Tag Archives: writing

Remembering

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If I’m honest, I have felt still—too still—the last few years. My life has been full of abundance: a job I love, many good friends, settling back into the neighborhood I grew up in, a sweet church full of creative people, so much travel to beautiful and beloved places. Yet I’ve been irked by the sense throughout that I, as a person, am stagnant, that I’ve stopped growing, that I’ll never feel changed or fresh again. In many ways I think this feeling is born out of my loss of desire to write, the fact that ideas no longer seem to come when I want them, or that when they do I don’t find them interesting. This loss makes me afraid.

The best spiritual antidote I have for this is to follow one of the few commands in scripture which I feel I’m naturally good at: I remember. I remember that the Lord led his people like a flock through the parted sea. I remember the woman who touched the edge of his garment. I remember Saul on the road to Damascus and Gladys Aylward on the train to China and Flannery just sitting there writing about her peacocks. I remember these things because I have read them and heard them, but perhaps even more pressingly, I remember the Pieta in St. Peter’s when I was seventeen, and the silent snow in Grove City when I was twenty, and the bursting red tomato on the nearly-dead vine in my parents’ garden when I was twenty-three, and the August smoke in the Vancouver sky when I was twenty-six, and the shared champagne on the beach at Spanish Banks when I was twenty-nine. I remember that I neither expected nor asked for any of these things, but that they came upon me like a warm summer storm. I hope that this can happen again.

But sometimes my remembering is not enough, because the questions nag at me: That is all well and good, but what if it’s all in the past? What if the summer rains are over and what if they never come again? What good does just thinking about them do? And the answer to all the fear at the heart of this is that while my remembering God has value, what has infinitely more value is his remembering me. And he promises that he does. In Matthew, we are told of the attention he pays to the smallest sparrow and to each hair on our heads. And then Jesus says wryly (I love when Jesus is wry), “Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” Because of course all those warm moments I habitually remember which feel like warm thunder in my hands occurred because he remembered me first. He always remembers me first. I am, in fact, always only echoing his remembrance. This practice of remembering between myself and God is not reciprocal—it is wildly imbalanced. He has engraved me on the palms of his hands.

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.

Journey in Poetry

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Back in October, I gave you a little collection of poems that were perhaps talking to one another, and I’m doing the same today, just to remind both myself and you that though it is the end of February, we can remain confident that we will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. All our running in circles will not bring us either farther from or closer to him. If we are in him, he is with us. So here’s Walt Whitman (who did not know any of that), a draft-poem of mine called “The New Lazarus” which feels perpetually unfinished, and the middle passage of Psalm 139, which has been stuck pleasantly in my throat lately.

From Whitman:

Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

“The New Lazarus”:

Come along out! I want you out in the light.
You think it’s you alone, but we are many,
We mothers of our own exile,
Our teeming selves, but worse,
Imprisoning lightning behind our breast-bones, 
In our wrist joints, at the base of our skulls
Where it sears us, marks us.

Show me those well-documented failures.
Come out in your grave clothes,
Your skin pale in brazen light,
Show me the hilly scar,
The busted ear, the lips chewed to silence,
The huddled back, the head so wrapped in refuse
It thinks you can’t be made new.

Now, tell him, go ahead and tell him,
Tell the good doctor:
“Lord, the one you love is sick.”

Psalm 139:7-12:

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,”
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

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 Summer of the Project

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This has been the summer of the project for me. Said projects have included sorting through all my papers stretching back to childhood, painting the bathroom dark purple, beginning the application process to do respite foster care, cleaning beneath the sink where for a few dreadful months a legion of mice took up residence, organizing students to come into school on their summer break so I can interview them on camera for a larger undertaking, painting the kitchen cabinets dark teal, listening to all of Narnia on audiobook, making lists of things to read and places to clean and food to cook, emailing with a travel agent about the course I’m leading to London with a teacher-friend next summer, hanging curtains in my living room that actually block light, finishing the non-fiction piece I started last summer about my endless adventure on Amtrak, and coming across a bag of cut-up t-shirts and deciding to make a quilt, though Lord only knows when that will happen.

All these things are for more than keeping myself busy. I paint because it improves my home, and therefore, by gentle degrees, my life. I plan to foster so that I can share that gently improved life with others. I take on creativity of various kinds to give myself a stable basis for joy.

I suppose on a larger scale, projects in general are all part of the good life, perhaps most of all in their unfinished state—when we are in the midst of the doing, the nailing the roof tiles, the writing the chorus of the song, the signing of the umpteenth form. Because we were designed to try. We are the strivers, the dreamers, the sweat-ers, the laughers, the wanderers and the wonderers, and the pursuers of goodness.

And the best of it is that though in our bones we are tryers, we do not finish the good work. The Lord is the one who brings it completion, who perfects our faith. That truth makes trying much easier, the burden of it light. His promise that he will finish the project that is us, the project that is all creation, his promise that he has already done it, means that we are free to try our best and understand just how little that is, to receive participation trophies in the form of abundant grace, to be prodigal children stumbling home reciting our apology speeches as our father crosses the finish line to meet us, to become transformed children of God waking up with paint still staining our nail beds to each fresh morning in which we can do it all again.

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.

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.