Almost four years ago, we published our first issue of The Molehill. The intent for the book, an anthology, was that it would give us an opportunity to showcase the works of different people in the community and hopefully introduce readers to writer’s they hadn’t encountered before. The Molehill, Vol. 4 is now in the making, and I think it’s safe to say the series is a success. So let me introduce In the Round, Vol. 1. Think of it as The Molehill for musicians. We’ve pulled together a compilation album from within the Rabbit Room community in the hopes that it will not only be a fun collection of music, but that it will give you a first taste of a talented bunch of musicians that you might not have heard before. So what’s on the album? Something for everyone, we hope. There are brand new songs from Randall Goodgame (w/Pierce Pettis), Arthur Alligood, and Ron Block. There are a few old classics from Andy Gullahorn, Eric Peters, and Jill Phillips (and a new classic from Andrew Osenga). There’s a track from Andrew Peterson that you’ve probably heard at the Ryman, but you won’t find on any album—and similarly, a song from Son of Laughter that has yet to appear on any record. Then there’s a great bunch of music from folks you may not be so familiar with, talented songwriters like Buddy Greene, Ellie Holcomb, and Melanie Penn. We also want to showcase some new blood. Volume 1 includes debut tracks from Service Unicorn and Cardiff State, good friends here in Nashville. All told, In the Round is an album packed with 14 tracks, and it’s on sale now for the reasonable price of just ten bucks. We hope you enjoy the music. And while you’re listening, we’ll get to work on Volume 2. [In the Round Vol. 1 is now available in the (new) Rabbit Room Store.]

I wrote this piece five years ago. Two years later, my Daddy was diagnosed with a merciless disease, and on Monday, August 3, at 67 years old, he passed from this life into the presence of his Savior. I’m so thankful that his sufferings are over, but the enormity of my loss will mark me for life. Tell your stories, friends. And love your people. It was a glorious November day, stark and long-shadowed as only South Georgia can make it. The road we traversed was a familiar one—as familiar as the drive to my own home—and every field and house and stand of pines was a familiar friend. Even the red dirt roads veering off to the left and right, which I’d never traversed but in fancy, were known to me. I remembered straining my child-eyes down them as we whizzed past in that lumbering Buick station wagon, my sister crouched up against the opposite window with a book and my brother hanging his elbows over the seat from the ‘back back’ and infringing upon my highly affronted personal space, and knowing what their sudden curves and tree-hung shadows held hidden from the passing view. I saw the old white farmsteads and the barns weathered black with their rusted tin roofs and the pine-guarded pastures stubbled gold in the light of a vanishing year. And if the imaginative sprite was strong upon me, I saw the folks that once inhabited them: women fiercely womanly whether their labor lay in a garden or a schoolroom or an immaculate kitchen, and men whose veteran integrity infused humble origins and working clothes with a courtly grandeur. I both saw and knew such phantom figures, for they were none other than composite daydreams of the kith and kin I had heard stories about all my life. On this particular day my husband was driving, and the celebrated station wagon, long gone to its own place with wreaths and laurels, was supplanted by a Ford Explorer. We were going to the funeral of my father’s oldest sister, a laughing light that had gone out at ninety-six, and though my mother and I managed to keep up an unflagging stream of talk in the back seat, my mind and eyes were awake to the scenes through which we passed. A funeral is always a solemn errand, no matter how graceful a soul may have been in dying (and such was the case with my Aunt Elise), and to combine it with a soul pilgrimage to the source of one’s springing is at once a trust and a gift. A memento mori. I love the way South Georgia makes me feel. I love the memories it kindles and the love of those long-dead that flares and flames amid the quiet streets of the town in which my father grew up. Who could guess that such unassuming spots as a certain street corner or an overgrown garden or a rusty swing set could be thronged with so many happy ghosts, all but elbowing one another aside for sheer joy of the company? I’ll bet a thousand cars a day pass that little grey house that used to be yellow where my grandmother once reigned, never dreaming that to someone on this earth it is a sacred shrine, lit with the undying lamp of remembrance. There was one place that we passed on the way into town, however, that gave me a turn and an unfailing shiver. It was the railroad trestle spanning the road about which my father had recounted tales that made my blood curdle deliciously as an six year-old and now, as a thirty-something, sparked that tantalizing sense of murky recollection that shrouds so many of the legends of childhood. What was that guy’s name? I leaned forward to ask Daddy, but he and Philip were talking politics. And any good Southern girl knows that’s not a conversation to interrupt, unless it’s to put an exasperated stop to it. So I leaned back and tried to remember on my own. Something dreadful…the train…made his hair turn white… Many people cherish childhood memories of their parents reading to them at night, tucking them in with a prayer and a kiss. I have all these, and reverence them with their due. But I have something more—something uniquely precious and entrusted to me alone. I have my Daddy’s stories. When Daddy tucked me in at night, I spurned the fairy tales and little-rabbits-living-in-the-roots-of-trees kind of books that had my heart at all other times. Requesting such from Daddy was an unconscionable waste of natural resources. “Tell me about when you were a little boy,” I would unfailingly say. “Tell me about you and Bobby.” I can still feel the tingling thrill of that new Schwinn for Christmas, green and gold with long tassels on the handlebars. The pathos of cigar boxes of buried treasure in the backyard to which no earthly map would ever lead. The storied splendor of Lynch’s Flowerland across the street and the high glories of playground fights. The hot, helpless anger rises yet at the thought of the anonymous poisoning of Bobby’s dog, Pal. The wonder shines untarnished at the miracle of a tin-can telephone. Bobby was Daddy’s best friend and as inseparable from him as David from Jonathan. Nearly all the stories had Bobby in them—I grew to envision him as an almost god-like entity of healthy, joyous boyhood, brown-eyed (I have absolutely no idea what color his eyes were) and abloom with life from the dew of the morning. Thus was Daddy’s reverence translated to me. When the stories reached the point of Bobby moving away, I could hardly bear it. I remember lying in my little white bed staring into the dark after Daddy had given me my kiss and turned out the light, suffocating with the impossible, senseless tragedy of it. It was my first exposure to the world’s pain. Years later, when my own best friend moved away, the tales of Daddy and Bobby gave context to the story of my own heartbreak and helped transfigure it into a desperate joy for the blessing lent of her nearness all those years. I came in from seeing her off on a life adventure with her new husband and found my Daddy reading in his chair in the den. I crossed the room at a bound, and without ceremony, curled all of my twenty year-old lankiness into his lap and sobbed. “When Bobby moved away, I thought I was going to die,” Daddy said quietly. And it was enough. There were other stories: family legends, winding narratives of the community, anecdotes that Daddy could hardly get through for laughing. I wanted to hear—again and again—about the Coca-Cola plant his daddy managed and about the chug-a-lug contests among the workers. About the pearl-handled pistol, which my grandfather relieved from a would-be robber. And the time Daddy knocked over all his grandmother’s beehives just to see what would happen and received the only serious scolding she ever gave him in her life. These accounts, and thousands like them, gave me the dead back again to see and know and love (both Daddy’s father and Bobby were gone before I was born), and they laid a foundation that serves to this day to convince me that real life is an epic story that’s worth the trouble of both living and telling well. It’s the model for the fairy tales, not the other way around. My aunt’s memorial was a time of story, as well. During the family lunch, people took the floor, one after another to tell such tales of Elise and her “singing heart” as to bring her vividly to life in every mind and heart present: as vivid as she must be this moment in her Lord’s glory. It was a rollicking, joyous time, and I felt so fierce-grateful for the blood that courses in my veins. I love the rock from whence I’m hewn; I loved looking around that room and seeing all those blue eyes and patrician chins and hearing that rollicking roar of a laugh bursting from my Daddy, the laugh he inherited from his father. I heard it again later that afternoon, visiting Aunt Ernestine, who wasn’t well enough to come to the funeral, but received all the family members in state, legs swinging girlishly over the side of her sickbed, blue eyes fixed keen and uncompromising on whomever she addressed. She reminded me of a queen, from whom every word and gesture meant something important. And there that laugh swelled and rolled, again and again, irrespective of lung cancer and all the rest of earth’s sorrow. She was so beautiful I could have stayed in the room all day, just gathering bits of light from her. Her laugh like Daddy’s and her eyes like mine, and that definite, dominant joy that filled the room and made us all laugh, though her breath came in gasps. She patted Daddy’s knee beside her. “This is my Daddy when I was your age,” looking at me. For some wild reason, I felt like she had given me a gift, a bequest. This wonderful, wondrous Granddaddy I had heard about all my life; this immortal Daddy of mine—sitting right here together on the side of Ernestine’s bed. On the way home I plied Daddy with questions. I was desperate—frantic—to hear the stories again. To gather as many to my heart as one four-hour drive could grant me. When one tale was told I fed him another. I kept catching Philip’s eye in the rearview mirror: he was enjoying it as much as I was. But I was more than enjoying—I was cataloguing. I was lining my childish impressions up against the experience of adulthood and logging them away as fully-matured accounts of human existence, in all its agony and ecstasy. We passed the railroad trestle and I leaned forward, imperative this time. “Daddy, tell me again about the man on the train—the dreadful thing that turned his hair white.” Daddy was thoughtful for a moment, gathering up the threads of a tale that had lain dormant for nearly thirty years. “Well, I don’t rightly remember—,” he hedged. “What was that man’s name?” I was aghast. “How could you forget?” I demanded. “It was so dreadful—,” “Oh, yes.” Daddy laughed to himself and the past glimmered in the sound. “Sidney—Sidney McCorckle, that was it.” “So what happened to him? It’s haunted me all my life.” Daddy smiled his slow grin. “Aw, Sidney McCorckle? I don’t know. I made him up.” The moral to that story is that if I possess, in addition to a reverence for the “true tall tales” which make up my personal history, an irrepressible penchant for fiction, you’ll know who to blame.

