In the Glow

Posted on December 22, 2016 by admin under Guest, Hope and Place, Uncategorized

We turn off all the lights, except the Christmas decorations. The tree sparks with red, gold, green, and blue. White strands frame the window, reflecting off the glass, doubling or even tripling the luminescent specks. The only other light in the room is the glow of the fire in our big stone fireplace.

It’s quiet, but for the soft crackling of the logs and occasional pops of moisture escaping the wood. The light of the flames dances on the walls around the room, flickering and fading, growing and changing. I have always been drawn to the warmth of fires, where the world seems to slow down, where there is space to ponder and ruminate, where I find reassurance, peace, hope.

* * * * *

You start with the small stuff: twigs and shredded paper, maybe some dryer lint or pieces of cardboard. Then come some bigger pieces of wood, thicker branches and split logs. Be mindful of the air: leave spaces for oxygen and heat to move around. Strike the match.

The flames spread slowly at first. Sometimes they need a little help, a little breath: don’t blow them out, blow them through. Let the air pass over and under and through the cracks and spaces between the twigs and logs. Be patient. As the smaller fuel burns away, the bigger pieces start to catch and you’ve done it: you’ve created something that breathes.

* * * * *

Camp outs in our Girl Scout troops were long days of hiking and cooking and relishing the outdoors, and they ended with campfires. In the red glow, flickering and fading, growing and changing, we’d sing songs, mostly silly and nonsensical, and roast marshmallows, promptly squashed between graham crackers and chocolate. Our moms — our troop leaders — called us firebugs. These were days of learning self-sufficiency and self-reliance, working together and connecting with nature. We didn’t know it then though, or maybe we did but we didn’t care. For us, it was just friendship. There was so much world out ahead of us yet.

Summers at home growing up were often punctuated with similar campfires: out in the backyard on the edge of the woods, my dad would build a little fire and set his lawn chair up close enough to reach the flames with a long stick. As the twilight faded and the stars showed themselves, the glow of the campfire lit up our faces. We would sit out in the backyard, listening to the frogs trill by the pool or watching the bats flit by overhead. We would talk, sure, but we would also sit in the quiet of the warm evening and stare as the flames licked the logs, charring them, breaking them down, consuming them.

* * * * *

At our own home now, my husband and I track seasons by where we lay wood for the fires: in the winter and spring, the fireplace, in summer and early fall, the back patio in a small fire pit, surrounded by benches and cushioned seating. Backyard parties always end with friends and family gathered around the red-yellow gleam. As some friends call it a night, others just gather in closer, filling their glass of wine or grabbing a blanket to wrap around their shoulders. This is when conversations start to change: boisterous talk of friends catching up turns to slow, more thoughtful topics. This is sacred time.

Under the cover of mostly-darkness, faces lit only by a gentle blaze, we let down our guards and talk of the things that have troubled us, the things that have changed us, the things that have given us hope. Our voices lower and conversations become quieter as they become more serious. We choose words carefully, laying out offerings at the feet of our friends, which are picked up gently and turned over thoughtfully in the light of the campfire.

* * * * *

In the soft light of the fire and the Christmas lights, we can stop the world. We can stop the worry and the bustle and things that up-end us. We watch the lights flicker and fade, grow and change. Then, the flames die down low. The charred logs crumble and the ash settles. We lay down our weariness as we look toward the new beginning coming soon to save us, to give us another chance, to give us hope for brighter days. And we sit quietly in this space, in the glow of the last red embers.

Jamie Y. Watkins is a wife, sister, daughter, and friend. She works at a non-profit by day and goes to school at night, trying to find time to write in between. Her biggest passions are travel– France in particular– film, and good conversation. She lives in New Jersey, where she and her husband open their house to others with good food and wine. She blogs at Seek.Follow.Love about wrestling with faith and church, looking for meaning in the every day, and feeling her way through life.

Twitter: @jamieywatkins, Facebook: @jywatkinswriter, Photos by Obed Hernandez and Rahul Rekapalli

Apartment Story

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Jonathan Bower under Uncategorized

At this writing, I’ve spent the past month moving the last four years of our trio’s belongings out of an unremarkable two bedroom apartment in midtown Anchorage. It’s possible I consumed my weight in ibuprofen during this undertaking. Throughout the endeavor, I also found enough Legos embedded in the carpet fibers to assemble a small, albeit misshapen army.

While I’ve known for some time that I wanted to move from this space, I never could have prepared for the emotional rollercoaster of actually doing so. Packing and cleaning our apartment made my July feel like an unending series of montage scenes. In many ways, my month resembled one of those corny “flashback” episodes of the sitcoms of my youth, like Family Ties or Growing Pains:

– photo, Brian Adams, 2013

This is the spot in the kitchen where we processed and cooked our first wild-caught salmon.

Here’s the place in the bedroom where our youngest, Matt, was born.

This is where I would put Sam down for a nap when I was in grad school.

