ocean

the world’s best window

~ hilly miller ~ Leave a comment

I love the ocean, but let’s not start there.

When I was around eight I got my own room (for the second time).

My parents remodeled our upstairs floor to be a very cool loft split in two: one side for the brothers and one side for the sisters. I love my sister dearly, but this situation made things tense. We shared a waterbed. The bed was wonderful; it made that great sloshing sound, and you pushed up when someone else got in. The bed was also a point of contention. I liked to cuddle and Heather didn’t. The tension escalated when in the night I touched my foot to her sun-burned calf, and she immediately slapped me. I’m pretty sure that was the last night I slept there.

I moved back downstairs, and relationships were restored. When I had my own room (again), Mom gave me three framed artsy photos to put on the wall: two girls walking with their arms around each other (which I am realizing could have been a message), a girl standing in the rain, and a group of girls looking out a window. (You should know that I originally wrote “winder” for “window.” Hoosier-talk.)

In the third picture, the girls’ backs are facing us as they sit in a windowsill. Most of them are huddled together talking in a group, but there is one girl sitting on the end, staring out of the glass. Mom said I reminded her of that girl. Now, it could be that she had the same haircut and color as mine, but I think it had more to do with that feeling.

My whole life I’ve been staring out windows.

Life makes sense when I stare out a window. There’s so much going on, so much beyond whatever is happening inside.

I feel the same way about the ocean. Things make sense with the ocean. It’s on its own clock. The ocean is calm and powerful and incredible, and seeing its majesty makes whatever I’m worrying about seem pretty inconsequential. Watching the ocean is feeling a part of the miracles of every day, the ones that are all around.

The ocean is the world’s best window, and I never tire of looking because looking at life on the outside makes you see life on the inside that much more clearly.

“For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea”
-ee cummings
I love the ocean. Let’s end there.
picstitch(1)

pretty views and pretty blooms

~ hilly miller ~ Leave a comment

So the title doesn’t rhyme, but it sounds like it almost does, right?  Throw me a bone.

I live in a pretty place, and sometimes I forget how beautiful it really is and how much I dreamed of living here when I was younger.

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But like so many dreams becoming reality.  Living here, in California, is different than I imagined.  It’s busier and more expensive and more real.  Isn’t that what happens when what we wish for comes true?  It’s simultaneously more and less and different than you thought, but that’s because it’s not just a thought anymore.  The dream has been thrust into reality and that means it’s so much messier than you imagined.  But, can I just say, it’s so much greater, too.

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There is someone out there “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.”  Isn’t that awesome?  Because I imagine some pretty great things.  I ask for specific, crazy, wonderful things in my life, and yet, everything I receive is so much better than anything I could think up to ask.  I’m not trying to paint a picture of perfection here because my life is FAR from it, but even if it isn’t perfect, it’s certainly beautiful.  Every day, here in California, and at home, in Indiana, life is beautiful as dreams manifest themselves in reality, and something greater, something more than we could ever imagine for ourselves, takes root in our lives.

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throwback thursday

~ hilly miller ~ 1 Comment

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The ocean.  One of my favorites then and now, too.  The ocean seems to me to be the ultimate metaphor for a good life.  It has it’s stormy days and it’s weak days, but no matter how many times the water recedes from shore, a new wave always comes back up. No matter what tragedy or bad day or any worldly happening, the ocean just keeps on washing over the sand, making it new again.