My eighteen-year-old son is a math whiz. He’s the kind of kid who learns Calculus 2 from some website, then lands a perfect score on the AP test without ever taking the class. Meanwhile, I’m still struggling with five times seven. Was it really fifteen years ago when I bought a gallon bucket of plastic counting bears to teach him addition? Now he’s dragging me to the kitchen table at midnight and patiently drawing out diagrams on paper napkins, unpacking the glories of the numerical universe one step at a time. He’s a born teacher, massaging higher math into the vernacular until my fog lifts, waiting for that moment when I gasp because I finally understand. All at once I see what he means and why it matters (Hallelujah!). I see why this concept is beautiful, why he wanted me to see it; then just as fast all the light passes away, and I’m back in the dark. I don’t know math well enough to hold on to that kind of truth, but for a half second it was mine, and the flash of insight changes me, even as it fades. It wakes me up and makes me ache to get it back again. It lingers like a perfect melody that you heard in a dream but you can’t remember well enough to sing once you wake up. Sehnsucht is a German word that comes close to what I mean, a yearning for something beyond our reach. C. S. Lewis referred to this desire as “the inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what.” It’s more forward-looking than nostalgia, more solid and more hopeful than sentimentality. When Sehnsucht strikes me, it feels like I am rising up through the thick, choking waters of the earth into a cleaner air. Philosophically, we can trace Sehnsucht back to George MacDonald, and back again to the German romantic philosopher Novalis. However, I want to save all that for another essay at another time — for now I’d like to just name the thing and move on to the heart of what I mean to say about it. This week JD has been teaching me about the possibility of a fourth physical dimension. We have all been taught about the three obvious dimensions: length, width, and depth. You may have also heard that the fourth dimension is time. However, JD’s been digging around in theories about a fourth physical dimension — a realm like depth, but beyond depth. I’ve sensed this possibility intuitively since I was a child, but I didn’t have good images for it until reading George MacDonald’s Lilith, and I didn’t think it was scientifically feasible until watching NOVA’s The Elegant Universe, a documentary about string theory. I also felt shadows of a fourth dimension while studying the discipline of philosophy. The transition from old, historical rationalism (think logical proofs) through David Hume’s more modern empiricism (think scientific method) left me hungry. In fact, Hume knew his own gaps. He knew it was impossible to bridge the expanse between what is real and what we perceive to be real (AKA: the mind-body gap), which means that it’s very difficult to prove anything at all. It’s not practical to linger in that futility very long. Those who take it too seriously seem to land in a sulking existentialism, but that’s not where it has to stop. Instead of pouting that we can’t nail everything down, it’s also possible to stay properly small and properly curious in a mysterious universe. As the old song goes, ‘tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free, ’tis a gift to come down where we ought to be. Is it so terrible to recognize that our five little senses and our three pounds of brain might not have the ability to master all that is? There’s something healthy about admitting the possibility that “Holy, Holy, Holy” isn’t redundant, but only the straight line of the edge of a cube? A multi-dimensional… trans-dimensional God … is likely to distort when we attempt to hammer him into a post-Enlightenment flatland. Yesterday I listened to a mathematician describe the blasted, necessary intersection of a Klein bottle. A Klein bottle is an edgeless object that can exist in four-dimensional space, but when we try to form it in a three-dimensional world, we have to insert a seam to even hint at what the thing would be like in a larger reality. As I listened to this man describe how a three-dimensional model could never truly suffice, I heard in his frustration the frustration of a theologian trying to unpack God to a materialist. Another four-dimensional object has been named the hypercube, a 4D version of a square. Generous researchers have tried to create computer simulations of the hyper cube, and there are several videos online that allow us to watch them rotate. When I see the rotation, I understand four-dimensionality for a moment, then lose it again. It’s so difficult to think beyond our own experience. However, the stretch to comprehend this has still been good for me, and I’m going to share with you some of the shadows of possible truth that I’ve collected while stretching. Some of you are more mathy than I am, and you can write and correct me where I am in error, but we must start somewhere, so I’ll take a stab at it. Actually, let’s make it a story. But instead of trying to tell this story in three and four dimensions, we’ll reel it back to two and three. Once upon a time, there was a two-dimensional square who was given consciousness. Our poor square has only ever existed in a flat cognition. He has heard about three-dimensions, but to him this is the stuff of sci-fi conventions and religious cults. Most of his fellow squares have grown out of such nonsense entirely and have declared themselves atheists. They are perfectly content to spend their lives studying the edges and planes, and in fact, they feel rather bright to be doing it. But our square is a bit of a romantic. That’s not his fault, he’s just survived a nasty breakup with a triangle, which has led him to wandering the flat streets, staying up too late, meeting with shady polygons in flat pubs — the sort of polygons who drink flat whiskey and talk about fairies, and fawns, and one particular mythical entity called a “cube of cheese.” You can judge him if you want, but the company does him good, even if he can’t take these dreamers too seriously. As it so happens, you stumble into the pub on a night when this motley crew is discussing three-dimensionality and you decide to help.  In fact, you have a couple of cubes of cheese in your pocket. How lucky. You rotate one cube of cheese for the square to see, but as you do, you realize that he can only understand one side of the cheese at a time. You go over and over it, but he is clearly confused, and at one point you think he might start to cry. “This is why she left me,” he mumbles. She said I just didn’t “get” things. “Women,” a rectangle groans. A new idea comes to you. You take a knife and start slicing your 3-D cheese into little thin slices, like images from an MRI. You even slice the cheese diagonally, trying to help the square understand what depth means. The square says, “Oh! A cube is a million flat planes!’” No, no. He’s closer but still missing it. You begin to organize these slices of cheese like one of those flip books kids use to mimic motion. You show him the slices one at a time, more and more quickly, trying to help him see that they come together to make something whole. As these slices of cube pass over the square’s vision, he suddenly catches a glimmer of depth. All of these individual planes could merge into a single unity. A cube!He can almost see it. Almost. No… it’s gone. Still, in that second, he felt what he had no real ability to perceive or validate. He caught the trajectory, an impression that woke up an ache in his wee little heart for a reality beyond him. I am telling you this story because I think we are but squares in a universe of cheese cubes. I am not a great scholar of science or philosophy, but I have studied enough to begin to feel the limits of the human mind. I can tell that there is a very real possibility that we we will not be able measure or reason our way through all that is. We can snicker at the idea of angels and gods, but the wisest among us are only nonagons. Tim Keller, in his book The Reason for God, cites an old Indian story about five blind men and an elephant. The men are asked to describe an elephant by feel, so the man at the trunk says the elephant is only a sort of tube, while the man at the tail says it is a rope. The man at the ears says it is like a rug, and the man at the side believes it is a wall. On and on, and we finally understand that only someone with sight can perceive the whole of what an elephant is at once. It takes a consciousness that transcends our own limitations to put all the parts in true perspective. It is not that we can know nothing, for God has given us senses, logic, and reason as gifts of imago Dei. Yet when an ache rises, when the universe hints to us that there is more still, and by a flicker, by a flutter, by a sudden flash of want and awe we are moved to Sehnsucht, perhaps these flat rocks are crying out to us. Perhaps this is the beginning of wisdom.

I don’t think about it a lot, but maps are kind of a big deal to me. As a kid, I would sit in the back seat of the mini-van while my mother ran errands to the grocery store and the dry cleaners, and I would use my crayons and spiral-bound notebook to scrawl maps of the streets we drove and the stores we passed, like Ben does in Song of the Sea. Most of my favorite books include maps to help me chart my way through the story — books like The Lord of the Rings, The Wingfeather Saga, Jeff Smith’s BONE, Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet, The Chronicles of Narnia, and — of course — The Hobbit. In fact, one of the main recurring plot devices in The Hobbit is a map, one which sets the entire plot moving and often takes center stage as the characters try to find their way to a secret entrance. I can’t quite claim a Bilbo-level affection for maps, but every explorer knows that a journey requires a map — especially if that journey is in the pages of a good fantasy story. As I’ve mentioned before, my graphic novel series ‘The Dragon Lord Saga‘ has been in some stage of preparation for almost ten years, and the map was one of the first things I constructed. It has seen some additions and adjustments over the years, but the basic structure of this fantasy world remains the same as my sketchbook doodles from way back when. The first book, Martin and Marco, was a one-man show — I drew every panel, wrote every line of dialogue, and designed the entire production. As I work on the sequel, it has been a joy to open this story up to collaboration with the Rabbit-Room/Hutchmoot community, working alongside others on inking pages, photo reference, and some secret side projects. I’m excited to premiere one of those side projects for you today. It’s the official map of the lands of The Dragon Lord Saga, rendered by the talented Stephen Hesselman! [click image to view full size] I connected with Stephen initially through the Hutchmoot community and the Martin and Marco Kickstarter. We quickly formed a bond in sharing our work, collaborating, and generally geeking out about comics. When I saw a map he had drawn for an earlier, abandoned project, I knew he was the one to bring this map to life! Check out this Facebook page to see some of Stephen’s other work and collaborations!