And here’s the place – during the period that Sam wanted his mattress in the closet, the year his brother and mom lived in Pennsylvania – that we read The Hobbit together…

Many writers – well, at least Burt Bacharach and Edie Brickell – have rightfully speculated that “a house is not a home.” We’ve all likely stepped into or dined at a location that at first glance seemed an enviable living space that instead revealed or possessed an unsettling feeling in the air: The spirit of “home” that we expect to inhabit a property can prove noticeably missing from a “house” structure. Still, I’ve visited many more impressive living spaces than ours in recent years, and frequently returned to our apartment – with its 1970’s, bright-orange countertops and carpet the color of a three day old March snow – lamenting that circumstances didn’t afford us a larger, more stylish space to dwell in together.

I once heard a bit of “literary lore” that’s over the years helped me work with, among other things, “writer’s block.” As best as I recall, the tale goes that Chekov – the Russian short story wizard and playwright – was seated at a table outside a cafe where a fellow writer lamented the difficulties of the writing task. In response to his friend’s grousing, Chekov lifted or pointed to a glass on the table and – I’m paraphrasing – remarked, “Look! This glass! Start with this glass. I could start writing about this glass and soon a story will emerge!”

If it’s true that each person invents, or at least significantly participates in shaping his or her reality, then Chekov makes a wonderful point. The materials for creating good writing and art, and, more importantly, a life are everywhere around us.

In other words, the tools for crafting the stories (and poems and songs) of our lives are always within view – in every direction we turn or look – provided we learn to cultivate an awareness of them, and then use them to pay tribute to the life we’re given.

“Every day is a god,” charges Annie Dillard, “Each day is a god. And holiness holds forth in time.” If this day is a god, too, then how have I recognized it for what it is, whether I live in a majestically-caffeinated, superbly-microbrewed, literary and artful progressive hub like Portlandia or Brooklyn; or in a gruff, misplaced neighborhood pitched between two thoroughfares amidst a gaudy cluster of stripmalls in Anchorage, Alaska? If Annie’s right, the divine runs amok in every place I find myself, and I’d be remiss to prove too stymied or checked out to engage with it somehow.

Or, as Mary Oliver intones:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you…

The daily task, it seems, for my small part in life’s continuing unfolding, is to ask if I am even listening in the first place? Am I curiously taking notes or am I continuing to uneasily recite the redundant, recurring melodrama of Me?

Rather, if the world is offering itself to my imagination, calling to me, perhaps it’s only common courtesy to pick up, to answer the call in the first place? No matter where I am?

By the end of July, in a space I had for months, even years, known it was time to leave, I was surprised and overwhelmed by the emotions accompanying the move, solely given the import of our collected memories and experiences under our little section of the building’s roof. Though our apartment was never the envy of others, our little brood managed to – with attention and care – create a place together. Not a perfect place – not by a longshot. In fact, at times, it was a deeply troubled and fraught place. (The middle of its story, after all, features a divorce.) But we abided there in the best ways we knew how, and in our abiding, this place became home.

…Here is the spot where I feverishly added to a list of “Reasons to Stay Alive” in 2013…

…This is the room where the songs “Olena,” “Book of Consolation” and “Hope, Alaska” came to life…

…Here’s where, in 2008, I watched an episode of Planet Earth on DVD, as I gently rocked back and forth in the living room with Matt, then only a few weeks old.

David Attenborough detailed the journey of newly-hatched sea turtles. The mother that the baby turtles never meet laid and buried her eggs in the sand, and then returned to the sea from where she came. In this scene, the newly-hatched babies clamored, scampered towards the roaring ocean, drawn there by some invisible, timeless knowing.

This is the spot where the film showed the baby turtles darting across the beach and flinging themselves at the surging depths.

This is where I was sitting alone with Matt in the dark when David Attenborough noted that only one in ten thousand of the baby turtles survives their journey,

where I was then unexpectedly overcome with tears.

This is where I looked down at Matt sleeping in my arms, and rocked a little harder and swallowed the sea…

One in 10,000.

One in

One in 10,000?

We can do this.

(Right? Maybe?

Do we have a choice?)

We’ll do

– we will –

everything

anything

The Three M’s

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Mary Peterson under Travel & Place, Uncategorized

“Leave it all on the top!” was written among the other encouraging words. My co-workers had presented the pink bandana covered with inspirational phrases as a gift.

That pink bandana was now tied over my dirty hair. I cringed to look at our guides with their inadequate gear as I looked down on all my carefully purchased attire, bought just for this moment.

It was summit day.

The night before, our support team had made chicken for dinner. I knew that chicken had been carried on someone’s head for the last five days and tried not to think about it.

After the meal, our guide, Wense, came to give my sister and I a pre-summit day pep talk. The highlight of his speech featured showing us an oxygen tank that he would carry for emergency situations. I wasn’t comforted.

Wense rattled the tent long before the sun rose, indicating it was time to get started. We wrestled into our clothes and emerged from the tent, strapping our headlights to our foreheads. He looked expectedly at us, silently asking us if we were ready to begin. Melinda took a step forward toward the trailhead and I forced myself to follow her.

The first stretch of the summit was bouldering in the dark. Yep, maintaining balance, moving from rock to rock, in the dark. I tried not to panic. As I looked at the twinkle of head lamps making their way up the dark mountain, I took a breath and told myself, “Do it for Melinda. Do it for Matt.“ 34239_409440772942_6699517_n

Since my brother, Matt, had been killed a few years earlier, Melinda and I had gone to crazy places to see the sun rise on his birthday. This year we were going to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. It is the tallest peak you can climb as a recreational hiker.

