[In the early summer of 2013, I contracted a blood-born bacteria which required open-heart surgery. Since then, I have been writing about that season, using my personal experience as a setting to discuss the relationship between affliction and faith. The following is a potential chapter from these writings, if they should one day be put together into a book. This piece explores the subject of depression from a person who was writing about it in real time. Um, enjoy?] I am depressed. My doctors told me this might happen—a detail my wife recently reminded me of when she saw the dark clouds rolling in. She has seen this in me before; we both have. Still, even though being depressed is nothing new, this particular depression—because it is mine now—feels new. It always does. My prior experience with this dark night of the soul tells me that, when unchecked, it has a tendency to become something untamable. And no matter how many times I’ve walked down this road, I still struggle to see it for what it is. When a child hears a tapping on his bedroom window at night, until he turns on the light to see that it is only a branch blowing in the wind, it might was well be the knuckles a dragon come to carry him off to its lair where his bones will be licked clean. I know from experience that when I leave the voices in the dark unnamed, they become monsters. Tap. Tap. Tap. They try to persuade me to climb into their bubbling cauldron on my own volition. So in an effort to overcome the darkness, I am going to turn on the light the only way I know how: I am going to describe what I see and hear and feel, and then I am going to look into what winds are blowing that cause the tapping that has me so troubled. This is what my depression feels like. This is my monster. My depression feels like anxiety. Worry and fear are never far from me. When I am alone, my thoughts gravitate toward my burdens. When I lay down to sleep, my mind drifts to unresolved fears I cannot seem to shake. I worry—not about my present health, but about my future. Am I supposed to return to the life I knew before this affliction hit? Can I? The world I know—my friends, my work, and my family—moves on while I sit in my recliner watching TV. The thought of climbing back into life feels overwhelming. My depression also feels like grief over these seemingly wasted days. I lament that I spent my fortieth birthday and eighteenth anniversary in a hospital bed. It is the sort of sorrow I experience when I feel forgotten, which is a very unique sort of pain. My depression feels like apathy. I do not care about things that once stirred me deeply. My desire to pastor people is all but gone. I don’t want to listen to peoples’ struggles—not because I don’t think theirs compare to mine, but because right now I honestly just don’t care. This disinterest scares me. Will my passion or empathy ever return? There are times when I cannot imagine they will, and that is a terrifying thought, which leads to another voice in the dark—futility. Finally, my depression feels like futility. I cannot work. I cannot lift heavy objects. I cannot do anything that requires endurance or focus. I feel like I’m wasting precious days—and, as Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I cannot concentrate. I can’t hold a thought. I feel cooped up, deprived of sun and motion and warmth. I’m told exercise is great for keeping the depression at bay, but my best attempts at doing anything active reveal just how weakened I have become. This makes me irritable. My emotions are all over the map. Some days I cry easily. Other days I feel little if anything at all. This inability to reign myself in leads me to hopeless thinking. So there they are—anxiety, grief, apathy, and futility. Anxiety raises questions about my future, grief casts a shadow over my past, and apathy and futility drape a fog over me in the present. These are my voices in the dark. These are the four-headed monster tapping on the window during the black night of my soul. He whispers his accusations into my ear, beckoning me to surrender hope. “You’re letting people down. You’re selfish. You’ve lost your spark.” No wonder I feel so lost. There is no reasoning with the monster. Like the devil, he laces his lies with gilded threads of truth. The truth is I am not yet recovered. I do depend on others to care for me. I wrestle with apathy, and sometimes it pins me to the mat. I have lost my spark. In my weakened state, this is where I am right now. This is all true. In seasons like this, the straight truth is my best help. One truth my doctor told me early on was that this depression would probably find me after I had been home for a few weeks. And here it is, like a train pulling into the station right on time. Now that I have named what I feel, I will describe what is actually happening to cause this tapping in the night. Why has this monster come to me now? Depression is a common after-effect of heart surgery. One common trigger is the anesthesia, which alters a patient’s brain chemistry just enough to mix things up. Depression is also often triggered by post-surgery PTSD, or soreness and pain, or the extended neglect of care for one’s well-being (such as hygiene habits, exercise, or diet). It can also come as a side-effect of antibiotics and other medications that have been introduced into the blood stream. I have experienced all of these triggers to one degree or another. More medications course through my veins now than at any other time in my life. My nightstand is covered in pill bottles. Some of the pills help my body heal, but they also make me nauseous. For that, I take an anti-nausea medication which amps up my blood-pressure. For that I take a blood-pressure medication which causes dizziness. Lucky for me I’m taking that anti-nausea medication. Along with those, I take one pill to fight constipation and another to help me retain fluids when the anti-constipation medicine does its work. And the painkillers. Oh, the blessed painkillers. I take a lot of oxycodone, as prescribed. Still, I get a few raised eyebrows when I tell people how much oxycodone I’m taking. I suspect I’m becoming chemically dependent on them because when the pill bottle gets low I feel anxious. What wonders those little pills are—reliable servants constantly eyeing the role of master. At some point soon I will step down from the narcotics, but for now my doctor tells me I must keep taking them because I cannot afford to devote any of my physical resources to dealing with pain. All my energy needs to go toward healing. Together, all these medicines combine like a cocktail numbing my system. As for my soreness and pain, they are less intense than they were. But it still hurts when I try to perform some of the most basic activities, like lying down or sitting up again. Being unable to roll over without losing my breath is disheartening. Then there’s the lingering effects of the anesthesia. One doctor told me it can take roughly one month per hour of being under sedation to finally come out of the haze. I am foggy headed all the time. Writing is one activity I can do to keep my mind sharp, but it is hard work—a frustrating exercise in false starts, heavy revision, losing my way, editing, and taking my time. Between the cabin fever, the effects of my daily meds, the pain, the loneliness, and the narcotics, I have begun to lose my grip on certain things I know, on an intellectual and theological level, are true. When I pay attention to how I am feeling, I can almost see it happening. This slide into sorrow has a name—depression. If I am to see this depression for what it is, I need to remember what I have been through. My feelings come from somewhere. The scar down my breastbone and the puncture wound in my abdomen through which they fed the electrodes into my heart in case it should need to be shocked back into rhythm remind me that I have been through an ordeal. The reality is that I have been taken apart and reassembled. I am like a vase that has fallen and been glued back together; close inspection will reveal that I am not what I once was. I bear certain scars—inside and out. My chest was opened up like a cabinet door and parts of me that were never meant to see the light of day were held in a surgeon’s hand. My heart was stopped for several hours as my blood passed through a machine. I experienced a stroke-like neurological event that left me temporarily paralyzed and confused. The physical trauma I have experienced is both unfamiliar and significant. Beyond the physical trauma, there’s also the emotional weight. I have carried the burden of facing my mortality for the first time and preparing for my own death. I have considered the possibility of unimaginable loss for my wife and children. I have prayed in advance for the grief they and my parents and friends might have known. All these factors together make up the soil from which the seed of my depression has sprung. So what am I to do? Keep going, though, to be honest, some of the time I don’t want to. One of the greatest lies the monster in the dark tells me is that I should neglect doing the things that I know on an objective level can only help—get good sleep, eat well, exercise, shower regularly, and nurture spiritual disciplines. I must avail myself of the means of grace that have been afforded to me—friendship, prayer, rehabilitation, Scripture, and time. When I look objectively at the common symptoms people with depression tend to experience—change in appetite and sleep, irritability, hopeless thoughts, difficulty making decisions, and a general sense of apathy—I recognize that I own them all. The trick is to not let them own me. This depression snuck up on me. It could easily have gone undetected because in almost every other health-related area, I am progressing nicely. My scars are healing and my pain is decreasing. My heart sounds strong through the stethoscope. My murmur is gone. But my mind and emotions are not recovering at the same pace as my body. That simple fact is very difficult to observe. And since post-op depression doesn’t usually show itself until after the patient has returned home from the hospital, it can be difficult for family and friends, as well as the patients themselves, to understand what is happening. Depression, when veiled by the good news of physical progress, hides beneath the skin out of earshot of the stethoscope, tapping on the window of my mind where only I can hear. It doesn’t take much for me to feel alone and afraid in the dark. But when I turn on the light, here is what I see. On one hand, my depression is common enough that my doctor told me to watch for it. There are a number of factors that contribute to it—some are named, others are more mysterious. My body has been medicated, taken apart, reassembled, broken, and put back together. But on the other hand, depression is not new to me. It resides like a pox in my heart—dormant throughout much of my life, but able to be awakened nonetheless. And this reality is one I know I will live with long after my prescriptions run out and my body returns to normal and I go back to the routines of daily life. Knowing my own tendency toward melancholy makes me regard this particular season of depression as a sort of a gift. This time around I feel like the monster is in a cage, like an old silverback gorilla at the zoo. I can observe him without too much fear. This is a gift because I need to know this beast. I need to study his movements, watch what he responds to, and learn what calms him down because I know that unless the Lord chooses to remove this thorn from my side, I will continue to battle with seasons of depression. The time is coming when the monster and I will live together in the wild. He will lurk in the shadows and I will train my senses to anticipate his ambush before he pounces. But there will come nights, no doubt, when I will hear the tapping and my soul will be gripped with fear. By the grace of God, I will use what I learn from this season of depression to feel my way around the room to the light, find the courage to flip the switch, and expose my depression under the light of truth. Sometimes that light will be enough to deliver me from fear. But sometimes it won’t. Such is the nature of the beast. God help me. ___________ Follow Russ on Instagram Follow Russ on Twitter Follow Russ on Facebook