Throughout his life – and certainly throughout his extraordinary career – multi-instrumentalist Ron Block has been something of a musical Huck Finn, a tireless adventurer exploring various styles yet rooted firmly in the bluegrass-country tradition. Now the longtime member of the Grammy-winning band Alison Krauss and Union Station discovers a whole new area of uncharted terrain, with the release of his fourth solo album, Hogan’s House of Music, his first-ever all-instrumental collection. Whether it’s the fierce, passionate bluegrass of “Smartville,” which incorporates pentatonic, string-bending electric guitar-inspired left-hand banjo work, or his hopped-up take on the classic “Clinch Mountain Backstep,” Block’s myriad influences are on display throughout the new collection, from Flatt and Scruggs to Larry Carlton to a lifetime of memorable experiences which the consummate musician pours into each track, resulting in 16 unique and compelling wordless stories. Supplementing Block’s own banjo and guitar playing on the album is a host of celebrated musicians, including his Union Station band mates Barry Bales, Alison Krauss, Dan Tyminski, and Jerry Douglas, as well as Stuart Duncan, Sierra Hull, Adam Steffey, Sam Bush, Tim Crouch, Rob Ickes, Clay Hess, Mark Fain, Byron House, Lynn Williams, and Jeff Taylor. The backing tracks run the gamut from a simple banjo and mandolin duet (“Seneca Squaredance”) to the free-for all of “Mooney Flat Road,” which spotlights two guitars, mandolin, octave mandolin, two fiddles, banjo, snare, bass, and accordion. “I tried to distinguish the songs from one another, to have songs with a few instruments and then songs with a lot more instrumentation,” he explains. “You can also vary the material with tempo and with the kind of song that it is, like on ‘Clinch Mountain Backstep’ with string bends or the pretty ‘Spotted Pony,’ or the slow and pretty ‘Gentle Annie.’ You get all these different feels together and you can put a record together.” Comprised of seven original tunes and some of his favorite covers, the self-released Hogan’s House of Music follows Block’s three acclaimed solo albums released on Rounder Records, Faraway Land (2001), DoorWay (2007) and Walking Song (2013), and the five studio albums and live LP recorded with Union Station. In addition, Block’s guitar and banjo have been heard on albums by Brad Paisley, Alan Jackson, Dailey & Vincent, Dolly Parton, and many others. He was also featured, with Krauss and Union Station, on the multi-platinum soundtrack of the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou and can be seen playing banjo in the 2000 film. Many of the stories told throughout Hogan’s House of Music were inspired by snapshots of Ron Block’s young life. Born in suburban Gardena, California, Block’s parents were divorced by the time he was 6 years old. His mother remarried a widower with six kids at home, meaning he went from being the youngest, with two older brothers, to being a middle child. The family soon moved to Northern California, to a rural town called Smartville, setting him on his Huck Finn-inspired path, for a while. “We lived on a rural road with maybe five houses and every house backed up against the creek,” Block recalls. “The backyard was hilly and went down toward the creek. My stepbrother that was the same age, John, any decent day we’d be out at the creek playing or going out fishing at a place where they used to strip-mine. There was a small lake where there were tons of catfish. Most of our spare time was spent outdoors.” Block’s rural existence was interrupted when he was 13, but the move to Torrance, California, where he lived with his dad, Hogan’s House of Music store owner Chuck Block, proved invaluable when it came to the youngster’s future. “I got my first guitar when I was 11,” he says. “I liked playing it but I liked it just about as much as I liked anything else. I liked to read, I liked to play guitar, I liked to go out and play catch with my brother. It was that kind of thing, really, until I heard bluegrass. When I heard Lester Flatt play on TV, I went nuts for it. For Christmas I got a banjo. My dad says he got me a banjo at 13 and I didn’t come out of my room until I was 21, which is partly true.” This was the mid-1970s, a time when FM radio could be counted on to expose listeners to a number of musical genres, from experimental jazz to hard rock. Thanks to the countless hours spent at Hogan’s House of Music in Lawndale, Calif., he was exposed to music of every stripe, from his fellow employees at the shop, where he began working in 1980. He soon joined his first band, playing banjo and guitar and singing harmony. After forming the group Weary Hearts with Butch Baldassari, Eric Uglum, and Mike Bub, Block was soon to meet young singer and fiddle player Alison Krauss and the members of Dusty Miller, Adam Steffey, Barry Bales, and Tim Stafford, who would soon join Krauss in Union Station. After a stint with Uglum, Dobro player Rob Ickes, and his wife, Sandra Block, in New Wine, Block, now living in Nashville, played with Virginia’s Lynn Morris Band. In October 1991, Ron Block joined Alison Krauss and Union Station, with members Barry Bales, Tim Stafford, and Adam Steffey. The following year, the group recorded the album Every Time You Say Goodbye. Now considered a modern bluegrass classic, the album earned a 1993 Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, the first of an astounding 14 Grammys Block has taken home thus far. Other early highlights of Block’s tenure with AKUS include touring with megastar Garth Brooks, and, of course, the O Brother, Where Art Thou phenomenon, which would put the banjo player on the big screen and also on concert stages with the Down from the Mountain Tour, featuring performers from the O Brother soundtrack. In 2009, the group performed for the President of the United States at the White House. With more than 20 years of touring as part of Union Station, Block most recently went “on the road again” with the legendary Willie Nelson for a 2014-15 tour that continued to expand the group’s diverse and enthusiastic audience. Fascinated by music from an early age, Block recalls the classic LP that made an impact on him: Marty Robbins’ 1959 masterwork, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. An avid reader and history buff, Block discovered heroes in books and on vinyl, and found he could tell vivid stories with his own style of playing – and writing – songs. “Early on, when was first learning how to play guitar and banjo, I learned that I could put a feeling across within a song,” he says. “I start with an image or a feeling. I wrote my last record (Walking Song) with Rebecca Reynolds. As we wrote the songs she would always call me back to the image, musically. She taught me that my strength is staying centered on a feeling or an image and playing or writing from that.” It’s no coincidence that all the images captured for his latest record became part of an LP titled Hogan’s House of Music. The influence of the store, the people he met working there, and the experimental, free-flowing music of the era have all had on Block are incalculable. And they are all represented on the album in one way or another. “I heard an awful lot of music when I was in that store,” he says. “The other guys who worked in the store would be listening to Eric Clapton or Leslie West. That was parallel with me going home to listen to the Stanley Brothers, Larry Sparks, Flatt and Scruggs, Jimmy Martin – all this sort of hardcore bluegrass. I would go home and listen to that stuff and practice and play. I got an electric guitar when I was 18 or 19 and started experimenting with that. Eventually, my study of guitar began infecting and informing my playing banjo. When I started playing with Alison it began to develop into a stylistic thing where I did string-bending and my left hand was often more like an electric guitar player. My right hand was often like a traditional bluegrass banjo. That’s the thing about this record being called Hogan’s House of Music: I realized it is kind of the clashing of those two worlds.” Like a true adventurer, Block has learned something from every avenue of exploration, whether as a member of one of the most successful bands (in any genre) of all time, or as a solo artist expanding his musical horizons. But being able to share the experience with other artists borne of that same pioneering spirit has made his musical journey one that is as indelible for music fans as it has been for Block himself. “Making an instrumental record is a whole different deal, especially one featuring me a lot more,” he explains. “There’s a whole different thought process that goes into it. It’s been a great experience to track this record with all these amazing musicians. To hear the end product and be thrilled with how everybody played on it has been a great process. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve started keeping a little notebook, just writing down the things I’ve learned or the things that I’ll do differently next time.” Hogan’s House of Music will soon be available for preorder in the Rabbit Room store.

Pappy and I drove south from Oxford to the Isle of Wight, but not before heading to the Kilns to see C. S. Lewis’s house and then the short drive to Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry to see his grave. Graves are funny. Let me qualify that. Death is most certainly not funny, and neither are graves, really, though some of the epitaphs at Disney’s Haunted Mansion are. What I mean is that, unless you were close to the person buried, there isn’t much to do other than stand there awkwardly for a few minutes and then move on. That happened years ago when Ben Shive, Laura Story, and a few others of us visited Rich Mullins’ grave in Indiana. It was meaningful, truly, but only for about 90 seconds. As I recall, we reenacted the Spinal Tap scene at Elvis’s grave (watch here), only we sang “Awesome God” with bad harmony instead of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Call me disrespectful, but I think Rich would have liked it. The first time I visited Lewis’s grave it was in the company of a tour guide who said that until he started cleaning the stone and the area around it, the spot was overrun with neglect. Mildew on the stone, weeds everywhere. Nobody in Oxford, he lamented, really cared much about Lewis, and wasn’t that a shame? If it’s true, then yes. Still, someone went to the trouble of commissioning a stained-glass window in Holy Trinity Church, near the pew where Lewis and his brother Warnie always sat. The window, which Eric and I were able to admire from the inside since the church building was unlocked, depicted Aslan and the Dawn Treader and several other scenes from the Narnia books. The Lewis brothers were creatures of habit, because there’s even a plaque that denotes where they sat to worship. The story goes that the brothers always left church about five minutes early, and no one really knew why. He suspected it was to beat the lunch crowd at the little pub just a block away. Whether it’s true or not, I like the story. Our respects paid, we hit the road and headed south, at which point we immediately came to a roundabout (or, in Pappy’s parlance, a “roundie”). Then we got up to speed, glad to finally covering some ground, and promptly encountered another roundie. Another short stretch of the English version of an interstate, then another roundie. It takes forever to drive anywhere on that island. After about fifty roundies (in about five miles) we realized we were hungry, so we took the first exit into a village and ate in the first pub we saw. Since we’ve covered graves, a quick word about pubs: they may not be good at motorways yet, but they know how to do pubs in the UK. In the States, pubs are noisy. There’s one in Nashville called Dan McGuinness that I used to like before I was spoiled by the real thing. In the States, a pub is just a singles bar with wood paneling. The music is loud. Meaningful conversation is all but impossible. They’re overcrowded, especially at night, with young professionals looking for a sad version of companionship. But in England the pubs are typically for peace and quiet and a pint of ale with your friend. They’re cozy and historic and unpretentious. And they’re everywhere. It took us all of five minutes to pull in, order a meat pie, and breathe a sigh of relief that we weren’t driving in circles on the wrong side of the road. Matt Redman, whose music you probably know, got wind of the fact that we were in England and invited Eric and I to Abbey Road Studios to sing on his upcoming Christmas record. We tried to make it work, but there was no way to do that and still make our ferry to the Isle of Wight. (Thanks anyway, Matt!) Instead, we took our time as we drove south and visited a little town called Whitchurch, because there was once an epic battle between rabbits there. If you’ve never read Watership Down—well, what are you waiting for? Seriously, it’s one of the best adventure stories out there, and I only read it because Eric commended it to me (and in fact his song “Rundown” from Chrome is a Watership Down tribute). The quote on the back of the book from the London Times sums it up: “I announce, with trembling pleasure, the arrival of a great story.” Incidentally, it’s the book I was reading when we moved to our property eight years ago, and when I saw the big sloping hill (a.k.a. “down”) above our little house and the rabbits munching away at clover in the field I thought of Hazel and Fiver and Bigwig and their epic journey to their new home, and promptly named the Peterson abode the Warren. One of the charming things about Watership Down is that author Richard Adams based the locations in the book on real places around his hometown of Whitchurch. There’s a real Nuthanger Farm, for example. If you’ve read the book you’ll remember the escape at the end, when the rabbits cross the perilous river. Eric and I drove to Whitchurch and, while we never found the actual hill of Watership Down, we did drive along that little river and had no trouble imagining General Woundwort and his cronies in hot pursuit of our rabbity heroes. It was really cool, but because there were no used bookshops I could sense Pappy’s impatience. We moved on. A few hours later we arrived in Portsmouth in time to watch the sun set over the channel. We boarded the ferry like the seasoned travelers we were, debarked on the famous Isle of Wight, and drove to the home of our hosts, James and Becky Pontin, without buying a single book that day. Aren’t you proud? Little did I realize that when we ferried back to Portsmouth in two days, Eric would once again find a treasure trove, while I, once again, would burn with envy. [Day One] [Day Two] [Day Three] [Day Four] [Day Five: Part One] [Day Five: Part Two] [Day Six] [Day Seven]

