The past three months have been wave after wave of unexpected wonder and happenings. Now, I find myself checking a PO Box in Princeton, NJ, getting coffee at Small World on the main drag across from the University Campus and reorienting myself to new “local communities.” People have asked me if I have adjusted to living in Princeton. I don’t know. I don’t know after traveling for nine years, if my mind and body really absorbing anything as permanent. I will say it feels normal to live in Princeton. it is a beautiful little city with a downtown the same size as Old Town Louisville where I lived outside of Boulder for years. I am fully functional…I know where I want to go to get coffee, where I will walk and where I prefer to do my grocery shopping. I have a few friends in town and many in the surrounding cities of New York and Philadelphia. But it also feels a little bit like I’m traveling because in traveling, newness and adjusting to different places has become normal to me.
It was after the Everything Must Change tour with Brian McLaren last summer that I started redesigning my life. The two and a half years I had in Woodland Park up in the mountains of Colorado had afforded me lots of rest and solitude and I was ready to reverse the rhythm and get into a city. I rented out my home there and moved to Colorado Springs. I new it was time to look seriously at giving a season to full time study and grad school, something that has been in my mind and heart for years, but the time finally seemed right and ripe.
My fall tour throughout the Northeast was wonderful and had led to many growing relationships. A highlight was the work I did with New York Faith and Justice and the friendship I formed with Lisa Sharon Harper the director. She invited me to be an artist-in-residence at New York Faith and Justice. As an artist-in-residence, I would simply be based out in the New York Area and work with Lisa on developing and nurturing the artists she had connected to, collaborating on new work, and sowing foundations of identity and purpose through relationship and teaching. I knew there were many opportunities from Boston to DC. I have wonderful friends in New Haven and communities in New York and Philadelphia that I have had the opportunity to visit multiple times now. But it was a wonderful and unexpected relationship that blossomed and set the ball rolling. Once the decision to move was made, housing and gigs lined up within two weeks! And so I am out here, doing what I have always done, but based in a completely different area until I go to Africa in June.
Already I have met great challenges with significant work and worship gigs I lined up before I came out falling through. But as my schedule (and finances) became uncertain, of course the Holy Spirit consoled me and I started to see the goodness in an open spring. I have already played worship at a chapel service at Princeton and am starting to have coffee meetings and conspire with some of the campus ministry pastors here. I have been to New York City to lead worship and am leading a full day artist retreat in the city March 21. On the weekends I have been visiting communities I have developing relationships with, leading worship, presenting concerts, speaking and teaching workshops.
I actually have not had a lot of time to work on songs and preparation for Africa until this last week, but that remains a prayerful and creative focus for me through the spring. I am learning about South Africa and Burundi and the refugee culture as my friends in Burundi continue putting together the refugee camp tour details.
I am not a fan of the February weather in New Jersey, or the incredible high pavement to bare earth ratio…I had to take my car to a shop and put it on the GPS and the directions included passing the shop on the highway 1.7 miles and then doing a U turn. There was no other way to get there! The spring is clearly breaking through though. The ice on the lakes and canal is melting quickly, the days are longer and I am quite looking forward to the Northeast spring blossoms.
So friends, I’m out here! I’ll keep in touch, the same as always. I have updated all my correspondence information on my website. I still hope to see people as I travel. Write or call anytime. Blessings, Tracy