The first few hours passed with few words and my continuous mental mantra, “Stay calm. You can do this. Just keep moving.” Or, the African version, “Pole, pole.”

Melinda was in top physical form. I, however, overcame a major mental hurdle just putting on a sports bra. I had done a minimal training plan…walking to work a few times with my pack, climbing the one local peak a few times. I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I should have been and I knew it. But, Melinda had convinced me to do the trip saying, with a twinge of exasperation, “Mary, you could do it right now if you needed to! You’d be surprised what your body is capable of.”

About 60% of the way to the top, it was clear that my sister and I were traveling at different speeds and needed to part ways. We stopped to take a “just in case” photo. She pressed the button, and then again, and then again. After several attempts, she couldn’t get it to work and shook her head in confusion. Later, she realized she had a pressed the On/Off button repeatedly, absolutely unaware. A first indication of her altitude sickness.

A few minutes later, I caught up to her as she vomited into the rocks. She went to get a drink out of her water, but the line stretching to her mouth had frozen. She did her best to spit and without hesitation, she pushed forward. The junior guide followed a few steps behind her.

As the sky began to light up and we rounded a corner, I could see the summit, still off in the distance. Doubt was taking root. “Oh, it’s still a long way. Can I do this? Do I even want to?” I asked myself.

The terrain had turned to rubble, and with every step forward, I slide back a few inches. The backwards motion was wrecking havoc on my mental game and my breaks grew longer and longer. Without a word, Wense pressed his shoulder against my back, prodding me back into motion. He didn’t appear to even be exerting himself.

My mental toughness wearing thin, I couldn’t rely on my own pep talk any longer. Starting to think about calling it quits, I turned to divine help and the rhythm of words.

“Hail…“–one step.

“Mary…” –another.

“full…“–eight inches forward.

“of grace…“–another.

The Hail Mary is 23 steps long.

After I finished the whole prayer, I would pause and then, go after it again. Another 23 steps. Another plea for help. Over and over.

Somehow, beyond my comprehension, I made it. The summit!!! Amen!

I was too drained to do much celebrating. But, I had done what I needed to do. I had done it for Melinda, for Matt, and for myself.

My sister left three M&Ms behind at the highest summit post, a small token of remembrance for “the three M’s” as my mom had called us.

Enjoying the view, I turned to glance at the trail and knew that I had indeed left it all on the top. Thank God for gravity and momentum. The trek back was a stumbling, fuzzy, grumpy blur except for one vivid memory where Melinda turned and said, “I have never seen you like this. Are you okay?”

I wasn’t. But, I would be…we had done it!

What We Talk About When We Talk About Traveling

Posted on June 13, 2015 by Jonathan Bower under Uncategorized

Sunrise through a tent door in Joshua Tree

“Pop,” Matt called out from the back seat, the wind from his open window whipping through his hair, “where’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?”

It was late. We were driving home from a house concert at a friend’s property in a secluded wooded area on the fringes of Anchorage. Between the trance of the evening’s music and the long sunlit Alaskan summer evening, I’d lost all track of time, and so I now raced along the highway, distracted by the hour and that tomorrow was Monday and that the kids were still awake.

“Well…” I said, jogging my memory, “I remember really loving Italy…”

“…and Spain…” I added, as an afterthought.

“Wait, Pop,” he gasped, “you went to Italy?”

In 1999, in my late twenties, my then girlfriend and I left Montana and backpacked around Europe for a few months. While I know the trip made an impression, and that there’s a box of photos in a storage closet somewhere documenting the time, I now struggled to put into words any lasting effect or poignant tales from the journey.

As the boys and I hurtled towards home, my mind only proved a soupy stew of vague, passing images and snapshot scenes: vines wrapping around a trellis of on the back porch of an apartment we rented on the Amalfi coast; standing on the balcony of our room in Barcelona and looking down on the courtyard with its little round tables and wooden folding chairs in the square; our host in the Cinque Terre, Giacomo, lifting a bunch of fresh grapes from a barrel and smiling as he handed them to us; a thumping nightclub in Prague where we winced our way through glasses of Windex-colored absinthe.

Yet I struggled to grasp these wispy images from a long ago former life, to contain them in the framework of story or to find threads that wove all these together into a single fabric.

Who in the world was that guy in Europe baring my name and face then? What were his dreams? What did he want out of life in those years?

And was this midlife? Do memories just erode like shore lines in a hurricane during your forties? I clamored back to the surface.

“Japan was beautiful, too, though, right Sammy?”

“Yeah…” my eleven year-old dreamily sighed from the passenger’s seat.

We emerged beyond the high trees running along the highway and were coasting past exits and turnoffs leading to Anchorage’s version of the gaudy, predictable chain stores and strip malls featured off of every exit in the United States.

On this night, however, well north of consumer culture’s eyesores in the foreground, the sun blazed and pulsed with a dazzling prism of colors and light. Rounding the curve that revealed as much, it’s a wonder we didn’t drive straight off the highway. Slack jawed, I directed Sam and Matt’s attention to the sun’s show on my left.

“Look at that!”

