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2025 Retrospective

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According to my journal, on the first day of 2025 I did “various tasks,” an appropriate harbinger of a year in which I would continue to be busy and full from one season into the next and the next. More often recently I’ve left out the latchstring on the door of myself, let the thing swing open, allowed the fresh air properly in. 

At the beginning of the year we had a few snow days, I cooked a lot of pot roast, and Katie and I started our early morning class meetings for our London trip, the kids straggling in sleepy-eyed in the half-light. A group of boys took to playing blackjack in my study hall and I wrote a poem about it to make them stop. (It worked.) I gave occasional after school cello lessons to a student who begged for them, and helped the women’s ministry at church put on a small weekend conference. I re-read Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day so I could lead a discussion about it at (one of) my book club(s), and I logged onto Zoom a couple times a month for a residency through Fuller Seminary where I watched eager creative people wrestle gently with their place in the church.

This was a year of travel and not a single trip was by myself (though a few flights were.) The first big one was a midwest road trip with Tze over spring break. We talked about tattoos and decision-making and church, and the morning after we left my old home of Madison, WI, when he pulled over to take pictures of something or other, I sat in the car and cried, because I was only just coming to understand how unhappy I had been in that place and how good it had been to me despite everything. We went through a lot of Air Bnbs and more rental cars than was ideal. We ate at Culver’s and nameless diners and saw Lake Michigan from nearly every angle. 

Back home I wrote the text of a song based on Psalm 2 for a project at church, and played my cello in a chapel program at school. I showed the 2015 Far from the Madding Crowd to my juniors, and they reacted with dramatic indignation. I read Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady for the first time and wept with grief and gladness when Ralph died and Isabel called him ‘brother.’ In May, I flew to Colorado along with parents to see my brother walk across a stage in a tent after years of work for his PhD, then came back to my students making up ‘tier lists’ on my whiteboard of all the books they’d been assigned, ranking them from top to bottom as if literature mattered and their thoughts about it did too.

By early June I was in London with my siblings, beginning my second big trip of the year. George and I climbed Primrose Hill and walked part of the canal while waiting for Mary, and then we all three had dinner at Dishoom and went to see a show. We stayed the next few days in a cottage in the Cotswolds and wandered its environs. Back in London, my students arrived—a moment Katie and I had been planning for two years. I was thrilled, and then our rental house cancelled on us right before check in. We found another place to stay, but I spent the rest of the trip reckoning with my own competency. We took the kids to see Oliver! and to Mary’s church in Southall and out to the countryside and to the Victoria and Albert Museum. They enjoyed so much but it was difficult for me to see this, and I cried on the tube home from the circus.

Back home I spent a week or two recovering then flew west with Stephanie (the third trip). We met Regula and drove her car down the coast, past lighthouses and rocks and trees and speeding tickets and deserts. In Tahoe we cleaned my granddad’s cabin, played in the glittering water at Emerald Bay, and drank Turkish coffee. I got blisters on my feet and the tattoo I’d been thinking about since trip #1. Mary came at the end for a few days, uncertain about her future in London and needing a place to think. We posed for so many photos and made playlists to reflect each other’s personalities. 

Back home, I returned to work in early August. When the kids came back I found my classes both delightful and exhausting. I went on exactly one date to a trivia night at a brewery, flew to Minnesota for the weekend for my cousin’s wedding in the woods, hosted ‘meadhalls’ for my freshmen when they finished Beowulf, and took my AP kids outside to read poetry under the sky. And then my sister moved home, with all of her books and her ten years’ memories of London in tow.

I wrote a paper about teaching that my mom really liked and gave it at a conference in South Carolina. Heather visited from Boston while in town for a diaconate meeting, and I invited my friend Ashley to a Caldwell soccer game, then got so involved in a conversation with her about some big emotion or other that I cried standing on the sidelines. I led a Bible study on Galatians, went off my anti-depressants, and started locking the freshmen out of my classroom at lunchtime so they wouldn’t think it belonged to them.

At thirty-three, I am still trying to learn to shut up and listen, to hear the melody of the Maker’s song. I have heard it better at year’s end. I think the music has crescendoed. Yesterday I read a little morality play by Charles Williams that my mom gave me. Towards the end the protagonist says to the angel Gabriel, “You look grander than you used,” and Gabriel replies, “It is only that you give me more attention.”

