Keeping a Record of War

A couple hours drive outside of Jackson, Mississippi, the Windsor ruins are all that remains of an antebellum home that survived the Civil War only to catch fire in 1890. The fire destroyed the original floor plans, photographs of the house, every brick baked and laid by the injustice of slavery. Even the original name of the plantation home is forgotten; Windsor refers to the sound of the wind passing through the trees and the pillars left to hold up the sky. The only record of the mansion’s appearance is a drawing by a Union officer, sketched while encamped on the grounds.

 Two years ago, both my brother and my boyfriend, Seth, deployed to Afghanistan. The flurry of their departure was like any departure—packing, good-bye dinners, delays, more good-bye dinners, and then the actual leaving itself, which was on a cold January day (Epiphany, actually) filled with wind and waiting. Like all departures, once the men had left, there wasn’t much to say. There was a lingering silence; all of our ears were ringing.

In static-ridden phone calls, my brother called from the FOB he was stationed at to tell me about the boredom of war, of lifting weights to kill time, of horse-riding Afghan officers with automatic weapons strapped to their backs, of bureaucratic horrors, and of a platoon member who shipped his entire drum set to the base so he could fill his free time with music. His deployment, it seemed, was filled with both excess and starvation.

While they were gone, I read about the war. Not newspapers—it was too risky, I didn’t want to stumble upon an account of violence they were witness or victim to—but fiction and poetry. I watched movies and documentaries. I looked at photography books.

In July 2014, The Guardian compiled a list of the top ten war poems. The list spans 1,000 years of poetry, but World War I poems are numerous on the list. World War I was the first time poetic voices from the trenches shed a light on the violence and ugliness of war:

 Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. -Wilfred Owen, “Dulce Et Decorm Est”

There is no glory in this muddy war of trudging and waiting. The illusions of grander and the noble death of a hero are just that, illusions. But isn’t this trudging, this story of the soldier as victim of false hopes and someone else’s orders, also a Romanticized vision of war? Is it possible to write of war, of violence and death and waiting, without coloring the truth? How much of art is artifice?

Throughout Seth and my brother’s deployment, I mined their absence for material. Yes, as Flannery O’Conner wisely wrote, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Much of my writing never made it to a final draft. But that’s only part of it. I returned to the page in hopes of unearthing the most human moment. I wanted to be awed. I wanted to feel. Isn’t war, that great equalizer of man, the best place to search out the searing moments of clarity?

Going back to the sketch of the Windsor ruins, I can’t help but wonder what art from this war will serve as the record of experience. Each war has a token literary voice—the poets of World War I, Joseph Heller and Eli Wiesel of World War II, Tim O’Brian and Ken Marlantes of Vietnam, the list is seemingly endless. We use the sum violence as our record. This war is no different: the photographs of Tim Hetherington, Phil Klay’s National Book Award winning short stories, the countless video games that allow the player to step behind the gun in fateful battles, Brian Turner’s poetry, all seek to give artifice to the truth of war.

In short, is our desire for a record feeding the fire? In giving violence an audience, are we creating a system that requires more violence? Do we do the pure an injustice by making the ugly beautiful? When have we written too much? And equally important, have we written too little?

Beginning Exploration

The downstairs bathroom was the most unique room in our home. Its walls were decoupaged with pages of poetry and fiction by the previous owner. I showed it off whenever friends came to visit—it’s even where my bio pic was taken. Then, the day before leaving for my first MFA residency, it flooded. We had gone to the water park and returned to discover my son had left the upstairs bathroom sink running with the drain plugged. The walls were ruined.

This past week we moved out of that house after eight years. I’ve been listening to The Mountain Goats song “Genesis 3:23” during this transition. This song details the experience of returning to a former home—I tend to get sentimental well in advance. In it, the narrator revisits his old house to “see how the people here live now.” New pictures abound on the walls, but the rooms are still “familiar and warm.” There is also the reminder of the “hours we spent starving within these walls/ Sounds of a distant storm” and the need to “dodge the ghosts in the hallways/ Duck and weave.”

Of all the crafted lines in this song though, I am intrigued most by the opening lyric “Picked the lock on the front door/ And felt it give.” In order to explore the former home, the narrator has to force his way in. I think that’s the nature of revisiting some memories. I have to force myself into those locked-away places. And doing so puts me at risk.

I’ve been re-reading T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets lately, too—the first book read for that first MFA residency. Sometimes I am loath to pick up a book I’ve already read, especially one that’s changed me in some way. Not even a year later, I cringed noticing the author—my favorite at the time—we’d used to paste over the wet spots on the bathroom walls. Revisiting a book or a work of art threatens me because of how often my perspective shifts, so will the book still give? But, there was the clarion assurance of “Little Gidding”:

 And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Exploration of my past may change my understanding. Like the Mountain Goats’ narrator, we may encounter risk in returning and have to “break the lock on my own garden gate”. A nod, perhaps, to the next lines in Little Gidding:

Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning;

We brought our three kids home to that house. We endured several career changes. I’m not yet fully aware how our present life was woven from the hard choices and the days when laughter overflowed inside those walls. But I realize, when the house sells, I will have to hand over my keys.

Touching the Sacred

Think about conversion, a spiritual or ethical change of heart. Can real change take place without a certain unrehearsed contrition, an artlessness that throws the soul off balance as transforming grace sweeps in? Can conversion take hold without touching the sacred?

In the German political thriller The Lives of Others, one achingly poignant scene shows GDR Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler slipping into the bugged apartment of a playwright under suspicion for disloyalty to the government. For weeks, the lonely, friendless Wiesler—wedded body and soul to the brutal Socialism that was East Germany—has been listening in remotely to the most intimate details of the love affair between this writer and his lover, a talented but insecure actress. As the agent plays government-sanctioned voyeur to absorb the couple’s unfiltered life, he becomes progressively beguiled, wooed from his cold political ideology into the world of the playwright; his fine artistic mind, his political courage, and an ardent love for his beautiful, but weaker-minded companion.

In this pivotal scene, we see Wiesler wandering from room to room, coming across items that are part of the couple’s life together and now mean something to Wiesler as well; a joke gift, certain books, sheet music he’s heard Georg play while Christa-Maria listens. He pockets a volume of poems and is later seen reading Bertolt Brecht’s love poem, "Memory of Marie A," apparently moved by its beauty. He finally arrives at the bedroom, the culminating shrine of the pilgrimage. There he kneels to stroke the bed, symbol of the holiness of human connection he lives only vicariously through the romance of these others. In contrast to his usual rigid, autocratic persona, Wiesler hesitates, barely daring to run his hand along the corner of the mattress and trace the creases of the rumpled bed sheets, taking his time to touch this sacred thing. He becomes disarmingly wretched, shy, and this is as it should be. Breaking from self-delusion to embrace the highest and best within us must almost by necessity be both enthralling and frightening. Wiesler moves through the moment with the innocence of a child on his face, and is transformed. Afterward, there is no going back.