Some time ago I began chattering about a photo-essay book idea rattling around in my brain. A hobbyist photographer since I was a teenager, I’ve typically trained my lens on objects and scenes; on the commonplace. There is a gravity in the commonplace, a certain courage born of endurance and experience. Rummaging through a pile of my old black & white prints recently, staring at an innocuous, out-of-focus photo of a botanical garden archway, Adam and Eve came to mind. I imagined them, long banished from the original Garden, years later on the outside looking in, training their eyes back to a place to which they could not return, reminiscing, grieving, and remembering the Old Man and his many charms, the flora, aromas, and vigor of the old world. I wrote this photo caption: Every so often I walk past the place, my old stomping ground. I peek through the gate, and the sweet aroma of rhododendron and jasmine meets me over the tidy hedge. In there, the days were good. To think, I traded it all for an apple of power and my own confederacy. I can no longer recall the finer details. Either that, or I’ve chosen to forget them entirely. Out here, nothing works, and nothing lasts. The edges blur and vignette, everything goes wrong and, if it hasn’t already, dies. Nothing is permanent. I want the recollection of that idyllic place stricken from my memory, and yet—I hope I never forget it. That spontaneous writing exercise resonated with me—this giving voice to overlooked objects, scenes, and dismissed persons—and from there I began “remembering” stories that, though never wholly mine, were, in fact, entirely my own. I penned more first-person vignettes with an eye toward one day publishing them in book form. More or less a coffee-table art book, each page comprising a photo and its accompanying prose. I titled the project Far Side Of The Sea (from Psalm 139), hoping to convey, albeit abstractly, the concept of separation and falling away from a God who, in what must have been an outbreak of delirious compassion or compassionate delirium, chose to cross the wide gulf to search for and deliver us safely to farthest shores, a paradise-of-a-place we could never reach on our own. Three years having passed since my last record, I needed to make a new album. So I also set about the intimidating task of writing songs based on excerpts from the book — imagine Eric in Wonderland following the rabbit trail ever deeper and you get the idea. If the overlooked things of earth have stories to tell, surely someone should offer to help them. Having written songs about an abandoned bicycle, the tear-inducing career of an onion, unwanted pennies on the ground, and scared rabbits (among others), I have tended, over the years, to find commonality with the tired, sad, rusted, deflated, defeated things of earth. Surely, like any one of us, they have their own clumsy stories to tell. Far Side Of The Sea is a collection of first-person narratives, photographic memories if you will. Where I fail the songs and their subjects, I trust in their grace (and yours) to forgive any impertinence or melodrama on my part, and to allow, as with a double-exposed photograph, a bit of your image to haunt theirs, and theirs yours. In a few weeks’ time, I will launch the crowd-funding campaign for Far Side Of The Sea, and I hope you will consider helping me bring this book-concept-album to the light of day.

One fine Easter weekend, having come home from graduate school, I stood in a field where waist-high egg hunters swirled like waterbugs. Their fathers and grandfathers stood in a knot and told each other stories, mostly about tractors they had known. I stood a few steps outside the circle of men, my arms folded, and I thought to myself, “Ah, yes…here is how men construct community: by rendering experience into shared narrative.” It makes me blush to admit that I ever entertained such a thought. Not because it’s untrue—for all I know, men do construct community by rendering experience into shared narrative. The embarrassing thing is that I stood outside that circle of men—at a critical distance—and thought I understood more about what they were doing than they understood themselves. At least I had an excuse: I was only twenty-two years old, and I was in graduate school. In graduate school, what passes for insight is the ability to take concrete, real-life experiences and melt them into abstractions. Within a couple of months, I had experienced a writerly conversion of sorts. I came home for the summer and got a job on a remodeling crew. One of my co-workers was a seventeen-year-old boy named Jake, who unwittingly launched my fiction-writing career. I have told his story before on the Rabbit Room. Most nights Jake spent in nearby swamps hunting wild boar, without a gun. After his hunting dogs bayed up a hog and caught it by the ears, Jake and his buddies would tie it up and carry it out of the swamp alive. Tough as Jake was, I saw him cry once—after an alligator ate one of his dogs. I say Jake launched my career as a fiction writer because he presented me with stories that were too good to turn into abstractions. In Jake’s hunting stories I recognized the distillation of experience that is the stuff of great fiction. That summer I decided that if I ever wrote books, they would have more in common with Jake’s stories than with the academic fare I was reading and writing in my graduate studies. The academic impulse is Platonic. For Plato, ultimate reality is abstract and cannot be detected with the senses. The world around us is a dim reflection of that abstract reality. Art, which imitates nature, is a dim reflection of a dim reflection; it is at a distant remove from the true and the real. Poets are liars, said Plato. He banned them from his ideal Republic. But the storytelling impulse is Aristotelian. According to Aristotle, stories don’t dilute the truth that is to be found in our everyday experience—they distill it. Stories, when they are told the right way, give us something that is truer than everyday life. Chesterton, that great Aristotelian, said we’re all like castaways who have survived a shipwreck and wake up on the beach. We don’t remember much about where we came from, but we’re surrounded by the broken pieces of our beautiful ship and its broken contents, and we set about the work of trying to put it back together. That’s what storytelling is like. It’s also what the teaching of storytelling is like. All these broken pieces of truth and beauty are lying about: how do you begin to put them together into something that is a little truer, a little more beautiful than what we see every day? I am convinced that we’re born Aristotelian/Chestertonians. We look and touch and listen and smell and lick so that the world will give up its secrets. Our hearts leap up at the old stories of long journeys and lost loves and old boys slogging through a swamp in pursuit of wild hogs. The Platonist’s skills of abstraction are important skills, but they can get in the way of good writing. It’s worth noting that those skills are acquired rather than innate. I find that teaching creative writing to adults is largely a matter of peeling away the habits of abstraction and helping writers recover the skills of storytelling and description and characterization that have been there all along. “Writing close to the earth,” as I call it, is about learning to speak again in our native tongue.

When Pete and Andrew approached me about the cover art for Everlasting is the Past, I was excited. When they told me they wanted a cover with a woodcut look in black and white, I was a little nervous. I hadn’t created a woodcut look before, though I had done quite a bit of pen and ink work, so I figured I’d give it a shot. [Click to view full size.] First, I wanted to come up with an idea that reflected Walt Wangerin, Jr.’s main theme. So I read the manuscript, and Pete, Andrew, and I kicked around some ideas. I sent them some sketches. This one is from an early scene in the book, where the author is driving into a storm. They liked it, so I kept working on it. Mr. Wangerin is driving into a storm, but the storm is more than a physical blizzard. It’s symbolic of a spiritual storm, which was the reason I made the car about to drive into a tunnel. I was trying to communicate the unknown that was ahead. But the tunnel didn’t quite fit, it wasn’t quite enough, so I changed the tunnel to a tear in the sky. I wanted to get across the bigness of this crisis, something existential, and nothing quite does that like ripping a hole in space. [Click to view full size.] Pete and Andrew liked it, so I began. I started by looking at a lot of woodcuts so see what I needed to do to create “the look.” Then I redrew the image and began to ink it in. I decided to draw the car separate and quite a bit larger (because of all the details), so that’s why there’s just a car ghost here. After the initial inking, I decided everything needed to be more substantial, so I went back and thickened up all the lines, and in some places added more. I did this several times until I finally got to where I was satisfied with the line work. [Click to view full size.] [Click to view full size.] Next, I worked on the car. Once it was finished, I scanned both images and combined them in Photoshop. Along the way I had also decided I didn’t like the lines on the ground to the left, or along the horizon, so I got rid of them as well. Lastly, I used the eraser tool in Photoshop to create the snow from the storm. [Click to view full size.] And that was the process. By the way, it’s a great book. Pre-order it in the store today!

[This piece first appeared at Jonathan-Rogers.com.] Until recently, my in-laws had a farm in South Georgia. When they bought the place, its charms weren’t altogether obvious to the casual observer. It was scrubby where it wasn’t planted in pines and swampy where it wasn’t scrubby. But my father-in-law made it the work of twenty years to beautify the place. When he planted pines, he planted longleaf, the tree that once shaded all of South Georgia–indeed, the tree that towered over nearly every mile of Hernando Desoto’s path from Florida through the Deep South to the Mississippi River. By the time my father-in-law was born, the longleaf had been logged to near-extinction; when the trees were replaced at all, they were replaced by faster-growing slash and loblolly pines, which produce income twice as fast as longleaf, but always fall well short of the longleaf’s native majesty. Much of South Georgia’s wealth and beauty had once been attached to the longleaf pines, before they were felled and floated down the Ocmulgee and Altamaha to the ocean, then shipped away to be the ribs of great buildings far away from Georgia.  My father-in-law loves his native country; no wonder he planted longleaf. If they take forty years to grow to maturity—well, then, they take forty years. He is a man of imagination and hope. A bare, sandy road ran between two fields on my in-laws’ property. My father-in-law always envisioned it as a grand avenue lined by spreading live oaks festooned with Spanish moss and resurrection ferns. So he went to the tree nursery to buy a few dozen baby live oaks. The nursery man squinted at my father-in-law, who was well into his sixties at the time. “You realize,” he said, “that it takes a live oak a hundred years to grow up?” “A hundred years?!” my father-in-law answered. “Then we don’t have a day to waste!” That’s vision. Those longleaf pines on my in-laws’ farm will one day tower straight and high like the pillars of God’s own house. But the man who planted them will never see it. That avenue of oaks will be a sprawling marvel one day—but not during my father-in-law’s life or his children’s lives, and maybe not in his grandchildren’s lives. Still and all, it is a good work to plant a tree. We don’t have a day to waste. “Planting Trees” by Andrew Peterson from Counting Starshttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/PlantingTrees.mp3

My parents often bought a particular mix of Christmas gifts for my brother and me. There would be: 1. Something fun that we wanted 2. Some clothes that we needed 3. A few supplies for creating new things 4. A resource to nourish our spirituality 5. Stuff for outdoor adventures 6. A book or toy that encouraged us to check out an unfamiliar realm 7. Something scientific 8. A couple of books for hours of solitude While working up my summer reading list today, I realized that I was automatically finding books that fall into those categories. (My list is pretty nerdy, but I’ll share it with you anyway.) If you were to choose a book to read in each of these categories, what would you select? What would your kids pick? If your family members decided to spend one week reading on each theme, then invited dinner conversations that revolved around what was being learned, what would you discover together over the next eight weeks? Just an idea. I’d love to read your lists, if you want to post them below. —Rebecca 1. Something fun that I want to read: Tremendous Trifles, by Chesterton 2. Something I need to read: a book on the German romantic philosophers (Still deciding on which one, maybe German Idealism by Beiser.) 3. If I read this it might help me create new things: Lyrics by Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, early American bluegrass lyrics 4. Nourishment for the spiritual realm: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, by Eugene Peterson 5. This will help me learn about the outdoors: Standing by Words, by Wendell Berry 6. Something that will expose me to an unfamiliar field: A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants, Peterson Field Guides 7. Something scientific: Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, Michio Kaku 8. For times of solitude: Library of Congress: Slave Narratives (These are so moving. Check them out if you’ve never read them before.)