In this last month or so I’ve gotten a new hot water heater and a new car and walked to see the lights in the very cold. My parents’ Thanksgiving table was full and eclectic, and their Christmas party had more singing than ever before. During exams last week sickness ravaged the student population, and I entertained myself by privately listing every literary figure I’d discussed with my juniors who’d died of tuberculosis: Helen Burns, all four of Charlotte Brontë’s sisters, John Keats himself, and Tiny Tim (in one timeline at least). Then this past Saturday I went to a Christmas brunch at Brooke’s and by the end my temperature was 103°. So I went home and wept. It was all I wanted to do. I felt certain that tears would heal me.

I may have been right, because I am mainly better now, well enough to read Mary’s words in Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being:

My flesh in terror and fire
Rejoices that the Word
Who utters the world out of nothing,
As a pledge of His word to love her
Against her will, and to turn
Her desperate longing to love,
Should ask to wear me,
From now to their wedding day,
For an engagement ring.

Amen and amen.

Quick Guide to Success

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Sometimes as I watch my sixteen year old students, I flip back through my own years as if through tinted plastic lenses of twenty different colors, so I can see the world as they do. And probably the singular abstract idea which looks most different to me now than it once did is the idea of success.

When I was young, success was clear and narrow and certain. Success reflected my own abilities and therefore my own worth. But now, in my thirties, I use the word much more liberally. I’m delighted to contemplate its small beauties all around me: a flower succeeds in blooming, ancient walls still succeed in holding up a roof, a baby boy succeeds in drawing his first breath. Success is not just some straight line drawn from desire to achievement. It is, instead, a miracle: an acorn beneath a forgotten mulch of leaves busting open, grasping the earth, then reaching green arms towards sun and rain till one day, unaccountably, it’s an oak.

The place where I feel successful most consistently nowadays is in the classroom. I love seeing students surprised by how much they care about the characters and words in front of them, their sincere engagement with what we discuss. But I can’t get away from the idea that the success in getting these kids to understand the goodness on the page is not mine, but the writers’. I did not dream up Elizabeth Bennet or Huck Finn. I’ve only required my students to introduce themselves to them. The bond that’s formed between the actual soul and the fictional one is a communal achievement—requiring not only the effort of someone a couple hundred years ago ,but my effort, and the kids’, and their parents’ for making them read, and mine, for filling the house with books, all for this one moment of wide-eyed appreciation.

This idea of communal success occurred to me with a vengeance last Sunday when the worship team performed a setting of Psalm 2. I’d written the words, and dreamed up the idea of it sounding a bit Johnny Cash, but my friend Robin had composed the music, and Michael had arranged it, and Griffin sang it, and several other musicians played a part. The isolated way I write often allows me to ignore how creative achievement demands a village in order to come to fruition, but here was an object lesson played out on a literal stage. I just sat still, watching something I had conceived but which a dozen other people had breathed life into—not to mention the original psalmist and the Lord himself. 

These are just passing thoughts, though. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about living an examined life is coming to realize that even if I did not examine it, every goodness I’ve discovered in the world would still exist. These truths don’t rely on my knowledge of them. Regardless of my efforts, we would all still have a thousand threads tying us together in our glories and our failures. We’d still be standing on the shoulders of giants. But sometimes it’s nice to know and to delight.

Travel-Around-London Vignettes

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I ride the Northern Line with my sister from Hampstead to Tottenham Court Road. Across from us sits a young man. He is probably in his mid-twenties with curly hair, fashionable slacks, a button down and dress shoes, and he is drinking a can of Foster’s lager. He is alone. There are delicate pink bruises beneath each eye, maybe self inflicted by lack of sleep. He carries a crumpled canvas duffle and as the car fills he moves it to make way for an older woman to sit next to him. The train jolts and an empty can rolls out of his bag, and, pinker than before, he hurries to retrieve it from the floor by someone else’s feet and tucks it, crumbled neatly, into an outer pocket. By the time he exits at Euston, two other empties have joined it. I suspect there is nothing else in the bag. Some small part of me travels with him as he—I know—boards an escalator which carries him up into hot, fresh summer.

The River Frome

Our walking guidebook is old.
Its clear posts and gates and stiles 
have stuttered into decades, disappeared,
But streams and woods abide
Forward on and on.

The River Frome on and on,
Undisturbed by its own minitude
Sings along through the Golden Valley
Softening all that could be hard
As it has for on and on in time.

This two-steps-width of river formed
This rumpled nape of the earth’s neck,
Carved it out of years with a gentleness 
unworried and absolute, on and on.