The kids looked and said nothing.

As a born and bred East coast kid from the working class suburbs of Philadelphia, Alaska’s skies always leave me feeling like I’m getting away with something. From the midnight sunsets of summer, to the aurora of winter, there’s something nearly scandalous about letting a random suburban Philly boy travel so far from home to witness so many jaw-dropping skylines.

I tried keeping my eyes on the road while still absorbing the sky’s show on my left. The last time a sky so brilliantly throttled me and consumed my attention was on my trip to Joshua Tree this past March, where I met up and traveled with one of my oldest and best friends, Mark. Every morning and evening in the park seemed, like and unlike in Alaska, an unpredictable but welcome pass for being daily sucker punched by a sky full of Amazing. The in between times, our days, were framed by stupefying encounters with dramatic stone structures, hikes on paths and ground that recalled Roadrunner cartoons, and wandering amidst ruins and desert flora that seemed props for a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Mark & boulders, Joshua Tree

I remember passing hazily through the airport, in slow motion on the morning we both flew out of LAX, heading our separate ways back to Alaska and Pennsylvania. I boarded my plane in a trance and sat in my window seat, gaping and eyes wide.

What had we just lived through?

While on one hand I felt like it’d take years to process the silent wonder of the desert and all we’d encountered there in its raw, unforgiving simplicity – in its stark landscapes, its sunsets and sunrises and stillness - my memories of Europe suggested I might not even remember or be able to note the trip’s impact on my life a decade from now.

As I sat staring out the window of the airplane, looking at nothing, my phone buzzed. Mark was texting from his gate, where he still waited to board his flight. He included a photograph featuring an underlined, marked up page of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire:

Matt watching Sunday evening’s sunset, 6/7/15

“If [the desert] has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful - that which is full of wonder…The shock of the real. For a little while, we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels.”

The desert, certainly. Alaska, too. Perhaps the passage even served as a way to more memorably travel and carry myself as I pass through the world in the coming years.

Because hadn’t I perhaps traveled blind and numb to wonder in my other, younger, previous lives? Didn’t I, like the strip malls we now passed and all they advertised, once treat Experience and the places I traveled like something to ravenously descend upon, consume, and devour? Could that be partially why the threads, the stories, and memories of other places prove so hard to come by?

I blew past our turn and steered the car north.

“Pop!” Matt shouted, “Where are you going?”

“There,” I said, pointing to the sunset in the distance, now straight ahead of us.

“We’re going there.”

To wonder.

Wherever it rests. Wherever we find it.

Sunset, Point Woronzof, Anchorage, AK 6/7/15

The Last Day of School: Lessons in Humility

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Sam Turner under Role & Place, Uncategorized

The first day I walked into a classroom and the door closed, I was terrified. I was all alone with 14 8th grade students. The room was oddly silent. I was in a very foreign world: an inner-city school, a middle school teacher, and math class. None of those phrases fit me. I am as white and upper-middle class as they come. I do not have the hip persona to connect with a middle schooler; I am more bookish and odd. Also, I barely knew what was going on during my own middle school experience. Relating to my students was like trying to jump across the Grand Canyon. Lastly, I was teaching math even though my passions, majors, and expertise are in literature and history.

When my first class started three years ago, I began by listing the rules of the classroom. I am not a rule follower in just about every area of my life, yet here I was expected to give and enforce obedience to many little rules. I told the students what I expected of them throughout the year:

“Show your work.” My 8th grade math teacher was somewhere rolling his eyes.

“Turn in your homework on time.” Some of my teachers are still missing many homework assignments from me.

“Write neatly.” This was just laughable. As my students quickly found out, I have probably the worst handwriting of any teacher ever.

By the time I was done with the rules and expectations, I was stunned to find myself still enclosed in this room with a bunch of students for whom I was responsible and was supposed to teach. I was even more shocked to find that even though the first day’s lesson was complete, I still had 25 minutes left in class. This was the first of many times where I had to think on my feet while teaching. I opened my text book and taught them Chapter 1 Lesson 1 from our Algebra books. Oddly, they followed along, did not immediately discredit me as a teacher, and learned something.

Teaching has been for me over the last three years an immensely personal and taxing job. I know there are many jobs which are more physically exhausting, but for me as a deeply introverted person, teaching is the most mentally and emotionally draining job I could imagine doing. Every moment with my students requires intensely thoughtful but intuitive responses to the immediate needs of many growing, emotional human beings. The Christian school I work at rightly asks its teachers to be habit trainers and disciple makers as well, but those parts of the job take an incredible amount of emotional energy. Every student I have taught carries a personal story, more often than not, those stories include poverty and broken families. But categorizing them never fully remedies their brokeness or sees them wholly as they are: human beings who desire to know and be known. This manifests itself in a thousand different ways. Sometimes in uncomfortably bold ways, and other times in quiet conversations. Each one teaches me something new, and in their own character and actions, whether good or bad, I find reflections of myself.

These reflections often reveal my own brokenness.