You’ve mentioned your own personal practice of singing the Psalms in the last couple years, and I’d love to start there. Can you define that practice? Is that within a faith community? On your own? What does that look like? I have learned and practiced by using the Daily Office regularly over the past few years. The guide includes a morning and evening Psalm every day, and it has been amazing to see how the Psalms speak to my circumstances, bringing insights, corrections, and comfort. I would often grab my guitar when something had particular resonance, and as I began to write this album it was a practice of singing truth to myself by borrowing these words. There is so much space created in the Psalms, space to feel, to question, to lament, to celebrate, and to worship. As a songwriter they are instructive in this way. I would like to make art, to write songs, that have this kind of sacred, invitational space. In such a confinining, disorientating culture that squeezes us in from all sides, the Gospel invites us to open ourselves wider, to wait and rest in God’s vast fullness. Even when we don’t have answers to the things that trouble us, God meets us and gives us his presence. Is it safe to assume you grew up with the Psalms? What was your relationship with them from before this process? I remember memorizing Psalms when I was a little girl. Psalm 103, Psalm 51, Psalm 139, Psalm 23—they have become part of my being after all this time. We all have a mix of things we get from our mothers, but what a gift it was that my Mom guided me to memorize those poems from such a young age. I hope to offer that same nourishment to my own kids. You said they taught you to be more honest. Is it the confessional style found there or even more than that? I try to make a habit of being pretty honest about feelings and situations. I have a rather introspective personality, wanting to bring things out into the open. But I know enough to know I have a lot to learn about myself. I have learned recently that a major blind spot for me is idealism. On one hand, I have this significant capacity for empathy or seeing the best in situations, but on the other hand, I am often unwilling to call things what they are. I don’t like confrontation and I avoid change. Thankfully, God loves us too much to not confront us, but instead he pushes in toward us, rescuing us from our compulsive and habitual ways of being broken. He is not fooled by our best efforts of making everything look good on the outside. The Psalms are God’s tender invitation to be made more like who we are supposed to be, to be made holy before him. The Psalms give a backdrop of history and they support the law of God, but at the center, the Psalms are about our affections, giving voice to our deepest fears and hopes. He wants to call us out of our places of hiding, that in all things we would know him and be known by him. It is an invitation to intimacy—with the full range of correction, closeness, intentionality, and good timing. In the Psalms, God’s Spirit is faithful to purify our hearts with his pursuing love as we submit ourselves to regular exposure to his words. Had you thought of a Psalms-specific project before or was it born from this process? These songs were born out of personal loss, much like when the seed falls and dies and bears much fruit. This is what came out of that seed. I didn’t see it coming, really. At the time of working on this, I didn’t have the capacity for other songs. I could sing Psalms and take the Eucharist. That was just about my only currency of conversation with God for a while there. I needed to step out into something artistically that could contain the width and depth of my emotion and experience. In these songs, I am bearing witness to the provision of God—always and everywhere, I give him thanks and praise. As my friend Leslie said every night on this spring tour, “He is good. And I trust him.” This simple faith is hard won. And at the same time, it is freely given. We practice the words and we sing the melody until our hearts catch up to the reality of it. #Psalms #SandraMcCracken

Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive.   -Henri Nouwen, “Theological Ideas in Education” I was born impetuous and energetic by nature. I’ve spent a good part of my life hitching myself onto ideas born in the moment, dashing them off, and catching the next ride. There was a time when I was the answer man, and it didn’t take much to let me blast you with my expert 17-year-old opinion. Thankfully, life and a little maturity happened and taught me to shut up and listen a bit more, to read and think a little longer before speaking. And yet, as I started to get serious about writing in my late teens and early twenties, the impatient fire continued to burn in other ways. I was under the impression, in those early days, that all good and genuine creative writing had to come in the moment, and that to later change or edit this inspiration from on high would somehow destroy the purity of the work. Thus, a lot of my early poetry and songwriting remained “as-is.” I realize now that while some poems and songs do seem to come as they are given, from some strange place I know not where, more often than not, and more often in recent years now that I think of it, I get only a melody, or a series of chords, or an image, or a memorable phrase. Then the struggle begins, to find the words that give voice to notes, or to tease out an image into a scene, or a phrase into a poem. As the title of this post suggests, I’m learning that good ideas are often given as seeds, or maybe buds, that have to be watered and watched and nurtured until they open up their treasures for us. This requires a few things: Time to be. I have been learning a lot about this over the past few years. There must be filling before there is outpouring. You need time to be before it is time to act. Madeleine L’Engle is great on this in her book Walking on Water: “When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening. I will never understand the silent dying of the green pie-apple tree if I do not slow down and listen to what the Spirit is telling me, telling me of the death of trees, the death of planets, of people, and what all these deaths mean in the light of love of the Creator who brought them all into being; who brought me into being; and you.” Patience. Doing good work requires patience with your material, and not trying to force something out of time. Anyone who has worked with plants knows there is a lot of tending, pruning, and waiting that goes into the process. The same goes with artistry. As Dorothy Sayers writes in The Mind of the Maker: “The only way of ‘mastering’ one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. If he tries to wrest life out of its true nature, it will revenge itself in judgment, as the work revenges itself upon the domineering artist.” Perseverance. It does no good to have the seed of an idea if you do nothing with it. Tomato plants usually do not produce great tomatoes if you just throw them in the ground. You have to water them, train them, and pluck those suckers out from between the branches. As Denise Levertov said in The Poet in the World: “Though the inspired poem is something any poet naturally feels awed by and grateful for, nevertheless if one wrote only such poems one would have, as it were, no occupation; and so most writers, surely, are glad that some of their work requires the labor for which they are constitutionally fitted.” Like any other vocation or craft, artistic endeavors require work and discipline. I know taking these ideas to heart and putting them to practice is helping me, and it can help all of us grow our ideas into their beautiful full forms.