I stayed for nine nights in a house in northeast London with three of my coworkers and eighteen of my teenage students. We had three bathrooms between us and one singular front door key. We threw open windows and cried and cooked and laughed. Sometimes we slept. This past Tuesday, we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum and I went up as many stairs as I could until I arrived somewhere I’d never been before, where the whole fourth floor was rooms and rooms of ceramics. They were organized by year and by country and they went on and on through time and place: flowering plates and teapots shaped like camels and ornate bowls the size of bathtubs and figurines of eighteenth century politicians. Room after room after room of bone china labored over with stamp and glaze and heel of hand by people who believed that beauty mattered but had no idea that what they made could last.

His mercies never come to an end. Each morning they are made new—dear and fresh.

2024 Retrospective

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On January 1st of this year, I wrote with triumph in my journal that all the mice that had been plaguing my kitchen for months were gone: “No more mice!” This did not, unfortunately, turn out to be true—full eradication would take until the spring, but we’ll draw a veil over that. Welcome to the exciting beginning of my 2024. My friend Laura sent me colorful pens for grading, and sometimes I sat in the big chair in my living room and made a mess with watercolors. 

My friend Regula and I joked that this year I entered my “club era”— full of the kinds of clubs that define your thirties. And it’s true that I seem to have become a joiner all of a sudden. Regular commitments include two—and sometimes three—book clubs (only one of which includes my parents), prayer on Thursday evenings, the women’s ministry team at church, and a couple other groups to breathe life into the curious child within me who still sometimes wants to put words on a page that preserve all the good and the odd in the world around her.

But my main commitment, in both time and heart, has been my job—spring teaching this year was hectic and sweet and occasionally made me want to tear my hair out. I cared about the kids so much I got honest-to-God angry at them sometimes and in turn they cared so much about what I had to tell them or teach that they cried earnest tears. A student told me I looked tired and when I told him that wasn’t polite, he took it as an invitation to elaborate on my lack of make up. I bought gold confetti from the dollar store to help teach a George Eliot novel, and it still lives on in my classroom to this day. And one day in mid-spring when we were all tired (not just me), I pressed pause on an honors Lit class so we could spend the period talking about the theology of clothing and I could pretend I was in grad school again.

In April, my friend Katie and I went to London to do teaching research, and it was sweet to see her experience it for the first time and also sweet to see the Victoria and Albert Museum and my sister and other people and things that matter. The week felt intense, but good for beauty and good for friendship. When it rained we sheltered under the awning at Royal Albert Hall. This coming June we’re going to go back and take eighteen teenagers with us. The planning process has sometimes been frantic, especially the financial side, because though I’m a reasonably sensible person, I’ve never been in charge of eighty thousand dollars of other people’s money before, but it will be so good to take the kids. Perhaps we too will wait out the rain at Royal Albert Hall.

My birthday was at the end of April after we returned and though some of those days felt very low, Katie and her husband threw me a birthday party with sparkly pink cocktails and at school students brought me flowers and a cookie cake and general frenetic excitement. 

And then came summer and I returned to writing (though it did not always return to me). I painted my kitchen cabinets and my bathroom. I sorted through nearly every item I own (especially the papers) and worked on applying for foster certification—including fingerprints, interviews, a fire inspection, CPR training, and a map of my home. I watched inarguably too much TV, got set up on a couple dates, listened to most of The Chronicles of Narnia on audiobook, went to the mountains for a day, and spent every single night in my own bed.

School started earlier than usual in the thick blue heat of August and for the first time I was teaching opposite one of my own former students. I took on a new role, helping manage our new(ish) house system, and spent most days teaching kids I’ve taught before, whose handwriting I know and whose growth over the years is a quiet source of hope to me, though many of them cannot yet see it. I had the same study hall advisory as last year and sometimes they argued with me about rules and facts the way kids do with their own parents perhaps because my classroom—sometimes too warm and cluttered—has some home to it. They are used to me and I am used to them.

Laura used to send me emails asking both facetiously and sincerely to hear about my adventures, because my life at the time was full of lots of unexpected newnesses, fresh delights and anxieties, but, as I’ve sifted back through, this year hasn’t seemed even to have many separate events in it, much less adventures. It has merely been long continual rhythms in various parts of my life, all layered on top of one another in syncopation. 