I have learned while teaching that to serve in this world as a Christian means to incarnate Christ in His most down trodden and bruised moments. Before I could really serve though, I found deeper and deeper layers of pride and selfishness. They were peeled back painfully and then trampled on as I thought I was doing a great service, but found all I could really do was pour myself out and hope to give something of value. When I think about the rough sides of serving, there is this deep, dark image that comes to mind from Shushako Endo’s book Silence. In this book about the persecution of Christians and Portuguese missionaries in Japan during the 17th century, this little statue of Christ is rubbed down to almost a non-image by the feet of the apostatizing Christians who instead of facing the suffering of persecution step on the statue to symbolically reject their faith. Their feet trampling Him with their rejection mar His face. Somehow this seems like the place Christ stands most deeply saving the world – He is the one serves us even as we deny Him.

In teaching I have found seemingly never ending tasks required to repair the broken breaches, and then as I work, the breaches within me have leaked my own sinfulness out into the kids’ messes. There have been deep, painful moments of brokenness in teaching which seemed to completely unravel any good I was doing. Sometimes it felt like the effort I was putting forth was getting nowhere and somehow the students or the parents or the world were just trampling down upon the work I was doing. But I think this often is the reality faced in serving this world: we get stomped on and don’t always see the benefit of it until much later. In humility we serve a beyond not our own.

There is this lovely poem/prayer often attributed to Oscar Romero but actually written for his memorial service which goes like this:

A Future Not Our Own

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

This is my last day teaching in a classroom. I am thankful for the rest to come, but I am even more thankful for the lessons on humility and service which I have received the last three years.

The Weight (A Balancing Act)

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Jonathan Bower under Alone in Place, Uncategorized

I wake up Monday morning, head in a fog and the sky a heavy gray. Maybe I need to pick up the pace on our Lord of the Rings bedtime reading, finish the series and find something lighter to read to the boys: This morning’s gray resembles a specter, a phantom seeping through the windows.

There is light, too. It’s April in Alaska. We wake to light now, but today it’s muted by the undeniable presence of sagging clouds gathered and draped across the Chugach mountains, shrouding them from view. But at 7a.m. in April, the dance between light and dark in Anchorage feels, for my East coast origins and conditioning, properly balanced, stable, “normal.”

“Be grateful,” I growl to no one but me.

Still, I hesitate to rise, to sit up. I rub my hand around my face, press my fingers into my eyes.

I was up till midnight grading papers, a task that segued into restlessly mulling over a number of personal matters while I thrashed around under the covers. At 3 a.m., my seven-year-old, Matt, leapt into bed with me on the heels of a bad dream. Once asleep, he proceeded to kick me through the night – an unintended reminder he was close.

I hear Matt sifting through his Lego drawers in his room across the hall.

Over a swift and admittedly pouty, self-pitying moment, I envy my sister in Virginia, who lives across the street from my parents and can frequently ask them to assist with carpooling or hosting her three daughters.

I also think of my married friends. Envy tag-team parenting for the “bazillionth” time since my boys’ mom and I split in 2011.

“Stop,” I growl. Remember: We’re here. Here and nowhere else. And we’re doing our best.

Aren’t we?

Some days, it’s hard to know.

I swing my legs over the bed.

I’m reminded of a montage scene set to feel-good music in Judd Apatow’s This is Forty, where Paul Rudd adoringly wakes his daughters for school – affectionately tousling one’s hair, canoodling the other, and playfully rubbing his hand around his teenage daughter’s face.

So, I “Power Up” – I motivate, inhale some of whatever so enviably possesses Paul Rudd characters. I breeze into the boys room and cheerily declare a robust, “Good morning! Good morning! Good morning!”

Matt, from his place on the floor, amidst the rubble of his Legos, looks up at me doe-eyed and crestfallen and meekly whimpers, “Pop? Do we have to go to school today?”

He’s still in his pajamas and between his strawberry-blonde bedhead and the spaceship designs stretching across his rail thin limbs, and his childhood-specific pot-belly rounding through his top, I am utterly smitten and vulnerably open to complying with anything he wants.

No! I want to tell him. No, we don’t! No school today! No work! Today we’re building forts in the living room and watching all the Star Wars movies! While eating Pirate’s Booty and ice cream and PB&J! I’ll tell work we took a, a, a Family Care Day, because our “us” is more important than desk work, than paper pushing and Microsoft Outlook; more important than racing you guys to school and then racing to grab you at after care, and then slogging through rush hour traffic and trying to make and eat dinner before 7pm and then bathe and read LOTR at a sane hour so that we can rise rested to start the whole rat race all over again tomorrow!

Instead, I sigh and tell him, “Oh, buddy, I know. I know. I used to want to skip school so many times when I was a boy.” He limply groans and sighs.

Sam’s body shifts under his blankets. Limbs akimbo, he slowly snakes them towards himself and then out again, stretching awake. He blinks a few times and sits up. He rubs his eyes and smiles.

Sam, for all eleven of his years, has possessed the magical ability to welcome each day the way you can imagine the Dalai Lama does. Or Mary Oliver. His waking hours are one long embrace of everything and anything around him, so much so that I’ve often wondered where he really came from, if the stork accidentally brought his mom and me a congenial ambassador or motivational speaker’s child. Never mind getting Sam into commercials or acting, as some have suggested: I often think he’s on the verge of presenting a viral TED talk, or might go solve the world’s problems with Bono.

Today, as with every day, Sam looks around, all smiles and sparkle.

