Tag Archives: reflections

A Thanksgiving Blessing for My Students

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Your dreams will change one day. They will be less ideal, less monetary, less shiny. The chrome will wear off. I suspect you will dream of reasonable estimates on car repairs. Of a comfortable afternoon sat on a friend’s couch or porch, of the far-scattered people you love all together in a room for once, of keeping the sticky fingerprints off the glass of your storm door.

I can’t tell you much more than that—only that you will change and your dreams along with you. What I can tell you is that I have dreams for you, hopes for you, blessings I want to lay across your shoulders like an ancient robe. There are already too many of them to count and I am sure they’ll only multiply with time, but they begin like this:

May your fingers and toes stay warm in bed and may you laugh so loudly for joy that it startles the birds out of the trees. May you wander to the far ends of the earth, but never be gone from home too long. May you gain calluses from chopping wood or making music or knitting very small hats, or any number of the good tasks hands are for. May reading fill you rather than drain you. May everything you cook make the kitchen smell good. May you learn to love The Wind in the Willows and may you own at least one truly comfortable chair. May you treat both your grades and your bank account with the dispassionate responsibility which is all that ephemeral numbers deserve, and may you, at least once or twice, need to wait for the city bus.

May you learn the strange wisdom of both patience and action. May you always sing out. May you resist resentment and get good sleep and may memorized scripture run through your mind when you least expect it. May you sometimes stand alone in the stillness of the woods. 

May you never assign a number or a letter or any pronouncement from human lips to your worth, but instead consign your worth to Love. May you weep most often for others and laugh most often at yourself.

May your bar for those you allow to be in community with you be as low as the wide threshold of your front door. May it admit the weak, the wounded, the weird, the sick, the sore, the huddled masses who have very little in common with you beyond the hearts in their chests which are twisted into the same tight knot. 

And may your bar for kindness be high. May you be quick to listen, slow to speak, and quickest of all to forget yourself. May you be like my grandpa Billy, so certain in the knowledge that Jesus is his friend and that his life is greatly blessed through no particular wise act of his own, that you regularly allow those around you to take advantage of your gentleness and generosity, because what are those blessings of your life for, if not sharing.

May you do the work that falls to your lot and ask for help when you need it. May truth always be more important than success. May you remember that, like every person around you, you carry great power to both heal and destroy, and that you will rarely know when you are wielding it. Step softly and don’t worry so much about the big stick.

May your life, over its many years, become a map of the many things that both you and those around you may have intended for evil, but which God intended for good. May wildflowers burst forth from cracked pavement and fresh springs from dry ground. At each turn, may you raise an ebenezer to remember what he has done. May you carve it into your heart as eternal blessing and pray its words over your children and all that fall into your care. May you not be shy in thanking the Lord for his gifts.

Waiting in the Wings

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I have more than one piece waiting in the wings to be written. There is a short essay for a church program—I know that will happen and it will make its way on stage, but the others are slower and less certain. There’s the piece I started a few months ago about my absurd adventure on Amtrak this summer. I planned to submit it for a competition, but the due date cheerfully came and went while the essay remained only a couple dense pages of notes on my google drive. And then, of course, there’s the friendship book which I intended to draft so much of this summer. But I’ve found unraveling my own thousand and one thin, tangled anecdotes and weaving them into a telling is both hard and solitary. It gleams bright with difficulty from every angle.

But why writing has been difficult is not the point. The point is, it has been. Writing has been difficult for the last couple years in a way I hadn’t known before now. The front of my classroom is now a much easier space for me to inhabit than an invitingly blank page. If you had told me at twenty-three that I would be saying that, I’d have laughed in your face, but here we are.

I’ve taken to picturing my writing mind, my writing self, as a barren field which used to yield all sorts of things and now, simply, does not. Some days I tell myself that my mind is lying fallow, resting itself in the shade, leaking out all its contaminants, gorging itself on water and light, readying for some full-bursting harvest in a few seasons’ time. But on other days, winter days, I really begin to suspect it has been abandoned, that the soil in which good things once readily took root is eroding over time and time and time, in the cold, careless wind.