It all began in the summer of 2008 when I hit a terrible slump with my writing. I would sit at my computer for hours at a time typing insipid sentences and immediately erasing them. I felt like I had lost my identity as a writer. Worse than that—I felt like I had never been a writer in the first place. Who was I kidding? Who did I think I was? And who on earth would ever want to read the kind of books I wanted to write anyway? It went on and on, for weeks. I remember one sweltering afternoon in particular, demoralized by the heat outside and the wordlessness within, wherein I threw myself on the sofa in a full pout of despair. “I must’ve missed it,” I half-prayed. “For some reason I thought I was a writer. But I’m not. I don’t have Story running through my veins. Or if I ever did, I’ve lost it.” I had an appointment that day, so I heaved myself up off of the couch and went downstairs in a black cloud of melancholy. It felt like a death, and my heart was cold with the sorrow of it as I stood before the mirror brushing my hair. Not a writer after all, the words scorched my weary mind. And then, something magical happened. Even as I stared into those despondent eyes before me, a running commentary wakened in my head. It was a voice describing how I was feeling, the awful deadness of my discouragement, the misery of my misunderstanding—in vivid words and in third person. I threw down my brush and took the stairs two at a time, flinging open my laptop before I’d even pulled out my desk chair. I spilled the description onto the screen, writing as fast as my abysmal typing skills would allow. And as the words grew under my flying fingers, a character emerged. (I was late to that appointment, by the way.) By the end of the next week, I had a story. Another followed, and another. I greeted the process with curiosity, seeing these people suddenly in my head and then following them around over a dozen or so pages just to find out what would happen to them. The whole thing was so fun it just couldn’t be real writing. Where was the agony, the hair-pulling, the angst? (Those jolly friends save their presence for the editing process, as I later learned all too well.) But I couldn’t help myself. I just kept pursuing these little whiffs and signposts of Story—some buoyancy within seemed to carry me along—and, before I knew it, I had the makings of a book. The vision grew with the collection, and when I reached ten stories I knew, instinctively, that I was done. I wrote this little book purely for joy, out of the most idealistic sensibilities of my heart. There were times I would actually have to get up from my desk and walk off the trembly feelings of happiness that made my hands shake and my heart skip a beat as I wrote. It’s not best-seller material. It’s not “marketable” or “mainstream.” It has no message, save that Love Exists and Beauty Matters, and it has no agenda. If anything, it’s unapologetically old-fashioned, very much in the style of my literary heroine, Lucy Maud Montgomery. It was the book I wanted to write seven years ago, and once I got out of the way of myself and quit trying to write what I felt was expected of me, out it came. As all of the stories have flower names, I titled it Poesy, a Nosegay of Prose. Poesy is a collection of love stories, some contemporary, some slightly historical, all with an old-fashioned aroma. It is a Valentine, of sorts, a personal declaration of sentiment and a bouquet of vintage ideals. I knew that a book as gently outdated as mine would require special treatment, and as my imagination had already quite run away with me, I gave in and gave it its head. It was out of this untrammeled flight of fancy that the dream of Low Door Press emerged: whole runs of books made entirely by hand. I longed to create something that was simply as beautiful as I could make it, start to finish, and, somehow, this book I had secretly (and accidentally) written seemed the perfect candidate. I started daydreaming out loud to Philip about this dancing vision I had. It was so absurd I couldn’t help being enchanted by it: Was it possible? Was it even remotely financially feasible? Was I crazy? I’ll never forget Philip’s reply. He looked straight at me and smiled. “We can do this,” he said. And, oh, how I love that ‘we.’ It has made all the difference. In January of 2010 we made a plan. It was his idea to do a smaller run of a public domain title that was about the same length as my book, so I could get my processes down and see what I was up against. It was a brilliant suggestion, and I knew exactly which book it should be: Kilmeny of the Orchard by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I selected this title for many reasons, chief of which being that I fell in love with it as an impressionable teenager, and I wanted to honor Montgomery and her influence on my life with an affectionately handcrafted edition of her second book. I was sixteen years old when I first made the acquaintance of Kilmeny Gordon, I wrote in the preface. I had known her older sister, Anne Shirley, for about four years at the time, and the blessed hours I had spent in her company had given me a love for Lucy Maud Montgomery and her writings that was akin to reverence—a reverence which remains steadfast to this day. I duly began to acquaint myself with the mysteries and mazes of Adobe PageMaker. I read everything I could on the craft of bookbinding, and schemed over how I could maneuver a one-at-a-time process into a multiple copy run. As the year went on, that ‘we’ expanded to a circle of dear and extremely talented folks. My amazing and artistic brother-in-law taught me how to use that ornery old PageMaker, and spent hours on the phone with me, sending files back and forth, and formatting things exactly the way I wanted them. My sister—the one who introduced me to book arts in the first place—designed the logo for my press. And she created two supremely gorgeous original oil paintings to illustrate my book: one for the cover plate and one for the frontispiece. Local letterpress artisans and dear friends, Matt and Erica Hinton, helped me figure out how in the wide world we could deboss and imprint so many cases at once, and Matt invested literal days into making it work. The result of his labors took my breath. I was overwhelmed at the support and excitement these people lent to my project, and deeply grateful for the mark of their talents upon it. The pages were acid-free rag content and the signatures were folded and sewn entirely by hand onto cotton tapes with Irish bookbinder’s thread. I used an archival PVA book glue and traditional English mull for the binding, and the headbanding at the head and tail of the spine were silk. The book cloth was Dover linen and the endpapers were Italian cotton. As I have mentioned, the artwork was from original oils painted by my sister, and the cases were individually debossed and inked on an early-twentieth century engraver’s press. I would not even be able to begin to say how many hours went into each book, but I can avow that every one of them was a labor of love. Kilmeny of the Orchard was the first grand experiment (I’m still dazed and delighted at the way she was welcomed into the world), and all the while I’ve been working away behind the scenes to bring my own little book into the world in accordance with the dreams I first dreamed for her. All these years I’ve been editing compulsively, revising, rewriting, undoing and redoing. I hired a keen-eyed and kindred-spirited editor to give my girl a final spit and polish. I finally finished the typesetting during an online sabbatical and after one final (agonizing!) export to PDF, I took my little book to the printer’s. I was so excited (and a little flustered) that I left the house without any lipstick, and by the time I walked out of the shop with a proof in my hand and an order irrevocably underway, I felt rather dizzy. To be honest, I was totally unprepared for the shining excitement that snatched me up and has held me ever since. My book—my very first book—was being printed! After all the agonizing and obsessing, the scrutinizing of fonts and the millions of exports, after learning the ways of Illustrator and teaching myself to use InDesign as everything I knew about PageMaker was outdated by this time—this dream was becoming a reality! Now that my book is in my hands and the binding is underway, I wanted to include all of you in the final stages of this project. I thought it would be fun to keep you posted periodically, in words and images, on the status of this second title in the Low Door library. I’m not ready to announce a release date yet (there are too many imponderables attendant upon the hand-binding process), but my hope is to have the first run ready by mid-autumn. I am employing a somewhat different method of bookbinding on this particular project: whereas Kilmeny was essentially case bound (the text block created separately and the cases inked and debossed on an antique engraver’s press before assembly), Poesy will be created in the even older style of hollow-backed binding. This will allow for slightly more flexibility in the spine and a chance to try my hand at individually gilt-stamping the titles as the final step in the process. (I even commissioned a brass logo die based on my sister’s perfectly realized Low Door Press design, and I found a 1940s-era hot plate in an antique store that now doubles as a finishing stove!) Like Kilmeny, Poesy will be bound in linen with acid-free pages and heirloom quality endpapers. The headbanding is brown silk, as is the slender ribbon bookmark. My amazing sister has once again lent her talents to this project and created four stunningly beautiful original illustrations, in addition to the full-color cover art. She took the images I had in my head when I was writing and made them a reality to grace the pages of my book. I’m still stunned over how lovely they are. Such a perfect complement to the pale green book cloth I’ve decided upon. So, why on earth would I attempt something so crazy? Am I glutton for punishment or a moonstruck lunatic? Neither, I hope. But I am a lover of beauty and the God who authored it. And I long, like all of us, in my small way, to contribute to His great canvas of beauty that overspreads the world in spite of all the evil and darkness and ugliness. In the face of it, really. My brush is quite small, more suited to details, but I want to ply it with a confident hope that it matters. That in a world of automation and plastic and hurry, there is still a place for something impractical and time consuming and existing only for love. Ruskin said the most beautiful things in life are often the most useless: “Peacocks and lilies for instance.” And maybe even handmade books. “I’d like to add some beauty to life,” said Anne dreamily. “I don’t exactly want to make people know more… though I know that is the noblest ambition… but I’d love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me… to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn’t been born.” Anne of Avonlea, Lucy Maud Montgomery

The drunkest man I ever saw was a mailman. I had gone down to the Echeconnee Creek with my fishing pole and was startled at the sight of him slumped against a bridge piling. There was always trash under the bridge at the Echeconnee—beer cans and fast food wrappers thrown from passing cars, old tires and broken palettes, the remains of campfires. I mistook the mailman at first for a pile of something left on the bank by the latest flood. I might have passed right by him if he hadn’t moaned and raised his head when I was five steps away. He fixed me with heavy-lidded yellow-brown eyes. Black hair hung in limp, greasy hanks on either side of a face as rutted and hollowed out as a strip mine. He was still in his post office uniform; but it wasn’t the crisp, pressed uniform of an on-duty letter carrier. He had obviously been wearing it for many days. It was dingy and wrinkled and covered in sand, and it hung loose on his wiry frame, as if he had lost weight since it was first issued. The blue postman’s cap with the eagle logo lay cockeyed on the ground beside him. The mailman’s head swayed on unsteady shoulders, and he blinked slowly as he mumbled and slurred something in my direction. “Pardon?” I said. “I didn’t understand you.” The mailman squinted at me and raised himself to something closer to a sitting position, trying to focus his free-floating hatred. “I said I could kill you,” he snarled. But the words were scarcely out of his mouth before he collapsed again into a drunken heap, snoring softly.

There are musicians who change the face and structure of a genre forever. In the 1940s through the 1960s, artists like Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, Reno & Smiley, the Country Gentlemen, and the Osborne Brothers took the country music of their day, old-time fiddle tunes, blues, and swing and fused them all together. They created a new genre. Yes, bluegrass is the original American fusion. This spirit that respects tradition and combines it with innovation is the real spirit of bluegrass. I have recordings of Bill Monroe in the 1940s on the Grand Ole Opry. Earl Scruggs had just joined Bill’s band, and Earl’s banjo playing was so radically new and supercharged that people at the Ryman were cheering and screaming every time he played a solo as if it were the Titans winning the Superbowl. The following generations of musicians would all point to Earl Scruggs as the king. Bluegrass lead guitar was fairly limited during those times. It was mostly given a rhythmic role in the early bluegrass bands, with the exception of a few players, like the Stanley Brothers’s guitarists—George Shuffler, Larry Sparks, and several others like Don Reno—the banjo player for Reno and Smiley, who would pick up a guitar and play lead now and then. In the 1960s times were changing. We had the great Doc Watson on the scene in the east, who could actually play complex fiddle tunes note-for-note on the guitar, and Clarence White in the west introducing a more improvisational and syncopated approach to bluegrass lead guitar. In the 1970s Tony Rice came along, building on those before him, especially Clarence White and Doc Watson, but in such a way that Tony soon became the Earl Scruggs of bluegrass guitar. Tony is not simply another guitar player, but a guitarist’s guitarist. The musical generations from the 1970s onward have nearly all been affected by his innovative approach grounded in tradition. This YouTube clip is from an instructional video Tony recorded in his heyday. Some of his best records were made during this period: Manzanita, Church Street Blues, The Bluegrass Album, Cold on the Shoulder, and others. This song shows his mastery of guitar technique. It isn’t the sum total of Tony’s guitar explorations, which often reach into jazz, but is one of the more traditional-style tunes he’s done. Note several things—how easy it seems for him, the economy of motion in his right and left hands, the dynamics when he is playing the lead part, the guitar runs between vocal lines, how his rhythmic emphasis follows the vocal, the seamlessness of the arrangement, and how he puts the lyrics of this great Norman Blake song across to the listener. This is live, un-retouched, unadulterated awesomeness. And a lesson from the same video on a fiddle tune called “Gold Rush.” Notice the guitar tone and the compact and economized right and left hand technique. By the way, that is Clarence White’s old Martin D28 guitar Tony owns and plays.

