One of the great things about being in a seminary and letting my theology nerd flag fly is being able to admit things like my love for the Advent season. Not the Christmas season as we see it, per se, although I love carols and Christmas tree lots and watching Linus haltingly recite Luke’s gospel in Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown! I love Advent. In the Catholic Church, it’s a time of longing, a time of preparation, a time of waiting to see what rare new things are about to be born.

The fact that it happens during the winter season makes it all the more powerful for me. The days get shorter, it gets colder, and – usually – the snow comes and covers everything, making the landscape itself seem like it’s holding its breath, anticipating.

Except now, I’m in California, and I walk outside and flowers are blooming and the neighbors have wrapped colored LED lights around the palm trees. I saw a hummingbird last week. All of my physical touchstones for the season are missing, and it could just as easily be a lovely mid-fall day as three weeks from Christmas. Which makes it hard for me to get into that spirit of preparation. Instead of longing for the coming of God in new ways in my life, I mostly feel like I’m longing for the white stuff to fall.

But sometimes little moments make me realize what I’m longing for might not be so far away. Despite the California warmth, the one place where it feels seasonably cold is our house, which is big and drafty and not insulated. My roommates and I generally commiserate together at our giant dining room table, opening our laptops and piling books and papers and pretending to work. We wear winter hats and sweatshirts and wrap blankets around ourselves like towels.

One day three of us sat there, pretending to work, and I mentioned my love of Christmas music. One roommate argued that Christmas music shouldn’t be played until Christmas, and I joked that there should be some good Advent music. I also mentioned my love of Sufjan Stevens and his Christmas music – it’s simple, folky, and yet moving and haunting. It cuts through the fluff of the season and makes me pause. It’s Advent music.

And so I played for my roommates one of my favorite Sufjan Christmas songs – “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” It’s not technically a Christmas song, and it’s never even generally been one of my favorite spiritual songs, period. I always felt like the lyrics were archaic. But his version gave me pause. It was simple and genuine and made sense, somehow.

We sat at the table, listening: Come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy praise… and I realized it said exactly what I wanted. I want a tuned heart; I want to be grateful, to be able to wait, to anticipate, even without the hush and the snow. I want to tune my heart to my immediate surroundings, and recognize the rare new things being born even here.

The funny thing about being surrounded by people in gorilla suits is that after just a few minutes, it seems normal. People are talking to one another, making phone calls, taking photos, drinking water, but they just happen to be a little hairier than usual.

That observation startled me as I stood with my boyfriend in gorilla suits of our own, two of 1,061 gorilla-suited-people who gathered in Denver on Halloween to break a world record and raise money for the Mountain Gorilla Conservation Fund. By running a 5K in a gorilla suit.

When Patrick suggested the run, I thought it sounded like a fabulous idea. Who hasn’t secretly wanted to wear a gorilla suit at one point or another, just for the experience? (Don’t lie to yourself.) Plus, besides saving mountain gorillas, registering meant I’d get a gorilla suit FOR LIFE. No more Halloween costume questions, ever.

We picked up our gorilla suits and bought some cheap hippie-ish accessories to distinguish ourselves from the other thousand gorilla suits who’d be wandering the streets of Denver. Once we put on the glasses, headbands, and chains with peace signs, we looked eerily like aging, hairy, naked hippies.

So we gathered to run, and to my surprise, the best part of the event had nothing to do with the race or the world record. It happened while we milled about in the street while we waited for officials to tally the number of gorillas and tell us we had broken the world record for number of people in gorilla suits in one place. One side of the street was lined with buildings with restaurants in the first floor, topped by several levels of apartments.

I looked up and saw a man staring out of a second-story apartment window. He looked a little sleepy, and was wearing a classic silk bathrobe: striped, with polka-dot lapels. He looked out the window with a bemused expression, the kind I imagine anyone would have while having the internal debate about whether seeing 1,000 gorillas in the street means it’s the kind of morning when one should go back to bed.