But it has occurred to me that I have the power to choose between these two options. I can choose to care for my words in their dormancy or I can choose to desert them. And of course I want the former. Of course I want light and life to spring from the dim stillness of rested soil. I hope my persistent writing of these words proves as much both to you and to myself.

And even before my realization of that decision, I think the fallowing had begun. Because writing has felt far from me, I don’t really have the words to explain, but there is some kind of softening happening inside me. “Peace has come with work to do.” A couple weeks ago I was reading an old book from childhood aloud to my sister—the chapter in which Mona Melendy gets a haircut and manicure then comes home and cries about it because she wishes that she hadn’t and growing up is so hard—and I almost got choked up myself because I felt for her—with her—so deeply. This stilling of the sentences running through my head and my fingers has perhaps led to a second adolescence, far different from my first. It seems to consist mainly of a kind of humility I have not before tasted.

Earlier this week a freshman girl came to my room after school to ask hard and good questions about God and truth and other things of that sort, and though I couldn’t answer all of them, I did what I could. I gave her a couple books to borrow. I gave her my friends.

In that same spirit, I’ve opened one of the packets of poetry I recently compiled to teach from, and looked to the words of even more of my friends. As my quiet ground waits for its coming season of good green things, I will allow those friends to tell me the story of things to come.

God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in – as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.
—Denise Levertov

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
—G. M. Hopkins

maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
—Mary Oliver

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.
—R.S. Thomas

Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
—Oscar Wilde

Then—- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune—-
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
—Edith Sitwell quoting Christopher Marlowe

If ye have any thing to send or write,
I have no bag, but here is room:
Unto my Fathers hands and sight,
(Believe me) it shall safely come.
That I shall mind, what you impart,
Look, you may put it very near my heart.
—George Herbert

and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.
—Pablo Neruda


So, having read all, having done all, in the shadow of your wings, I will sing for joy.

Community in Quiet

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Yesterday afternoon I came home from work, ate chips and guac, peeled off my tights, and took a walk with my sister—a walk we’ve taken a hundred times. We each arrived back home with novels we’d found in different Little Free Libraries. Then we sat in my living room and I listened to her read a chapter of a favorite childhood book aloud—a chapter where the boy goes to the opera, watches a snowplow, and finds an abandoned puppy. After that, I drove north for dinner, outside city limits down winding late-summer roads, where I sat at a long table with four other women from work in a shining house with a round window. We ate good food with more than one kind of cheese, and laughed deep and long, though now I can’t remember what it was we were laughing at.

This morning I took a hot shower, because the weather almost feels like fall, and then got back into bed and listened to the audiobook of a mystery novel. Three cousins sat around a dinner table pouring drinks for each other with a heavy hand in an effort to nudge the others into confessing to murder, so just my type of thing. Later I got up and drove to Kernersville, where Karen and I took a meandering hike through the woods over rocks and tangled roots. We ate good greasy burgers at a little grill decorated unabashedly with grinning clown dolls, then I came home, laden with two old maps of British Columbia from her historian husband, and napped to the busy whirring of my washing machine.

Weeks ago, I sat down and started making notes for a blog entry about community and audience and the difference between the two. My notes were mostly a series of questions, not answers: Is it possible to have both? Which do I write for? Which do I consider my students to be? Is it possible to be both?

I never did manage to get answers on the page. My mind has been full of a hundred other whirring things while my body has been simultaneously busy following the rich gentleness of the path above. 

In an hour or so, I’ll head over to my parents’ house for drinks. Both my siblings are home for the next week or so, and there is a plenty to our time when we’re together, all talking over each other at once from five different directions, laughing teasingly in the face of one another’s confidence. Then tonight I will get dressed up and drive back to school on a Saturday to stand cheerfully behind a punch bowl and watch my students decide if they are comfortable enough to actually dance for Homecoming. They like to wait until the lights are way down, until they can convince themselves no one can really see. Then, at last, they’ll crowd close together in raucous safety and let loose.