Sunday afternoon, and I’m sitting on a picnic table under an open shelter at the local state park. I’m up on a hill that looks down on the lake, watching a bunch of people messing around in the water. Maybe fifteen preschoolers are held afloat by inflatable arm rings, and they are bobbing in orbit around their parents like Jupiter’s moons gone wild. The older kids are playing shark, sitting on each other’s shoulders, and dunking one another under the dirty green water. If I were their mothers, I would be terrified about somebody drowning or getting a brain amoeba; but these are women who wear big sunglasses and tank tops while smoking cigarettes; they throw their heads back and laugh so easily. Some folks are able to live fully in the present, and they are probably healthier than I am because of it. Under a tree shade a little way out from the water, a couple is sitting on a blanket, putting suntan lotion on each other. They’ve been going over the same spots six or seven times, kissing every few seconds, hugging and fondling. All these people are sitting around them, and they don’t seem to mind the audience a bit. The guy is wearing a doo rag and the girl has dry blonde hair grown out a couple inches from dark roots. They’ve got to be all sweaty in this heat. He’s too pink, she is too burnt, and they are both too soft to win any beauty competitions, but they are each the whole world to the other this afternoon, and I’m glad those little kids in the water aren’t paying too much attention to what’s happening on the land. I used to despise July, but over time I’ve grown to love it even better than spring’s shy, pink graces or the sad, sweet, cinnamon longings of autumn. July is heavy, lazy hot. It makes your joints loose. The leaves are hanging down from their trees trying to get spread out from one another, wilted and soft like the skin on the back of the hands of a middle-aged woman who has just finished a full sink of dishes. Wasps and grasshoppers rise in little whirring motions out of the tall grasses, and when a kid runs through them it’s like the earth is throwing confetti up at the sky. I know that if I sit here long enough this place will tell me what it’s saying. Robert Capon once devoted an entire chapter to the cutting of an onion, and his ideas have changed my outlook on almost everything since. He urges the seer to take his time: “As nearly as possible now, try to look at it as if you had never seen an onion before. Try, in other words, to meet it on its own terms, not to dictate yours to it. You are convinced, of course, that you know what an onion is. You think perhaps that it is a brownish yellow vegetable, basically spherical in shape, composed of fundamentally similar layers. All such prejudices should be abandoned. It is what it is, and your work here is to find it out.” Plato looked into the heavens for forms that would explain the earth, but his disciple, Aristotle, chose to look at the earth to understand the heavens. A balance is wise, I think. Both are necessary. Still, the willingness to see what’s close has a lot to do with why Flannery O’Connor was such a good writer. It also explains why my friend Carey Pace digs photographic wonders out of whatever her kids happen to drag out in the kitchen today. Seers get down on their knees and explore a thing, because they know art isn’t about running off to grand places to find grand things, it’s about going inward and inward, into what’s already here, until you find out what the world has been telling you all along. Looking at details is humility, and it allows a disciple to recognize the Messiah when he shows up in Bethlehem or sometimes even in the middle of Wal-Mart. A child is screaming hysterically. I think he has water up his nose. His big sister and brother are making a ring around him splashing as hard as they can, and he is mad that they aren’t empathetic. He has always been the baby and protected. Suddenly, he decides to smack the lake back at them until (haha!) he understands that he is both small and fierce. At once fury dissolves, and everyone is laughing, because all three kids are strong now, and that is camaraderie, which is something to celebrate. Their mother missed all of it, which was all right, because sometimes children need space to learn things instead of being refereed. A new woman has entered the lake to swim. I didn’t see her until just this minute. Up until now, everybody in bathing suits has just been regular people, too white, too fat, wearing suits that look like they were bought two years ago with elastic that looks like it’s about to give up the ghost. But this woman is a thin, tan blonde in a firm coral bikini. She keeps tugging at the tied string that runs around the sides of her hips, but that looks like more of a habit than a necessity. Every few minutes she bends over toward the children to run her fingertips in the water. She is a nymph, a transcendent wonder of the peasant gene pool. She is standing smack in front of the kissing couple on that blanket, but they aren’t kissing now because the man is leaning away from his woman, elbow planted way down into his knee so he can watch the bikini in the water. With the other arm he’s drinking one of those tall canned beers. The woman on the blanket is angry. She angles her body away from him even while their rumps are still touching at the sides. He leans the other direction. They divide and divide, getting their spines to about a 45 degree angle before the woman on the blanket decides to change strategies and lie on her back with her glory up to the sun. As if on cue, the skinny nymph moves out of sight, and the boyfriend comes to himself and chooses to bless what he has been given instead of what has been taken away. All is forgiven. I don’t like to see them kissing, but I’m glad the pretty girl didn’t win. A breeze is picking up because it’s about six thirty and the hot can’t hang in these mountains very long. That breeze is catching up the hair fallen down on the sides of my face, and it cools the sweat rolling down my back. I’ve been with people too much lately. My husband kicked me out of the house a few hours ago and told me to find somewhere quiet to settle down. Lately I’ve been all stirred up about the rotten things happening in the world. Getting outside can do me some good when I get like this, but I don’t know if it will today. I tried to read but couldn’t focus, so I turned the speaker on my Kindle app and listened to a computer voice offering up Tim Keller’s thoughts on suffering. Keller knows the world is broken, but he says even if I fight like mad, I can’t change everything that’s wrong, because sin’s got itself all woven into everything. He writes, “[p]ain and evil in this world are pervasive and deep and have spiritual roots. They cannot be completely reduced to empirical causes that can be isolated and entirely eliminated. As Hamlet said, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. . . .’ Perhaps even more to the point is a line in J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings : ‘Always after a defeat and respite, [evil] takes another shape and grows again.’ No matter what we do, human suffering and evil can’t be eradicated. Even when you put all your force into stopping it— it just takes another form and grows in some new way. If we are going to face it, it takes more than earthly resources.” Every penny in my pocket says “In God We Trust,” but the older I get, the more I see how often we don’t, neither the atheists nor the religious people like me who freak out and yell that everybody needs to trust Jesus and stop ruining my country. I need to learn to believe more, fight smarter, and fear less. Besides all this, my oldest son is leaving for college in a few weeks, and the countdown makes every word we speak in our house feel so strange. I keep waking up at night with a feeling like he’s two years old and lost in a department store. He’s tall, muscular, wise. He’s ready, but I’m not sure I am. Like everything with the first kid, I’m letting this become too big a deal. He told me a few days ago, “Mom, do you realize you are bringing every conversation back to the dangers of substance abuse?” It’s not that I don’t trust him, he’s a great kid. I just keep wanting to tell him something to settle my own nerves. These last few days feel like cramming for a test, and I want to write the answers to life all over him—not that I know all the answers to life, but I want him to have them. When he’s at home, I’m gravitating around him, trying to make him sandwiches and finding excuses to sit close by. I’m going to miss him so much. The woman on the blanket just stood up to wave at two kids in the water. She yelled and told them to get over near the bank because there are jet-skis coming. She’s a mother. I wasn’t expecting that. There’s a blue chalk drawing on the shelter concrete. A child made it. There are six circle bodies drawn with six circle heads on top of them, then there’s another big circle drawn all around all of that, like children draw to signify that this all makes a family. Every child I’ve ever known has drawn families this way. It’s universal kid language. There is also one body drawn halfway through the large family circle, and I wonder who was meant by it. I wonder if that’s somebody who died, or somebody who got remarried, or somebody who grew up and left home for good. I want to find some blue chalk and fix that drawing so everybody gets in. Have mercy, the couple on the blanket is rolling around. I mean it, they are wrestling in full daylight. The man is on top of her, and I see an arm flailing. She’s laughing, so I sit still, but other people are staring. They’ve been drinking too much and are making a tangle. When they finally stop, they both stand up and shout at the kids in the water again. I realize that one of the kids is a teenage girl swimming with her boyfriend, and that those two are front to front, and the fella has lifted the girl up, carrying her. The momma tells them both to cut it out, then stands up and adjusts her shorts so she can take a few selfies before she sits back down. There’s a walking trail that runs near the water, and people are making miles on it today. A young couple comes pushing a stroller. The mom is wearing her baby weight still, and it suits her beautifully. I’m not being kind, she’s radiant with maternity. Her head is wagging from not sleeping nights and her ponytail is a mess, but Dad is grinning and proud. I see her come up on the swimmers, and she’s panting, cheeks flushed. I can tell she doesn’t realize how beautiful she is, because her shoulders fold in like she’s ashamed of herself. Meanwhile that baby’s got his fat legs sprawled out wide and white, and he’s passed out from a belly full of milk, and the sunshine, and the motion of the stroller wheels. Dad doesn’t even notice the other women because he’s trying to make sure the other trail walkers get a good look at the child he helped make. I don’t blame him. Two men with a little groomed dog. One swings his arms a lot while he’s talking and he walks kind of pinched in the back. The micro dog is leading both of them, and they wait for the pup to pee anywhere and sniff anybody he wants. I get judgmental and think that I’d make that dog mind a little better if he were mine. An athletic girl in a yellow tank top walks on strong, brown legs. I remember that I need to start exercising. Retired guy on a bike too small for him. He’s dressed up and wearing a helmet. Probably an engineer. The shadows are starting to get longer. Here comes an older couple. The woman is wearing a visor, a bright floral top, and Bermuda shorts. She is trim and looks like the sort of person who would cut sugar and salt in recipes and plan for when celery is on sale. She’s walking a few steps ahead of the man, and she seems comfortable there. Her husband looks a little lost, but he has a wondrous round belly, round nose, round cheeks. I like him. She is alert and angular, as if she’s been figuring things out for both of them all their lives. She carries her hand in a point and directs his eyes and thoughts with a finger. I suddenly realize that she was a teacher, probably fifth or sixth grade. He has a baseball hat pulled way down over his eyes. I look down near the water and see that the blanket couple is packing up their stuff. They take it slowly, standing with their hands on their hips. The weekend is over. We’re all delaying, and no matter what differences there are between us, as evening falls on the park, a communal empathy starts to make everyone gentle with one another. I missed church this morning, but this time of the day makes almost the same feeling I get Sunday mornings during the greeting when everybody turns around and says, “Peace of Christ to you,” and suddenly you smell everybody’s aftershave and fabric softener because people are reaching across one another to make a welcome. I’d like to watch that greeting from the ceiling someday. I’d like to look at all the stillness, all the obedience, all the standing and sitting, quicken up into that glorious awkward flutter of fellowship. Another Sunday gone. Another Sabbath that we all took to rest, and to love, and to swim, and to kiss. An afternoon to catch a breath from fear. A walk. A nap. An hour or two away from the noise. I don’t want Sunday to end. I don’t want July to end. I don’t want this stage of life to end, but time moves on and on. The peace of Christ to you. – – – Painting: “Swimmers, Javea” (Detail) by Joaquin Sorolla (1905)

If you’re an illustrator and you suffer from a condition I refer to as “Head and Shoulders Syndrome,” I’m here to say there is hope. This is a condition that plagued me for many years until I had a revelation. First, let me explain the condition. Say, you sit down to sketch, and you rack your brain for something cool to put down on that blank sheet of paper. After thinking for what seems like forever, your inspiration to draw is slipping and you do the only thing you know to do. You draw a portrait of a character. A profile. His head and shoulders. That’s it. You go no further. No arms. Certainly no hands, because hands are a huge pain in the rear and frankly, it’s easier to pretend there are no hands in the world you are drawing. I’m not poking fun at you. I’ve been through this for years with myself. I don’t know what the cause is, or if there is a singular cause at all. Is it possibly that, for most of us, the face is the most expressive thing we see each day? Every face we come in contact with? Maybe it’s that we see all of the expressions in a face and they make an imprint on our creativity. We draw a creature. He has scales and dark, lifeless eyes, and a nasty sneer. We draw a weathered old soldier. His face is covered in scars and scruff—an expressive face that tells a story of his warring life. But I’ve come to feel that there is so much more of that character’s story to be told than can be told in just his face. In the beginning of my relationship with my mentor, I’d share these character studies with him. He responded with, “These are great characters. Let’s see them doing something.” Several years ago, while I was courting Abrams Books for work, I sent character studies to the art director, and he said, “These are great, but what’s the story?” I love following illustrators on Instagram. It’s such a great way to get inspired. However, one of the saddest things I come across is that there are so many artists out there who can draw really well, but daily they will not push themselves beyond the “creative block” and beyond the head and shoulders of the characters they create and share. Though they do share some really expressive heads and shoulders! But if you read the rest of this post, will you agree to challenge yourself with what I’m going to propose? I promise you will grow as an artist. You will inspire others. You will surprise yourself. Here is my challenge. As you observe life around you each day, don’t look at the expressions in the eyes and the mouth for a while. Let those features take a back seat while you retrain yourself. You have enough mental images of those features packed away in your subconscious anyway. Instead, step back and look at the whole expression. The hands. You might dread drawing them. They are tremendously expressive. They are talking. How many people you come in contact with talk with their hands? Why don’t your characters? I promise that once you realize how much character is in a hand gesture, you will look forward to adding the hands as an accessory to each character. Some are bony, crooked, chubby, stubby, missing fingers, crazy nails. You will discover how much fun it is to create expressive hands. Clothing and accessories also tell a story. A weathered wanderer’s clothes will tell the story of where he’s been. If we never see past his shoulders, we won’t see that they are bearing the weight of a worn out bag, loaded with a bed roll, pots and pans and utensils, magical trinkets, and a string of dried fish for snacking along the trail. Sounds silly, huh? But that sure will make the viewer stop and wonder about your character. Look at the arch of the spine as the character is arguing, pouting, thrusting a sword, taking a blow on the shield. That arch should tell the story of the emotion and power in the scene. The legs and feet should matter just as much. The weight of the character, not just physical, but emotional, rests on those legs and feet. And I could really dig into how expressive shoes can be! They tell a story. There is so much happening that talks and expresses emotion. Once I got myself drawing more of the character’s body, I began to challenge myself in new ways. When I sit down to sketch from my imagination, the challenge I present myself with is “Draw something that tells a story.” I’m not saying you should never do a character study again, but let me give you an example of how I challenge myself. I hope I get a chance to see some of your work once you challenge yourself with this mindset. Together, we can defeat Head and Shoulders Syndrome.