To touch the sacred isn’t usually graceful. Think of Saul of Tarsus. I think of Christ’s words that unless I become like a little child, I might never discover what the Kingdom of Heaven actually is.

What Good Stories Compel Us Toward

It’s true that America’s favorite podcast is over—of course I mean Serial and its twelve episodes exploring the nature of truth and reasonable doubt—but the story is still happening. It’s actually just begun, thanks to Sarah Koenig’s investigative reporting and scrupulous storytelling. The case for Adnan Syed’s innocence is … well, pending. If nothing else the State of Maryland’s case against Mr. Syed was shown as fragile at best and ludicrous at worst. DNA evidence was never tested, other witness testimony ignored, and, while never explicitly mentioned, the whole justice system stinks of corruption. (Why is it the only people who adamantly stand by the case are all white men involved in the prosecution? We’re looking at you, Kevin Urick.)

This is what Serial has done. One friend of mine posted on Facebook after episode ten asking if anyone would meet him at a coffee ship to talk about the episode. I even begged my friends and family to catch up so we could swap theories and tell each other, honestly, what we thought about Adnan’s innocence. One Reddit user even uncovered a possible lead for Adnan’s case, another possible suspect not on anyone’s radar. This is in addition to the other serial rapist and murderer whom the Innocence Project is testing the DNA evidence against.

Twelve episodes have done this, galvanized listeners and lawyers alike. Just by laying out the story, presenting facts, poking holes in weak arguments, getting up close and personal with a convicted murderer, wading through murky waters of truth and lies and opposing narratives and timelines, and judging human character.

It’s rare when a story is so compelling that friends need someone, anyone, to discuss it with them in person, over coffee. Yet here we are, fascinated and flummoxed, crying out for what good stories compel us toward: justice.

Chesterton and the Latitudinarians

I have often heard people who read Chesterton say that despite the expenditure being a mite difficult, reading him was something most definitely delightful. Perhaps this is because Chesterton has the uncanny ability to rephrase a thought or concept in an untraditional way—through a new lens. In many ways I find this helpful since it enables me to rethink what I previously assumed had already been soundly concluded. Either way, looking through the Chesterton lens is often rewarding. And more often than not, the G.K aperture captures a very large region of thought. Plus, Chesterton himself simply refuses to be narrowly labelled or simply catalogued. I suppose, if asked his category of choice, he would quickly and loudly respond “orthodox,” but then even that word would have to be greatly expanded since for many it simply means conservative. And orthodox certainly isn't just that.

In fact, Chesterton spoke out against many an aspect of conservatism. Actually, when it came to capitalism, the vitriol he uses is nearly startling. (“Starling” due to the most unfortunate truth that for many—including me, though it’s changing—the word “Christian” is often linked to conservative, and conservative is linked with capitalism. A truly nasty bit of connection.) Anyway, I was surprised then when I first saw his use of the word “Latitudinarian.” If you go to Google and type in the word “latitudinarian,” you will see the following words:

Latitudinarian was initially a pejorative term applied to a group of ... theologians who believed in conforming to official Church ... practices but who felt that matters of doctrine, liturgical practice, and ecclesiastical organization were of relatively little importance.

And if you search for “latitudinous,” you will get: having latitude, scope, range, breadth, etc., especially of ideas, interests, interpretations, or the like.

Sounds really quite nice, doesn't it? It sounds positively inviting and timely, even. I mean, in terms of the ecumenical movement, it sounds downright attractive. And in terms of mindset, it seems more than just helpful. The more latitude of thought, the better the perspective and ability to appreciate things. Yet every time Chesterton uses the word latitudinous, it is in a pejorative manner—like a lot.

But then again, Chesterton has a way of viewing things differently. So when it comes to largess of breath and range and all that, here is what bothers Chesterton about being overly latitudinous: since the nature of the world is circumscribed by limitations—and we know that our acts of volition (to choose to act in a certain way, whatever it is) will necessarily mean that we will be rejecting some other action—there must be limits even to breadth.

So is it sensible to have a wide perspective? Absolutely. But even with this, there must be limits. In his Orthodoxy, Chesterton says that as in life, in art there are laws and limits.

If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Thus while having latitude is good (we must have an expanded enough vision to appreciate variation and variety), we must always maintain the ability to have distinctions. Namely because, when breadth trumps distinction, nothing can be really distinguished, and then, of course, there is an inability to perceive variety. And what is the spice of life? Why, it is variety, of course.

[Some sources for Chesterton’s view on limits and latitudinarians can be read in greater depth from his grand Orthodoxy, and from the following essays: “About Shamelessness,” “Rabelaisian Regret,” “The New Theologian,” and “The Flag of Thought.”]

Life Imitating Art Imitating Pain

“Ladies, I don’t know who told you that dance was easy.” I use an admittedly unnecessary amount of force on the pause button on my computer. “You were misled.”

That, it seems, is how corrections are going to go today. I go back and forth with my intermediate students. Sometimes they need to calm down because “we are only doing pliès” and other times “pliès are the hardest thing we’re going to do all week.” I don’t think there is any logic or pattern to which days get which corrections. This particular class falls after a series of bad days. I am both pressed and crushed, persecuted and abandoned, struck down and one best-laid plan away from destruction, and so, in a "life imitating art imitating life" sort of way, pliès are hard today.

“You want to know what else is hard?” I continue.

“Life,” they answer in unison, and I am equally amused and concerned that I have conditioned them to answer this way. I wonder if I need to go away to reset, change my attitude, and come back with a more positive sensibility. Then maybe I can be one of those “Your pliè should feel like a rainbow glittered butterfly freely floating on waves of wind,” sort of teachers and less the “Dance is hard. Accept, move on, and point your feet” person that I am in and out of class.

Though the din of their aching muscles will prevent them from believing it, I am somewhat sympathetic to their plight. In fact, I give myself this same pep talk. A couple of days ago, it was me at the barre in a ballet class dripping with sweat and ready to clap, curtsey, and thank the instructor for an excellent class. This was after pliès (and it is here that I should probably mention that pliès are the first exercise in a ballet class).

“We’re going to do that again,” the instructor responded. She told us why and what to change. “This,” I thought to myself as the music began, “maybe the last class I ever take.” I don’t mean that in a “live every moment as if it is your last,” bumper sticker sort of way. It was more a realization that there was a pretty good chance that I was going to pass out before the class ended. I focused on breathing as my right arm floated out, in, up, and open. My hips and knees and ankles cracked harmoniously. My muscles joined and sang long, minor-keyed groans with each action, and then something wonderful happened: I did not break.