These have been the days of small things, the days of inviting people to this and to that, of getting a french bob and watching it grow out, of my car shutting down as if possessed while driving home from work but then continuing to operate as normal, of a long weekend in Minnesota for a cousin wedding reception by a river, of going to Trader Joe’s, of borrowing a dress to wear to a high school friend’s wedding, of leading a Bible study on Ephesians, of bringing my cello to school, of realizing that there are too many small things and I cannot, in reality, foster a child right now, of driving to Greenville in the quiet, and of going to a reading at a bookstore, hearing flash fiction, then becoming entranced by small things all over again.

December has been a gift. When I walked into church on the 1st and realized it was the first Sunday of Advent my heart made a little leap. I always love this season, perhaps because for much of it the corners of my mind become preoccupied (and therefore filled) with light. When there is more darkness than usual, things that glow become precious: light hanging from trees, light nestled in windows, light bursting out of a night sky in a blinding choir singing “gloria in excelsis Deo!” 

Tomorrow I fly to London to spend Christmas with my family, and I’ll land on the winter solstice when there will be less than eight hours of daylight. But oh, there will be candles and oh, there will be stars. In all these small things I keep remembering some lines of T.S. Eliot I discovered as a teenager, stumbled upon as if they were El Dorado:

For all things exist only as seen by Thee, only as known by Thee, all things exist

    Only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies

      Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.

The Joys of Talking About Books You Don’t Like

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I’ve always been good at critique. It’s fun to take sharp words and slice something apart so that people can see the mess inside. I still have vivid memories of reading Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Live Coal in the Sea because I disliked it so much, and as I read I constructed scathing criticism in my mind, line by careful line, making the whole experience a delight. 

But in grad school I remember being at some friends’ house for dinner, and embarking on a treatise about either Marilynne Robinson or Wendell Berry. (Embarrassing that I can’t remember which, but there you have it. It really could have been either one.) My central thesis was that this revered author did not really understand what it meant to write fiction, only what it meant to have their head up their own rear end. I don’t think I said that exactly, but something significantly more lengthy and with nearly that effect. My speech was met with silent, wide eyes from everyone in the room. Though nobody spoke, the air was filled with reproach. And it occurred to me that perhaps I should have held my tongue.

So I’ve tried to keep my mouth shut in recent years, and when about a year ago a friend here in Greensboro invited me to join a book club she was starting, I suggested I might not be a very good candidate for it. “I’d be too critical,” I told her. “I don’t want to stop anyone from enjoying what they enjoy.” She told me that she knew what I was like and I should come anyway, which is always a wonderfully comforting pronouncement, so I did.

And lo and behold, these monthly meetings have been a gift, because they’ve turned out to have things to teach me. Mostly when I talk about books, they’re what I assign, books I already like and know, and I’m talking about them to students who, though they are free to disagree, have to listen to my perspective. My perspective is what I’m being paid for. But in a book club, rather than coming to the novel as a teacher, I come to it merely as myself. Of course that’s true when I read for fun on my own time (which I get to do a fair amount of) but I’m all the more aware of it when I carry my copy into Brooke’s living room and sit down with a group of other women who have all come as themselves too.

We sit and we talk and I will tell you a secret: I’m not the only one who dislikes things. Sometimes I recommend True Grit and no one else enjoys it nearly as much as I do. And sometimes someone else proposes The Women and I dislike it with such vehemence deep in my bones that I stop a quarter of the way through. But we find a way to disagree, and we manage to explain why we think the things we think without enforcing a painful silence on the whole room. We listen to each other, and in doing so we come to understand not only the books on our laps, but one another: our tastes, our comforts, our joys, our fears, our hearts. And then we lean back and chat about everything and nothing with warmth and wine and tea and cake.

For someone like me who talks about books all day while people who know less than I do listen, this is a sweetly humbling experience. And the best experiences with books are always humbling ones, ones that leave you feeling small and surrounded and grateful that so many people out there know the same language that you do and want to tell stories with it.

On Sunday, I drove down to Greenville, South Carolina to visit some friends for a few days and on the way I listened to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’d never read it before and it starts off so funny and sharp, and even though I knew that he dies at the end I found that I deeply wanted to know how, not by what means but in what mental state, in what spiritual land. I listened as his illness pulls him down and the narrative slows, while the peasant boy holds Ivan Ilyich’s feet in a comfortable position and he struggles in terror with the value of the life he’s lived and then stumbles on forgiveness and, at last, “instead of death there was light.”

I cried passing Spartanburg, knowing myself to be small and glad. I badly wanted to talk about the book, sitting on a couch, and to hear what my friends thought too.