Audience is often good and well and appropriate. But, in the long run, all right human interaction is in hopeful—if sometimes shy—pursuit of community. It’s a need which, unfulfilled, rumbles and aches like an empty stomach. And I suppose it will not be filled by agonized black and white answers on a page, but only by a complex and hearty stew of other people’s chairs and laden tables, of familiar words read aloud in well-loved voices, of silences and noticings, of drives through country this way and that, seasoned over long months and years by patience and by the practice of joy.

Homemaking

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August always feels still and hot and thick inside my chest.

I have spent my time the last week or two going into work for the morning then coming home to mop my floors with vinegar and water and play solitaire with a double deck of cards while I listen to nineteenth century novels on audiobook. Sometimes I go for a walk or text a friend. If there’s something I can do to help, I am glad.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a little meditation for the upcoming women’s retreat at church about peacemaking. And doing that has got me thinking about our powers of making, not just making things like chairs and pasta salad and promises, but our participation in larger acts of divine making: making peace, making good, making beauty, and—most particularly—making home.

I have never been more home in my life than I am now, not even when I was a child. I have lived away enough now to know how good it is to see everyday familiar faces and squares of pavement and to be myself part of that scenery.

And one of my great delights of the last year since moving back to Greensboro has been to have a place all my own, to make my home precisely what I want it to be. I’ve hung all my dresses and skirts along my bedroom wall where I can see them and turned my childhood swing into a kitchen shelf. I’ve imposed order of the kind I love and called it good.

I believe I am meant to do this homemaking. All of us are in our places and spaces.

And yet. Irish spirituality talks of “thin places,” usually places so beautiful and eerily “charged with grandeur of God” that the boundary between earth and heaven, human and divine, has collapsed to a mere veil, a curtain which may be torn in two at any moment by the thundering laughter of the Lord.

If homemaking, the ordering of what we’ve been given, is a participation in God’s larger work, I suspect his ultimate desire in that making is to turn all our places into thin places.

This is what I’ve been thinking about sitting in my big green chair in the corner of my living room: we are called to carefully order our homes and ourselves and our lives so that they are sensible and stable and welcoming, while simultaneously understanding it all as mutable—vulnerable this very second or maybe the next to sudden and complete permeation by the full glory of God.

I suppose without fully understanding it I’ve known this about every place I’ve ever loved properly. With each move of the last few years, as I’ve settled all my things just-so I’ve thought, “Who knows what will happen here?” and as I’ve organized a new classroom the last few days, I’m fully aware of the chaos that will rumble in with my students next week.

But to hold order and everyday routine in one hand and true, full surrender to God’s eternity in the other opens us up to much more than teenage angst. In making a home the way God means us to, we may find that only a gauzy curtain separates us from the utterly sacred. While following our best-laid plans we could find ourselves welcoming angels unaware, encouraged not to be afraid while in receipt of some great message. The curtain could tear as we set the soup pot in the dish drainer and dry our hands, and we could become like Mary, the one who carries the Lord in her womb, the one who sits at his feet, the one who breaks open her carefully hoarded savings to wash them with her hair, or the one who discovers his tomb, singingly empty.

East of the Mississippi

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This summer I made a promise to myself, to the universe, to anyone who cared, that I would stay in the United States and east of the Mississippi. But, because in the last few years I can’t seem to stay put no matter how I try, I immediately planned a trip that tested the limits of that promise: spend most of July journeying around the Northeast and Midwest, visiting friend after friend after friend. Between stops, I would take Amtrak, look out the window, and work on a book about friendship. In my head, this was a satisfying construction. Different friends, themselves homebound with kids or job, affectionately referred to it as my “East Coast Tour” or my “Grand Adventure.” I was pleased.

I boarded the train last Friday in Greensboro—my first time on a train in the US in fifteen years—and immediately found myself glad for its peace. I liked the way it moved. Its glide and shiver suited me. I liked that we passed so many tiny towns called “Crossing” or “Junction” and that I could hear a train whistle (our train whistle) for ten or twenty seconds before we blew through them. I could hear trains from my childhood bedroom and they have always been a home sound to me. And I liked the way mountains and tunnels slurped us up whole like a long noodle before spitting us back out into the green.