“Good morning,” he sighs, standing.

“It’s dark out there,” he notes peering through his window, “do you think it’s going to rain today?”

“Might,” I reply. “Looks like it.”

Sam stretches once more and bounds to his dresser and pulls out some clothes.

“Wow,” he sighs, “I am so tired.”

Just say the word, I clamor inside. Say it. Say something like, “Can we not do this today, Pop? The weekday runaway train thing we do?”

I stand thoroughly poised to call a sick day, to announce “Fort Building Day.”

He turns and proceeds towards the bathroom.

“Take a load off, Fanny!” he sings.

Ok, wait. No fair. He’s boldly singing the chorus to my favorite pick-me-up song. The one I play on the stereo the way others take a daily vitamin.

“…Take a load off, Fanny!” he continues, running the bathroom faucet, “Annnnnnnnnnddd!…Put the load right on meeee!!!”

I look at Matt.

“Ok, buddy. Time to get dressed.”

Matt sighs and groans, pouts. I want to tell him, as Sam’s dutifully reminding me only by the way he embraces a day, something about how we’re in this together, that we can do this, and that every day is somehow always in some way infused with surprising moments of joy, of grace. I want to tell him all that, but he’s seven, and I can’t expect him to agree or understand now.

I pat the top of his head, and he leans his head on my knee. I tell him only, “I know. I know.” Because I do.

There’s a balance to strike somewhere in all of this, adrift as I often feel we are, alone together and striving to keep up with the pace of things in the terrifying, stark, and beautiful spaces we find ourselves. Rather, I imagine, or I hope there is.

I lean one way and then the other, stroking Matt’s hair, wobbly and wavering.

Life Together: The Gift of Family

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Sam Turner under Together in Place, Uncategorized

We often express brokenness in our lives to share in each other’s suffering. This vulnerability about the hard things in our lives seems to be an essential element of building community. However, I wonder sometimes if we know what kind of community we are hoping to build. Too few of us have experienced the sweet gift of an unconditionally loving community. Many of our homes seem to be hodge-podges of love and hatred, and the hope we may have of building our own homes seems to be more of a prayer or a stab in the dark than a definite, intentional progression.

I teach many students who have never seen a father and a mother love each other. They have so many broken relationships around them that they have no idea what a right relationship is, and I wonder: what do I have to give them? I have a lot of brokenness, but they see that every day. Do I have any true goodness in my brokenness to leave with them?

Any goodness, any hope, any true light I have to give I owe almost exclusively to my family.

Let me explain:

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Alone Together (New Wilderness)

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Jonathan Bower under Uncategorized

Baby…we’ve been alone too long.
Let’s be alone together –
let’s see if we’re that strong.

– Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle”

I forgot about Lent this year. I forgot about it even being a thing on the calendar that happens. And while I might be excused for my forgetfulness – I’m not Catholic and didn’t grow up Catholic or in a liturgical tradition – I have to admit that being oblivious to it caught me off guard.

I only remembered it when, one particular Wednesday in February, while at the supermarket – a bottle of wine in one hand and my iPhone in the other – a woman passed me with an ash cross smeared across her forehead. Hazily noting her gray smudge, I was seized by, well, not guilt (“Protestant Guilt” is a topic for another time), but a sudden burst of surprise.

I paused in the aisle, looked at the bottle of wine and a curious ambivalence surged through me. On one hand, given the pace of my life the past few months, I knew I could benefit from a contemplative period of intentional, spiritual reflection, if not also a detox and fast from you name it.

And then I decided to forego Lent. I decided not to indulge myself this year.

Right, indulge myself. I know. That seems implausible. It contradicts the spirit of the season, on one hand. But let me explain.

Ever since I first learned about Lent in my mid-to-late-twenties, I wanted on board the Lent train. Not even wanted on board. Knew I was already on board – one of its passengers.

After all, for as long as I can remember, I’ve adored all the wilderness imagery evocative of the season. Whether the spare, stark pictures of U2 on its Joshua Tree album, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” or every Tatooine scene in the Star Wars films, desert wanderings and wilderness imagery and references have always spoken to something deep at the heart of me.

For as long as I’ve known about and observed Lent, I’ve delighted, too, in its meditations on death and mortality. My lonesome inner-adolescent – still carrying a torch for the bummed out musings of The Smiths, The Cure, and Tears for Fears – can’t resist feeling an albeit maudlin affection for the overtly melancholy tone of the season.

So, for many years, I’ve anticipated – with a kind-of adult version of the excitement kids possess for Christmas – that one Wednesday towards winter’s end, when the church lights go dim and the organ inclines towards slow songs in a minor key. More than that, however, I think I’ve reveled, too, in how Lent affords me – a shy, introverted individual by nature – righteous permission to avoid the hustle of the marketplace and everyone passionately competing for attention from one or another soapbox there. While it’s certainly not written into its script, or part of The Book of Common Prayer, Lent enables a guy like me to justify stealing away into literal or metaphorical prayer closets, solely in the interests of escaping any undesirable or annoying chaos or hullabaloo that rubs me the wrong way. And always under the guise of a spiritual endeavor.