There is an Agnes DeMille quote that I am, in Sunday school fashion, trying to write on the door my heart. “Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult. It never becomes easy—it becomes possible.” Of course, I want to protect my students from pain. There are moments when I will go to great lengths to avoid it, but my dislike for discomfort doesn't change the fact that it exists.

The other day, one of my students raised her hand in the middle of class and announced that stretching hurt her. “Mhmm…” I nodded, and there was nothing more to say than that. Ballet is hard, demanding, and it hurts. The only way to get the flexibility and strength that dance requires, however, is to endure the pain, and the dancer that runs from it never sees anything become possible. Sometimes there are instances in which the cure for pain is to let yourself experience pain for just a little while longer. If you can ride it, out you just might surprise yourself with the realization that you can bend without breaking, after all.

Bees, A Book, and Risk

If I’d known what I was getting myself into, I’m not sure I would have done it.

In the beginning, it was just anger and frustration driving me, keeping me up at night wondering what to do. Fifty-thousand bees were killed by insecticide in a parking lot, because customers were complaining about the honeydew aphid leaving trails on windshields. It was early summer 2013, all the linden flowers in bloom, every creature doing its work in the intricate warp and weft of life, including the drowsy bumblebee. Because the natural world is built on interdependence, you cannot kill one thing without harming another, without harming yourself.

It was seven years since the wider world had heard the first signs of trouble for pollinators, when beekeepers began reporting massive and inexplicable colony losses. A name for the crisis appeared—colony collapse disorder—and theories mushroomed. Conservationists pointed out that it wasn’t just the honeybee, industrious friend of agriculture, but native pollinators of all kinds that were showing ominous signs of decline.

Grief is a heavy, suffocating thing. When neonicotinoids killed those bumblebees, I needed something to do, maybe more than I needed to “do something.” Because really, I thought, what can a girl with degrees in literature and a little backyard garden actually do for pollinators? I wanted, in some way, to help close the gap between humans and the tiny creatures we too easily ignore or brush aside as mere nuisance—or worse, kill outright with no sense of consequence.

What resources did I have at my fingertips? I thought I’d make a book about the relationship between humans and pollinators. What started as an idea for a hand-sewn chapbook of my own poems, hand-sold to raise funds for conservation organizations, quickly became a much larger vision for a published collection of work from writers of all kinds. Suddenly, there was plenty to do.

I learned how to write a grant proposal and a book proposal, met with friends and friends of friends who taught me the basics of social media marketing and self-publishing, set up a website and established an LLC. I took out ads in literary magazines and opened a Submittable account to invite writers to send in work. As submissions began to come in, I found I needed another pair of eyes to help me, and joined with a local poet and beekeeper to co-edit and release the book that would eventually become Winged: New Writing on Bees.

Fast forward a year, through many kitchen table editing sessions, late nights of research, endless emails, event-planning, and sleeplessness. Somehow, there is a beautiful book in our hands, designed and printed locally with a cover illustration from a local artist. Inside, there is stunning work from a wide variety of writers, including two poet laureates. We’ve earned grant funding, held a writing workshop, and participated in an event with the honeybee research lab at Oregon State University. We’ve made our book available to school and county libraries, and in January we matched all copies sold with a copy donated to the Prison Book Program.

Yet the project has not been without its missteps and misunderstandings. I’ve had to turn down really good work, including work from friends whose writing I admire. We let errors get through our painstaking proofreading, which still feels terrible in spite of the beautiful erratum bookmark we printed to correct them. There were plenty of hurt feelings along the way, and many nights when I wondered if it would have been better to have just made that hand-sewn chapbook after all.

I’m not sure I will ever feel completely certain of the answer to that question, just as I was never completely certain, in beginning the project, if it was the right thing to do. I prayed a lot about it, and worried about my ability to see it through. Reading the book now, though, and reflecting on the 18-month journey (and counting) it has led me on, I am mostly grateful for the lessons I learned.

Anything worth doing will not be without pain and sacrifice (and let’s face it, whining). It will not be perfect. That’s the choice we make when we take a risk, when we move to create something that doesn’t yet exist in the world. I had no idea in June 2013 that that was the choice I was making, and being the fearful human being I am, I probably wouldn’t have made the book if I had known. It sounds funny, but I’m grateful for that ignorance. It allowed me to make Winged, and I’m so glad I did.

Choric Space

Christ_the_Pantocrator

The whole of my school sat within the nave of an Orthodox cathedral, learning the language of icons. Think of the way language works, our guide, Joshua, said. We experience far more than we can express. Our words are the tips of icebergs. 

I looked again at the painted dome a hundred feet above us: Christ the Pantocrator, within a circle of light blue. Think about the metaphor, he said. Our words are not detached from the reality we hope to convey. They’re part of it. They’re the surface of the known and the unknown.

His own words ebbed; morning prayer had begun. We rose. The priest was coming down the aisle. He stopped before the twin doors that stood before us, the threshold between our place and the space where the altar lay. Small beneath the surging interior, the priest willed himself smaller, bowing as the cantor chanted, “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.”

The rapid words nearly lost their meaning, nearly dissolved into the substance that gave them rise—the human thrum of pure and urgent need—but they did not dissolve; somehow, they grew more integral. I was aware of the words’ surface meanings, even as I felt the unseen gravity in which those meanings participated; in no time, I was consciously outside this ritual’s import and helplessly within its radiant compression.

And I was not alone. As Seamus Heaney puts it in The Cure at Troy,his version of Philoctetes,such space in choric:

[…] my part is the chorus, and the chorus
Is more or less a borderline between
The you and the me and the it of it
Between the gods’ and human beings' sense of things.
And that’s the borderline that poetry
Operates on too, always in between
What you would like to happen and what will--
Whether you like it or not.

The chorus of Ancient Greece entered and exited like curtains, moved and had their say in a circle of space between the audience and the players, fluidly entering and exiting the drama, becoming one person, returning to twelve. They shared in the action and were outside it. And the hilltop rose around them, row upon row.

When the moment had passed, the students, my fellow faculty, and I made our way to the conference we’d come to see. I watched as learned men dissected and diagnosed the secular age, derided the destruction of mystery by the forces of science; I watched a man return again and again to the subject of same-sex marriage as though trying to come to terms with a blight. His parting words, the end of an answer to a curious member of our assembled body, were “And that is why I am not hopeful about the future.” The theme of the conference was wonder.

“How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick.” The words, of course, are Whitman's, but they were my words, too. All morning, they arrived to fill the space other words left empty. Sitting in the fellowship hall, I longed for awe, for the choric space Whitman found: “[R]ising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself/In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,/Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

Small wonder my thoughts floated back to the nave.