Because of a bad delay (the only one I’ve had so far) I spent an unexpected night in DC, courtesy of Amtrak, before arriving outside Boston the next day. Then there was a warm, lovely few days with my friend Heather, seeing her New England. We walked in the woods, ate dinner at an old inn, and drove down many winding green two lane roads. We ate ice cream, visited the ducks at the Boston Public Gardens, and poked around antique and book stores where even my stern sales resistance was put to the test. We wrote together, and wandered round graveyards populated mainly by three hundred year old dead with “memento mori” engraved solemnly on their headstones.

But the best bits were in the rain: hurrying to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through puddles to wander past its tile and courtyard and art and papers and stone and people, and then that evening giggling together under a golf umbrella in Lexington as we waited wetly for early Fourth of July fireworks, which came eventually, lighting our upturned faces with green and red and white. The smoke from up north gradually cleared throughout the week. One evening I sat on Heather’s parents couch before dinner, the house full of the smell of bacon and the sound of a ticking fan and “Clair de Lune” on the piano, and thought that while this was not my home, it certainly was a home, in every good sense of the word.

Early Wednesday morning I left on a train from South Station in Boston. I slept as we sped back down the coast of New England, the way I’d already come, and then, it must be admitted, took some time to check and ponder my students’ newly released AP scores. I switched trains in Philly, and crossed Pennsylvania from side to side, something I’d never done before despite spending my college years there. Here, instead of being encased in tunnels of green overgrowth, there were breaks in the trees and the scenery was lush and simple, homes and hills and fields. We climbed up round edges of mountains rather than shooting through them. This was railroad country in a way my home down south was not. 

Then I arrived in Pittsburgh for my days alone, between proper stops, between friends. Each day I walked downtown a bit—to the park, along the river, where a few people floated along on a buoyant tiki bar beneath gray clouds. After just a couple blocks I was always sweaty, somehow both gooey and squeaky in all my crevices. The people on the street I passed, either swinging along purposefully or wandering lost in their own minds, made me feel both more and less alone. Cutting back up from the riverwalk I found a tunnel lined with tumbling LED-lit waterfalls. It was deserted, cool and fresh.

My AirBnB was convenient and safe and comfortable, but devoid of personality, almost entirely blank. As I curled into its corners to read and write, I wondered how I could, for myself if not for future occupants, fill in that blank. I’d intended an external grand adventure, but I was maybe a fool to think it would not be an internal adventure as well. The Lord usually intends more than we do. I moved home a year ago, and this summer has been my first real break in the action to think about all the changes of my last half-decade. And I don’t intend any more changes for the time being. I’m settling in and that’s significant.

On top of that, the main task of my writing right now is to remember. To catalog many of the most important relationships of my life and try to put into words the way they’ve shaped me. I’m writing about what sort of friend and what sort of woman I’ve become and how. I’ve always been a habitual rememberer, but let me tell you—swallowed in extra-large doses like this, memory is potent stuff. And the faulty memories mold you just as much as the true ones, forming this bright, painfully irreverent patchwork of selfhood.

I am grateful for the ability to remember, to stitch meaning together, to follow steel tracks from one familiar friend to another in a wide slow loop, but something about this trip has made me already hold home a little closer, has made me more hopeful (or at least more desirous) for the now and the not yet, for the settling in to come.

My friend Emily picked me up midday today and I’m now back in the town where I went to undergrad, and then I’ll see Laura and then to Abby and then Hannah. There will be several babies and bigger kids too and I’ll probably stop and see art in Chicago. There is richness in all of that.

But a joyful part of my mind, a part which urges me on, also whispers: You get to go back and write those pieces for church, you get to check on the wildflowers you planted, you get to sketch out improvements to curriculums, you get to paint your cabinets, you get to sort clothing and papers, you get to be in place, your place, and work to make things grow.