I know it must sound strange, on one hand. Many good-hearted, pure-intentioned loved ones and mentors admirably and enviably enter into this contemplative season. It’s only recently that I began sheepishly second-guessing my impulses, my fine-tuned behavioral patterns and the creature comforts these serve.

I blame happiness. Joy. Will go out on a limb and accuse Love of revealing a shortsightedness on my part. I’ll also blame an altogether bewildering and, for me, mostly uncharted territory I only know to name as Relationship.

Taken together, these, for me, add up to prove an altogether different kind of wilderness. Actual wilderness, perhaps. The kind that Tolkien’s hobbits dread, that explorers for centuries have strived to tame, erase, or domesticate. Relationship, for me, has long remained a region too frightening to bravely explore – even, regrettably, while “in a relationship” with someone. Relationship too frequently proves thoroughly terrifying ground, a terrain more distressing than any postcard-esque desert landscape or overabundance of welcome monastery silence. More than any solo adventure I’ve undertaken, relationship leaves me thoroughly exposed, and so also at perpetual risk, often underdressed for its dangerous and unpredictable weather patterns, unprepared for its unexpected turns, its steep climbs, and deep, shadowy valleys.

That bottle of wine I was holding on Ash Wednesday? I was buying that for dinner later, to drink with a woman I’ve spent nearly every Wednesday with since mid-August of last year. In fact, somehow, sometime last autumn, my Wednesdays earned the status of Friday, solely given the degree of excitement with which I look forward to seeing this person.

So, you might pardon me if ashes and meditations on my mortality were the last thing on my mind this year.

When we first started talking late last summer, we certainly didn’t see landing here nearly eight months later, together, in a strange, wild place called Relationship. One evening, we simply and unsuspectingly engaged in a memorable conversation. We decided to pick up where we left off a couple weeks later. The conversation continues today.

Meanwhile, I can’t help trusting that my otherwise predictable flights into the desert – the oasis of those welcome, lush silences, and the “do-able,” time-limited fasts from whatever – can wait for now. These aren’t going anywhere. They’ll rest ready for me if I need to return to all things overly familiar down the line.

That night, as I walked towards the checkout counter, the mystifying opening lines of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” poem came to mind:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves…

I wondered then – bottle of red wine in my hand on Ash Wednesday, longing to lean into the good evening ahead – do I have what it takes? Can I find it in me to bravely, wildly, and only love what I love?

Something unfamiliar whispers that it’s worth the risk. That the journey could prove epic.

The Fullness of Fall

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Sam Turner under Season & Place, Uncategorized

Everything dies. Nothing dies.
That’s the story of the Book.

It’s like this for me in Texas: fall is when love blossoms only to die in the spring.

In the fall, the air is fresh. The promise of cooler weather is heralded with storms rushing from the north. The grey winds from afar release the death grip of the Texas summer heat. The fall is football, Friday night lights, and the romance of a dying summer. It is a chance to actually enjoy the outdoors again, and a reminder that Texas is still a great place to live.

Autumn with its too-muchness,
Stretching the boundaries
Of Song

Fall is full. The wounded red of fall drips from the trees. There is an aching in the shadows of leaving trees, and even the very slant of autumn light stirs my overly romantic soul.

I once kissed a girl on a fall night after a heartbreaking home football loss. It was my first kiss. We were out under the October stars, still warm enough to only need sweatshirts as we lay looking up at the eternal markers. I am not sure I have ever been more scared. I am sure I have never been happier.

In a Texas spring the weather is violent. It unleashes furious storms, snows in the middle of a perfect week, and then hints at the hated summer heat. The wildflowers come roaring along Texas highways bursting forth in strokes of crimson, yellow, and blue. But their life is doomed by the coming heat. Aborted beauty burned up like martyrs holding out against the summer’s tyranny. Even the spring’s green brings with it an awareness of the brown it will turn to in the overbearing sun.

I was heartbroken by the next spring. The first kiss in the fall turned into a last parting kiss on an April day. A Friday, holding her at the door, my first broken heart left exposed before the summer heat.

**********

Others in the north will speak of seasonal depression hitting them during the long winter, but for me, the weeks of early spring, the lenten season before easter, is when it comes. For the past 7 years, I have waited ominously through spring for it to strike. Sometimes it does not arrive, but sometimes it does as the creeping nausea of blank feelings emptying my heart of any joy.

Several years after my first broken heart during my last spring semester in college, I met this girl with burning blue eyes. I fell for her like a boy lost at sea, but she was unable to return it. Another spring romance born only to die.

The wave of depression that followed was one of the worst I have known. The weeks of late March and early April nearly crushed me. I could hardly breath much less attempt to write my senior paper, and I almost failed my last class at Texas A&M. It was the first time in my life where I fully felt the need to take a pill.

For the last three years I have attended an Ash Wednesday service during February before spring could come. It has been my bulwark against spring. I would like to think the reminder of my death, the passing from dust to dust recalled in the service, protects me with my own weakness. We are dying, yes and amen. On Ash Wednesday there are no false promises.

**********

I read the Book for years
And never understood a word.
Scrawled in its margins.
Wrote my own versions
Of what I read there,
But never got a thing right.