A few minutes later, I looked up again and the man had returned with a camera. He smiled as he snapped a few pictures of the crowd, which must have looked pretty impressive from above. There were gorilla cops, gorilla brides, gorilla Denver Nuggets, and even a gorilla Statue of Liberty.

As we waited, the race officials announced that we had officially broken the world record. (Shattered it, really – the previous record had been a little over 600 gorillas in London.) The crowd started cheering, and then grunting like gorillas. The man at the window had come back again, this time with a cup of coffee, and was visibly laughing as he watched all of us celebrating.

I can’t imagine what he thought was going on, other than some kind of gorilla apocalypse scenario. But watching him sit and drink in our ridiculous revelry with that kind of sense of humor (and fantastic bathrobe) was a highlight of an already out-of-the-ordinary day. We do strange, funny things, and sometimes the best response you can get from someone is simply delight at the unexpected.

Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

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It rained last Thursday, which is a statement that wouldn’t be a big deal on the East Coast (my homeland), unless it was followed by something like “and my house washed into the Hudson River.”

But for the first time, I understand, at least in a small way, what it means to live in a drought in a climate that’s really only a step away from being a desert — and to finally get rain. Things are green in Colorado, but it feels forced, like the grass would be much happier to be brown and tough, thank you very much. My first impression of the state (after the mountains, of course) was of reddish rock and dirt and hardy scrubgrass. With more than 300 days of sunshine a year, clouds here are generally a tease. They gather and darken and look threatening, and then they dissipate, at which point someone in my house usually storms into the backyard, looks up at the sky and yells “Just DO it already!”

Because I’m from a climate where it rains fairly often, my gardening skills reflect that expectation. If I forget to water my tomato plants, they’ll be fine. It’ll rain soon. Except then it doesn’t, and my plants become things you can describe with adjectives like “crinkly.” Our neighbors have lawns; we have a dirt patch. I refuse to water grass in a semi-arid climate in draught conditions on principle. My students are embarrassed by this and covertly water the lawn when they think I’m not looking.

This summer has been dry, even for Denver. We’ve had 24 days in a row over 90 degrees, almost all of them sunny. We get teasing sprinkles, a few drops that splatter on the ground and practically sizzle away. We pray in our churches for rain for the fields, and I with my one crinkly tomato plant feel a sudden sympathy for farmers who truly rely on the rain for their living and their sustenance.

Last Thursday, I sat home alone, a few days after my summer community had moved out of the house. The clouds gathered and looked threatening, but they didn’t scatter. A cool wind blew in our open windows. As I lay on the couch journaling, I could hear a drumming sound on our metal awning in the backyard. The awning always makes it sound like it’s raining harder than it actually is, so I didn’t pay attention until the drumbeat got louder and more sustained. Finally, I got up and looked outside — it was pouring like I had never seen it do in Denver, the kind of pour where the rain just becomes a curtain of water. I ran outside excitedly, and quickly ran back inside when I realized how hard it was raining. So I stared hungrily outside the window, watching the water pool in our backyard dirt patch and stream down the driveway. I ran to close the windows at the front of the house, where rain was blowing in sideways and soaking our bookshelf.

It rained for hours, for the rest of the afternoon. The backyard threatened to flood, but the dry ground gulped down the water. At one point, the drumming on the awning became particularly violent and I looked out to see pea-sized hail filling the yard. But in that afternoon, the change was palpable. Everything seemed to be stretching and opening, almost relieved to be able to soak in the moisture. And I shared their relief. For a day, I didn’t have to be outside, doing, watering (or fretting about not watering). I could just sit, and be, and let nature do what I couldn’t to take care of the dry earth. My job was to just sit and soak it in, and let myself get a little less crinkly. I did it gladly.

When I was in high school, I was the kid who packed every book she could possibly fit into her backpack. I’d walk around school needing 18 extra inches of clearance behind me, wobbling under 70 or so pounds of books. (At least, it felt like it.) I loved going to college and being able to pack books for only one course, and the feeling of my slim Timbuktu bag slung over my shoulder was my symbol of freedom from the strictures of three-minute breaks between class periods.