Ten Years of Reading

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When I was in middle school I sunk into a particularly pernicious Christian romance novel phase. My mom thought it was absurd and would kick me out of the house for reading too much. So at her behest, I’d take a walk, but I’d bring the book with me and read as I went. Sometimes friendly folks out walking their dogs would call out to me to ask how I liked my book, and I always felt self-righteous annoyance—couldn’t they see I was busy?

Then the other day I left my house for a walk (no book in hand) and saw a man around my age or maybe a little younger walking toward me. It was muggy out—nearly drizzly—and he was wearing sunglasses and reading a book grasped firmly in two hands. I was fascinated and wanted desperately to know what he was reading. I squinted at its back cover as I passed him, but though he didn’t look up, I knew he could feel my looking and suddenly remembered how he must feel. I left him alone, and continued on my merry way, eyes up to the world around me.

So it’s in honor of my twelve year old self and that stranger and everyone in between who has not wanted to tear their eyes from a page that I offer you what I’ve got today.

In my heart of hearts I love a bit of light data, and for the past ten years, beginning with the summer before my senior year of college, I’ve kept track of every book I’ve completed on a running document. It’s titled “The Hooray List.” (I was in an era of celebrating accomplishments, however small.)

The list contains 371 entries total (though some of those are re-reads) which means the actual  number of individual books is 337. I divided it into the summer and the school-time of each year, and the least I ever read was in the summer of 2016, when I read nine books, four of which were for children. The most I read was this past school year, 2022-23 when I read 46 books, 13 of which I was teaching. (I spent a lot of weekends reading. Those were good weekends.) In the re-reads hall of fame there are 22 books that I read twice, six that I read three times, but the big winner is The Great Divorce, which I read four times in ten years.

If it’s not already abundantly apparent, I transferred the list to a spreadsheet just so I could organize it in a variety of ways and procure all this data, so this is, transparently, an ode not only to the joy of reading, but to the joy of list-making, of ordering and organizing the good.

I alphabetized all the titles, and here are some facts that I think are interesting:

Twenty titles begin with “A” but a whopping 101 of them begin with “The.” The only first letters I was missing were X and Z (so if anyone wants to rectify that, feel free!) Four of the titles are questions, and three begin with “Death,” but only one that begins with “Life.” I also read novels titled both Original Sin and Original Prin, which I thought was funny.

And now for some awards, doled out with no regard for anyone’s taste but my own:

Oldest: Beowulf

Most Nostalgic (For Me): A Tangled Web

Complained About the Loudest: Gilead

Best Opening Line: I Capture the Castle

Best Closing Line: Invisible Man

Read It Twice Because I Forgot I Read It the First Time: The Stone Diaries

Most Fascinatingly Niche: A Discarded Life

Most Enjoyed Hating: A Live Coal in the Sea

Took the Longest (4 years): The Brothers Karamazov

Read Aloud in One Sitting: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Most Beautiful Non-Fiction: An Unquiet Mind

Feels Most Like Home (To Me): Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

Least Favorite Book I Taught: The Crucible

Most Favorite Book I Taught: The Sun Also Rises

Most Frequently Recommended to Me: Jayber Crow

Most Frequently Recommended by Me: Everything Sad is Untrue or The Remains of the Day or The Mennyms

Everyone Should Read Regardless of What You Think of My Taste: Jane Eyre

Anyway, that’s that. This summer, I’ve already read a lot and walked a lot and wrote some about my childhood. I don’t like letting go of things—books, cards, scribbled notes on paper, memories. I like storing them up, holding them tight in my fist as I keep moving forward. And on occasion I’ll stop and sort through all the disparate pieces I’ve gained, and try to make sense of the picture they form when laid side by side by side.

The Part That Doesn’t Age in Colorado

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On Labor Day weekend I flew to Colorado to join a family reunion that was already in progress. When I landed in Atlanta for a layover, I turned my phone back on and found emails from two of Bonnie’s children—Bonnie, the elderly client who I spent most of my time with last year—saying that she’d passed away about a month before. I wasn’t surprised. You can’t be surprised when death comes to a house-bound woman in her late eighties with a laundry list of serious health conditions, but she had been my friend, my good friend, and the news sat heavily on my shoulders on my flight to Denver.