[Today’s guest post comes from Josh Bishop. We think he might be a long lost cousin of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Be sure to check out his website at Josh Bishop Writes. If you’d like to submit your work to the Rabbit Room, check out our submissions policy here. I never expected Charles Spurgeon — that cigar-smoking Calvinist preacher from the late 1800s — to take my breath away. Like so many of my great-grandfathers’ well-thumbed volumes that sit inherited and unread on my shelves, Spurgeon seemed a dusty relic, old before my grandparents were young. Yet when I was pointed to an excerpt from one of his sermons, I found something unexpected: a full-throated delight in the natural world, an unashamed defense of the pleasures to be found all around us. It was Spurgeon who, before Chesterton and his “unutterable muddiness of mud” or Capon’s lamb for eight persons four times, first taught me to bite into an overripe world and let its juices dribble into my beard. “The man who is altogether bad seldom delights in nature,” Spurgeon said. “One of the purest and most innocent of joys, apart from spiritual things, in which a man can indulge, is a joy in the works of God.” This world isn’t a distraction from God, like some of those misguided, naysaying and pinch-faced neo-Puritans would have us believe, but a means of seeing and knowing and enjoying him better than we could were we to shutter our windows against the world in an act of mistaken piety. No, Spurgeon reminds us that ours is a Christ who can be found “on the hills, and by the shores of the sea”; we “hear [our] Father’s voice in the thunder, and listen to the whispers of his love in the cadence of the sunlit waves.” His sermon proclaims a view of the world in which creation points to and participates in the goodness of God. It carries within itself the loveliness and beauty of the Artist who made it and gifted it to us, his children. And it points beyond itself to the higher glories of the new birth, of creation made and remade. Here was a view of the world better suited, I thought, to poetry than to sermon. No, perhaps not better suited — at least as suited to poetry. One that should be preached from a thousand pulpits, yes, but also one that could comfortably fit in the formalwear of metered verse. In any case, I was determined to try. Spurgeon’s sermon had gripped me and would not let me go. When I looked out the car window on my morning commute or visited the local petting barn with my sons, I saw Christ there; every summertime trip to the beach or midwinter slide down the sledding hill had become a new vision of our Father’s wonder-full world. I heard Spurgeon’s voice urging me on. His words haunted me. I’m not bold enough to think that my scribbled lines have reached Spurgeon’s heights. Please, when you’re finished here, read his homily yourself — this message is better heard straight from the churchman’s mouth. I pray that he gives you, as he did me, new eyes to see our great Savior in the world he made. Lord’s Day, July 5, 1891 Adapted from a sermon by Charles Spurgeon It is righteous, this pleasure in natural things: In these star-speckled heavens – sky-scattered delights! – In these meadows, pale garnished with daisies and kingcups; In seas, where beasts creep from deeps darker than night’s Vasty pitch; in these woods, sounding round as with wing Beats swift minstrels mark time and, mid-carol, take flight. They are madmen who marvel the mountains and say Of their chisel-chipped peaks – here brushed light, there daubed dark – “No, I see here no God,” though the Maker’s mark’s made In pinched clay. There is something of him in this art. Only look: Lift your eyes from that beauty-blind way To rejoice – echo: “Good” – as God praised from the start. O what gladness – what joy! – in the craft of his hands. Hear our Christ in the hills – how he thundering raves! Hear him whisper his hush at the sea’s pebbled strand, Where his cadence sings soft in the sun-stippled waves. When admiring these works of our Father we stand All the nearer, among them, to him. If we say, Then, that bulbs’ goblets gold, filled with sunlight in spring, Speak of life newly waking from winter-wrapped rest – How much more must the sight of a man new-born bring News of goodness and grace? How much more should a breast Choked with thorns, once – once withered with sin’s leeching sting – Give us joy when revived by Christ’s cross-borne caress? How much more than the buds of the silver-leafed birch Bursting new should those walking, once-dead, now proclaim: “Let this slum-become-temple, this whorehouse-turned-church – This old life dawning new like the darkness turned day – Spur your praise!” Though there’s joy to be found when we search Shore and brake, glory’s more in creation remade.

My 12 week online class, Tolkien I: The Silmarillion and The Hobbit, starts on August 31, followed by Tolkien II: The Lord of the Rings in the spring of 2016. Find out more and register here. In the meantime, here’s a little about my own personal journey into Tolkien: My love affair with the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien has been relatively short but passionate. As a child, I had a peripheral knowledge of some book called The Lord of the Rings by someone named Tolkien that was considered to be relatively important. But I never read it, or The Hobbit for that matter. In fact, I did not crack the covers of these books until about fourteen years ago. I heard that a movie of The Fellowship of the Ring was being made and would come out in December of 2001. Given my faint knowledge of Tolkien and his greatness, I kept up on its development, and when it came out, I went to see it. Hook. Line. Sinker. Something happened. The movie’s rendering awakened something inside of me that had been asleep for a long, long time, as if a part of me I never knew existed had been found. It was exactly as C. S. Lewis put it when the first book of the trilogy came out—“Like lightning out of a clear sky.” A new world had been opened up to me, just begging me to enter in and explore. And explore I did. As soon as I could, I purchased a boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and I dug in with both hands and an unlocked imagination. Needless to say, my love only deepened, and the reading quickly piled up. It didn’t end with the books. I read commentaries, critiques, articles, analyses. Soon I was getting into Elvish language guides, Tolkien’s letters and life, and wonder of wonders, The Silmarillion, which blockhead once had the temerity to call an “Elvish telephone directory”. The amazing thing in all this was that, at no time did I reach the point where I said, “Oh, that’s it? That’s all there is to this?” I never hit the bottom of the depths of Tolkien’s mythology. And I’m still sinking. I have become absolutely convinced that J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the greatest literary geniuses to have graced this earth. This simple Oxford don, with the brilliance of a single imagination, combined with his extensive knowledge of mythology and language, spun off thousands of years of history in the form of poems, narratives, languages, annals of kings, chronologies, explanations of traditions and customs, calendars, etc. If you have done any serious exploration of Tolkien’s writings, you will know what I mean. And if you’ve only recently begun to explore Middle-earth, you will soon learn to stand back in awe as I and so many others have done. But what comes even closer to my heart is the religious nature of this mythology. I use that word with the uttermost reverence and passion. But perhaps a better phrase would be incarnational nature. Just as Christ became the enfleshed representation of the divine on earth, Tolkien’s mythology serves as a lesser (and fallible) incarnation of divine truth, enfleshed in a great tale. The genius of Tolkien’s religious expression was that he understood the power of communicating truth through myth. Today we see that word and we might tend to think “a lie, something that is probably not true.” But Tolkien had a better understanding of it, that of a profoundly moving story that actually attempts to say something true. He realized this as he poured over the ancient mythology of the past; but he also realized it as he looked at the Bible. The power of myth was derived from the fact that the Creator was the Author of myth, particularly what Tolkien called the True Myth. As he said in his lecture “On Fairy Stories”: “I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe [good catastrophe]. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation [our own works] has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality.’ There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.” This is what makes us come to the end of great stories, including The Lord of the Rings, with a deep sigh and a slight pang of heart. It is because our souls are echoing with the faint strains of some greater music, and it is the music of heaven. Our eyes have been touched by faint splinters of pure light, and it is the light of God. It is, as Tolkien said, “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

I saw Mad Max: Fury Road again last week and marveled for the third time at its ability to convey incredibly complex action scenes with rare clarity. My wife (and plenty of others) don’t understand my fascination with the film. “What makes this different from Transformers?” she asks. “It’s just two hours of action and explosions.” Well, I think there’s a LOT that elevates it above dreck like Transformers, but below is an interesting contrast. The first video is about “Bayhem,” a pejorative term given to Michael Bay’s style of filmmaking, and it does a great job of illustrating (part) of why his films are so mind-numbing. The second is a short example of how George Miller shot and edited Mad Max for maximum clarity. These two examples of the art of cinema are a lot like the way I often talk about writing: poor writing is overblown and meandering while good writing is succinct and clear.

In Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, the antagonist who sabotages many a creative undertaking goes by the name Resistance. Resistance wears many disguises. It might show up as the deadlines and demands of your day job, the apparent indifference of the people around you, or your own apathy toward the “industry” of making art. Or sometimes it looks like vegging on the couch with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and seven seasons of Parks and Rec on Hulu. (At least… um… that’s what I’ve heard…) For many unfinished manuscripts, stagnating blogs, blank canvases, and forgotten songs, Resistance is at least one of the cuprits. “Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear… If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.” When it comes to turning my work loose in the world, lately, the Resistance is me. For a long time, I’ve wanted to publish a book of poetry. I spent 7 or 8 years collecting little poems here and there, observing life as it is or exploring life as it should be. I gathered them up in a Scrivener document (ask me about why I love this program sometime), and arranged them into a folder titled, brilliantly, First Poetry Book. Just keeping the dream alive. Wrote more. Submitted to a few online poetry journals. Got rejected. Wrote more. Explored self-publishing options. By summer 2013, I’d gathered up enough for a decent collection, and I emailed the manuscript to Chris for a second opinion because dangit, this would be the summer! We got engaged. Wedding planning put everything else on hold. In summer 2014, I added a few newer pieces. The wedding happened, and I moved a thousand miles. The book was pushed to furthest back corner of my mind, because who has time to edit when you’re changing your name and decorating a house and trying to learn how to survive the New England highways without a GPS? So summer is here again. On good days, the manuscript, the little book with no name, feels like a pebble in my shoe. When I’m busy, I think about how I really should work on it. Sometimes I’ll open that little document and play with fonts. A few poems appeared in The Molehill Vol. 3, for which I am grateful. Feeling the weight of a book in my hands and seeing my long-hidden words beside art by some of my favorite people on earth somehow makes me feel like maybe I have something to say after all. (I am also thankful for Pete Peterson’s immense kindness and honest editing process, which made all of them better and spurred me to revise the book AGAIN.) Which brings me back to Resistance. I have second thoughts sometimes. “These poems are so OLD! Do I really want my first book to be OLD things?” Granted, “so OLD” is relative. The book spans 40 odd poems I wrote between 2008 and 2013, really not that long ago, but long enough to feel like a lifetime away when you’ve been through so many changes — marriage, moving, and a new job all at once. In a year of rediscovering my identity, Jen Rose seems like a separate person sometimes. And yet, maybe that’s why it’s time to let them go? It’s so easy to slowly forget where you came from, the concerns and dreams that used to be everything. That your past, present, and future selves are all one you, all ages, all experiences woven into your greater story. So Rabbit Room friends, this is how I’m fighting the Resistance. I am working on a book, and I am determined to finish it before year’s end. It’s from another era of life, true. But I still want to hold it in my hands, slip it into my poetry shelf between writers I love, and let these little stories mark my place so I don’t forget where I’ve come from. I’m inviting you into this process, hoping to give updates now and then, so I’m less tempted to procrastinate. But most of all, I’m excited for you to meet this book. With fear and trembling, of course. But that’s all part of the adventure.