Didn’t understand that each
Poem was a magic spell.
Was a voice,
And under that voice: an echo
That was the spell

As if each poem clearly spoke
The word “Death”
And the echo said “Life.”

And this is why I love the fall: it is full of death, but its echo is life. Roiling under its scenes of dying, I often sense the true vibrancy of life. Amidst all the life of spring I am too aware of its coming end, but in the fullness of fall heaving with death, I hear what sounds like a symphony to my soul: the oblique cry of life like an echo from an empty tomb.

(All quotes are from the beautiful poetry collection Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr)

Fill in the Blanks

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Jennifer Pelling under Role & Place, Uncategorized

If you had told my seventeen-year-old self what she would grow up to be, I think she might have cried. But then again, she never knew half as much as she supposed.

It all began early. In second grade I was set apart as “gifted.” Practically, this meant I stood waiting in the school stairwell on Thursday mornings, with a little boy name Todd, and a mini-bus came and delivered us to a neighboring school. It was the best part of my week. There, waiting in the library, were several other children, word puzzles, art materials, floppy disks labeled “Oregon Trail” and “Turtle LOGO”, and a magical teacher who made learning seem like play.

As school progressed, I rode the wave of privileges and honors. When I was in fifth grade, they let me assist the kindergarten teacher, in junior high I chose among special electives that were only available to kids ‘like me’. By the time I got to high school, I was enrolled in A.P. Everything, heading for Governor’s School, and chosen as a National Merit Finalist.

I was so very impressive back then.

****

When I was seventeen, I wanted to be an elementary school teacher when I grew up. And so I chose a college, and everything went swimmingly for about two years. But my interests were broad–or maybe I should say ‘scattered’. Toward the end of my junior year, I added some religion courses and decided not to student teach.

And with this choice, I stepped off the marked path, and began wandering in my very own vocational wilderness. Eventually I would end up in seminary, still longing for the day when I could finish this sentence: “I’m a _____________.”

If it wasn’t “I’m a teacher,” it could be “I’m a pastor.” Right?

But then our lovely, miraculous and terribly inconvenient babies were born. We welcomed two little girls, in two years. As graduation approached and I was changing diapers while learning Greek conjunctions, the thought of ordination exams-or a role as a full-time pastor-was more than I could bear. Again, I chose to get the degree without the title.

And again, “I’m a _____________,” was an open-ended statement. Sure, I could say, “I’m a mother,” but many of my friends were mothers and _____________. I had no “and.”

Without a professional certification, there was no point in getting a job just for the sake of getting a job. I made less per hour than we paid our babysitter. If I stayed home, the numbers worked. But still, it gnawed on me. How could it be that the little girl who was so smart, so full of promise, could grow up to become… me?

****

Here is a true statement: we would never talk to our friends the way that we talk to ourselves.

Did I consider my fellow stay-at-home-mom friends “failures”? No, of course not. They were making choices within a specific season of their lives. They were blessed to have spouses who made good salaries, allowing them to focus on their young children. They were doing what they needed to do, as were my friends who pursued their professions.

And I soon learned that the grass wasn’t greener for my “mother and _____________” friends. Their paths were not as straightforward as they seemed. Some alternated between full and part-time, and many felt as if they did everything, but couldn’t do anything well.

It seemed that we were all making this up as we went along.

photo by Niklas Fridwall

As my children have grown older (both are in elementary school this year), I have added hats along the way. Two years ago I took a part-time job as a secretary, working for an organization and with people I love. I’m also (as you may have noticed) writing, or rather trying-to-write while volunteering at my kids’ schools, leading a community Bible Study group, and being the “on call” parent for snow delays, sickness, after-school activities, and random inservice days.

It’s good. It’s busy. It’s worthwhile. However.

The most difficult part of all this is that it is almost completely volunteer. Not getting paid is a blow to my ego, makes our finances tight, and sometimes makes me feel as if I’m not a real, contributing grown-up. Now again, would I ever tell a friend that you “are” what you “make”, or that volunteer work is worth less than paid work? No.

But there are times, many times, when I still find these thoughts needling into my sense of who I am. Especially when I am tired, or a child is screaming, or some activity was a disaster, or a blog post fell flat, my seventeen-year-old self sits on my shoulder and says unhelpful things like, “We could have been someone, you know.”

And I just nod, wearily, and say, “I know. I know.”

But when I recover, usually after getting a good night’s sleep, I also know that being a grown-up is more complicated than I ever imagined it would be as a child. And then, ironically, I often remember a picture that was posted in the halls of my daughter’s elementary school, a picture that stopped me in my tracks.

The kids were asked to complete this sentence, “When I grow up, I want to be a __________” and then draw a picture of themselves in this role. Down the row there were firefighters and teachers, police officers and dancers-all the typical kid answers-but the one that stopped me said this:

“When I grow up, I want to be a woman.”

And underneath this sentence was a smiling stick figure. I suppose it was a picture of me.

You Are Here

True stories about roots, identity, and place.

Category Archives: Uncategorized

In the Glow

Apartment Story

The Three M’s

What We Talk About When We Talk About Traveling

The Last Day of School: Lessons in Humility

The Weight (A Balancing Act)

Life Together: The Gift of Family

Alone Together (New Wilderness)

The Fullness of Fall

Fill in the Blanks