The week before I left, when I told one of my freshmen classes that I was going to a family reunion, one of them immediately quipped, “Is it gonna be fun or is it gonna be awkward?” “A little bit of both,” I shot back. Maybe I thought this was true when I said it but in actuality the week I spent there was often fun, never awkward, and just about always good.

At its zenith, there were 45 people. (We thought. An accurate count was more difficult than it should have been.) We stayed in two huge cabins at a YMCA Ranch a couple hours of switchback highway west of Denver. Both had big common areas with tall windows that faced out toward the horizon of mountains and also had comfortable furniture which my sister kept expressing appreciation for. My mom pointed out that my grandma, who has been gone since 2015, would have loved this. She was always looking for a place where all seven of her children and their offspring and theirs could be all together in one room—eat meals cooked in a line-up of vast pots, sit and play cards, talk and laugh. 

And we kept busy. We were the loudest and most cheerful at a bingo night run by Y employees at the rec center, with several of my cousins’ kids ending up calling the numbers themselves. We played a game of kickball in which there were two participants under four, which necessitated a variety of paces. We were the entire population of the Y trivia night one evening, and the room echoed with an inability to keep secrets from other teams made up of siblings and aunts and cousins and uncles. And we hiked over and over in the thin air, up mountains brown and green and rocky, to see little humps of snow melting by waterfalls.

I’d forgotten how much I like the people I’m related to. We are very different, and yet there’s a unity despite our difference—maybe because of it, at times. It is a unity of practicality, of unfussy kindness, of good humor, of just saying what you mean without pretension. I found even the barriers within myself crumbling at times. The rough beauty nudged my heart into order. All year I’ve steadfastly refused to play chess with any of my students even though I have a board in my room for them, but I played a game with my cousin’s son one morning, because though I can easily turn down a seventeen-year-old, saying no to a seven-year-old is entirely too cruel. He beat me soundly, at one point saying encouragingly, “You’ll figure out how the pieces move soon, or maybe you’re just bad at it.”

I read in quiet corners of one cabin or the other where I could see out a window, and on the last day did a loop on a path through a meadow, while listening to an Austen novel, past the old homestead which housed a family of little foxes who had been darting across the corners of our vision all week. 

On Sunday, in the morning light through all the eastern windows, most of us gathered for a service in the assembly style which many of my family grew up with, sharing one-by-one what we were learning from scripture, and singing hymns acapella. I listened to our swell of song rising to the roof and realized that I knew those voices of old, and was glad to hear them again after so long.

I used to write about my cousins on here a lot—nearly every Christmas. But we are all grown now and see each other much less. We’re spread across the country and beyond—tied to the places we live by jobs and families and commitments. But watching us here in adulthood, properly on the far side of excitable adolescence, I still saw a shared and generous familiarity, a sort of assumed kindness in one another we could all rely on—this was the thing which staved off the awkwardness my students joked about. 

Also, I leaned over to my sister one night and said, “You know, we’re all grown up, but everyone still walks the same.” There are certain things we never do, perhaps never can, grow out of. Once last year, talking about my relationship with Bonnie, Abby gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten, particularly because she’s known me so well for so long. She told me I was good at seeing the “part of people that doesn’t age.” And it’s true—that odd loping walk or wild laugh that has always been and always will be is my favorite part of any person, the part I hold precious in my palm.

And this family time away was a reminder that not only is there a part of people that doesn’t age, but maybe there’s a part of relationships that can’t and won’t age either. On Monday and Tuesday nights after the littlest ones were in bed, some of us cousins sat down to play Authors. It’s not a particularly brilliant game, a little like “Go Fish” but fussier and with the titles of more nineteenth century novels. But we played it so much at my Grandma’s when we were young that it’s in our shared DNA now. One summer when I slept on the couch because we were short of bed-space I would regularly wake up to my brother and my cousin Joe sitting on my feet, already deep in a game at 7:30 in the morning. 

