langley and escapism

I wish you were here with me right now. I wish you could take in what I’m taking in right this second. But to understand why this place matters to me I’ve got to backtrack a little. A few years ago, I went to Colour Conference in Los Angeles with my best friend Alex. Colour Conference is a Christian women’s conference hosted by Hillsong Church. We flew out on a whim thinking to ourselves, “Why not? We’re young and spontaneous, let’s do it!” So, we did. I remember eating lunch at an upscale restaurant in Downtown Los Angeles with about fifteen other women from our church in Seattle who had also flown down for the conference. I ended up sitting across from a woman named Jennifer. Jennifer is this beautiful Korean middle-aged mom of three. We were all making pleasant lunch conversation when out of nowhere Jennifer looks at me and exclaims, “You love Japan!”  

Hold up, hold up. I have to interrupt my story here. As I’ve been sitting in this gloriously well-lit coffee shop/barn thing writing to you, a slew of high schooler’s carrying musical instruments have filed in. I figured they were grabbing a quick brunch on their way to a band practice or something. But they just started playing actual live music, like five and a half feet away from me. There’s a soft drum and a large bass and even a saxophone. Like a full-on freaking Jazz band! Hahah, life is wild. They’re playing live, cheery jazz right in front of me and it’s the best thing ever. I feel like I’m on Main Street at Disneyland and my heart is so very happy. Main Street USA in California’s Disneyland is very literally my favorite place on earth. My very soul comes alive as I walk down Main Street USA towards Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. Ask anyone who has been with me, I dance, and jive, and skip my way down Main Street with a beaming smile. It’s my big kid happy place and it will be that way until I come back at eighty-nine with my husband and we stroll hand and hand down the boulevard bopping our heads to the soft, cheery jazz. Man, that just made me really happy. Look for those little moments in life to be grateful for happy little things, they make life so, so worth it. 

Anyway, back to my story…

So, there I am, in an upscale restaurant in Downtown LA, trying to push my way through awkward small talk when a woman I’ve never even met says, “You love Japan!” Here’s the thing, she wasn’t wrong. I do love Japan. In the month previous to this conversation taking place I had been thinking about Japan a lot. I had even mulled around the idea of moving to Japan in my head. So, when without any foreknowledge or preempting she just outright said, “You love Japan,” I couldn’t help but think, “God is that you? Are you trying to speak to me?” Hahah I always think God is trying to speak to me. But this just seemed scarily coincidental, and I’m not even sure I believe in coincidence. I told her about being half Japanese and that I did in fact love Japan. She asked if she could take me to coffee when we got back to Seattle and told me she wanted to talk to me about something. I obliged and moved on with my weekend. 

Fast forward to a few weeks later, I was freshly out of a sort of breakup, and driving my car onto a ferry from Mukilteo, WA to Langley, WA to meet Jennifer for coffee. Jennifer lived a ferry ride away from mainland Seattle in a place called Whidbey Island. I was born and raised in LA, so I had literally zero idea what or where Whidbey Island was, let alone why I was boarding a ferry to get coffee with this middle-aged mom. Nevertheless, something pulled me there, so there I sat, in my car, onboard a ferry, unsure of what to expect. We pulled into the docks, and I made my way to the coffee shop Jennifer had sent me coordinates to. As I drove, I noticed just how different Langley was from anything in Seattle. Remote, small town feeling, the kind of place where everyone knows each other. I may have grown up in “LA,” and the small-town suburb of La Crescenta that I lived in may have been in LA County, but it certainly had some of that same small-town feel. The guy who owned the window washing company was my best friend’s dad, and the Mexican restaurant you got all your soccer trophies at...your friend’s parents owned that one too. Something about growing up in small-town LA made me anxious for anonymity. I love a big city! The bigger the better. But somewhere in my DNA is ingrained a big affinity for a “small-town feel.” A real community, where people are born and raised and live and die. I don’t necessarily ever desire to live in a community that small for the rest of my life, there’s just too much for me to explore. But sometimes, when life gets kind of noisy and crowded, I yearn for the simplicity of a place where the old people all seem like your actual grandparents, and where the barista at the coffee shop is the great granddaughter of the guy who opened the shop in 1965. So here I was, in Langley, Washington, at Useless Bay Coffee Company. I sat at an umbrella covered table out on the patio and marveled at how much brighter the sun shone a fifteen-minute ferry ride away from Seattle. I was kind of nervous. I remember thinking, “What am I doing here?” Jennifer arrived, we sat down and started to get to know each other. She asked what I was passionate about and what I felt like I would spend the rest of my life doing. I told her that I loved people, and that I wanted to spend the rest of my life talking, listening, writing, and speaking to and with people. I told her I wanted to plant churches and live abroad and live at home and live this great big beautiful life. She told me that she and her husband had lived in Japan and were the Campus Pastors at the Atsugi Campus of Life Church. To this day, I still don’t even really know where Atsugi is, but I knew it was in Japan. Jennifer explained how they had recently moved back to the US but that she had left a huge piece of her heart at Life House Atsugi. Her aim was clear. Jennifer thought that I might be a perfect fit to move to Atsugi, Japan and help pastor the campus she and her husband had planted. She came armed with information on work visas, a picture book of the church, and even a Life House Atsugi t-shirt and bracelet. This was a pitch. In all the best intention, she was here to encourage me to uproot my life and move to Japan. Honestly, I was a little overwhelmed. At this point Japan was a very whimsical idea in my head. I usually keep one or two of these such ideas around. I use them when I find myself dissatisfied with my current life or circumstances. A sort of “escape plan,” if you will. Currently it goes something like this, “I’m scared that I’m not going to get what I want or that life will disappoint me and the future is scary so I’m just going to move to Shanghai.” “Why Shanghai?” you might ask. I’ve been watching this Disney Imagineering series on Disney Plus and they have a whole episode centered around Disney Shanghai, and somehow Shanghai got stuck in my head and has recently become my newest escape route. Having an “out” helps calm my subconscious when I don’t want to deal with the reality of my actual life. 