Twenty Little Poems

“It is that incidental, almost accidental, encounter with memorable beauty or knowledge—that news that comes from poetry—that enables us, as the poem by William Stafford says, ‘to think hard for us all.’" — Tony Hoagland, “Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America”

A friend sent me a link to Tony Hoagland’s article, “Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America.” I am a poet and an instructor, so I should read this, right? The grand title gives me pause, but the case that Hoagland makes for his canon of twenty poems is astute. I have been trying over the years to inculcate in my students not only the pleasures of poetry, especially contemporary poetry, but also the necessity of poetry.

The word “save” is always intriguing. Often I use the “save” function on my computer to hold onto an article I’ve been reading or to keep my written work safe. Sometimes I will save something in the Cloud. I think about saving grace and salvation sometimes. Hoagland is suggesting a kind of salvation that comes from reading poetry, a national salvation no less. And he may be onto something. I have often thought that poetry has a saving power, a way to put us in touch with the magnificent and the miniscule. To read a poem well, we have to slow down and look closely. The close looking that poetry requires is akin to meditation, which is not exactly what Hoagland is advocating, but close looking often translates to thoughtful actions in life.

To acquaint students with poetry, Hoagland suggests using living, well-wrought contemporary poetry in the classroom, and working our way back to the classics. This is, in fact, how I approach poetry with my students. It makes so much sense to work our way backwards in literature, because language becomes less familiar the further back in time we go. But to return to the theme of salvation: Hoagland calls poetry “our common treasure-house” and explains:

"We need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling . . . . We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through. We need its preview of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak."

If we all subscribe to Hoagland’s argument, then we can collectively save ourselves culturally through a common currency of poetry. So Hoagland also offers up several ways to read poetry and acquire a common language. These categories are especially helpful to me, an instructor who likes to organize curriculum thematically. Hoagland’s topics range from poetry that teaches the ethical nature of choice or respects solitude and self-discovery to poetry that stimulates daring, rehabilitates language, and acknowledges trouble ahead. If as a culture, we had more poetry in common among us, language to help us appreciate the beauty and trouble of everyday living, we might also be shored up collectively, and eventually feel closer to that great shalom we often wish for among ourselves.

Quiet

Like a lot of kids, I used to fantasize about slugging a bottom of the ninth game winning home run for Cleveland. Game 7 of the World Series of course. Crack! And the crowd goes wild. I grew up some and fantasized about becoming a comedian, and even lived that one out a little bit, at least more than I ever lived out the game-winning home run fantasy. A whole room laughing at my jokes? Mozart himself couldn’t create a sound quite as beautiful. In the more recent past, I’ve thought about what it’ll be like to read from my National Book Award winning novel (you know, after I write it.) The reverberation of my own voice in lecture halls packed with fans. Fans? Nay, international literary aficionados. And then afterwards: “Mr. Luikart, absolutely stunning. A harrowing work. Truly.”

But right now, you know what sounds good? Utter silence. No, strike that. Sounds that go on and on, whether I’m there to hear them or not. Sounds like water dripping from the ceiling of an empty cave. Wind in pine trees. Ocean waves. Fire. In other words, the sound of a lack of me. I don’t really permit myself any kinds of reminders that the good of the world isn’t predicated upon the author of this blog entry. In fact, the world still crackles and splashes and burns whether or not I exist. So what good is it to exist? Of course that depends. Who are you? What religion do you (or don’t you) practice? Do you have suicidal tendencies? Likely, though, the answer falls on a line segment stretched between two philosophically opposite poles. At one pole, you might find people existing because they’re working out their salvation with fear and trembling. At the other, people who are hyper-aware of the meaningless of life and would just as soon fall off into the void.

The most profound image in the Bible to me is Jesus going off alone. Which might sound weird that I think that’s all that profound. The Bible is full of profound images: An entire sea magically dividing itself in half, for example. I have to imagine that Jesus’ life, except for those times He spent alone, was a non-stop cacophony of wailing and “Heal me! Save me!” and the ancient equivalent of “You’re making zero sense, Rabbi.”

The Bible tells us that Jesus went to be alone so He could pray, that is, to talk to and listen to God. Far be it from me to put my own feet in the footsteps of the Divine, but if I were Jesus and I’d just gotten away from my idiot best friends or a bunch of lepers whose body parts keep dropping off or all the hoity-toity church types who get their rocks off praying super loud and then, when I finally disappeared into the hills, my Father said to me, “Okay, here’s the next plan,” I think I might say, “Please, God. Let’s just be quiet. Okay? Just for a minute.”

Pre-sales of Issue 8.1

Issue 8.1 is officially ready for pre-sales!

Issue 8.1 features knife fights, Christian charity fails, and poems between friends. Interviews with poet Julie L. Moore and author Robert Vander Lugt. New poems from the dames of Christian poetry: Luci Shaw, Jeanne Murray Walker, and Tania Runyan.

Find the Story Inside You

For as long as I’ve been teaching, I’ve been giving the same assignment. I ask my students to write a story about their lives, a “personal narrative.” And when I explain the assignment, I’ve always, always, met with a chorus of “but nothing’s ever happened to me! My life is so boring!”

At this point I always tell the story of Joseph, an English Language Development (ELD) student from my first year teaching, whom I can only describe as a 15-year-old curmudgeon. Interrupting my description of the assignment, he stubbornly yelled that he “had no stories in him.” (His words, as often happened, became unusually pithy due to the language barrier.)

I asked him if he’d ever been in trouble. His eyes flickered. And in almost one breath, he told a hilarious story of being three and nearly burning down his own house.

“Write that,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said. And he did. And when he turned it in, he grudgingly admitted that he’d loved writing it.

I’ve given this assignment for nearly ten years, so you’d think I’d be tired of it by now. But I’m not. There’s power in asking someone to tell you a story. And there’s something about my classes after they’ve submitted their stories: they stand taller. They participate more actively. In the years that I’ve made time for them to read their stories to one another, the change is even more pronounced. They are kinder. They listen to one another more willingly.

Because there’s something really good about knowing you had a story inside you, and even better about being able to give it to someone else for safekeeping.

Now, I’m making the whole process sound utterly dreamy. Of course it’s not. There were some dark days this year, grading 140 narratives. One boy wrote a three-page saga about finding worms in his kindergarten lunch box (this one lacked any decipherable moral and most punctuation, but was rich in figurative language). Another submitted a technically flawless essay about having the stomach flu, also rich with metaphors and sensory imagery (I suspect this to be passive revenge on me for assigning the essay in the first place, or else a far-too-literal interpretation of my “find the story inside you” pep-talk). One student misunderstood my prompt and penned a sweeping, 15-page elementary school memoir. He’d also missed the part of class where I imposed a page limit.