Now that I’m back in grad school, and biking four miles to get to school every day, I’ve pulled out a trusty REI backpack and begun carrying everything I need for the day in there. Folders, planner, laptop, textbooks, lunch, a clean shirt: once it’s all in I again look like the overeager high schooler who wants to be prepared if her World History teacher wants to point out a map on page 463 of the textbook. Add to that the need to bring things like a study Bible (which answers the question: what would the Bible look like if every verse had a footnote?), and you come to a picture of me biking up the hills of Berkeley, fighting the downward momentum of my ridiculous backpack.

The bike ride takes about a half hour, which means getting up at what I formerly considered ungodly times to get to my 8:10 a.m. classes. It also means I try to wake up as late as possible in order to maximize sleep, so I’m usually rushing in the mornings and throwing things in my backpack at the last possible minute.

The first week of grad school was a little overwhelming — learning my schedule, getting to know my professors, coming to the dawning realization that there was no way I’d ever get all the reading I was assigned done. The stress, and the lack of sleep, had me exhausted and frazzled on the first Friday of classes as I got ready for school. We had our “Mass of gathering,” or opening Mass of the school year that day, and so I packed a dress and some nice black shoes in my backpack to change into once I got to school.

As my roommate and I sat down for our first class, panting and sweating, I opened my bag. Sitting on top was one Birkenstock and one black high-heeled shoe. In my rush to get out the door, I grabbed two black shoes, and wasn’t concerned with the minor details after that. Such as whether my shoes were the same height.

But the sudden absurdness of it made me laugh. I pulled out my shoes to show Sara, my roommate, and she laughed, too. I realized the ridiculousness of feeling so rushed, and resolved to give myself the time I needed to adjust to this new lifestyle. Sara later went home and brought back the lonely other halves of my two pairs of shoes, and I stood tall and even as I sang in the choir for our Mass of gathering. I breathed deep, looking at the many faces I already recognized from my first week of class. And I know that the reading will pile up, my backpack will continue to weigh me down, and sleep may become scarce and precious. But I know that I’ll at least give myself the time to really look at what I carry with me along the way, to make sure it’s necessary and useful and not cluttering my life with its absurdity.

I moved to California and I tiled a kitchen floor.

Because I’ve lived in intentional communities of various kinds for the past three years, moving into a former convent with six other theology students sounded ideal. The house, called Shabbat House, is big and old and feels pretty much like a convent would feel if you turned it into a normal home. A TV sits in the old chapel, and each of our bedrooms comes equipped with its own sink.

But because it’s old, the house has its fair share of repairs that need to be undertaken. And when we as a house received a donation from an “anonymous benefactor,” we decided that replacing our kitchen floor would be the perfect task. It was yellow linoleum, the kind of pattern that probably seemed bright and vibrant in 1972 but had faded to a dingy, faded remnant of its former glory.

We exchanged e-mails about the floor, ones that now seem almost heartbreakingly naïve: “We’ll just knock it out in a weekend and be done with it!” was the general consensus. I pictured two days of happily working in the kitchen with my housemates, removing linoleum and laying down tile and singing along to the Temptations or Aretha Franklin or the like.

A weekend quickly turned into 10 days of laying a subfloor, learning to mortar, and only eating what we could eat raw or microwave. Our refrigerator hummed in our dining room, and the stove sat lonely and unplugged. Dishes sat in stacks on our dining room table. As we lay tile, we realized our new floor – the color was called “Caribbean Sunrise” – clashed with our kitchen’s yellow countertops and periwinkle blue paint. And so painting was added to our list of renovations, and two more days of painting and cleaning everything that had gotten covered in cement dust were set before us.

