Hello loved ones,
How have you been this May? I hope the month has been awash with the beauty and busyness spring tends to usher in (busy like a bee, hopefully, as opposed to like a headless chicken).
Speaking of heads, our headspace this month has been filled with flowers, vegetables, and berries. As I write this, in fact, the first crop of strawberries is ripening up. Soon we'll be happily floundering in a great sea of them. I had my first strawberry of the year on Tuesday (Kai, as you might expect, was the first to find a few ripe ones). I was shocked at how sweet it was, as though he had dipped it in sugar. We forget these things somehow.
Barring the pumpkins, our garden is finally planted out, and our fingers are crossed hoping everything survives. This year we planted a lot of things we won't see fruit from for a while. We put in three rhubarb plants and ten asparagus plants, a 3x5 mushroom patch, a blackberry cane and a raspberry cane. Of all of these, the earliest we might harvest from might be the mushrooms, once autumn rolls around. Next year we'll get small yields on the rest, if any, and the following year more than that.
Our lupines in the back meadow are fading now after a stunning entrance in late April. We've waited three years for these beauties to grow to blooming age, and they did not disappoint. The summer flood of echinacea, wild bergamot, bearded tongue, and black-eyed Susan is coming in on their heels. I’m not sure I can adequately explain how thrilled we are with the whole native prairie experience. We already have plans this year to solarize another 4000-square-foot space in the front for another meadow. I may or may not be researching beekeeping.
To me, the essence of May is unending possibility. Every sale on seeds or empty patch of soil whispers to something deep inside of me: do something with this. The raw materials are here: sunlight, water, soil, compost. You have what you need to plant this thing and watch it grow into something beautiful and delicious.
If you're a gardener or a chef or an artist of any discipline (or a human being, let's be honest), potential can be intoxicating. Think about how crazy this is: our eyes are designed not only to see what's in front of us, but to see what could be. Imagination is just another form of sight, wherein we image the creative capacity of God.
And if you're any of the above, you know how difficult achieving those imagined possibilities can be.
I'm in a liminal sort of space with writing right now.
Releasing Masks & Mirrors felt like closing the book on a season in life. It represents (and contains) three years worth of words wrestling with some vital components of my faith, identity, and vocation.
In the same vein, Tethered Letters started because I knew people who were leaving the faith and I wanted to know why I wasn't doing so. This process was by necessity exploratory, reactionary, and inward-looking, and it was what I needed to peel back some layers and get down to the bones. This is, in large part, what Masks & Mirrors is meant to chronicle, in hopes that some of the striving will be helpful to those of you in similar seasons.
This coincided with a return to my childhood town and home, not to mention a change of jobs, two additional children, a global pandemic, a contentious election, convulsions in evangelical Christianity, and the attendant chaos and possibility. It feels as though it's taken the five years since moving to Indiana to really settle into the "where we are" of it.
So this spring, then, has been one great big "now what?"
Part of this process of slowly rooting myself into this physical place has been removing social media. I relied on it too much for a sense of identity, community, and place. Yes, I know this is ironic given its egocentric, faux-relational placelessness. But them's the facts.
SM's absence has confronted my writing, because so much of what I've written has been ignited by something I've read or encountered by way of Facebook or IG. The question I've run up against is this: What will I write about when my words are not driven by a news cycle, an online discussion, or a baring of my soul to an online world? What fuels my writing in the absence of reaction?
I have struggled with this, as someone who has been writing for years in reaction instead of ignition. The silence of some days has felt a little terrifying, as if maybe I don't have anything to say if I am not responding to "things out there." But it's also comforting, pressing into the knowledge that the words will come when they need to. Better to write a good life, seen or unseen.
That's where the endless possibility comes in. Because the spaces formerly filled by all the things from the past season are being filled with the stuff of an ordinary life — life together with my church family, getting to know my community better, playing board games with the kids, teaching Kai how to use the lawnmower, going out for sushi with Linnea, etc. The trouble is not that I have nothing to write about, it's that there's too much to write about.
I could write about how my friend just had his fourth child and to celebrate I got him a pipe. We sat out on the front porch and smoked some good tobacco together, just talking about the ups and downs of parenthood, family, and life itself. Maybe we can't remember everything we said, but that's why it mattered. The conversation doesn't stop there, because we're in this thing together and there's still a long way to go.