After they turned in their papers, I asked my students for a metaphor for the process of writing about themselves. Some of my favorites: “looking for the whitest flower in a field of white flowers,” “peeling back layers of skin, but not in a way that hurt” and “staring into a fun house mirror for a long time.” And of course, there was the “falling down a deep pit of despair.”

But even as I’m accused of inflicting despair, I consider this a noble task. And I consider this lesson perhaps the most important one I will teach: you have a story in you.

A Part of "The Divine Project"

In a lecture I attended last week called “The Sound of Freedom: the Music of Liberation,” Dr. Jeremy Begbie explained that, “The divine project is to re-humanize, not de-humanize.” As we partake in the transforming work of Christ on this earth, we are to learn, teach, and act out our own humanity and cherish the humanity of others by imitating Christ. This is an embodied work; Christ took on flesh and “dwelt among us,” wearing the very humanity that He had/has given us.

It is a challenge to think through how our human embodiment, a partaking in Christ’s humanity, acting as his healing feet and hands, applies to our strangely disembodied, ever-changeable, presence in virtual communities. We encounter others online, but the encounter is not in the flesh; and when we don’t look directly into the Imago Dei eyes of another human being, it is quite easy—and maybe even tempting—to forget about the “divine project” of “re-humanizing.” In my last post, for instance, I wrote about the painfully cold, judgmental, and sometimes even cruel comments that were so casually strewn around the internet in response to the Brown and Garner verdicts and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

In When I was a Child, I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson explains that, “Community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we know or whom we know very slightly." On the Internet, we are continually and often, concurrently, encountering friends, acquaintances, and strangers; it can be hard to generate “imaginative love” for these people, to truly have community with them, when we are unable to look into their eyes, hear their voices, sit in the direct presence of their stories. Louis C.K. poignantly highlights this often cruel disconnect when explaining why he won’t let his children have cell phones. He claims that “these things are toxic…they don’t look at people when they talk to them…they don’t build empathy.” He then comically explains that when a child hurts someone to their face, it might even be ultimately painful for the offender as his or conscience is pricked; but when these comments are written online, it provides a false, dangerous high, a buzzy self-satisfied feeling.

As we are rapidly transitioning into a largely online culture, we must work to learn how to “re-humanize” ourselves and others even via an isolating screen. This has been on my mind quite a lot lately because of the amazing ongoing story of the ways in which photographer Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York, and his Facebook community of thousands, raised over one million dollars to enable students from Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brownsville, Brooklyn to take a yearly visit to Harvard University. This project started from a simple encounter between Stanton and a thirteen-year-old boy named Vidal who told the photographer that his greatest hero is his school principle, Ms. Lopez, because, among other things, “she told each one of us that we matter.” Vidal is a profoundly sensitive and perceptive young teenager; in one interview, he explains that in the projects where he lives “some of the people around here aren’t friendly. I don’t think it’s a sadness or an anger that they feel, but a sort of emptiness.”

Stanton was so touched by Vidal’s story—and the impact that his principal has had on his life—that he went to Mott Hall Bridges Academy to find Ms. Lopez, who explained to him that the students at her school are always referred to as “scholars,” and that everyone at the school wears purple to remind them that they are royalty. Stanton has since photographed and interviewed Vidal’s mother, as well as many students and teachers at the school. All of these stories are both painful and beautiful; all of them are powerful and deeply human. For years, Brandon Stanton has walked around New York taking photos, coupling them with short quotes or stories directly from the mouths of those being photographed. There is something sacred about this connection between photograph, story, and viewer. There is a great deal of kindness, generosity, and a complete lack of judgment in Stanton’s bold, yet gentle, photography. He does not seem to see those he photographs as merely subjects, but as truly human, and because of this, he enables us to hear their voices. Many of these images and stories are breathtaking, quickly leading the viewer to tears or laughter and, in the case of Vidal’s story (and many others), to real empathy. This is not the first time Stanton and his followers (he currently has almost 12 million) have started a fund raiser, creating an almost embodied online community in order to rally around a “real” person whose story is briefly shared via their own words and their sacred eyes, eyes that might be either downcast or full of light. On Brandon Stanton’s Facebook page, there are, as Schaeffer says in the book of the same name, “no little people.”

When interviewed, Ms. Powell, one of the teachers from Mott Hall Bridges Academy, expressed her frequent discouragement as she asks herself: “How do you fill in the gaps created by the years of mis-education?”. She goes on to say: “Sometimes it feels so hopeless you want to give up. But I was up at 2 AM the other night, reading all the comments people were writing on the posts about Ms. Lopez, and I just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and it reminded me that I have a purpose and I need to keep going.” This brief story is an example of re-humanization, the ability of a community—even an online community of strangers—to work together in “imaginative love,” to bless other human beings by listening to their stories, by having conversations, even by raising funds to create opportunities for children that have often been underserved and ignored.

Jewish philosopher Martin Buber claimed that “all real life is meeting…all actual life is encounter.” With Humans of New York, Brandon Stanton has created opportunities for us to have “real” encounters with the humanizing story of another. And, as Buber also notes, any time we allow ourselves to have a real encounter with another human being, it is impossible not to be changed ourselves.

Good and Evil and Video Games

I’ve never been a video game person. My parents—whether by design or by chance, I can’t say—never had gaming consoles in the house. Being able to play a video game is not something one easily picks up past a certain age. I’ve always been content to watch other people play. That all changed a few weeks ago when my boyfriend set up his PlayStation 4 in my living room and downloaded a free game. It’s called “The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth,” and it’s got all the components that would appeal to an uninitiated video game player—color graphics, basic gameplay, and hundreds of power-ups and bosses to keep you interested. I started playing one day on a whim and was immediately hooked. Not until a few weeks later did I really start to think about the premise of the game I’d been playing. In the story, a mother hears God tell her to sacrifice her son to save him from his impurity. The son, Isaac, overhears her consenting to kill him, and escapes down a trapdoor in his bedroom just in the nick of time. He finds himself in a labyrinth of basements, cellars, caves, and dungeons, fighting monsters and big bosses before moving to another level.

What’s really interesting about the game is the religious symbolism that permeates every aspect of the game. Aside from the fact that Isaac finds himself the object of his mother’s religious delusion, he uses tools like the Necronomicon, a goat’s head, rosary beads, the Bible, and other religiously-charged objects to gain power. As you approach the end of the game, your character is become virtually unrecognizable—different power-ups change your appearance. My most recent game found me transformed into a horned demon, weeping tears of blood followed by an entourage of familiars—mummified babies, floating heads made of tar, a swarm of spiders. Eventually, players fight their mothers and their mothers’ hearts, ascending either to a cathedral or descending to Sheol. In Sheol, players fight the devil; in the cathedral, they fight themselves. It’s a striking image—you start in the dungeons as a scared, weeping child, become transformed into a grotesque character disfigured by deals with the devil and the gruesome powers you need to survive. Your grim, newfound self fights your angelic past self in a cathedral, complete with monks chanting in the background. Or, instead, you fight Satan himself before going on to meet other bosses like The Lamb, a hellish creature with horns and fangs.