Late September

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The waters are still high in the mountains right now. In all the pictures I’ve ever seen of this or any flood the water is a creamy brown—dull, unassuming, lethal only in the way it wraps itself around the waists and necks of buildings, carries in its depths the shards of bridges it has washed out and whole shells of cars and porches.

I’ve had an unplanned long weekend down here in the low hills, since school was canceled on Friday. I read a novel set in Seoul, as well as Ephesians, did some laundry, waited out a power outage on Friday then helped put on an event at church. I walked to the corner farmer’s market in the sunshine on Saturday. Tonight I’m bringing shortbread and roasted veggies to contribute to dinner at community group, and I’ve gained a tiny, stinging blister on my finger from peeling rutabagas.

In the meantime, folks evacuate homes or drive up into the mountains themselves, toward that softly ugly water, to search out family they haven’t heard from since the storm came.

Tomorrow for me is work and Arabian Nights and Wordsworth and grading and leftovers for lunch in a classroom that’s just slightly on this side of too warm and coming home rightly tired at the end of the afternoon.

All these are the facts of the matter, and I balk at the task of ripping the threads of meaning from their core and arranging them before your eyes. You can see them well enough yourself. 

It’s late September. The sun is golden warm, knives are busy in four p.m. kitchens, and He holds our lives in his hands.

Remaking with Layers

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We’re starting again before the planned six months’ hiatus is up, stepping gentle back into this space.

There is not much new to tell you except that all things are being made new. This is hard to remember because usually newness comes in layers, like pale watercolor seeped over paper again and again or translucent fabric laid over and over itself, until what was sheer becomes solid, vibrant, real. This imperceptible, unhurried layering is how relationships form roots, how children grow, how people are transformed. 

The last few weeks my classroom has held more tears than usual: over Henry V, over test grades, over The Velveteen Rabbit, over friendships, over Dickinson poems, over endings, over everyday—which is to say eternal—pains and joys.

None of these tears have been mine—teenagers’ emotions have the volume turned up on them—but I have been grateful for them each time because they’ve reminded me of the becoming that’s happening before my often-short sighted eyes. On one hand these are just kids, but on the other, no one is just anything. Their tears, their laughter, even those occasional holy mixtures of the two are another sheer layer of film, another millimeter’s thickness in the story God is telling. We forget too often.

But sometimes we’re reminded. Thursday night was the much-beloved Senior Recognition ceremony at Caldwell and as each of the students—some of whom I frankly struggled to teach last year—rose in turn to be spoken to by their teachers, I thought that though they stood quiet, they were loud in feeling. So many of them looked raw, just-hatched, shining, frightened, hopeful, transformed. For a moment, I could see all their layers at once.

I was struck by the same changed look on their faces, the different angle to their shoulders, the next evening at their graduation. This newness was a wild mystery, and it brought home to me my own ineptitude. After, I drove from the graduation venue to school to see the newly-minted seniors paint the rock—their rightful territory—for the first time. But the whole drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids I’d left behind, whether I had taught them well enough, whether I had loved them well enough, how badly I had failed them, and most, beyond my own sometimes-misguided efforts, what a strange, unknowable work God was doing and would continue to do in their young souls and frames, what he was building with a thousand repeated whispers.

And then, as I stood at ten p.m. in the parking lot of what was my high school and is now my vocation, watching students chase each other to slap wet pink handprints on their friends’ arms and legs, the mystery of divine remaking sat heavy on my shoulders. They blasted country music from one speaker and then another and I wondered whether these kids could understand the color, the wholeness, what the Lord wanted to build within them.

I suspect the answer is no, they do not comprehend, just as I do not comprehend. We will none of us understand what it means to be real, saturated purple and gold people, to step fully into the presence of the God we were made to image until we reach that other shore. But I am glad that these kids can weep with remorse when they have hurt someone and shriek with joy at a song they love, that they can abandon self-consciousness, tilt their faces to the sky, and let God get down to the slow and certain work remaking his people, his world.

2023 Retrospective

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My 2023 started with a walk with my friend Heather, visiting from New England. That evening we sat in my warm living room across from each other and wrote poems about the year and other stuff we’d seen. Then those first few days brought some difficult things at work—quiet things, heavy things, which in retrospect I may have mishandled in many ways. An inauspicious start, but I’m not grading this year on my own performance.

In very rough chronological order, this is what followed:

I took a cold little hike out in Rockingham with Karen and CJ and a hundred strangers. I read a lot and chatted with my coworkers even more in the quiet cracks of planning periods. I got more colds than usual and collected and organized all the digital curriculum guides in the two upper schools.

