All at once the sound of children singing in the monastery stopped them in their tracks. The voices calmed Tin Win. As if someone were stroking his face and his belly, soothing him. He stood frozen, listening. The soft rustling of leaves intermingled with the voices. It was more than a simple rustling, though. Tin Win realized that leaves, like human voices, each had their own characteristic timbre. Just as with colors, there were shades of rustling. He heard thin twigs rubbing together and leaves brushing against one another. He heard individual leaves dropping lightly to the ground in front of him. Even as they drifted through the air, he noticed that no two leaves sounded alike.

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, page 116

When I was halfway into this beautiful book, I flipped to the opening pages to check the publication date and was shocked to see that it was published 10 years ago and translated into English six years ago. Why haven’t I heard of this book before? Why isn’t everyone reading it?

In poignant yet accessible prose, Jan Philipp Sendker draws a portrait of the contrast between Western and Eastern thought through a modern-day fairytale. The only words that come to mind for this book are lovely and beautiful. I read it in only a few sittings, barely able to put it down. It felt like my reward after persevering through The Paris Wife (which I wish I could recommend but cannot as it somehow, inexplicably, makes Hemmingway in Paris in the ’20s boring). I’ve read so many great books this year that it’s hard to say where it ranks in comparison, but I found it delightful and hope you do too.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die — but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. …For while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.

Romans 5:6-10

I love (really, love) used book stores, and it turns out that Lincoln City is a used book store mecca. Small stores where books share shelves with antiques; big, rambling stores with shelves from floor to ceiling and books piled knee-high down every isle; curated, manicured stores where the owner seems to know and love every book in the place.

We worked our way from south to north, and our first stop had a cart out front with $1 sale books. Most of them were written by or about politicians, or were about spirituality. I picked up a small devotional for women and read the back cover.

It started well, affirming that God created us as individuals with unique — and lovely — characteristics that are to each her own. But I stopped short at the end of the paragraph, which concluded, “No wonder God loves you!”

Wait… Really?

Don’t misunderstand me — I absolutely believe that God is in the business of creating extraordinary people. People with amazing gifts and talents, people who are dynamic and magnetic, people who are wholly, gloriously different from one another. In David’s words, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. As this beautiful song says, I believe that you marvel over me / Maker of the galaxy, marveling over me.

But this isn’t why God loves us.

God loves us because of his character — not ours. He is love, in his very being. At best, we try to be loving and gracious and tenderhearted and compassionate and selfless — and at worst, we’re a mess — but either way, we are still imperfect, and since God is perfectly just, he could never love us based on our performance. It only works if he loves us because of who he is.

One of my biggest traps is trying to earn God’s love. Intellectually, I know it’s impossible, but my actions tell a different story. When things are going well, this leads to pride — Look at how great I am! No wonder God loves me! When things are going badly, this leads to lies (and, really, another kind of pride) — Look at what a failure I am. There’s no way God could love me. I humanize God. I start to think that — like people — his love grows and wanes in proportion to my good behavior. But his love isn’t fickle and transient like human love.

His is the love that covers, love that endures, love that sacrifices — not just for good people, but for trainwrecked people too.

It really is no wonder that God loves us — because that’s truly how great and awesome and perfect he is.

Last week, we celebrated our third anniversary with the most beautiful day in Lincoln City. We didn’t expect a sunny day (that wasn’t even windy — I was walking around town without a jacket, which felt like a miracle), so we didn’t come equipped with hiking gear or an outdoor itinerary, but you will never see me complain about spending a whole day wandering around antique stores and used book stores, smelling old books and looking for antique pie plates and wearing the new earrings that my husband gave me.

Our day ended with this stunning view of Siletz Bay at sunset and then pizza and wine and Neverending Story at the hotel. A perfect day.

The front of our house is lined with giant, gorgeous hibiscus trees. We moved in during the summer, in late July, near the end of the blooming season; two of the trees were still full of blossoms, but the others were just bundles of green, and as we transitioned into the fall, they all lost their blooms.

Except for one little corner — the back corner of the tree at the corner of the house, right behind my reading nook in the living room. That corner had a small cluster of blossoms that faced the window all through the winter. There was always at least one flower nestled back in that corner. It felt like God had placed it there just for me, as a reminder that spring — which I so love — would come. That he would again make all things new.