Several weeks back, I found myself in Vancouver with nothing to do. So I left my hotel room to wander around the city and made it about fifty feet before stumbling into The Paper Hound, an amazing boutique used bookstore. The surprise of finding such an excellent shop along with the fine selection of books made me go tharn. I determined to return to my room for a few minutes to collect my wits and mentally prepare a list of titles to search. This is how I discovered my hotel room rested directly above the bookshop. The serendipity was irrefutable. I knew I had to spend time and money below the floorboards of The Victorian, where I was staying. Over at Alan Jacobs’s Text Patterns blog, I have been following his technological history of modernity project. The thought occurred to me that so long as I was in Canada, I might try searching for a Canadian author in a Canadian used bookstore. Jacobs recommends Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology. She was German but made her life and scholastic career in Canada. Good enough. So I trotted out of my squeaky-floored hotel room, down the hall, past the fire escape, out of the front door, down the stairs, around the corner, and into the lusty smell of The Paper Hound’s book stacks, where I took my time getting to the section I figured would contain Franklin’s book. It did. Ursula Franklin is my new favorite Wendell Berry. That sentiment, however, must wait for another blog post. (Though, I hope it has piqued your interest enough to rush out and find a copy of The Real World of Technology to read.) For now, I want to get down an out-of-the-way quote from an early chapter and then ask a question. In this passage, Franklin is describing how we do things in certain ways and the way we do things can identify who we are. Here is what she says, On another occasion I sat in the back of a large meeting room, listening to a long and boring discussion. I began to knit. A young woman came over, sat down next to me, and whispered, “I’d like to talk to you. You knit just like my mother.” Of course, her mother was also German, and there is a German way of knitting. I began to wonder, does anyone ever see me doing anything and recognize the way I am doing it, like how Ursula Franklin knits like a German? I am Italian but aside from belching like my grandfather, I do not suspect anyone would ever notice me doing anything like an Italian. Being from San Diego it is possible my casual demeanor might give me away as hailing from Southern California. But do I do things like a San Diegan? Especially on my heart and mind, do I do things like a Christian? If I were at a conference for my work in digital marketing, could I imagine someone crossing a meeting hall to sit next to me: “I’d like to talk to you. The way you take notes in your Moleskine reminds me of my dad. He was a pastor.” There is a cynical way to think about the Christian way to do things. I am skeptical when it comes to the Christian versions of coffee shops and clothing. It is possible, I am sure, to open a Christian coffee shop or create a Christian line of clothing. But that is not the kind of doing that Franklin is talking about or that I am wondering about. When she began to knit, she did not declare herself to be a German knitter. She just was, and it was noticeable. A Christian way to do things might include declaring belief, like adding an ichthus under the name of the coffee shop or on the label of the clothing. But in that example someone would notice what is declared, not what is done. In Franklin’s example someone noticed what was done, not what was declared. In the same way that there is a noticeably German way to do knitting, is there a noticeably Christian way to…? There could be many ways to complete that sentence. How about this one. In the same way that there is a noticeably German way to do knitting, is there a noticeably Christian way to do art?

In the early to mid ’80s, I was a boy in a family where I was allowed to have a He-Man action figure, but not Skeletor. I could play with Lion-O but not Mumm-Ra. I don’t know, maybe they could throw a costume party or set up a lemonade stand together—but those muscles and swords were NOT for fighting evil. Actually, I can remember our church passing out a list around Christmas of what toys were and weren’t appropriate. For a few years, I had to choose Christmas gifts off of that list. Thankfully, I was allowed to have both G.I. Joe and Cobra, Luke and Vader, and even those little, pink M.U.S.C.L.E. guys on the no-no list. But seriously, what good are heroes with no evil to defeat? Just a bunch of guys building muscles and inventing weapons because they love to share those things with each other? This morning I read a quote from Brennan Manning that reminded me of these funny memories: God will bring good out of evil – even a greater good than if there had been no evil – and the trial will have been an immense good for us. So I say, the bigger the bad-guy, the greater the hero. [Editor’s note: I actually own this poster (below), and it’s awesomeness is scarcely to be comprehended.]

It’s a Johnson Century reel, model number 100B, made in the U.S.A. It used to be my Dad’s—the reel I used when I went fishing as a kid. There’s a white release button with a smooth indent where your thumb fits, and it makes a delicious click when you push it down. Even sitting on a 5-gallon bucket in the garage, I can’t hear that click without hearing also what comes next, the whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr of a line making hope’s arc to heaven, rising like the angel Gabriel leaving the Virgin Mary, then suddenly recognizing that he’d forgotten something. At its peak, that line is carried by gravity down to the earth, down into the dark, wet, green, down near the thick, red mud where the soul of a fish gets itself wooed. “I will make you fishers of men,” Jesus said to those leathered few who already knew by trade how hard it was to fish for fish. Fish are fickle as women, and women are fickle as men, and I don’t know how to sink down into the shadows where I am called to go forth and woo, and to preach, and to mother, down in this cold, blind darkness. The line wasn’t rolled up right the last time this reel was used, and somehow it’s got wound all around the rod handle. A big mess is hanging down in an irreverent tangle, looking like a pretty little blonde baby whose momma didn’t fix her hair before they went out to the I.G.A. to pick up a carton of cigarettes and a sack of light bread. The top dome is covered in dust, and a crust has collected on top, bits of insects caught in webs, cat hair, and probably spider feces. I suppose there’s something living inside the casing. I want to look inside it, because I remember how it smells like old grease and turns my fingertips silver brown with the residues of metal and oil. Some of my first memories go back to this reel. Dad always kept a jon boat because he had character. I never did care for a bass boat, those shiny, loud river bullies, smelling like burnt gasoline and gaudied up with glitter. A Jon boat is quiet, dull, and simple. It lets you be a part of what’s around you. Sometimes when the fish weren’t biting, I would dip the tip of my rod in the water and let a line of it race down and drop on the dry sides of the boat. In full sun, the wet would dry straight off, and there was something hopeful about watching the mark you’d just made lighten back up into nothing.  A new beginning. A baptism. “Whiter than snow, whiter than snow, wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow,” the old people used to sing, and that lyric is woven all through the world. The casing on the reel is racing green, which I should have told you straight off the bat. Any other color, and it wouldn’t be the same. There’s also a silver pinstripe run round the perimeter. The word “Johnson” is slanted to the right a little, like the bottom of those letters got stuck in 1982. A dial sits on the front of the reel over the thumb button. It’s got numbers nine down to zero, and that’s your tension. Dad knows how to set it so it works. I’ve seen him sit at the kitchen table and take this whole thing apart. He knows where to drop oil in it and how to thread it with a strong new line. When you’re fishing you need to give a little line for a strong fish, or it will just snap. That fish needs room to run and wear himself down. If it’s too loose, though, if there’s no resistance, he can wiggle off. You do this, of course, after you’ve teased the little booger into interest with a flickertail that catches the sunlight or with a nightcrawler pinched in quarters with your thumbnail. You do it after you’ve worked your way up under tree branches where it’s a little bit risky, knowing you might get hung up. Fish have personalities, some nibble, some yank and run—and you never know what’s coming, but when it happens, you have to decide what to do about it right then, when to set the hook, and when to give him space. Lately I’ve been fishing for men like one of those Bubbas who throws a stick of dynamite in the water and collects the dead fish off the top with the net. The world got all messed up, and I’m impatient with it. People got everything upside down, calling good evil and evil good, and I want to share the Gospel with a lit fuse and a ker-blam. I don’t feel like making an art of it any more, sitting still, and taking it one word at a time. “The end is near! The end is near!” Some days I’d rather use fire and brimstone or at least a plague of frogs. Couple of turns, the dome comes off. It reminds me of those colored metal glasses old people would use for drinking sweet tea. Those glasses would burn your tongue with the cold, and they had a taste to them, kind of like touching your lip to a nine-volt battery. When the ice hit up against their sides, they bing-ed like a dime store countertop bell. It was the best way to drink sweet tea, and a Johnson reel is the best way to catch a bluegill, I don’t care what you say. Still, I don’t know how to untangle this line. Dad would probably know. He’d probably sit at the table for hours taking it apart, but I’ll just cut it and unwind the yellow outside layer off and pick up the end of a clean start. Thread it through the hole. Screw the lid down. Lord, have mercy, I don’t know how to be a writer in a place like this, either. I can’t fish these waters. Everything is so tangled up, I don’t know what to say to change anybody’s mind about anything. But every day the sun still sets, and every evening you can still hear the water splashing laughter against the banks, and the Canadian geese are yakking at each other like women gossiping, and a cool, calm sinks down while the tree frogs make their chorus, and all the natural world turns pink and gold, and longs and aches for the return of the Christ, and I can feel him hovering over the surface of these waters, “Holy, holy holy.” Here he comes, stirring order from all chaos, speaking “Let there be light,” here and there, just like He’s always done. He still loves this place, even when I get tired of it, and that makes me cry, because I stay so homesick. But here He is filling me up so that there’s nothing left to do but take a deep breath and look out upon the deeps, upon this ghostly netherworld, upon these shadowlands, and cast a line.