As writers of fiction (or as creators in general, regardless of the medium¹) we sometimes invest our hours in maginations and discussions most ephemeral and transient: What are the ideal weights of storm clouds? What becomes of distant cheese? Will this or that amount of caffeine kill me? How might I bind the Pleiades? Etc. etc. etc. We become at times so lost and disembodied in our work, that time ceases to exist (we enter a state called Other Time²) and we are eventually shocked at resurfacing into Ordinary Time to find that we yet remain embodied beings dwelling in a physical space, wherein practical concerns such as sustenance and visits to the necessary room are indeed more of an obligation than we had accounted for in our other less corporeal forms and modes of being. That, however, is not what this essay is about. This essay presumes that all readers will agree that such a state as Other Time does exist. And further, that achieving the passage to Other Time is a necessity for writers of fiction. And further still, that at times this state is reached as effortlessly as stepping through a magic mirror but that, at other times (no pun intended), the surface of that same mirror behaves badly, being hard and unyielding and so painfully ordinary that the writer dashes himself repeatedly against it like some territorial songbird doing battle with his own reflection and soon begins to question whether the other world behind the mirror ever existed at all or was only childish illusion. Writers routinely begin to drink when they have too long been barred from that passage and have begun to despair of the belief that Other Time still exists for them and is reachable by them. But the correlation between these two things—the exile and the drinking—is also not the subject of this essay—[Though if those last lines describe your current state, WRITER TAKE HEART! There are remedies at hand. There are METHODS & MECHANISMS whereby one might prise those locked gates and slip into that other country as if one were a naturalized citizen. And chief among these methods is the knowledgeable application of various musical compositions which work in much the same manner as old school enchantments. And that, finally, IS what this essay is about!] Music, it will be seen (or rather heard) then, is both a transport, and a key into that other kingdom. Or, to put it more literally, music (the right music, mind you) is a secret tunnel that the guardians at the gates of Other Time are unaware of. The enchantment of music will sometimes allow one to bypass the gates and the guardians altogether, and so, simply to arrive at one’s destination (like an electron jumping orbitals with no detectable movement between one and the other). Now we shall move beyond the theoretical and to the more practical focus of our discussion: What sorts of songs do, and what sorts of songs do not, serve this end? When writing fiction, one requires music that will easily carry one out of the pressing and the daily. One requires music that is capable of stirring emotions and opening new folds of imagination, but that is consistently able to do so without announcing itself too boldly or clamoring too cleverly for attention. That is the foremost key. If you look at the music, it immediately stops working and you find yourself pulled back into Ordinary Time. DON’T look at the music. If you find yourself intermittently aware of the songs, in a way that competes with the story for your attention, you have probably chosen music OF THE WRONG SORT. Choose again. A writer must select music then, that can meld into the backdrop of thought, that can become the air of that other world. The writer is in need of a sort of songs that radio DJs will not play and that college kids on spring break spinning in their convertibles to sunnier climes will not blast as an ode to some impending notion of a secularized carnevale indulgence³. One is not likely, after all, to write a substantive and moral novel while under the repeated influence of Van Halen’s “Panama.” (However, I would enjoy being proven wrong on this count.) Writers, we can agree, are generally in need of a more serious and substantive fare. In the end what you really need (if we may speak bluntly as friends) are songs that will play you. You are in search of those musics built of movements that will strike softly the various keys of your own emotions and memories and imaginative constructs, so that as those hammers strike the taut strings, their vibrations seek out those things which already vibrate at the same resonant frequency within your own heart and mind and soul and memory and modes of thinking and feeling and reacting and conjecturing and imagining. The melody plays you in this way, and so opens the way into Other Time. The songs you seek will not be the sort of songs that are ends in themselves. They are instead (as we have already established), tunnels and tickets and gateways into Other Time. Therefore we seek the sort of music that is a means, and not an end. It is a dead certainty that songs with vocals will not do, except in very specific circumstances. At least not unless the words are smooth and flowing and in a foreign language so that they register no literal meaning in your consciousness. If one does not speak a lick of French, one could perhaps “break on through to the other side” with the aid of songs artfully emoted in French. I do not think one could do the same with German. In general, as a first principle, we must rule out vocals, though I have in the past managed to write productively while listening to Lord Huron’s Lonesome Dreams LP, and have had some success with Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, and also with Radiohead’s In Rainbows. At most times and on most days even these singularly evocative mood-weaves register too prominently in my awareness to be of much use though, when I am needing to be in another world and thinking other thoughts. All three of them are albums that are more a whole movement than they are a collection of individual songs, but my batting average with them is spotty at best. I did try Lord Huron again briefly a few weeks ago, but it got me nowhere. The project I am currently locked in mortal combat with is a beast that has been a year now in the making. It is a science-fiction novel that sprawls expansively in its history and backstory. Early on in the writing process, I set out to identify and choose several soundscapes for my long journey, music that would spur the rapid transition to left brain thinking and usher me into that timeless placeless place where good writing can consistently happen for hours at a stretch, uninterrupted. Here, presented in the most practical of terms (being a list), and for the benefit of those readers who are also creators, are the transport pieces that I have recently discovered and employed: Cellos are sublime, their voices so painfully human and also so transcendent of our humanity. Cello tones ache with a beauty that is like the longing and the loss all rolled into one. It was (1) Zoë Keating: One Cello x 16: Natoma that carried me through several of the early weeks of writing. A sparse and gorgeous aural landscape that contained everything I needed. I looped it. The entire album. Over and over and over and over, for days on end. Good stuff. Superbly good stuff. Now, towards the end of the writing of the first draft of the novel I have returned to Zoë Keating because I am now crafting the confrontation between my young protagonist and her tormentor, and that extended scene also contains the protagonist’s temptation to surrender to a sort of darkness within herself, and “One Cello x 16: Natoma” is the perfect soundscape to inhabit as I write such a scene. Early in the writing process as well I discovered Nils Frahm and his piano arrangements with their ambient sounds that feel like memories viewed through a rainy glass. The best of his offerings, for my purposes anyway, is (2) Nils Frahm: Felt (Click here to listen.) I am weaving multiple story lines together in this novel, story lines that take place at different times in history, and for certain of those storylines, it is Nils Frahm’s Felt that I always return to. It sets the tone for the story of my unsung heroes who have endured long and given everything in the service of a cause that only a handful of people have ever even been aware of. If you need to conjure empty spaces and loss that still aches with the beauty that once was, try listening to Felt as you write. A few weeks into the writing of the book, I came across a band called Caspian. (3) Caspian: Hymn for the Greatest Generation, & (4) Caspian: Waking Season Their albums fueled several long writing sessions. I deleted a song or two from these album playlists in order to streamline the projects for my purposes, but overall these were good offerings and I find it helpful to have options. If I’m stuck at a certain point in the story, switching soundtracks can have a beneficial creative effect, prompting a new line of thinking. I moved on from Caspian to multiple instrumental projects by three more bands: (5) Explosions In The Sky: All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone¹ (6) Explosions In The Sky: Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (7) Message To Bears: Departures (8) Message To Bears: Folding Leaves (9) Message To Bears: Maps (10) This Will Destroy You: Tunnel Blanket Each of these had its useful applications and standout moments, depending on the sort of scenes I was attempting to write on a given day. If you are searching out soundtracks to write to, I would say try them, and if they work for you and fit the tone of the content you’re writing, great. If not, move on. Most of these projects (5-10) featured guitars somewhat prominently in their compositions, and for me, the voices of guitars (unless played in an atmospheric and dreamy sort of style) can tend to fight for my immediate attention, threatening to pull me out of the creative space. Still, I did get some good writing mileage out of Explosions In the Sky, Message To Bears, and This Will Destroy You. But then . . . Then I hit the motherload of projects. My purest find since Zoë Keating and Nils Frahm. A band called Eluvium. It was as if they were creating music specifically with fiction writers in mind. Eluvium has released several emotive instrumental projects that strike just the right balance between subtle presence and conjured wonder: (11) Eluvium: Copia (12) Eluvium: Nightmare Ending (13) Eluvium: Talk Amongst the Trees (14) Eluvium: An Accidental Memory In the Case of Death (15) Eluvium: When I Live By the Garden & the Sea All of them gorgeous soundscapes that transport the listener effortlessly into Other Time. I usually pick my music for the day, and let the album loop for hours and hours as I write—and I’m writing anywhere from 2,000 to 7,500 words per day. Except on days when I’m stuck. Like I am right now. Not because I can’t access Other Time, but because I’ve run into a story structure problem that must be sorted out before I can write the final four major scenes of the book. I guess that’s why I’m writing this essay now instead, while the oyster part of my brain is hopefully at work in the background, worrying the sand grain of my story issue into something like a pearl. Or at least into a spiffed up sand grain. So now, at the conclusion of our practical essay, I would kindly beseech all readers who are also writers (or creators of any sort) to elucidate those albums and artists you have personally discovered over the years that have repeatedly exercised the mystical power to punch your ticket to Other Time. What are your magical mirror compositions of choice? I shall quiet my own voice now, that yours might be heard. ¹ Though fiction writers are arguably in a more difficult position vis-á-vis the attempt to create ex nihilo worlds from intangible words than are, say, sculptors who at least have the physical lump of clay in front of them that can be touched and manipulated and which, in and of itself, acts as a kind of gateway to transport the artist into that creative space. ² A state popularly referred to as the Time Vortex—which, as any fiction writer worth his or her salt can tell you, operates according to mysterious quantum principles which have yet to be explained using current models. ³ With the burdens of collegiate scholarship replacing the deprivations of Lent.