I had a writer’s retreat in the grey winter hills of the Piedmont where I wrote a bit and took more baths than there were days. I covered the walls of my bedroom in curtain rods, so I could hang my clothes from hooks like garlands. I let students read my novel in bits and pieces, and while waiting for planes and trains I made use of long layovers the best way I know how: talking to friends and walking to see the art.

I flew to Jolene’s wedding and let the Vancouver drizzle permeate my skin. I wrote postcards for my students before their AP exam, and spent two months preparing in excess for a half-hour chapel talk for the high school. Now that I have a place of my own I discovered that I am sometimes unsure of what to do with myself when I am in it—I rattle and chafe—but at school a coworker friend bought a TENS unit so the kids could simulate period pain, and I knew the best response to that was laughter.

Over spring break I went to Tennessee with my mom and, with my aunt, we walked around Cheekwood and saw model trains and spring blooms and paneled libraries. My freshmen illustrated Dante’s circles of hell (and added Where’s Waldo to many of them), I went to a Kentucky Derby party for the first time since childhood, and while on my way to a sweet and full family reunion in the brown and green mountains of Colorado I received news that my client Bonnie, who took up most of my working hours when I lived in Wisconsin, had died.

I went blonde, later covered that in henna, then a few months later chopped it all off, because changing my hair has always been a reliable constant. I took a long train journey for all of July, leaving my life behind to take up temporary residence in the lives of half a dozen friends: attending the birthday party of a little girl I’d only barely met, watching Survivor, chatting with the neighbor kids, and peering up at fireworks from beneath an umbrella. Then I came home in August and killed a couple house plants through well-intended negligence.

I watched Love Island with friends, because you can’t be teachers all the time, and waited six months to get my car repaired after running into a tree. I purloined a couch from storage at school for my classroom, was immediately asked to return it, and then, in perhaps the greatest miracle of the decade, was gifted an armchair and ottoman. My sister came home for a few months, taking lots of walks and visiting every thrift store and church she could find. I made new friends here and there, but struggled to maintain the friendships I already had as I sank into fall. Regardless, I watched people’s dogs for them and cleaned out my gutters.

I went to Charleston with my family where we ate at The Obstinate Daughter and played trivia, and I discovered that I do, after all, like the beach. A student cried over a test I wrote for the first time in years, and I planned trips to London and maybe to Tahoe for next year. I went to the zoo with a friend and her kids, and was asked to write two essays for church, one of which led to me teaching a George Herbert poem around a campfire to a bunch of open-faced grown women. And despite my own grown-ness, I found myself more and more often the recipient of generosity from those around me—rides and patience and time.

God has been just as good to me this year as he is every year, and many of the gifts enumerated above echo his long goodness, but I’ve felt myself straining to keep afloat, despite all that. I know this primarily because writing—which used to be so full of joy, like stepping into sunlight—has become stale, difficult, full of grey sand. I’ve posted here every month since I was eighteen—more than thirteen years—but I’m going to take a sabbatical now. I’m working only within the framework of my own rules, but those rules have often been fairly definite things, so I need a fancy word to feel as if this is allowed. Sabbatical it is. I will return to this space—I think—in six months.

The fact is, I’ve felt both older and younger—more squinting, childlike, and lost—recently, and I might as well dwell in that, holding my empty hands out and taking what others have to offer. Last week, my friend Katie gave me a basic lesson in watercolor and told me she was going to start at the beginning, like I knew nothing, and, sitting at her kitchen table with the paint brush I wasn’t sure how to hold, I said that made sense. Wendell Berry wrote that “when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,” and he may be right. Yesterday was Christmas. I sat with my family for nearly two hours opening the presents that were piled under the tree. It was a very good day, and I thought of Mary two thousand years ago, picturing her as the song does: “not used to the light, but having to squint her eyes in the sunshine,” yet chosen and beloved by God, nonetheless.

The day school let out a week or so ago, my siblings came over in the evening. I was very tired, so they heated up dinner and we ate together. After, as we were cleaning up, my sister asked for a container for the little bit of peas that were left. I reached into the cabinet and pulled out a tiny container the size of two bottle caps stacked on one another, and held it out to her, giggling hysterically. In the space of about five seconds my laughter dissolved into tears. Mary took the container from me, told me to sit down, and began to rummage in the cupboard herself. So there you have it—I don’t always know what to make of things anymore, or what to say about or do about them. But I will treasure them all up, and ponder them in my heart.

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.