[Read Part I here.] One of the boundaries that has helped me integrate my creativity and my spirituality is the sister-discipline of solitude. I’m a true monastic at heart, but it has been extremely hard for me to come to a place where I’m not crippled by guilt in my efforts to live in a way that is, as Macrina Wiederkehr so lovingly put it, “kind to my own soul,” to make choices with my days—even small ones—that are not only good for me emotionally and creatively, but that keep my heart calibrated to its true north. In a world that is whirling faster than ever, I long for soul anchors, rituals and ancient rhythms that connect me to my center. One of the things I do, in an effort to make my days more liturgical, more centered, is to try to keep the traditional monastic hours of prayer—I want to emphasize try. Some days it doesn’t happen at all, and there’s not a single day I have kept every one of them. But the “interruption” of a few moments of prayer in the midst of a busy day keeps me connected to the Source that makes my work meaningful, whether it’s doing the laundry or cooking a meal or writing a novel. Two practical helps have been Seven Sacred Pauses, a layperson’s guide to the monastic hours by the Benedictine sister Macrina Wiederkehr, and Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours, a series of prayerbooks divided into the seasons of the year. Another anchor is the commitment I’ve made to show up at my desk for at least two hours a day. After years of struggling to justify the habit, it’s finally become a debt of honor—whether anything “productive” comes of it or not, I’m learning to accept this discipline as part and parcel of each day’s obedience. In a more general sense, I seek sincerity in my choices between various opportunities: to let my yes be yes and my no, no. Again, this has been a thorny path for me (you can ask my husband!), but to the extent that I have learned to extend grace to my own heart—in other words, not saying yes when my heart is saying no—my days are saner, more centered, and my love more genuine. Say no, the Lord told me a few years ago, until you can say yes with freedom and joy. It’s taken me a long time to make peace with this facet of my personality; to admit without shame—even to a roomful of likeminded rabbits!—that I seem to forget everything I know about myself and about God without relatively enormous amounts of solitude. I say relatively—I think previous generations didn’t feel quite so hagridden to justify “wide spaces” in their own hearts the way we do in this efficiency-enamored era of ours. But all I know is that for as long as I can remember I have been haunted by something I have only recently begun to refer to as the Monastic Ideal—a phrase I lifted from an Elizabeth Goudge book—the sense of stepping back from the world in order to make something beautiful by which to love the world. This is from one of Goudge’s first novels, The Middle Window, a book I would love for this passage alone, it was so life-changing: “That’s the monastic ideal,” said Judy, “and I’ve always thought it rather selfish—a creeping away from life. “Then you have misunderstood it,” he said. “The monastic ideal is a core of sanity in a loathsome world, a core of sanity that spreads. Again and again men have gone into solitude to create beauty, and the beauty, created, has revolutionized a whole country.” Judy was still unconvinced. “But if nothing can get through the mountains to contaminate your Utopia, how can the beauty you create get out into the world?” “If you light a bonfire in a sheltered valley, the protection makes such a huge blaze of it that those outside see the whole sky lit up.” When I read those words, something elemental in me leapt to answer them. I wanted to be that bonfire in the sheltered valley, the branches consumed by holy fire! I wanted to create from a place of soul-sanity, a place where I might glimpse some gleaming shard of God’s image that the world might not see otherwise—and could not see, but for the darkness of this God-haunted solitude at my center. It was a moment of epiphany. And like all epiphanies, it was followed by the difficult task of following where its bright finger pointed. Last August I was in a slump. It had been one of the hardest seasons of my life, and I was living through the three remaining weeks of exile before my husband and I traveled to the coast, to an island that is my spiritual home if there ever was one. I was treading water, really. And in a total funk with my writing. Anyway, before we went I was sitting in the vet’s office with one of my dogs or cats—I can’t remember who now—and I pulled up Sarah Clarkson’s blog on my phone. (In case you didn’t know, Sarah Clarkson is one of my favorite people on the face of this earth) I started to read her latest post, a beautiful and heartfelt piece (of course!) written from Scotland where she’d journeyed on a writing trip. She was staying with this lovely, saintly, Goudge-like old woman, and while she was there, Sarah read the woman’s memoir, a chronicle of a life of adventuresome devotion. One afternoon, in a tumult of inner questions, Sarah set off on a long walk. Remembering how Venetia (isn’t that a lovely name?) wrote in her book that, occasionally, when she really needed guidance, God had given her mental signposts in the way of pictures or images or stories. Sarah made bold to ask God for the same thing: a picture of what she was to do for Him, of what her writing life looked like. In Sarah’s own words: Instantly, I do mean instantly, a Millais painting came to my thought. It has long enchanted me for its vivid, startling image—that of a blind young girl sitting amidst a glory of a golden field with two rainbows like stairways to heaven behind her. Not a bit of it can she see. But in that painting, a small child sits next to the blind girl, peeking out from under her cloak, neck craned in awe at the glory, telling the blind one of all the beauty. And I knew in that image that my task, as a soul, but particularly as a writer, is to be that child. Write the rainbow, God told her. Tell this broken world of things it cannot see. I read that and my heart burned with kindred longings. But I was also mad. Sarah was having all the adventures and, besides, she’s a better writer, so, of course, God would give her a noble charge like that! But the notion of God speaking in pictures lingered, and I made up my mind to pray about it just as soon as we got back to the coast and I had my mind and heart still again. Accordingly, I survived the intervening weeks. And then, miraculously, we were there again on our island. One morning—I think it was the first, I was so eager—I got up quite early and went for a solitary walk along the marsh. I optimistically took my little notebook, on the off chance that I “got something.” And away I sauntered, under the summer trees, into the golden stillness and warmth of a quiet August morning. When I got to the farthest bench on the path, I sat down and looked up into the live oaks above my head. “All right, God,” I said. “I read about how You spoke to Sarah, how You gave her a picture of what it is You want her to do. You gave her an image of her writing that was unmistakable and it was very precious to her.” Silence for a moment as I gathered courage. “I’d like to ask that You would do the same for me. I’d like a picture, please—I’d like an image of what You want to do with my writing, of what my work looks like, if anything.” More silence, and in a kind of frantic despair, I spoke again. “I mean, maybe You love Sarah more than You love me—I mean, I would, if I were You—” At that moment—I am not kidding—I was interrupted by such a gust of wind that my mouth literally dropped open. It came out of nowhere and roared through the tree over my head, sending leaves skittering from the branches in frightened little shivers. It was not so much angry as reproving—I felt reproved by it, and in the instant that it subsided, the cicadas, which had been maintaining a low, steady hum—so low and steady, in fact, as not to be noticeable—suddenly raised their pitch, and with it, their volume to a high, insistent whine, for all the world as though they, too, were protesting my petulance. It was almost deafening for a moment or two. After it subsided, I sat in a chastened quiet. “I’d like a picture, please,” I murmured, humbled. Nothing came. My mind was a jumble of nothing. I knew that Philip was waiting for me for breakfast, so up I got, trying not to feel discouraged. God does not always answer, of course, and when He doesn’t… As I walked along back to the hotel, smiling at the beauty around me, clutching my little notebook tightly, a picture flickered into my mind: wavered, faded, materialized. And then it faded again, as I dismissed it with a smirk. Nothing more than a picture from one of my childhood books. One of my favorites, in fact, but obviously so firmly established in my memory that my brain, hunting feverishly, had found it without effort. Oh well. God doesn’t have to speak to me the way He speaks to Sarah and to the saintly Scottish lady. It never really occurred to me to wonder why that image, out of literally billions that must inhabit my brain. Especially when I had not seen it, or so much as thought of it in years. I can be kind of dumb that way, I guess. At any rate, a couple of weeks later I was sitting at my desk, grinding out my Hutchmoot talks—at great pain and effort, I might add. I was feeling like such a fake, a failure, a poser, a fraud, and I just laid my head down on my desk in complete and utter defeat. “I just can’t do this, Lord,” I told Him. “I’m not one of these brilliant souls and I don’t know why I’m speaking at Hutchmoot and I don’t even know why I’m on The Rabbit Room.” That kind of thing. And as I moaned and mullygrubbed, that same picture from the island morning came back into my mind. As at an audible charge, I immediately got up and went downstairs to the bookcase. I knew right where it was: The Tasha Tudor Bedtime Book, one of my all-time favorites as a little girl. I turned to the well-known page with a trembling heart (and trembling hand), and stared at the illustration of “The Star Dipper.” It was just as I remembered it: the little cottage, the girl and her mother gazing up into the night sky, the corgi at their feet—and above them in the warm blue, the radiant formation of the Big Dipper. I read the story again with tears in my eyes. The story goes that a little girl lives with her mother in a cottage at the edge of the wood. It has been a long, hot summer, and her mother is ill. Her mother sends her to the well to draw her up a dipper of water because she is so parched, but when the little girl endeavors to do this, she discovers that the well is dry. Undaunted, she sets out with her dipper into the dark night, certain of finding a hidden spring she knows of in the wood, the waters of which run cool and clear. Off she goes—but it is a dark night and the way is very difficult. Much more difficult than she had anticipated. It is so difficult that she fears she has lost her way. The branches tear at her face and her dress, and the stones cut her feet. She is near despair, but the thought of her mother and her great thirst drives her onward. At last she comes out into a little clearing and there it is: the Hidden Spring. With joy she fills her tin dipper with the crystal water, thinking what healing it will be to her mother. Immediately, she proceeds to return the way whence she came, but somehow it’s not quite as dark. The lowly dipper glows with a faint light, just enough to guide her way. As she goes, she encounters an old man, bent with years. He begs a drink of her from her dipper, the night is so hot and the springs are all dry. Quickly reasoning that there is enough for her dear mother and enough for the poor old gentleman, the girl lowers her dipper that the man might have a drink. The water is so pure and cold that he is revived at once, and thanks her with blessings. Resuming her passage through the wood, the little girl notices that there is even more light than before. “Could it be that the moon has risen?” she wonders. But, no—it is the light of her little dipper, no longer tin, but shining silver in the dark night. Next she encounters a little dog, so tired and weary it can hardly beg, its tongue hanging out of its mouth for thirst. Without a word or a hesitation, the girl kneels and allows the dog to lap from her dipper, wherein she is thanked accordingly, as only doggies can do (and, to surmise from the illustration, he follows her home, which makes my heart glad, of course!). As she once more resumes her homeward journey, the little girl is amazed at the brightness shed across her path, for her dipper, no longer silver, has turned to a brilliant gold that lights her way. When she reaches her own cottage, she rushes in to her mother’s bedside and holds the golden dipper to her lips. The mother drinks with grateful alacrity, and the water is so cool, so refreshing and healing, that she feels well at once. The little girl sets the dipper on the table while she tells her mother of her adventures, but as she does, a kaleidoscope of light and color begins to flash about the room, like the sparkle of gems, and, suddenly, the once humble dipper flies out the window and shoots up into the night sky, no longer an earthly dipper at all, but a heavenly one, made of diamonds, so that all who saw it would remember the little girl’s hard passage through the dark wood and the loving gift she found there, bestowed with such generosity to all she met. Fight your way through the Dark Wood. Find the Hidden Spring. And bring back the Sacred Water you find there for the good of all. Find the Hidden Spring. Since that time, the image of the Hidden Spring has given me courage again and again to keep doing this thing—to make it my sacred charge and pilgrimage, whether a living soul validates it or not. This work is not of me—this great thirst is not mine to quench. That doesn’t mean that the Dark Wood is not terrifying at times. But that gives me strength, even when I’m plunging through it—to know that the Spring is there and that it flows with the original Creative Love that set the stars in the heavens and calls them each by name. It’s a deep, bone-level call, at once rigorous and refreshing. I did not make the Spring; I do not fill it with water. But it’s there. And Love will show me the way to it. I can count on that. Mine is only to do as I’ve been charged and leave the matter to God. Carey Wallace expressed the harmony between creative discipline and spiritual discipline in a way I won’t forget: An artist’s failure to work is rarely mechanical—fingers that fail to curl around a pen or a brush—but spiritual: a fear that has rendered them artistically blind or deaf. The solution to them all is to draw closer to God, the source of all order, rest, and freedom, and of every image, sound, and word. Go then, saints beloved of God, and find your Hidden Spring—the world is parched for its water. I’ll be brave for you, if you’ll be brave for me.