Now that all of the trees are covered with buds (really, covered — every single stem has a bud at the end of it), I get to watch the blossoms spread from my secret corner to the rest of the trees. Spring!

If it was abandoned, it was not empty. Curtains hung bleached to gray and tattered rugs scattered across the floor. Against one wall, nestled under the rise of a staircase and a high landing, stood an old upright piano. One sulling eyebrow rose. Orren had told her of a piano on the property, one she could practice on, but it could not be this. Aloma edged past its sunken frame, leaving it untouched, and walked back through a dining room washed in south light past a table papered with bills and letters, into the kitchen. The ceiling here was high and white. It seemed clean mostly because it was empty—spacious and empty as a church. She circled the room, tugged open drawers and cabinets, but her eyes stared at their contents unseeing, her mind wheeling backward. She turned on her heel and stalked to the first room. She tossed back the fallboard and reached her fingers to the ivory. The keys stuttered to the bed, fractionally apart beneath her fingers, and it was no more, no less than she had expected. The sound was spoiled like a meat. She slapped the fallboard down, wood on wood clapped out into the echoing house in cracking waves, and then it was gone. She turned away with the air of someone halfheartedly resigned to endure, but as she turned, she started and stopped. A wall of faces stood before her, photographs in frames armied around a blackened mantel, eyes from floor to ceiling. She studied them without stepping closer. They gazed back.

All the Living, page 4

And so begins the story of Orren and Aloma, vividly drawn in Kentucky farmland. As I read, one word kept coming to mind: quiet. This is a quiet book. And yet the depth of feeling, the aching of devotion, the land itself — all becomes a part of you with each page turned. You stand beside Aloma, looking out over the stricken tobacco fields, rehearsing musical scores in her mind, praying for rain. C.E. Moran’s debut novel from 2010 points to great things to come.

For the last three weeks, I’ve prayed the same prayer every morning: that God would multiply the hours of my day. This certainly isn’t one of those super spiritual prayers (you know the prayers I’m talking about — those altruistic prayers that we all tell ourselves we ought to be praying). It’s just an honest one. And one I know God can, and does, answer.

Sometimes he answers this prayer by telling me, no, you don’t need to vacuum today and yes, you can pull two bowls out of the cupboard, fill them with microwaved frozen Trader Joe’s brown rice, Costco chicken meatballs and roasted broccoli, and call it dinner.

We did crowd 11 people around an 8-person dining table for a St. Paddy’s feast — an annual tradition that always, always culminates in these cupcakes. And between then and now, a few notable recipes have passed through my kitchen:

• If you have a leftover sheet of puff pastry in your freezer and some beautiful spring asparagus in your fridge, make this asparagus tart. She recommends gruyere, but I used what I had on hand — bits of leftover mozzarella, asiago and parmesan — and it was delicious.
• If you have some more asparagus (because you got excited about the first good asparagus of the season and bought three bunches at the store), make risotto. This one is a favorite.
• If you want to bake once for two weekends of guests, make these apple and cheddar scones. Bake half of them now and pop the others in the freezer to feed your next visitors. (They’ll be so impressed that you got up extra early just to bake for them.)
• If you want to have a great dinner waiting for you when you get home, make crockpot honey bourbon chicken. (Serve it over another packet of microwavable rice. I won’t tell anyone that you used a whole box this week.)

Looking for something to drink with your meal?

• If it’s a day like today and suddenly, blessedly sunny and 65 degrees outside, open a bottle of Valentin Bianchi New Age White, pour it over ice, and serve with a squeeze of lime juice. It’s like sangria (and summer) in a bottle.
• If it’s back to rainy, early spring weather, pick up a bottle of Nerelo Del Bastardo ($7 at Trader Joe’s) on your way home from work. Serve with chocolate and a good book.

If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony.

—Fernand Point

That quote (which was sent to me by the wonderful Carrie) is all that really needs to be said about coq au vin, which I made for the first time last weekend. Chicken, browned in bacon drippings and then braised in cognac and a bottle of wine, tossed with pearl onions and mushrooms, and served over mashed potatoes.