What I can’t decide about the game is what it says about the culture that produced it. Steven E. Jones, a professor of English at Loyola University in Chicago, says, “Video games are the most quintessential social texts of our present cultural moment,” and I tend to agree with him. But what does that mean? If one assumes that art reflects the culture that prompted it (which it does), and one accepts video games as an art form (which they are), The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth must have something to say about the perception of religion at least in one predominant part of society. But what?

There are myriad possibilities, but I’ve fixated on two thoughts. I’m struck by the fact that both Christ-figures and demonic figures are both antagonists—there is no concept of good and evil, only the concept of survival, despite interference from spiritual influences. One is just as easily killed by angels or the (admittedly demonic-looking) Lamb as they are to be killed by Satan or his legions of monsters. Tools like The Bible, Bible Tracts, and rosary beads are just as useful as Necronomicons, severed paws of animals, and pentagrams. What does it mean that the game designer conflates traditional symbols of good and evil in such a way that they’re both equally antagonistic? I don’t know.

Even more striking to me is the juxtaposition of muddled, ambiguous religious references with the style of the game. The game’s graphics recall the same bright, basic shapes and simple graphics today’s gaming community associates with nostalgic favorites like the early Zelda games. It’s decidedly unnerving, sometimes, to see such heavy-handed symbolism combined with decidedly nostalgic graphics. What does it mean?

Today’s art community struggles with the significance of video games as an art form. Peoples’ opinions seem to be split on a generational basis; most of my friends (and most academics!) don’t think twice about saying that games are an art form. Asking three ladies not of my generation the same question sparked almost-instantaneous exclamations of “Oh! No, of course not.” But, try as you might to deny it, video games—whether they be games with simple graphics like The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth or beautifully-rendered social commentaries like Bioshock and its sequels—make intriguing and often uncomfortable commentary on today’s cultural and social climates.

I will never be good at video games. I am 27 years old, and it’s too late for me. But I am excited and intrigued by the video game world and the ever-blurring lines between video games and the arts community. I look forward to other games like The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and what they’ll make me wonder about the world and the leading zeitgeists of our society. And I look forward, too, to the day we all agree that video games are a significant part of our culture, even if they make us uncomfortable.

Guided By Our Sense of Beauty

The subjects of Noémie Goudal’s Observatories photographs aren’t real. Look closely at the architecture. Notice the grid of seams. They're made of print-outs. Goudal says she places the structures “as if they were a story being told. The viewer knows it’s fiction; he can see the paper, he can see it’s a construction. But still gets into it. It’s telling a narrative.”

This is the kind of narrative, it might go without saying, that is meant to be evocative, not informative. It opens up possibilities. The real answer to the question "What happened?" isn't relevant.

So what is it about the images that changes when we see that the buildings aren’t real?

I feel invested in this question because Goudal’s sense of narrative resonates with the way we craft narratives out of our own lives. We are expected to do this in hindsight, but we also do it as we occupy each moment. The stories we’ve lived continue to unfold in the present, and when we live with them in mind, however nuanced they may be, however lightly we may manage to hold them—isn’t it possible that we’re not telling ourselves the truth?

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes that "novelistic" does not mean "unrealistic" or "untrue to life." We find motifs in our lives—for example: a woman enjoys an intimate Beethoven concert, her first experience of culture. Several weeks later she meets a man in a restaurant while Beethoven is playing on the radio and she decides to run away with him to the city. The stories we form about our own lives can hinge on larger or more complex things than hearing Beethoven, but the effect is the same:

“Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life....Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress,” Kundera writes.

This kind of meaning is real, even if it is something we construct. Anyone who denies this, says Kundera, "deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

Noticing the seams in Noémie Goudal's Observatories doesn't change the images. The buildings are still real, even if they are not what we expect. Goudal built them, and they occupied that landscape, and we can look at the photographs now and they're beautiful. Whether or not it’s true may depend on the kind of truth you’re looking for. But in this kind of narrative, a correct answer isn’t the point.

Unfinished Work

“The sad thing is they could try to finish it/But I don't think they will do it.”—The Alan Parsons Project

When Antoni Gaudí began work on the La Sagrada Família Basilica in 1883, he knew he would never complete the project himself. He took his time on the Gothic and Art Nouveau structure, supposedly commenting “my client isn’t in a hurry.” Construction continues today and the plan is to have it completed in 2026 to mark the century since Gaudí’s death. On the album Gaudí, the Alan Parsons Project laces through its tracks a sense of loss for what’s left unfinished with lines like, “Follow the light of truth as far as our eyes can see/How should we know where that may be? How should we know?”

I lost two artists from my life this past year. One, a dear Facebook friend, and the other, my well-loved mom. My grief for them is accented by a feeling of loss for their unfinished works. Elizabeth was working on a memoir. I was among a dozen or so friends who received her drafts as she completed them. I looked forward to holding her book in my hands and tracing her steps through the weaving of her work and words. I wanted to see which of her paintings she’d match with each chapter, recalling particular periods of her life. One I hoped she’d include was a creative depiction of mud pies that she considered pairing with her story of how, as a five-year-old, she decorated mud pies with what she found in her garden; feathers and flowers, then stored them to dry under her bed. This was an early memory in the life of an artist who opened a window for me to a world that was vibrant in color and fluid in motion. I could never put into words exactly what her work expressed for me, but seeing it come through my newsfeed on a daily basis removed the “film of familiarity,” as Coleridge said, and I began to see art, and often life, differently. As I miss her, I ache to see these works finished. Parsons’ words are a lament, “The sands of time won't wait and it may be too late.”

My mom painted with oils, acrylics and, my favorite, colored pencils. Wildlife was her muse. She painted horses, dogs, koalas, giraffes. But she often challenged herself by painting a Pacific coast, or a copy of an Ansel Adams. She generously painted and gave away family portraits or pet portraits for friends who asked. Just a week or so before she died, she told me she wanted to make paintings of photographs my son had taken of an owl and great egret. She had also been contemplating moving toward abstract art. I will now never see the world interpreted through her abstract perspective. These works have become “Secrets for keeping that won't see the light.” There’s also the element that as part of her “creation” she has left me, in a sense, unfinished.

Who knows where the road may lead us, only a fool would say Who knows what's been lost along the way Look for the promised land in all of the dreams we share How will we know when we are there? How will we know? Only a fool would say.