When my cousin Charity unearthed the deck she’d brought last week, at first none of us could quite remember how many cards to deal. But then it all came back, and not just the rules, but the joy. We curled up in our chairs, all cares and griefs of our grown selves forgotten, and giggled for forty minutes straight over well-worn cards with pictures of Sir Walter Scott, all in a large cabin made small by a valley of snow-capped mountain peaks and the dome of a black-silk sky.

Much of May

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May has been much, much, much at school and I am grateful for it. 

I’ve struggled to understand my students in this first year back teaching. They feel not only inherently different from the students I used to teach, but inherently different from me. It takes me longer to really see them than it used to. In the last few months I’ve taken to reminding myself that the world in which they’re coming of age is quite different than the one in which I was fifteen and seventeen. History—the kind that will be written in books—has happened in the meantime and their perceptions of life and fairness and value and the way things should be are sometimes alien to me. 

I’ve cared for them and enjoyed them, but I’ve felt a gulf between us, a gulf which not only seems difficult to cross, but which I haven’t been entirely sure that I want to. I’ve sometimes fallen into annoyance and frustration rather than choosing the patience required by love.

But May has been a slow pulling together of the pieces. I gave a talk in chapel in which I was honest because that is the way I know how to be. My little all-boy class held an NFL-style draft for which elderly residents at the nursing home they’d be matched up with before we embarked on an interview project. The school launched a house system, my freshmen drew the nine circles of Dante’s hell, and some of the boys in my AP class performed “Man of Constant Sorrow” for me for extra credit. And student after anxious student recited Psalm 90, eyes boring into the carpet, then glancing up to me for reassurance. 

All these things have been tackle ropes thrown across that gulf, hooking into the soft flesh beneath my armor and tugging the cliff of me and the cliff of my students nearer to one another, inch by definite inch. 

I’ve had proper sit down conversations with a few kids this week, some of whom I haven’t even taught yet, and have been struck by the individual complexity and openness of their questions, how good it is to laugh with them. I now find myself wanting to feel gently towards them. I want to see their humanness, the lines around their eyes that Graham Greene talks about in The Power and the Glory. When I watch them stumble, I want to choose grief over irritation, love over easy dismissal.

And last week I wandered around a secret place on campus, a place on which for the last twenty years most graduating seniors have had the chance to make their mark. My own seventeen-year-old self is there with my classmates, as well as the upperclassmen I was once awestruck by and many of the boisterous kids I taught myself, all of us immortalized at that odd and painful wonder of a moment, on the cusp of we-knew-not-what.

So many things were felt in that place and then pressed into it in felt-tipped marker with immediate eagerness: joy, confidence, cynicism, vulgarity, wisdom, wildness, complacence, nostalgia. And every feeling expressed by those youthful hearts and hands, from before me all the way to after, promises loudly in that place to last forever. In the deep convictions of our emotions, we did not, a single one of us, really understand how much we would change. We considered our words to be final. 

There was an extremity in our certainty, in our hope, in all our desires which demanded fulfillment in permanent ink. And God at all times and in all moments stood watching us in that place, a resounding magnetic force, drawing the true desire rooted deep in each of us toward his center. 

So here I am, tired and content on a Friday after oral exams, digesting the assurance that my world is not so distanced from that of my students as I thought. The cacophony of the teenage years, its extremity, its color, the rawness of its desire for more and better has always been and will always be. May is much, much, much, and so are they.

The Mysteries of Loneliness

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What I’m about to say might be best off as a poem. But let’s try it like this anyway.

This year I’ve lived alone for the first time in my life, and I can’t imagine giving it up. Solitude is a luxury equal to none. This place is my place with things where I put them and all my own beloved oddities on the wall. With the world being what it is, I can even order exactly the food I want to my door—I can choose what suits me at any given moment. I am not responsible for others, for understanding them or for making myself understood. I eat dinner anytime between 4:30 and 11:30. I sit in all my different chairs in turn and take long baths without guilt. I think aloud to myself. I look at a book or a screen or a wall or a pen in my hand or the mirror or out the window where the rain puddles on my neighbor’s paving stones. It’s so easy to be alone.