Julia Child, Ina Garten and Cook’s Illustrated all have recipes for coq au vin, and after extensive comparison, I can tell you that they’re all nearly the same. Julia reminds us to brown the chicken well (this is super important — it adds flavor and keeps your chicken from turning purple when it’s cooking in wine); Ina adds pearl onions; and everyone emphasizes the quality of the wine. (When you’re adding half a cup of wine to your risotto, you can use that $5 bottle of Mirassou that’s been in your fridge for a month. When you’re pouring an entire bottle of wine into a dutch oven and then cooking chicken in that wine for two hours, it’s time to splurge a little. I used a bottle of Zenith pinot that I picked up at Costco for less than $20.)

Did I mention that you get to light it on fire? Go make this.

After I made my life list for 2012, several of my friends sent me their lists — including my dear friend Leanna. Her birthday was at the end of January, and since I was in LA for CHA, I got to have a slightly belated in-person celebration with her, so I assembled a basket of things inspired by her list and attached a tag to each item, explaining which list item inspired the gift. (Some things, like the London city guide and “#16 — go to London,” are more obvious; others, like the Sprouts gift card and “#27 — try a new vegetable,” are less so.)

There were many great things on that list, but three things in particular stood out to me. She talked about looking for God in the everyday, finding the best in people, and seeking joy even in unhappiness. I’d seen some index card-based daily journals floating around in the blogosphere and on Pinterest, so I put my own twist on it: half-size index cards, each stamped with a day of the year, with dividers for these three themes. Every day, she can jot down a note about how she saw God, or found the best in someone, or chose joy. I slipped the cards and dividers into a small Anthro berry basket and tied it with twine.

Last Thursday, I woke up in the morning wanting to make banana bread. And lo and behold, Twitter informed me that it was national banana bread day. (Yes, apparently this is a thing.) I knew it was meant to be.

I found this banana bread recipe online about ten years ago. It’s one of the first recipes I ever discovered online, and it’s still one of my favorites. I’ve tried a few others but I always come back to this one. Someday, I do plan to make coconut banana bread and peanut butter banana bread… Someday, when I have ground flaxseed meal on hand. Probably not on a Thursday.

This bread is aptly titled banana banana bread; it uses almost twice as many bananas as your run-of-the-mill banana bread. Therein, with its total simplicity, lies its charm. It’s the kind of thing you can throw together on a Thursday afternoon between work and dinner when you’ve run out of freezer space for overripe bananas and you have 16 other things on your to-do list for the evening.

Banana banana bread

Makes one loaf

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs, beaten
2 1/2 cups mashed very overripe bananas
3/4 cup chocolate chips or chopped walnuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350°. Lightly grease 9 x 5 loaf pan.

In a large bowl, combine flour, soda and salt.

In separate bowl, cream together butter and brown sugar. Stir in eggs and mashed bananas until well blended. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture; stir just to moisten.

Pour batter into prepared loaf pan. Bake in preheated oven for 60-65 minutes until a toothpick inserted into center of loaf comes out clean.

Let bread cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.

contiguous, adj.

I felt silly for even mentioning it, but once I did, I knew I had to explain.

“When I was a kid,” I said, “I had this puzzle with all fifty states on it — you know, the kind where you have to fit them all together. And one day I got it in my head that California and Nevada were in love. I told my mom, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I ran and got those two pieces and showed it to her — California and Nevada, completely in love. So a lot of the time when we’re like this” — my ankles against the backs of your ankles, my knees fitting into the backs of your knees, my thighs on the back of your legs, my stomach against your back, my chin folding into your neck — “I can’t help but think about California and Nevada, and how we’re a lot like them. If someone were drawing us from above as a map, that’s what we’d look like; that’s how we are.”

For a moment, you were quiet. And then you nestled in and whispered,

“Contiguous.”

And I knew you understood.

The Lover’s Dictionary, page 63

I started seeing buzz about David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary several months ago in the Powell’s newsletter, and then it showed up on the staff top 5s for 2011. I hesitatingly added it to my to-read list; the concept sounded interesting, but the description wasn’t grabbing me.

At the end of last month, my mom and I were wandering around in Barnes & Noble, and I saw it on the staff recommendations table. After a handful of pages, I knew I had to have it, and once I started it, I couldn’t put it down. One of the reviewers on the back of the book calls it “charming [and] compulsively readable.” I have to agree.