[Adapted from a session at Hutchmoot 2013, “The Art of Caring”] If I’m not mistaken, it was Martin Luther who recovered the sense of “vocation” for general Christian use. Broadening the idea beyond merely a religious calling to the church, he anchored the essence of a believer’s assignment squarely in the ordinary details of exquisitely unique lives. “What would you do if Christ himself with all the angels were visibly to descend, and command you in your home to sweep your house and wash the pans and kettles?” he demanded, with characteristic no-nonsense. “How happy you would feel, and would not know how to act for joy—not for the work’s sake, but that you knew that thereby you were serving him, who is greater than heaven and earth.” Like the stuff of fairytale, a vocation makes use of the workaday components of our lives, transforming them with a touch of heavenly “deep magic” into practical intersections with eternity. Every single one of us is carrying around a priceless dowry of affinities, talents, and inclinations: we can’t make the magic, any more than a pumpkin can turn itself into a gilded coach, but we do have to show up with our notebooks or guitars or mixing bowls or running shoes. A vocation is simply the point at which garden-variety faithfulness bears the grace of God to the world. In preparing my sessions for Hutchmoot, I was assailed with the fear of being “found out” for the fraud I all-too-often feel myself to be. Terrified that I would have nothing to say to these rooms-full of people wiser and more articulate than me by far; panic-stricken that what I did say would be useless to them: the trite, redundant wanderings of someone who had no right to speak with authority on any subject, much less the subject at hand. In my fear, I cried out to God: “Oh, Lord, I’m just so afraid of giving myself away.” The moment the words were out of my mouth, I grinned at the assurance that reverberated through my entire being: My child—you’re going to do just that and nothing else. Give yourself away. It’s the only place from which to truly connect with another soul. And so, I’m sharing out of my weakness here, not my imagined success. I wanted merely to comfort with the comfort I’ve received. I am speaking from a place of recent and recurring exhaustion and failure. It’s a place I come to often, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I don’t even pretend to ask all the right questions. All I know is that in these places of body and soul weariness I often find my prayers reduced to three simple phrases, desperate as a parched land weary for water: Show me who I am. Show me who You are. Show me the way. And the Lord, so patiently, so kindly, keeps bringing me back to these fundamental things: my Calling and my Source. It’s like the recalibration of a compass, this life examined and re-centered. For it’s when I get outside of my calling that life gets out of hand—overwhelming, too much. And it’s when I forget my source that the springs of creative love dry up and I have nothing to give. A couple of years ago, I got a phone call from a friend of a friend, a woman wanting to know if I would host a few Russian orphans for the summer. She knew I had spent time in Russia, and felt I would be a perfect candidate for the opportunity. It’s no secret that my husband and I have shared a vision for hospitality from the very beginning of our marriage—we have always wanted what we have to be at God’s disposal for the good of others, and we cherish an ideal that encompasses beauty and material comfort as valid bearers of grace to the human heart. However, I had been learning about my limitations and the need for boundaries, and due to some health issues and a host of other commitments that summer, I knew that this particular assignment probably wasn’t for me. I told her I’d pray about it, and talk to my husband. But this did not satisfy her, for, doubtless from an overflow of her own commendable passion for adoption in general and Russian orphans in particular, she proceeded to critique—volubly—not only the childless status of our home, but the basic values upon which it was built. She cited the time I’d spent learning to cook and sew, to garden and can and keep house and basically care for other souls in a practical, domestic way as evidence to support her case. And then, with a swiftness nonetheless stinging for its good intentions, she pronounced her verdict: “You’ve spent all this time learning these homemaking skills, and here you have no children to use them on. I tell you—it’s all wasted.” Her words fell like a physical blow. I literally felt like I had been hit in the stomach, and it hurt so badly I wanted to cry. How could she speak to me of such things when she didn’t even know me—knew little to nothing of my journey? I reeled under the shock of it. And then, in the next moment, I wanted to laugh. Not at her, of course, but at the tunnel vision we can all be guilty of in this supposedly broad-minded age of ours. I was reminded, there in my pain and amusement, of a fact that clings to any calling, namely, that howsoever sure we may be of it ourselves, we can count on being misunderstood. The emotion aroused by that conversation brought me back to the some of the conflict I experienced in sorting out my calling during my teenage years. There were so many voices, audible and otherwise, speaking into that place of possibility: My piano teacher wanted me to be a music minister. (Huh?) My beloved grandmother dreamed of my becoming a speech therapist. (I’ve never quite figured that one out.) My wonderfully supportive father quietly hoped, I think, that I’d take up law, though he never said it in so many words. (He’s a judge, and you won’t find a man more passionate in his vocation.) But there were two things I wanted to be: two things towards which every impulse of my soul turned as naturally as a flower to the sun. I wanted to be a homemaker. And I wanted to be a writer. (I love the fact that in her book [Real Love for Real Life] Andi [Ashworth] acknowledged this latter as a facet of caring.) My education is nowhere near complete in either one of these callings, but in the years after high school I invested a good portion of my time in learning skills I hoped would compliment my ambitions. My heart was completely taken with the romance of domesticity, and I longed to create a home someday that would be a true haven from the fret and hurry and confusion of the world. I cornered older women in my life which had expertise in certain areas of cooking and gardening and sewing and begged them for specific lessons in their craft (which they gave, I might add, with all the largess in the world). And the patience of my mother over my cooking disasters and expensive grocery lists was nothing short of heavenly. (I remember one evening in particular in which I went through no less than three dozen eggs, perfecting the art of flan for the noble sake of impressing Philip, who was coming to dinner that night. I found out later than he doesn’t even like flan—which cooled my enthusiasm for the mastery of that particular dish.) In those years, I taught piano lessons and I taught ballet classes. And at night, under cover of darkness (and, usually by candlelight), I scribbled stories like mad, stuffing my desk drawers with closely lined sheets of notebook paper that never saw the light of day. That was a precious time of preparation, and, for better or for worse, I would not be who I am today without it. And it was this period, this seeding and cultivating of vocation, which my acquaintance of the Russian orphans had just defined as “wasted.” I got off the phone and went and stood at my kitchen sink. There is a plaque hanging between the windows there that a friend made me for Christmas one year, inscribed with my favorite passage from Pilgrim’s Inn by Elizabeth Goudge: It was homemaking that mattered. Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected again and again against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and it was no good weakening oneself for the brick-making by worrying too much about the flood. Every home. Every really, truly home is an outpost, a Last Homely House West of the Mountains, whether there are children swinging from the rafters or a single woman contemplating a quiet meal with a friend. Andi has already cast a vision for the kind of fruit which a life grounded in obedience to a calling can bear, and how so very much of a lifestyle of caring springs from the home. It’s so much more than clean sheets and three meals a day, though there is deep value in these things, and high privilege to nourish the bodies of those we love and wrap them in comfort. But there is also refreshment, fellowship and healing, the nurture of conversation, the nourishment of beauty and good books and noble thoughts. I love how it’s described in Proverbs: By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures. Andi wrote Real Love for Real Life to help people name their calling—she’s really a voice in the wilderness when it comes to this particular vocation of caring—and I am so grateful that she did. I’ve often wondered just why it seems so difficult for Christians to own their calling in this day and age: to claim and be claimed by it, if you will. I’ve wondered why it is so difficult for me to celebrate the fact that my calling doesn’t really look like anyone else’s—nor theirs like mine. Is it fear? Pride? Simple insecurity that merely wants to be understood? Why is it so easy for me to feel guilty that I’m not doing everything that Christians are “supposed” to do, not meeting every single need that comes to my ears? Why, in my unlit moments, do I feel like I have to earn or defend the desires of my heart, or that they can’t possibly be fit for His use? Elsewhere, I’ve called it the “evangelical bugbear,” this denigration or distrust of our own desires simply because they are ours. And while the Bible is pretty clear on the point that God gives desires to a heart delighting in Him, it was the words of C. S. Lewis in his Letters to an American Lady that really shed light on my fundamental confusion: Don’t be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn’t do. Each must do his duty ‘in that state of life to which God has called him.’ Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing’s sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American, and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view! There can be intemperance in work just as in drink. What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one’s self-importance. As MacDonald says, ‘In holy things may be unholy greed!’ And by doing what ‘one’s station and its duties’ does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice. Just you give Mary a chance as well as Martha! Ray Bradbury, when writing of the unique and individual creative call, said that we should look back to the earliest memories of our childhood, to the things that first made us intoxicated with life, for solid clues into our artistic destiny as adults. This is first-order fantastic advice. But sometimes—at least for me—it also helps to look at what a calling is not in order to recognize the genuine article. What it doesn’t look like, so that we may see more clearly what it does. A calling is not . . . Burdensome. It may be difficult—it most certainly will—but it won’t cumber the life out of you. His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Uncomfortable. It will certainly require uncomfortable things, moments in which we squirm beneath our own inadequacies. But discomfort does not define a calling, like cramming our feet into shoes that are too small or struggling to walk in pants that are too big. Overwhelming. We will absolutely feel overwhelmed (I do on a daily basis!), but we will never be overwhelmed. The waters of a calling will not go over our heads—God will not lay upon us the full weight of the world’s need, but rather portions His tender concern into bundles, laying a part upon each of us. I’ve searched the Scriptures time and again seeking validation for my desires, like some kind of heavenly check mark over my calling. I’ve camped out on verses like “neglect not the gift that is in you,” and “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.” These passages bear great wisdom, and they make me feel good about seeking to live in harmony with the unique way God has wired me. But the real quickening word within the Word, the verses that sting me awake like the flash of a brandished sword, are those Jesus spoke in Matthew 25: The Parable of the Talents. There is absolutely nothing “feel good” to me about this story. Truthfully, I find it one of the scariest in the Bible. There are three examples of servants given, but only two types: good and faithful, and wicked and slothful. And here’s the rub: the only difference stated between them was fear. In The Message, the master calls this latter servant a “play-it-safe.” And, of course, we all know there’s nothing safe about the Kingdom. So that is the last thing a calling is not: it’s not safe. In opening our hands to vocation, we are signing up for misunderstanding, exhaustion, criticism, occasional failure, even despair. There’s no way around it. But we’re all slated to a bit of this magnificent canvas God has unfurled over His history with humanity, and if any one of us leaves our part blank, the world will go on parched and hungering for that glimpse of grace only we can provide. It’s inconceivable, really–that things like preparing a meal or penning a sonnet could carry such weight. Ludicrous like pumpkin coaches and mice-made-footmen. Crazy in the way that only God could dare to be. And deeply, soul-gladdeningly good, in only the way that He is good.

[Editor’s note: Jonathan Rogers not only writes great books, tells humorous anecdotes, and wears bowties and seersucker suits, he also teaches literature at New College Franklin, teaches online writing classes (which you can join here), and now he’s even teaching the entire internet how to improve its writing in his new series of youtube videos. Enjoy!]