I could write about how I just finished rereading Dune, and rewatched Denis Villenueve's movie with Linnea, who enjoyed it even though sci-fi is not her jam. I absolutely believe her interest is a statement on its quality and not only on her humoring me. I could also write, tangentially, about how we're both less interested in things being amazing experiences, or being exactly what we want, and more interested in just experiencing them together because we like each other. How we're laughing at ourselves more and it's just comfy. How I didn't feel a need to dissect Dune for an essay, but just enjoyed the ride.
I could write about the moment last month when something happened that needed the right words, and I found that I had them. How it felt like less of me and more of God, with a love and frankness I covet most days. How it was all grace, and continues to be. How it didn't matter that anyone but the people who mattered most read it.
I could, hypothetically, write a series of chapter-by-chapter reflections on The Wind in the Willows, because I love every sentence of that book. Or a new book of poetry based on musical forms that's all about the flowers in our meadow (theoretically). Or I could pull out the fantasy trilogy I've been world-building off-and-on for a few years now and write chapter six (given that the first five chapters might, supposedly, already be written).
Maybe you catch my drift. The question is not really: what am I going to write about? The question is: which seeds will I plant, and where? Some will flourish and others will fail, and the word of the Lord will still endure forever.
I don't know where this letter finds you, if its in a place of unrest, in the doldrums of a dark season, or on the cusp of something new. Maybe it feels like the only patch of dirt you've got to work with is a shallow crack between two slabs of concrete. Maybe you just expanded your garden and wondering what to plant first. Maybe you're harvesting a winter crop.
I guess I would just want you to hear again that every season is a necessary and good thing, not only because of what it contains but also because it ends, and a new one begins. Where you are now is not the end, and the potential of what comes next is exciting for a reason: because the God who orchestrates your seasons is good and kind and creative.
Knowing what to do with your season now is ultimately an exercise in prayer, relying on a seeing, knowing, answering Father to guide your feet to the next row and drop a few seeds into your outstretched palm.
Keep going, friends, further up and further in.
And hey, let me know in the comments what seeds you’re planting these days.
C
May Favorites:
I love writing the Five Lines poetry series I just started, because it expands the field into song lyrics and interviews, both of which reveal so much about poets. It's fun to write and I hope you all are enjoying it as well. All of you will continue to get two of the featured lines twice a month, but you can go paid to get all five.
Jon Guerra's Ordinary Ways is just so good. We've been listening as a family, and the rest and prayer inherent in it is absolutely earned, complex, and convicting. Jon has quickly become one of my favorite devotional artists at work today.
Dune in both book and movie forms is a stunning feat of sci-fi story-telling, reaching into realms of politics, human nature, faith, and culture in surprising ways. Villenueve's version is on a commensurate scale to Herbert's vision. If you've heard the phrase, "every frame a painting," that applies here.
Linnea and I really enjoyed the limited series Howard's End. It was such a nuanced, gracious, character-driven story of deeply flawed individuals. I have yet to read the book, but I've heard from those in the know that the two complement each other perfectly.
Yes, Ted Lasso season 3 is finally over and yes, there were plenty of tears and laughs at the Wheeler household. I've read a few critical reviews of the season as a whole, but I could care less. I love all of these goofy, beautiful characters and it was the perfect ending.
I've really been enjoying Devin Kelly's Substack Ordinary Plots. Every Sunday he sends out a beautifully hand-crafted reflection on a poet/poem he loves. It's gentle and insightful. Check it out.
This was so refreshing and convicting. I have a t-shirt from the musician Lucy Wainright Roche that says "There's a last time for everything." I thought of that when you were writing about the hope and perspective in seasons ending. George Eliot's Middlemarch (which I have yet to read in its entirety!) Also comes to mind. How things in the world would not be reconciled if it weren't for the hidden lives of people in unmarked tombs doing the work.
I'm rereading East of Eden this summer w/ my editor and writing a 3 part series on it. We'll see what grows from that. :) Anyway, thanks for your faithful work.
This is so rich🌱