Christ’s words from the cross, It is finished, are consolation and sharp contrast to life's incompleteness. And while we can't know much of its mysteries, can anything be unfinished in eternity?

La Sagrada Família the war is won the battle's over La Sagrada Família for the lion and the lamb La Sagrada Família we thank the lord the danger's over La Sagrada Família behold the mighty hand La Sagrada Família the night is gone the waiting's over La Sagrada Família there's peace throughout the land.

Intersections On the Way

1.

There is a cruciform linkage at the point of the Sabbath in the Decalogue that, try as I may, just will not be reduced to a graphic of the cross. What a teaching tool that would make if I could just figure it out. It's an intriguing, if daunting puzzle. If you want to play along, then imagine the first three commandments as the vertical pier of our our relationship with God, and the last six as the horizontal beam of our relationships with mankind. They hinge at the point of the fourth commandment, the Sabbath. Please, try it for yourself and let me know how it goes.   

2.

The Rule of Three is an actual thing and innately human. The Latin phrase omne trium perfectum says how three is intimate perfection to us. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Liquid, solid, and gas. The three bears, Stooges, blind mice and Musketeers. Three outs per inning. The list is endless. God describes Himself with this same three-ness in revealing his persons, and so, created in his image, we identify with it in creation. While reading in Matthew, I became aware that chapters 12 through 14 say who Jesus is: Lord, teacher, and healer. So, maybe Christ is symbolized best in triangles. Or maybe the sign of the fish, the ichthus: mirrored arcs that break the reflective plane and cross at the end, a symbol of story and reversals. But Jesus, also in Matthew, said the sēmeion, or sign, was Jonah's three days in the whale, and that all of Nineveh repented.

3.

I have a friend, a lover of etymology, who has created his own vocabulary with homonyms that reveal the true derivations of words we dumb down in common parlance. “Conversation” in his language is “converse-action”, which reveals the potential for conflict in the word we've come to associate with pleasantries. The Latin versus means “to turn” as com means “with.” The literal result is “to turn with” and connotes a struggle, mutually enjoined.

4.

Another friend sent me the photo above and suggested I write a poem about it. This happens on occasion. People intuit poetry. They feel something true about the image, where the material and ephemeral intersect, but they need the words. The trick to poetry is less about the object than revealing the relationship between the image and the one holding it. It's in the transformation as they enter into conversation that is never really finished. So that is what I wrote: Say more, said the little girl / to the frozen lake / about time and desire.

5.

The Temple at Jerusalem was an intersection. In a scene as unsettling as the opening of MacBeth, Mary and Joseph are confronted with prophecy when arriving at the Temple. Instead of priestly ceremony, they encounter Simeon, a righteous Temple loiterer given to divine oracles, who worshiped God at the sight of the baby. Then, an eighty-year-old prophetess, Anna, emerged and praised God, and spoke of the child to all who longed for the redemption of Israel. Simeon pronounced that the child was set for the “fall and rising again of many in Israel,” and “a sign which shall be spoken against; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” For one who was said to be looking for the consolation of Israel, Simeon's words sound a portent of conflict.

6.

We live in days where hopes for reconciliation, the potential for resolution, seem fleeting. Jerusalem at the time of Christ, the historians say, was just such a time, when the Pax Romana rose to put down the conflicts of east and west. I'd like to think that the Christ could be shaped into a compelling graphic that crosses the barriers of cultural suspicion and gets to the matter of peace. But he confounds our simple forms and gives us relationships – face to face, with conflicted minds and fragile hearts – where he keeps residence as the only form that transforms.

7.

And on the fortieth day after his birth, Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the Temple, the place where heaven and earth kiss.

Calvary and the Virtue of Self–Sacrifice

“Self–sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.” —Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

My favorite film from last year was an independent movie, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh entitled Calvary. If you are not yet familiar with it, shame on you because Tom Sturch wrote a wonderful piece on it just a few days ago on this website, linking the eight-day structure of the movie to the “Octave of Christmas”, which many in the ancient church celebrated. They did so because one day, i.e. Christmas day, cannot really contain the significance of what actually happened in the incarnation two thousand years ago. Something that big we should celebrate for eight days!

Anyway, the number eight is just about all that the traditional Octave and Calvary share in common because the film moves about as far from celebration and joy as is possible. Calvary is a slice-of-life drama set in a town in which almost every citizen is despicable. I say almost because—in a counter-cultural twist that is mind-boggling for me—one of the two decent characters in the film is Father James Lavelle, a priest played brilliantly by Brendan Gleeson. (The other, a French woman who is a heart-breakingly endearing character, is from out of town.)

The townspeople are portrayed through superb performances, each actor playing an oddball with serious moral deficiencies. There is a police chief, who has a gay lover and points guns at people for fun; a suicidal daughter with attitude; a wealthy retired investment banker, who cynically pees on a priceless painting he owns; a butcher, who is perfectly happy to let his wife’s adultery continue because he is glad to be rid of her; and on and on and on. If there is one thing all of these characters share in common, it is a personal and social nastiness that makes them sardonically dig at the priest over and over again in every interaction in the film.

All of these characters are in need of forgiveness, and none of them seek it. The police chief mocks the priest with his lifestyle and his belief in power. The daughter, who is his own, loves him but resists his attempts to get her to talk about her suicide attempt and, in a remarkable scene when he is sitting in the confessional and she in the place of the penitent, mocks Christ by calling him suicidal. The cynical investment banker cannot let go of spitting on the church for being so greedy, and derides the priest for being part of such a corrupt institution. The butcher, his wife, and her lover all tell the priest to get lost when he tries to help all three of them, because the love-making has turned violent (she’s been beaten up, but it is never quite clear by which man).

What does the priest do in all these situations? Like Jesus, it seems to me, he simply continues to love and seek to serve the people of the town, regardless. The only one for whom he ever really has harsh, condemnatory words is his fellow priest, again like Jesus with the Pharisees. The movie is a study in the responsibility of all of us to treat those who despise us with love and prayer (Matthew 5:43-46), and Father Lavelle does this consistently. He takes the pain and the suffering each of these broken souls experiences, and he internalizes it, not without some suffering of his own, since he is human after all.

But when his church is burned down, when his dog is slaughtered mercilessly, and when his own life is threatened, he simply remains faithful to his tasks of tending the flock, whether it be in the church, at their places of work, in their homes or in the pub. He pays dearly for his love; though he has been personally self-sacrificial throughout the film, he is willing to die—if it takes that—to help his wounded sheep.

Calvary may not be a perfect film, especially in its theology, but it is at worst, a study of a character so worth emulating that the movie ought to be high on everyone’s list to watch. Too much of the meaning of the film seems to be lodged in a thinly veiled religious humanism, though I could be argued out of that, since the priest is often seen praying before a crucifix, and the chief element in the marketing of the film is an empty cross. I’ll leave you to see it, evaluate the striking image at the very end of the movie, and meditate on what it means to forgive.