Some readers of The Green Ember, my first fantasy adventure novel for kids, found the ending to be a cliff-hanger. Some kids even shouted at their parents in frustration, “That is a horrible ending!” and “There has to be another book!” Hey, I’ll take any kind of enthusiastic, emotional response. It means they cared. So, I’ve gotten a few emails along those lines. It hasn’t been the majority. Most don’t even mention it, but there’s a few who are fired up about my “cliff-hanger.” I didn’t mean to make a cliff-hanger. Sure, like all such books, there’s a big part of the story that remains unresolved, remains “out there” for future adventures. What I meant to do was give a mostly-satisfying resolution to the main promises I made in the “contract” with the reader implicitly agreed to at the beginning of the story. I wanted to have significant resolution to two problems. The, “What’s wrong with the world?” problem, and the, “What’s wrong with our main characters?” problem. I hoped that when the end of this story came, the reader would feel like a big dent in the World problem happened, and that the characters would have grown to the point that the reader felt satisfied. (Of course they are both mingled.) Is Picket the same sort of rabbit when the story begins as when it ends? What about Heather? I hope not. That’s what I was aiming for. The majority response from parents and kids has been very encouraging, but I know I have a lot of room to grow. I think one problem might be that, for some readers, I failed to deliver enough of a Character story to make up for what is unresolved in the Event story. Orson Scott Card talks about the main kinds of stories in his book Character and Viewpoint. In a minefield of material designed to keep writers from writing and perpetuate the Writer’s Self-help Creed of Tell, Don’t Show, or perhaps more likely, Sell, Don’t Show, Character and Viewpoint is practical, insightful, and generally helpful. Card writes about the different types of stories thus. The M.I.C.E. Quotient Milieu The Milieu is the world—the planet, the society, the weather, the family—all the elements that went into creating that special world. Idea Idea stories are about the process of finding information. Think of Nolan’s Inception. Character The Character story is about the transformation of a characters role in the communities that matter most to him or her. Event Event stories focus on events which rip the fabric of the universe or disrupt the natural order and cause the world to be in a state of flux. Or, “What’s wrong with the world?” So all stories fit into these basic types and every story I can think of emphasizes one or two and contains all. Most stories deal significantly in Character and Event. This example might help you understand what he’s talking about. One of my favorite parts of The Lord of the Rings is “The Scouring of the Shire.” When this was cut from Jackson’s film trilogy, I was sad. Why? Because Jackson gives us the Event story, but robs us of a huge part of the Character story. The Event is the destruction of the ring and fixing the “What’s wrong with the world?” problem as Aragorn is married to Arwen and enthroned in Gondor. But what of the hobbits? What of these characters through whose eyes we have seen the Event story? What of the Character story? For me, their return to the shire and its liberation from statist bureaucrats in league with Sharky, is crucial. How many character stories are resolved in those chapters cut from Jackson’s film? So many. Sharky himself, and Wormtongue. Merry and Pippen, both now literally taller and spiritually greater, in profound ways. But also Sam and Frodo. It’s heartbreaking and glorious. It’s smaller than what happened across the wide miles in Mordor and Gondor, but it’s huge for our characters. The story isn’t over until they liberate the Shire. The Character story isn’t over until we are satisfied. And Tolkien delivers an ending to the Character story that is glorious and truthful. Jackson, as with so many other details (cough, Bombadil), misses something good and, I would argue, essential. The Green Ember came up short in many ways. I’m sure those few furious kids are going to be unhappy that the next book I release will be a shorter prequel and not the sequel they are demanding. I’m working on the sequel, but it will be a little while. And part of what I’m doing with the prequel, The Black Star of Kingston, is to fill out the world. I’m delivering on some promises and making new ones. It’s a relationship I’m forming with readers. I hope that, in the end, they will be pleased with the journey we went on together. After all, in and among a thousand motivations I have as an author, the deepest and truest one is love for those readers and a sincere effort to delight them. And what am I? Only another character in a story, not yet what I will be. But I am going somewhere. I am growing. You are too. —– The Green Ember is available in the Rabbit Room store (in both hard cover and paperback).

I have always suspected that the simple act of eating together holds a deeper significance than we generally recognize. A few months ago a newspaper article outlining the impact of regular family mealtimes on young people caught my attention. The research confirmed a long list of benefits including stronger communication skills, improved mood, decreased risk of obesity and an increased sense of belonging and cultural identity. The results did not surprise me. If there is one image that could define my childhood it would be the kitchen table with its flickering candle and unhurried conversation. At a time when my own identity seemed constantly under threat, it was there that I knew myself best. In fact, above the food itself, I think it is that sense of security and belonging which still draws me back to my parents’ table more than two decades later. Over the past few years I have become increasingly fascinated by the Jewish context of the life and teaching of Jesus. As part of that, I have been excited and challenged in equal measure by the fresh perspective this has brought to the place of the table within the Biblical story. Central to their festivals, their worship, and their discussion of Scripture, the table was a place where each new generation would encounter the tastes and sights and sounds that would always serve as a reminder of their place within a bigger story. In Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, Ann Spangler & Lois Tverberg sum up the beauty of table fellowship like this: “Though the Israelites didn’t have fancy tables or place settings, they had something better. For them, the table was much more than a place to eat. It was a place of mutual trust and vulnerability. Sitting down at the table to eat with someone meant you had a protected relationship with them. Whom you ate with revealed something important about who you were, showing to whom you belonged. Just as the word “house” could mean your family lineage or the word “bed” could mean your intimate relationship, the word “table” could stand for family and friends—all those you trusted and on whom you depended. These were the people with whom you enjoyed table fellowship. In fact, table fellowship implied a nearly inviolable relationship. To be a guest at a family’s table meant that you were under their protection. As long as you were with the family, they were honour bound to defend you, even at the cost of their lives.” There is a reason why our literature is so full of great banquets. Why kings summon their commanders and officials to feast with them. Why, in their darkest hour, the downtrodden heroes often find themselves invited to sit with a stranger and share a bowl of stew. Something happens around a table; bonds are formed, stories are told, barriers are broken down and hope is quietly kindled. Eating together has always had a deeply symbolic place in the life of God’s people. In Acts 2, as the early church exploded out in the power of God, one of the things that marked them out was their commitment to sharing meals together. Right from the beginnings in Genesis, this sharing of fellowship meals has been closely tied to the stunning concept of covenant. In order to symbolize their solemn promises to one another, whether it was a marriage, a peace treaty or a transfer of ownership, the parties would sit down and share a meal together. One of the most remarkable examples of a covenant meal takes place in Exodus 24. On this occasion the covenant is not between two friends or two families, or even two warring kings, but between God and the people he has called His own. Having appeared in fire and thunder on Mount Sinai in a demonstration of holiness and glory that left the Israelites trembling in fear and awe, God Himself invites Moses, Aaron and the elders of Israel to come up on the mountain, sit down and eat and drink with Him. Think about that for a moment. It’s astonishing. Remarkable as it was, Mount Sinai was not the last place God would eat and drink a covenant meal with His people. In an upper room with his disciples, as He prepared to face the cross, Jesus instituted another meal that would be the sign of an unbreakable covenant between God and his people. This time God was not only the host but also the meal to be shared. A meal that was to be repeated again and again as a sign and a reminder of the covenant that was made at the cross. If an understanding of our covenant bond enriches the meals we share around our kitchen tables, then on a deeper level it transforms our approach to communion. As the bread and wine passes from hand to hand, each person who eats and drinks it is reminded that they have been invited to share in the indestructible, resurrection life of Christ. Not only individually, but together. Just as the cross brought a covenant of peace between God and man, it also broke down the barriers of hostility between those who take His name. Like Moses and the elders of Israel or the disciples in the upper room; when we come to communion we sit down to eat and drink in the presence of God Himself. That is a privilege we could spend a lifetime exploring. However, it is easy to forget that we are not the only guests at the table. If we have entered into a covenant that is symbolized by the bread and the wine, then each person who takes it is part of the same covenant. Sharing in the same peace. Entering into the same story. At communion the table becomes the altar. The place where we not only fellowship with God and with each other but where we sacrifice our self-importance and take our place within a kingdom governed by a covenant of forgiveness and peace. For me, this raises some difficult questions. How do I view the person next to me when we break bread? Do I see someone with whom I have a protected relationship? Someone whom I am honor bound to defend? Does the oneness of this meal remind me who I am? Does it remind me what I am part of? If not, then I am in danger of accepting the undeserved welcome lavished on me by grace, while at the same time rejecting the essence of the very covenant that gives me a place at the table.

[Nick Flora is well known around here, and he’s recently launched a new Kickstarter campaign. We asked him to drop by the Rabbit Room and tell us about it and here’s what he had to say. Click here to support Nick on Kickstarter.] One thing they don’t tell you when you sign up to be an indie musician (at the “Indie Musician Sign Up” booth) is that your dreams get to come true in the smallest of ways. Like twice a year or so you get to play “PBS pledge drive host” to all your fans, friends, and family! Remember those pledge drives? When you’re just trying to watch Ken Burns’ 156-part documentary on turtle doves and every 20 minutes some guy with a ill-fitting suit and a skinny Bob Barker microphone chimes in to tell you about tote bags or VHS copies of Anne Of Green Gables you can get for pledging 15 bucks a year? Okay, if you were born after 1990, then this probably doesn’t ring any bells for you. But that’s what it has come down to for indie musicians thru the amazing technology of crowd sourcing platforms like Kickstarter, PledgeMusic, Indie GoGo, GoFundMe, HelpMeGetMyScarfBusinessOutOfMyStepDadsGuestRoom.org, etc. It’s a really cool time we live in. We can directly help out the artists we like by literally putting our money into the art they create and then see it created. It’s also the most stress-inducing time for artists, since we have to “bug” our fan bases by constantly reminding them how broke we are because we chose to go into the music business. Then after all that bugging and reminding about the campaign, we HOPE that our goal is met and we can finally make the thing! So that brings me to the point of this blog. A couple weeks ago I launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund not one but THREE musical projects. The idea is to make three EPs over the course of a year. Each EP will have a different style or theme attached to it, but will be inherently still “Nick Flora” (if that’s a thing). Let me tell you the top 3 things you may not know about each of these EPs. [cue Mark Mothersbaugh’s score from The Life Aquatic] EP #1: Futureboy 1. This EP deals a lot with time travel. Not literally, sadly, but in the ways we often become (too) attached to events from our past, worry about the future, and struggle to stay present. More specifically, it’s about the after effects of things we go through, like why it’s hard to open up (even with people we love) or start over after we’ve invested so much time and love into something that didn’t pan out. 2. Despite those heavy themes, it’s easily the most fun-sounding record I’ve made. I wanted to make a recording that sounds like summer. The feeling of waking up in the morning and not having to go to school, or the way it feels in the evening as you get a little more nostalgic about summer’s past. 3. The bass player from ’90s Christian Brit-pop band All-Star United played on it. True story. ‘Nuff said. EP #2: Christmas I’ll be the first to ask the question: do we need more Christmas music? And then I’ll be the first to answer with: “If it’s good, then yes!” So the second EP (that will hopefully release around the time when holiday music isn’t obnoxious) will be Christmas-themed. My friend, and frequent musical collaborator, Stacy Lantz and I have written a handful of songs that fit nicely with the holiday season and we’d like you guys to hear it. 1. I’m interested in writing songs that deal more with the feelings that surround the holidays than the actual holiday itself. Feelings of melancholy and self-doubt, that feeling that you didn’t accomplish enough in the year, and so on. That’s more relatable to me as an adult going through the holidays. 2. I wrote a song about how to make a Christmas-themed mix CD, which is something I know a little something about. It’s hopefully more clever than as lame as that sounds on paper. 3. This EP will most likely be produced by Andy Osenga, bringing him out of “producer semi-retirement.” EP #3: Stripped down Despite the provocative description, it’s just because I don’t have a better way to describe it at the moment. This EP will be more stripped down tonally. Acoustic, piano, and vocals are my favorite combo for hearing songs. 1. I’m diving into a lot of struggles that remain constants in my life, some that I’ve never heard brought up in song before. 2. There are a few more “too bizarre to be true” family stories I’d like to tell in song. If you’ve heard my previous record, then you know a few of them already (see “Lost At Sea,” parts 1, 2, and 3) But there’s more, believe it or not, and I can’t wait to tackle them. 3. Obviously this EP will be influenced by some of your favorite Rabbit Room artists, and maybe not the ones you’d guess. In summation, let’s remember, it might be obnoxious to get 215 emails or Facebook posts in a week from artists reminding you to pledge, but that just shows how much we care about making the highest quality art we can. We want to make something you can be proud to say you backed. For an artist, it’s all worth it. I love how connected it makes me feel to my fans, and how it makes random people on the internet feel like friends and family. Click here to check out Nick Flora’s latest Kickstarter. #NickFlora