Kitchens, for me, have always been a kind of sacred space. I believe that making and sharing a meal with other people is a sacramental act: that we are not only nourishing our bodies but our spirits, and our relationships with one another. In the communities I’ve lived in, the kitchen has been where we gather to talk about our day, laugh, cry, and use cooking as a form of procrastination or stress relief. To not have that touchstone available the first two weeks I lived in the Shabbat House made me feel disoriented and a little stressed.

But last Sunday, we finished sealing the tile, painting the cabinets a lovely buttercream color, cleaning appliances, and setting the stove and the refrigerator in their rightful places. Our dining room seemed disconcertingly empty; our kitchen felt like new.

That night, my housemate Susan and I came downstairs after one of my first days of orientation and opened up a bottle of wine. We grabbed the wine, a bag of chips and some salsa, and sat down on our new tile floor. We talked about my excitement for grad school, her past experiences, and ate and drank and enjoyed our functional kitchen. In those few minutes of sharing food and conversation, I felt things click into place in a way they hadn’t quite yet. I’m learning to call a new place “home,” and now it feels a little more like one.

A 36-hour train ride sounded like the perfect transition from Denver to Oakland. Not the most efficient means of getting from one place to the other, but as I left life as a campus minister to begin graduate school at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, it seemed like an opportunity to reflect and prepare for my new stage in life. If nothing else, I was trapped. What else was I going to do?

The train ride seems an all-too-perfect metaphor for transition, for the “journey of life” and the constantly changing landscape of our experience. It doesn’t necessarily capture the messiness that leaves when one becomes uprooted: the heartbreak and the excitement that seem to come in waves, sometimes at the same time. And it’s hard to encapsulate that experience of transition, or even of being on a train for 36 hours. So I’ll offer, instead, a small snapshot from my first moments in California:

Start, then, with the train. Start with the gently rolling, almost-bouncy movement, like bobbing on an inner tube in the ocean at a point before the waves have fully formed and rush crashing into the shore. The décor is blue-on-blue-on-blue: blue seats, blue carpets, blue curtains with little strips of Velcro so you can put them together to block out the sun or accordion them close to get a better view.

Piles of personal belongings are scattered throughout the car: pillows, bags, computers, blankets, books. Outside the window the land is composed of crumbling rock. Pine trees cover the hills. There’s a lot of green ground cover, and wildflowers, some white, some orange. The smell is hard to define: a little bit of fabric, a little bit of people who haven’t showered since they’ve boarded. The dull rumble of the train is a constant background noise, as is the air blowing out from the vents. When the doors between cars open, you can hear more clearly the whum-whum-whum-whum rhythm of the wheels. Occasionally the low minor chord of the whistle will blow, echoing through a landscape that appears from our little capsule to be silent but is probably far from it.

Passengers chat about their hometowns: buying apple cider in upstate New York, or swimming in the cold waters off the shore of northern California. Kids babble on, and occasionally burst into giggles. I can hear the muffled sound of a crew member describing the sights outside coming from the lounge a few cars ahead. Someone is watching a movie on a laptop. We pass a narrow valley where water rushes in a tight stream over rocks and downed trees. Occasionally rock walls pass by so close it seems as though they’ll scrape the sides of the train.

The landscape has a healthy, hearty feel about it: soil that’s a rich shade of orange combined with the deep green of pine trees and other trees. Part Steinbeck territory, part a wilderness where you could picture bands of wild hippies wandering, hunting and gathering granola. I keep seeing palm trees and they’re disconcerting, an alien life form. They’re Sideshow Bob trees, nothing that I should be seeing on a daily basis in real life.

But suddenly, it seems, I step off the train and I am in my real life, palm trees and all. I learn from housemates that the palm trees aren’t native to northern California: they were imported a long time ago, though no one seems to know by whom. They’ve planted and shot up high above most buildings. They assert, in their uncompromising weirdness, that they belong now. I’ve begun to look at them affectionately, my odd cohorts as I feel like the new kid in town. For the first time since I’ve become a twenty-something semi-nomad, I’ve come to a new place with a sense of who I am. And while I might not be palm tree weird, I know I can plant myself with the same sense of assurance and odd grace.