Trying to Capture It All

This Christmas, my daughter received her first diary. She did not expect or ask for it. But as I sat on the bookstore floor, figuring how many Amelia Bedelia books and candy canes would slide into her reindeer stocking, I saw it—a small diary, the cover bright with a single blue owl, its giant eyes wide open and jewel yellow. On Christmas morning when she dumped her stocking, two Amelia Bedelia books and one blue owl diary, replete with a lock and two tiny silver keys, tumbled into her growing pile of presents. I fumbled for my camera only to realize I had forgotten to change the batteries. The irony of the instant thickened; Ellie smiled at her diary, and I lost one of the morning’s moments I meant to keep.

Maybe my being a writer has strengthened my notion that first journals are a pretty big deal. I still remember mine—its sky-blue cover, the pages tall and crisp, silver lined and longing for the blue ink of its attached pen. I wanted to write down everything. And that felt exciting and also bit like a burden.

In his book, All Over But the Shoutin', Rick Bragg acknowledges the importance of a single moment: “It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.” Bragg’s words suggest something of the writer’s intense desire to frame instances in ways that feel concrete and touchable. Even before that first diary, I hardly remember a time when I did not feel a need to record what I noticed with words that tried to get inside the noticing and hold the smell and look and feel of the moment in ways that felt true. The problem, though, is that everything, every smell and texture and color, clamors to be noticed. So much pleads for attention, and part of being human means there is only so much attention to spend on any given moment.

As a writer and now, as a parent too, I struggle with urgency, with the frantic need to capture the moment, all of the moments: ordinary Tuesdays and boring three o’clocks as well as Christmas plays and birthday milestones and even the way the light bloomed in one open patch of cloud cover on my way to the coffee shop this morning. All of it seems important. It feels a waste to let any of it go unnoticed and unwritten. There is a pleasure and also a heaviness in knowing what words can do—the power of discovery they wield, the way they hold to the wisp of an instance even after it has dissolved.

But something has occurred to me in the slow writing of this piece, something so simple and basic, that I am ashamed to have forgotten it. Each day I bear witness to acts of grace around me—the unexpected gift of a diary or the surprise of light breaking through cloud. Perhaps it is easy to forget, in all this noticing and rendering, that grace is also offered to the writer. Spilling into the fissures and cracks of my own lack and finiteness is the same grace I watch play out in the moments that surround me. Somehow and without my remembering to expect or ask, another Tuesday, another three o’clock, another moment arrives like an offering. Maybe I will miss some of what I mean to see or remember or write down. But that’s okay, because grace also comes in the remembering that as a writer (and a parent) I am allowed to do more than merely capture moments or lament missing them. I am also free to create them.

Smartwoods

If I can see a tree outside my bedroom window, blood flow to my brain will be different than if I was looking at a view without vegetation. Right now, I have a rectangular perspective of deciduous trees and evergreens making their home next to sidewalks and steep neighborhood staircases. The Italian restaurant across the street is shaded by bare-branched trees adorned in twinkle lights. I have lived in Seattle, Washington, for four years, the most urban place I have ever called home. Wildness and development exist as two tangled lovers, bound by each other’s bodies. I came from Arkansas, and there was a forest in my backyard. I went to the woods as often as I could.

Nature is unscripted. There are no directors, writers, artists, activists, scientists, or programmers predetermining my experience. No one is cuing or staging events. I get to be surprised on nature’s terms, and with thousands of variables at play, the possibilities are limitless. In Seattle, this means a sea gull suddenly appears. Occasionally, a bald eagle will soar. I wonder about the village life of microorganisms dwelling in the rosemary bush that Chef Paul uses for his pasta dishes.

On clear days, I can see beyond the Italian restaurant and the undulating Seattle neighborhoods, all the way to Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains. Though I have never penetrated the heart of its wildness, glimpsing the glacial-capped mountains from my home perch offers its own kind of exhilaration. I know there are six species of shrews and four species of bats. There are flying squirrels, marmots, and Pacific jumping mice. Wolves and black bears, elk and porcupines and cougars are living somewhere in the folds of the land I see from my living room window. River otters share territory with both the spotted and the striped skunk. And those are just a handful of the mammals. Amphibians, reptiles, invertebrates, birds, and marine animals breathe the same air. There are six kinds of salamanders, four kinds of frogs, one toad, and one newt, the rough-skinned variety.

Yes, humans are part of nature. And, humans are influencing nature in terrifying ways. And yes, there are no longer any places on the planet untouched by anthropomorphic choices. We’ve altered the chemistry of the atmosphere after all. But still, I know that walking through my childhood forest is vastly different from using a painting or sketching app on an electronically-intelligent, handheld device. The toolbox on the iPad was decided for the “user” by someone else. The forest’s toolbox is up to your own imagination. You may decide the forest is a place for solitude, reflection, adventure, or escape. It may be a place to play, learn, draw, plant, crawl, climb, cry, laugh, or pretend. There is medicine. There is food. There is sanctuary. There are tools and potential tools. There is paint and clay. There are nuts and crystals and vines. There are bones and long branches dotted in lichen hamlets. All in the forest. All free.

The forest is not framed as a box. It did not arrive in a box. Imperfect spirals and curves and edges separate one thing from another. Nature lives and breathes. Smartphones are not vital organs. Swamps are the lungs of the Earth.

Though it’s possible to reduce ecological processes to precise scientific explanations, nature is miraculous just as human life is miraculous. It is no wonder I secretly hope trees may speak a human language. Or maybe the trees strain for us to hear them. The skin of the Earth and all the wild things thriving from its body are the souls keeping us alive, holding us, sheltering our sanity, giving us hope and inspiration to be more than users. We are creators. We are imagineers in ways most opposite to Disney’s brand of employment.

And here I am, writing this missive on my MacBook Air, created by a wildly imaginative person who loved art and calligraphy and beauty. I am listening to music on iTunes. It is an instrumental piece titled Become Ocean. I gaze at trees and buildings framed by 90-degree angles. The music calms and transports me away from the gray dark winter of Seattle. Given these ironies, I still know with all that I am that walking through the woods gives my heart delight unlike any cyber-styled comfort. No, delight is not a correct description. The euphoria of breathing without worry for what may happen, knowing something exquisite could transpire at any moment and a shimmering wave of endorphins will sparkle through the body—that’s the feeling. That’s the surprise I long for amidst the predetermined criteria of computer-generated beauty. Give me a fungus-infested tree over a perfect sequence of Fibonacci numbers, which produce the ideal pixelated tree. I want the freedom to not understand everything. My body needs mystery and mistakes.