You can’t imagine how this music (below) takes me back. It takes me back to a dusty township and dirty children, smiling wide, excited to come to church. It takes me back to Africa, to the beautiful Zulus I shared life with as a boy. My father, who planted a Zulu church along with a Zulu pastor, used to joke that you could tap the next five Zulu men you met and if you put them together you’d have the Mills Brothers. This is no insult to the Mills Brothers, a group we love. Instead, it’s an only-barely hyperbolic expression of how incredibly gifted Zulu people are as singers. Almost all Zulus can sing, but perhaps no group is more famous than Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Ladysmith Black Mambazo is legendary in South Africa, hailing not too far from where I lived. But they are also well-known internationally, most famously for backing up Paul Simon on his classic album Graceland. (Here they are singing “Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes” live.) You might also actually recognize them from a Lifesavers commercial. They are wonderful. They remind me of a powerfully formative period of my life. I love all their music, but hearing them sing “Amazing Grace” is particularly poignant. Why? Because the composer of that song, John Newton, once captained a slave ship trading in African slaves. This is, of course, well-known and was dramatized in the film Amazing Grace about Newton’s friend William Wilberforce. That all these years later, an African group would sing Newton’s song so beautifully is a kind of glorious irony. The Gospel shattered Newton’s way of life, and the music born of that beautiful breaking has circled the globe and is sung by Christians everywhere, including Africans. Including Zulus, a people I will always love.

[Cartoon by Jonny Jimison]

This one’s personal. I could explain it but you could also just read the lyrics or listen to the song. Our desires are built for more than this world can offer. How do we live when we realize we may never get the things we want this side of Heaven? What if we actually get it and it doesn’t satisfy us? “Whatever It Takes” from Andrew Osenga’s Flesh EP [audio:Whatever.mp3] passion is a river that rages right beside the streets of gold symphonies of empathy sing out to me from angels I am told but everywhere I reach these days my hand gets slapped every voice says no passion is a river raging deep within that has no place to go no place to go I’ve got two hearts that keep me beating one’s been torn apart, the other’s healing and I’ve fallen far but I’m not retreating whatever it takes, whatever it takes whatever it takes, whatever it takes failure was a fear til it walked with me for miles down the road loneliness, my greatest threat, seeped slowly to the marrow of my bones disappointment, how I’ve grown to know it well the fire that fuels our ache expectation drowns the good in should-have-beens ’til bitterness remains or we choose to change disappointment, how I’ve grown to know it well disappointment, I’ve survived and lived to tell…

What’s the great quote from The Princess Bride? “Life is pain. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.” I may not be quite as nihilistic as that, being a recovering cynic and all, but there’s truth to that line for sure. It used to be that we couldn’t all be president or NBA stars. Maybe we could be an astronaut on a technicality for a little while, but you still weren’t in space, just in a warehouse that smelled like pineapple salsa (not a bad thing). These days it’s the drive to drop my girls off at school. Every day I pass a hundred houses I will never be able to afford. Martina McBride’s estate. Jack White’s place. The Governor’s mansion. And all their neighbors. I can’t lie and say that doesn’t affect the way I feel about the house I actually do live in or how much money I can bring in. Life isn’t fair. We can’t all date the homecoming queen. But maybe we don’t want to. She’s not really very kind, and that lasts longer than beauty. And I may not be in the dreaded 1% they talk about in the news, but I might be in the 20%. That’s still not fair to the other 80%. And globally I’m rich and live in a relative mansion. I have a job I love, three smart healthy kids, and a Netflix account. I have more than I deserve, but I focus on what somebody else has that I don’t. Like cynicism and pride, what a waste of time. The recovering cynic tries to take a breath a few times a day and focus on gratitude. This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. “Who Said Life Was Fair?” from Andrew Osenga’s Flesh EP [audio:Life.mp3] it’s been a long, cold winter finally gone I have spent years just waiting for my turn to come but who said life was fair? they only tried to tell you cause they wanted you to turn your head while they robbed you blind I could tell by the way he was talking that has was lying to me oh Lord, I know a liar I got a mirror and vanity cause we all know that life ain’t fair things they tell you in the schoolroom don’t mean nothing when it’s us and them you got to stay alive oh no, I keep falling in a Hollywood love affair with a life that isn’t really there oh, why don’t we fight it? buying when they’re selling air wanting when we shouldn’t care who said life was fair? open my eyes, let me see open my heart, let me know open my mind to believe that there’s a reason but who said life was fair? they tell you in the schoolroom but they knew it wouldn’t last out there oh no, I keep falling in a Hollywood love affair buying when they’re selling air who said life was fair? hide it when you find it better hold it when you got it got to slide it in your pocket cause they’ll sniff you out, sniff you out power, absolutely, is the absolute solution to the pesky little conscience oh yeah!

This song is about realizing you aren’t quite as amazing as you think you are. Your problems probably aren’t any more unique or heartbreaking than anybody else’s. I’m a 4 on the enneagram personality test, so maybe this song is just for us 4s. Because we think we’re special and we do dumb things so we can justify feeling that way. “Fight Like A Man” from Andrew Osenga’s Flesh EP [audio:Fight.mp3] I was raging like a prophet I was hungry as a cub I was sure as a young man never taken punches yet read a book and thinks he’s wise I had expectations I had my birthright I had a vision of who I was, fell in love with it like a drunk found that light but oh hey, I’m fine cause I fight like a man, fly like a dove hide when I can’t, lie when I don’t how about you? me, I got rich, white problems as big as my TV I got open doors left and right who’s to say where I might feel the call next week? my dreams have swept me out to sea I have this sick feeling there’s something in the wind the scene before the doctor calls and nothing stays the same at all I hope I’m wrong again sometimes I get like this

This was kind of a gut reaction song. The past few years saw a lot of tragedy in my community. A lot of divorce and deep hurts. Some of these felt like they couldn’t be helped. You grieved but you understood. And sometimes, from the outside anyway, it looked like somebody was just deciding to be selfish, knowing that it was destroying other people. In those moments, it’s rarely wise, but you just want to shout “Grow up!” So I put it in a song that, as usual, ends up being more about me and my own issues than anybody else’s. “We Are Not Children Anymore” from Andrew Osenga’s Flesh EP [audio:ChildrenAnymore.mp3] we can fake, we can fall, we can follow we can change on a dime we can gripe, we can grow, we can be strong we don’t get what we want we are not children anymore we are not children, no we are not children anymore sun falls harder where there’s no good water and the sins of fathers fall on sons and daughters so grow up we can plan, we can play, we can pretend there would be no regrets we got years full of pain we can still feel that we can not forget

Alcoholics Anonymous teaches us that you can never rest in your freedom but you need to actively continue to pursue it. That’s why they’re “recovering alcoholics” and not “recovered.” I call myself a recovering cynic. It’s a tendency I have and it’s a place I willingly gave myself to for years. Wasted years. Life is better than that. Nobody ever hung out with a cynical person and left thinking “Well, that was really nice!” It’s just a drain on everybody. How was I able to move past it? I saw people loving when it wasn’t easy. I saw them have joy when they were hurting. I saw them failing each other, forgiving and being forgiven, and moving forward together. When you really see that you have to decide if you want in, or if you want to call it stupid and walk away. I want in. And I want to keep wanting in. “I Was A Cynic” from Andrew Osenga’s Flesh EP [audio:Cynic.mp3] I’ve been a, I’ve been a, I’ve been a cynic it was a, it was a waste of time thought I had, thought I caught some kind of vision I was a, I was a foolish child but I cared and that’s something I still do that ain’t nothing come on, come on, come on! I had my, had my, had my opinions I’ve had them, I’ve had them bite me back woke up in, woke up in, woke up in prison love broke me, love broke me out at last cause you cared and that’s something you still do that ain’t nothing come on, come on, come on! oh, I believe it oh, I have seen it oh, I have seen real love looked nothing like I had thought looked nothing like I had thought cause it hurt nothing like I had thought it took time only holy soul in the back row, baby watch me slowly loosen my grip dare I claim the death of a darkness, darling? can’t you see it starting to slip?

This song is about the spiritual and mental malaise that seems to follow me everywhere some years. There are sometimes people, places, and things attached—and sometimes it’s just an enveloping haze. The time I spend in this feeling is usually accompanied by a pretty critical mirror, showing me all that’s not working about who I am—guilt, shame, mistakes that follow me, loudly mocking me and kicking my heels. The usual suspects. But like the black cloud that led the Israelites out of Egypt by day, and as a pillar of fire in the night, I want to ask whether this might be a natural part of being led through the valley of the shadow of death. Because that’s where we all live. “Black Cloud” from Andrew Osenga’s Flesh EP [audio:BlackCloud.mp3] hiding like a two-year-old and acting like I’m in control I’m waiting for cops to throw the warrant down and tell me that they’ve found me out I’m breaking a thousand little laws a thousand little flaws have found their way inside show me who I am deep beneath the skin still a spark divine still a spark divine? there’s a black cloud over me, over me and I’m too proud to get on my knees, on my knees a dumb kid fighting to fight and I’m tired all the time under this black cloud failing like a pharaoh just to glimpse the straight and narrow when it’s so clear buzzy, sick mosquito thinks he’s soaring like an eagle when the hand’s near a thousand lessons learned a thousand tries to earn what’s already mine remind me who I am shining through my skin still a spark divine? still the spark divine black cloud, when the day fades will you burn in flame? black cloud, when the night aches will you light my way? black cloud over me, over me when the day fades will you burn in flame? black cloud I’m on my knees, on my knees when the night aches will you light my way? light my way