I didn’t quite know what to say to Jennifer. I didn’t really want to move to Japan. I mean if I was sure that I was supposed to, I would have, but I didn’t really want to. I was really just unsettled with the unknown nature of my future and stamping a country on it gave my mind some stability. We had coffee, roamed our way over to a pizza shop and sat at a window overlooking the water and ate the yummiest veggie pizza. She told me about her kids and how she met her husband and what her life had been like since she had been a follower of Jesus. It was lovely honestly. Lovely and so very odd. I remember sitting there across from this woman with whom I seemingly had very little in common. And yet, we were one in the same. Just two women who love Jesus, a bay window, some veggie pizza, and a great big beautiful life. 

We finished our meal and decided to stroll along the rocky beach. Jennifer forced me into a photoshoot so she could, “send it to my future husband.” Haha, moms are awesome. After a while we said our goodbyes and she left me there on that beach alone. I sat there for a long time, for a bit I walked, and for a bit longer I sat. I sat and contemplated life, and God, and how truly beautiful waves of water are, and how much fresh air makes me feel alive. It was cathartic for me. I needed that day, I needed that beach, and I really needed that reminder that everything was going to be ok, even without an escape plan. 

Meeting with Jennifer forced me to look my escape plan in the face and realize how “escapey” it really was. I didn’t really want to move to Japan. I didn’t really feel like I was supposed to, I just wanted to do something. But what about what I was doing? Could I be joyful in that? Could I be grateful for the things that seemed mundane and monotonous? Could I look at my “fantasy life” and my actual life and joyfully choose my real life without question? I could. BUT, it took me getting quiet enough to know it. 

So that’s how we get here. Here as in present day. 2/22/2020. 

I’m back in Langley, Washington. A few years have passed since that fateful day with Jennifer. A few more breakups have happened. A whole lot of life has been lived, all good and some hard. The past few months or so I’ve been thinking a lot about this place. I keep thinking I need an escape. Not to Shanghai or Japan or anywhere in Asia for that matter, but an escape from the noise. The noise of life. It’s funny, I don’t think my actual life is all that “noisy.” I live with four other girls and we are hardly ever home at the same time, so my house isn’t particularly noisy. My job can be, but it isn’t always. And I certainly don’t live in the middle of noisy Manhattan, although I LOVE Manhattan. It’s not life that seems noisy lately, it’s my mind. My mind is loud these days. Racing with book chapters I want to write, and poems I need to pen, and things I’m worried about, taxes I need to file, places I need to grow, and that plant I keep forgetting to water. You may be a middle-aged mom of three reading this right now thinking, “Oh honey, you think your life is noisy now…you just wait until you have three kids and a mortgage and a dog that pees on your brand-new carpet.” Or maybe you’re watching a loved one die and you’re in the toughest season of your life and you’re thinking, “For real Katie? You think your life is noisy now…you don’t even get it.”  And I know you’re right. Life is simpler now than I think. But that doesn’t change what I need. I need a quiet mind in the midst of a noisy life. And sometimes the only way for me to get a quiet mind, is to go to a “quiet place.” A place where I know no one, and no one knows me. A place where I don’t listen to music as I drive so I can hear the road noise. A place where clear thinking is natural. Where clarity comes easily, and you smile at things you would never even notice in your “normal busy life.” 

So, I’m here, in Langley, Washington at the world’s most charming coffee shop. If you’re ever in town it’s called, Café in the Woods at Mukilteo Coffee, and its damn magical. Nestled in the literal woods, I’m sitting in a refurbished barn at a wood table all by myself. The chandelier is a rigged piece of rusted metal with roughly thirty mason jar Edison bulb lights fastened to it. I had scrambled eggs with sausage and avocado and LOT’s of Cholula because you can’t take the California out of the girl. 

I wish you were here with me, but I’m also really enjoying the solitude. I’m definitely not an introvert so I’m sure I’ll tire of the loneliness soon, but right now, in this very moment, I am just so grateful. Grateful that we never need to escape from our actual lives, no matter how bleak things get, because God is always better than we can see with our own eyes. I guess I’m realizing that maturity looks a lot like knowing yourself well enough to know what you need when you need it. And for me, sometimes a six-hour escape to a lonely island in Washington really revives my soul.  I don’t know what that is for you, maybe it’s a pedicure, or going out for a run, or even going to a comedy show, it could be anything really, but if you’re feeling noisy lately, if it feels like peace is fighting for room in your mind instead of filling in the whole thing, then please go escape. Go get healthy, go smile softly, and remind yourself that life is already, and will be so much more worthwhile than you think. It’s all gonna be ok, and you’re like really great. And if you can’t tell yourself, I’ll tell you myself, you are so loved and you’re good enough to stay even when you want to run away.