But sometimes I suspect it’s too easy. With the freedom I have, I choose less for myself. I choose a smaller, more manageable world in which obligations are trimmed to the bone and disruptions are strictly outlawed. But just because I am my own favorite company doesn’t mean I’m my own best company. And perhaps I should already know that I’m meant to have company other than myself.

For much of history this world has not been a place in which someone, particularly a woman, could survive well on her own. Except for believers who sequestered themselves as a decades-long spiritual discipline, people needed community: someone to fix the leaks and someone to bake the bread and someone to stitch the sheets and someone to take out the waste, someone to fill the cabinets with medicine, someone to feed the cattle and someone to keep the hearthfire burning. It took more than two hands to support the flourishing of a human life. In the popular imagination (or at least in mine) people who are perpetually alone eventually starve to death in cramped garrets in Paris while the world dances on just outside their door.

Which is all very confusing when being alone feels so nice.

On top of that, from what we see of Christ in scripture, he was just alone here and there—only when he expressly planned to be. In fact, his moments of solitude are notable exceptions in the midst of a full-to-overflowing life and ministry, just as devout hermits were notable exceptions in the midst of a general population of families and villages and towns. But of course, his life for the first thirty years, before his ministry really began, may have looked much different. We can’t take the pace of Jesus’ early thirties as an exactly prescriptive blueprint for the entirety of our own lives. (And yet, we shouldn’t just ignore it either…)

Perhaps it’s clear already that I have no closing statement to make. Really, I’m just beginning a conversation with myself. It’s not really a discussion of whether or not I should be alone, but rather how I should treat the solitude which already exists within and around me: As a restorative? As a reward? As a natural and unavoidable state? As a place to hide? As a place to create? As a place from which to escape? Or as a place into which to welcome others, a place which can be expanded? And if so, how? (And where and why and when?)

Dearest Freshness Deep Down

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Last weekend I flew to Vancouver for Jolene’s wedding. This act of travel, of going to this other home of mine, was good for me. When you fly west, you end up chasing the light, and we landed around sunset. The skies were clearer than I thought they would be, for all the dumping cold grey the Pacific Northwest has been having, and a smile bloomed involuntarily from my gut when I saw the city’s glittering, twisting self rising to meet me. I split my time between looking toward land, and watching the faces of others who were watching it as well—still and childlike, lit by the reflection of the sun. I would’ve cried if I hadn’t been so busy with the watching.

This is my 300th entry, and I think that after more than a decade of this blog and thousands upon thousands of words I may finally be in a place (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, semantically) to tell you what the dang thing is actually about—it’s about the things that are more than they seem, which make joy and surety and gratitude rise strong and indisputable out of nearly nothing.

The day before I left I finished All the King’s Men with my AP Lit kids and told them that I had cried at the last chapter, that I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d found so moving but that I’d thought—oh, I’d thought—that it was Jack finally calling Willie his friend. And on the plane I watched Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, which was sweet and fun and not notably profound except that when the Dior dresses came out on those models, and the little London house-cleaner gasped over the beauty of them and imagined which she would buy, I thought, “Yes, yes, yes,” and scooted as far forward as my seatbelt would let me. And now back home I’m teaching The Sun Also Rises, which I haven’t read since college, when I remember finishing it right before class one day at a crowded cafeteria table of strangers during the lunch rush, my nose tipped into the book, and every muscle in my chest taut because I could tell something was happening to Jake Barnes, something big. He was being brave.

This blog is about those things, the small, thorny, glistening gifts of this world, of art, of nature, of circumstance. Things that can be buried, unnoticed for a long old time, but then they’re brought out in some new way, and it’s like that song of Andrew Peterson’s: “When the joy that you feel leaves a terrible ache in your bones, that’s the voice of Jesus, calling you back home.” 

So now I’m reminding myself (and maybe you) to look always for the land that’s been lying fallow, to roll up my sleeves and, with gentle assurance, to turn over that soil, to unearth Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things” which have been waiting there, their faces ready to reflect the light.