A Tale of Tweelie
Joy and Matthew Steem
This is neither ghost story nor a tale of suspense: it is a bit of writing about a bird teaching me insights that I should have learned a long while ago.
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Filtering by Category: Meditations
The Water is Wide
Laurie Granieri
Joan Didion famously wrote: “It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” but I don’t know. As I waded through my divorce, all I saw was End End End. Myopia is one of suffering’s dirtiest tricks, temporarily stripping us of our ability to imagine a future.
Read MoreThrough the Ruins of the World
Jean Hoefling
Icons are created for the sole purpose of offering access, through the gate of the visible, to the mystery of the invisible.
—Henri Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons
In his book of meditations on the icons of 15th-century Russian artist Andrei Rublev's, theologian Henri Nouwen says this about the iconographer’s famous “Christ the Redeemer:”
When I first saw… I had the distinct sense that the face of Christ appears in the midst of great chaos. A sad but beautiful face looks at us through the ruins of the world.
Read MoreAbove Earth's Lamentation
Laurie Granieri
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
I administer these words to my body like a balm as I heave and weave, clambering up mountains, hiking parts of the Appalachian Trail, the Rockies, the Adirondack High Peaks.
Read MoreWearing Narrative
Joy and Matthew Steem
“The body interacts and changes places with apparel as we wear it, changing ruffle to ankle, in the vision of one motion. We let it affect the way we move, the way we interact, the way we shape affection, the means by which we negotiate other’s opinions of our social standing, the way we cognize our own body.”
—Daneen Wordrop,
As one who doesn’t typically pay a great deal of attention to the act of dressing, I have an ambiguous relationship with clothing. In fact, I often catch myself contemplating the necessity of clothing in negative terms, partly because over the years I have become increasingly aware of the class distinctions and identity communicating elements inherent in clothing choices. My mindset has been slowly changing though, in large part thanks to a generous benefactor of luxurious hand-me-downs.
Read MoreOur Shared Burden
Briana Meade
It’s no secret that we live in a culture that idolizes productivity and ability and youth. Ours is a culture of ideals. We set up shrines to perfect skin, lithe bodies, and Instagrammable-health.
Read MoreGyroscope
Jayne English
One thought can produce millions of vibrations and they all go back to God ... everything does.
—John Coltrane
Do you remember playing with a gyroscope as a kid? You’d snap the string, lean down eye level with the table, and watch it spin on its axis until the momentum slowed and it wobbled to a stop. The gyroscope’s movements are the same ones that weave through our lives. It appears balanced enough, but the view from the axis can look like a lot of frantic spinning.
Read MoreLonging for Home
Joy and Matthew Steem
I remember the first time I experienced the blunt heaviness of homesickness: the pulsing desire to return to the place of belonging, to people who care, and an environment that’s safe. I was in grade two and had been away from my family for about five days at a non-profit kid’s camp a few hours away. Curiously, the wumping of homeward ache didn’t hit me until after arriving at my friend’s house, where I awaited mom to pick me up. Suddenly, less than half an hour from home, the telltale symptoms of loneliness started leaking out my eyes. I remember my friend’s gentle dad leaving a message on my parents’ machine, “come whenever you can, I think someone is quite homesick.”
Read MoreThe Surrealist’s Storm
Jayne English
"I come into the peace of wild things." — Wendell Berry
Have you ever listened to an instrumental version of a song that’s familiar to you and realized, while you’re humming along, singing the words in your head, that a younger person, hearing the same version, would have no idea that there are words to it? You would be experiencing the same song, but at different levels.
Read MoreOur Subordinate Clauses
Jessica Brown
When I think of metaphors for our identity—the prismatic, shifting, layered, being-becoming self—I sometimes think of landscapes with peaks and valleys, or three-dimensional stained-glass kaleidoscopes, or even the deep expanse of space.
Read MoreMidwinter Spring
William Coleman
A few years ago, my school brought a young man named Liam Robinson to America. He hails from Lincolnshire, England, and makes his way by teaching English longsword dancing and performing folk songs he's gathered from his home country and from every country in which he's found a home in song.
Read MorePain and Petition
Briana Meade
Today, I sit on the bed, looking at the piles of laundry. There is a pile on my right. There is a pile on my left, and there is a pile on the bed. Afternoon happens to be when I am at my weakest. The pain is like a splinter I can’t get out of my thumb, but in this case, that splinter is wedged deep in the space between my condyles and my skull. The diagnosis I’ve been given is idiopathic condylar resorption—in other words, my jaw joint is disintegrating, along with the condyles. “Idiopathic” simply means no one knows why.
Read MoreSub[urban] Creation
Jayne English
“A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien
I grew up in the suburbs. Those places where you could only see distance if you looked up, because the houses and yards and hedges of your neighbors and their neighbors became the extent of your horizon. These views were vastly different from the ones that inspired Coleridge and Wordsworth on their walking tour through moorland and woodland, and along the coast of Bristol Channel. They weren’t like Emily Dickinson’s views at the Homestead, where she wandered through orchard and gardens, tending the flowers that thrived in her poetry. And they’re not the English countryside Tolkien knew as a child that charmed his Hobbits’ Shire.
Read MoreEmail From a Young Poet
Howard Schaap
“I like the poem ‘Purity’ by Billy Collins as a way to think about writing poetry,” a poetry student wrote to me recently. She also had some profound questions about the poem, beginning with, “As Christians, while writing poetry, are we still Christians after we’ve stripped ourselves pure as Billy Collins says?”
Read MoreOn Attending
Briana Meade
We are driving. My three year old daughter says cute things in the car. She says she is dreaming about brownies and milk. I want to kiss her cheeks every time she pipes up. I love her strangely and fiercely for the cute things she says at three.
Read MoreFormal Feeling
William Coleman
I’ve been mentoring a student in a senior project on poetics. Recently we read this wrenching instance of the sestina, a form that calls for the same six words, in differing orders, to end the lines of six consecutive stanzas, then for the sudden yoking of those words into a three-line envoy.
Read MoreThe Romance of Grief
Jean Hoefling
My mother died on a snowless January morning high in a hospital room from whose window one could see pretty much into forever. Sudden failings in her body’s systems had taken hold—imbalances of blood and bone and lung. Frailty won the day. Fresh in our shock we gathered, reeling from the cruel slap of this impossibility.
Read MoreI Scream, America
Chrysta Brown
I am not here for my own inner peace.
No, I am at this for the inner pockets of my wallet. My boss walks into the office, which is separated from the studio by an opening in the wall and turns off the light, leaving me to sit alone in the darkness.
Read MoreThe Dark Ages: What Petrarch Didn’t Know
Jayne English
“My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms.” — Petrarch
We all have them, dark times of struggle. Whether they last an intense day or long years, whether they’re about money, health, or relationships, they settle on us like night. They create tunnel vision, and can blind us to what lies beyond their shadows.
Read MoreCountdown
Howard Schaap
We’re driving home from shopping, two 40-something parents and their three teen and tweens. It’s January. Call us old-fashioned—we listen to the radio, Rick Dees. It’s not just the Weekly Top Forty; it’s a countdown of #1s. A list of a list. We click around but the kids insist—“Go back to Rick Dees!”This pop culture is ruining them, I think, ruining us all, a proud tradition of pop culture ruin for every generation—Rick Dees, Casey Kasem, Dick Clark.
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