of a mystery than ever.  And I see myself diving into you to figure you out all over again.  After nine full years, I no longer see the past or the present; I see the future.  Here’s to us.

My mind wakes up and high tails it out of bed.  It runs directly away from me and I literally have to put on my tennis shoes and chase it.  If my voice was awake enough, I’m sure I would be yelling a Hold up! as I burst each morning into the brisk fall air.  I use the word “burst” loosely.

As reluctant as my body is to start the circuit, my heart is what really takes the beating.  It cringes as my mind revs up, desperately seeking a final, significant, mind-blowing answer.  The path of my mind is a series of uphill questions.  Will I always be single?  Am I doing enough to better myself?  Should I facebook that person?  Am I running fast enough?  Should I have two shots of espresso this morning or just one?  Will the espresso make me weepy or fidgety?  Will this be my life forever?

This year, my heart ran all the way to Italy to attempt to address its own racetrack.  And as my mind only saw this move as unreasonable, leaving behind my family in turmoil and offering no salary to pay my piling school bills, my heart just kept singing.  You will find love.  You will find real, true, passionate, all-accepting love. Love was the basic question on my heart–my heart’s pursuit.  So my heart charged away and my mind was forced to follow.

In Italy, we (my mind, heart, soul, and body) did indeed find a new and undeniably sweet love.  The only thing was, it was not the kind of love I thought my heart had promised.  The love I found was spirituality embodied in the physical.  It was inside me, above me, all around me, and all at the same time.  It was Tina and Alan, Kip and Tammy, Carlie, E, Lorenzo, Laura and Liana.  It was ancient ruins and motorcyles.  It was fresh buffalo mozzarella, basil leaves, Sardegna wine, and cappucinos with my name scrawled in foam.  It was whistles and bella, construction workers, pizza makers, and marinarie.  Love flooded to me as a church choir, as a happenstance piece of advice, as Piazza Gerusalemme.  It was real life.  The love my heart found was humble and delicate, and somehow, amidst a great deal of pain and confusion, my heart understood it.  Accept.  Accept the love each day has for you.

If that is not grace, I do not know what is.  (By the way, it is certainly possible that I do not know what grace is.)

This is why my heart is exhausted by my mind’s morning running.  My heart has already found answers for most of the questions my mind is still asking.  My heart cannot believe that my mind has yet to learn its lesson.  Did I not take you half-way around the world and show you that none of that is the goal?  The goal is Nature Boy–love and be loved in return.  Accept every common gift.

So yeah, I want to say to my mind stop running in circles, but somehow that seems insensitive.  My heart was given grace and opportunity to learn its lesson.  It is my mind’s turn now.  My heart needed the beauty and energy of Rome and Mediterranean to learn.  My mind, apparently, needs the canopied sidewalks of rural Minnesota at 7AM, every day this fall.  Accept.  Accept the track and field day of your own mind.  It will grow, be strengthened, and one day, embrace the answers it has already heard.