Over the years people have encouraged me to do a picture book. I love to paint and I love to write, so why not put those things together? And I’ve wanted to, but I simply haven’t. Other projects have crowded it out, or I’ve started and then given up, overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. But now I’m in neck deep. I’m doing it. And I want to share with you what the process has been so far: the ins and outs of creating a book, and in creating it, what’s been good, what’s been okay, and what’s been unexpectedly terrible. There are several ways to go about publishing a book. I’ve decided to self-publish. This means I’m not submitting my story and art to a publishing company or an art director. I’m not relying on professionals for design input or editing. I’m doing it all myself. Which means I have a lot of work to do. It also means it could look like garbage, and it would be all my fault. Why did I choose to self-publish? There are a few reasons. 1. I have more control. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do, and I want to see that vision fleshed out. I’m confident of my idea, and I want to see it carried through to completion. 2. It’s quicker. I want to have it done by this fall, and that kind of turn-around time can only realistically happen with self-publishing. 3. Self-publishing isn’t sub-par anymore. Or it doesn’t have to be. The materials available are high quality, and the finished product has the potential to look as good as something printed through a publishing house. Now I recognize the dangers of going it alone, of navigating unknown waters without experienced guides. There’s much to be said for editors and designers and art directors. They know things, after all, like not to use Papyrus for my cover [Editor’s note: Or anywhere else for that matter.], and they could help me avoid some major problems, many of which I probably don’t even know exist. (I know about Papyrus, trust me. [Editor’s note: Whew.]) I’m certainly not blind to the enormous benefit of having those kinds of folks around. I get it, but I want to give it a shot anyway, without them. And so I am. I may regret it. So how did this all begin? Imagery. I think of ideas for paintings and sometimes those paintings end up being related. They begin to suggest a larger narrative. Ellen and the Winter Wolves, the book I’m currently working on, began with three paintings, completed over the course of two years: Ellen and the Peacock (see above), Ellen and the Key, and Ellen and the Owl. For a while now I’ve asked myself, “What’s going on here? Who is this girl and what is she doing? If I were reading this, what would I want to happen?” A story began to emerge, and in April of this year I went to a coffee shop for about a week and hammered it out on my laptop. Then I sent it off to a couple friends for feedback. I wanted them to tell me if the story hung together, if the characters were interesting, or if the whole thing was horrifically boring. Well, they liked the story but offered some suggestions for changes. So I weighed their advice, knocked out another couple drafts, and called it good. “Fantastic!” I said to myself, “Now all I have left are the illustrations!” Next time: Things I Didn’t Think About

Usually by the end of the year, the Internet floods with the best of everything lists. When the time comes to make said lists, I imagine I’m not the only one who feels like it’s a huge project to just remember everything I’ve heard in twelve months. So, since we are just over the halfway point in an exceptionally good year for music, I thought it would be fun to talk about our favorite albums so far. It’s only scratching the surface of this year’s goodness, but I’ll get things started with five I’ve enjoyed, in no particular order. What would you add? What do you have on repeat until The Burning Edge of Dawn comes out? Disclaimer: In the interest of fun / pointless self-imposed rules / sharing new things with friends, I decided to only include artists that haven’t been covered at The Rabbit Room yet. So yes, do go read Matt Conner’s post about Josh Garrels’ fantastic new record and buy everything Andrew Osenga releases, especially when it involves glorious ’90s rock riffs. The Lone Bellow – Then Came the Morning While the tight harmony and alt-country vibe of their first album might have had The Lone Bellow poised to be the new Civil Wars, Then Came the Morning, the second album from the Brooklyn-based Americana trio, favors a more raw and spacious sound that embraces many shades of American music — Elvis, rootsy country, gospel, and a touch of indie are all in the mix somewhere. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CKS7qWayDk] Dave Barnes – Hymns for Her Dave Barnes has been making great pop albums for a long time, but this moodier, stripped down EP has become my favorite thing he’s ever done. With spare production and gorgeous string arrangements by Ben Shive, this brief collection of love songs shines in its simplicity. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j90y-sLCOAs] Mat Kearney – Just Kids I have a deep, abiding, and (mostly) unashamed love for pop music, and Mat Kearney makes some of the best. If each album has a unique theme and flavor, Just Kids is a nostalgic trip, exploring themes of home and identity through a creative mix of ’90s inspired sounds and memories of Kearney’s Oregon childhood. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgUafccJSw] The Brilliance – Brother A stunning album that rethinks the modern worship record into a haunting musical liturgy. Brother is understated indie pop that moves along at a slow, meditative pace, pairing thoughtful lyrics with ethereal sounds. This isn’t a typical worship album, but a collection of songs that weave a lovely soundtrack for personal contemplation. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1tSasof7A] Jon Foreman – Sunlight EP If you haven’t heard his first set of EPs yet, go forth and discover the awesome. Then join me in eagerly awaiting the rest of The Wonderlands, another set of four EPs, this time exploring the hours of every day. Jon Foreman is especially compelling when he writes about the brevity and beauty of life, making art with a philosophical edge. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXGqWCRWHU]

[Day One] [Day Two] [Day Three] [Day Four] [Day Five: Part One] [Day Five: Part Two] [Day Six] DAY SEVEN 25/02/15 Oxford With that lead-in, I need to confess: I’m not necessarily a fantasy-fiction guy. Put a history of early America or a book about book-collecting in my hands, shut me in a padded room, and I’m as giddy as Gollum with his precious ring. Shut me in with a roomful of fantasy board-gamers, and I’m as cranky and miserable as Gollum without his precious ring. Look, I’m coming clean, don’t throw vegetables at me. I didn’t grow up in a family of bibliophiles. I do remember, as a child, noticing a small copy of some book about “hobbits” wedged in a short stack of paperbacks on my dad’s nightstand. I don’t think the book moved from its spot in that undisturbed pile for many years. Examining it, I liked the cover, mainly because it depicted a solitary soul, presumably Bilbo, floating in what looked like a barrel down a broad river. I’m not sure I ever asked Dad why those books sat there idle all those years. Really, the only time I read anything of substance was when it was required of me for school. Even then, I read the required books far less than half-heartedly. To this day, I’d very much like to give Thomas Hardy a swift kick in his Victorian butt for his book The Mayor of Casterbridge, an excruciating “classic” that was my required reading the summer of 1989. I hold a mini-grudge against Hardy for robbing from me a portion of that summer’s joy. Now, as more or less an adult who finds no small pleasure in reading, I should probably give The Mayor a second chance, but it’s not easy forgiving those who trespass against us. Speaking of British writers, let me get back to Birmingham… Andrew, myself, Toby, and his wife crammed into their car to visit the childhood home and scenery of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, which were later to inform his tales of hobbits and their Shire. Toby pulled into an apartment complex parking lot, and there, surrounded by an unremarkable tract of woods in the middle of suburban Birmingham, we walked the fifty or so feet along soggy ground to a small stone bridge crossing the River Cole. The trail curled away into the wooded area. The setting reminded me, oddly enough, of my native south Louisiana, sans mosquitoes. I imagined Frodo and his furry, oversized feet scurrying about the leaf-strewn trails. Then, not five minutes from that bridge, Toby parked the car in front of a coffeeshop, The Hungry Hobbit, where we crossed the street (at a roundabout, hello), and followed the sidewalk to Sarehole Mill, now a museum, and its adjacent pond. This structure of bygone industry, in its heyday, surely informed Tolkien’s imagination and his creation of Mordor. Literally across the street from the pond was Tolkien’s childhood home, a rather normal residence on a rather normal street among other rather normal residences. While staring at the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of a reclusive Baggins, I marvel at the hedges fronting the sidewalk. The tightly interwoven branches formed vegetative sentries standing guard. We snap pictures of the house, and I wonder if these hedges were present in young Tolkien’s day, and, if so, did he brush past them on his way to school, or did the brambles snag his shirt on his way out to meet his dad coming home from work, or to play hide & seek with his pals in those nearby woods. It was time for Andrew and I to hit the road for the hour and a half drive (much longer, obviously, with the surfeit of roundies) back to Oxford for the second of our two shows at Ilyria Pottery. We arrived and helped Katie and Micah clear the sales floor of displays. I begged for coffee, and by this time in the trip I was tapped out socially and desperate for solitude. Entirely exhausted, I laid on the floor in the shadow of a throwing wheel and a work table. With no place to go for privacy, a cold, hard floor would have to do until it was time to be social again. I must have fallen asleep because I remember hearing in the fog, “Where’s Eric?” and realizing there was drool in the corner of my mouth. “Hey guys, I’m here. No, over here. Here! Down on the floor.” The crowd was a bit larger than the first show here, and it even included a few familiar faces, folks who had come back for the second show. Andrew proved true to his gifts of storytelling and ministry of humor in making folks feel at home and at ease. His are rare gifts of hospitality and the ability to bring people together. I am not alone in recognizing this about Andrew. The audience was again gracious to me and my six songs. At the end of the night, we all chipped in (nice pottery pun, Eric) to reassemble the shop to Katie’s specs. Sleep couldn’t come fast enough.

When we asked Walter Wangerin Jr. to speak at Hutchmoot 2010, we scarcely imagined that he’d accept our invitation, much less that in a few short years Rabbit Room Press would publish his newest book. Yet here we are, lovely new books in hand, and it’s release day for Everlasting Is the Past. In this new memoir, Walter Wangerin Jr. takes us on a journey into the past to experience his loss of faith as a young seminarian, his struggle to find a place for his chosen vocation amid a storm of doubts, and his eventual renewal in the arms of an inner-city church called Grace. With his inimitable style and keen eye for detail, he remembers his own story and gives it to us as an everlasting testament to the faithfulness of God. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to help bring this story to the world, and with it’s tales of denominational struggle, doubt, racial conflict, and grace, it’s a book that we are proud to be a part of, and a story we think people need to hear. Everlasting Is the Past is now available in the Rabbit Room store and wherever great books are sold.

“So, what’s your story, Hannah?” The magic of North Wind Manor settled close as one of the guests asked the question of another. One was a long time Rabbit Roomer. The other, a friend of Andrew’s, saw a tweet and came. By the candlelight in the old kitchen, they exchanged stories—and the exchange of stories became the currency of the night. The story we came to hear began years ago as a conversation between Chris Slaten (otherwise known as Son of Laughter) and Arthur Alligood as they talked of one day playing this show together. They didn’t have a set list; instead, they responded to each other, to each other’s stories. When Arthur played a song about leaving home, Chris echoed it. The stories continued, the pages turning from tales of restless running to the needing of friends and community. When Arthur sang, “It’s laughter mixed with sorrows of the soul,” he unknowingly summarized the night. After an intermission, Andrew Peterson played “The Rain Keeps Falling,” a song from his forthcoming album, The Burning Edge of Dawn. He introduced it saying, “Sing along. You guys are going to collectively represent the Holy Spirit.” And so the room full of musicians, artists, and stories sang “Peace, be still.” The magic of stillness descended on the room, and then, we danced. Andrew invited singer-songwriter Jon Troast to the stage. While Andrew asked the audience to experience peace, Jon asked for the peace to overflow into action saying, “You just need to be goofy sometimes. So I’m going to be super vulnerable and ask you to stand up and dance.” As we listened to and participated in the sophisticated, jazzy, hokeypokey-like dance number, the spell of stillness morphed into the magic of laughter. “You’ve inspired me to write a dance song,” Chris Slaten said, returning to the rustic wooden stage made homey by a simple rug. Jon was quick to encouraged him. “You’ve got it in you.” And Chris replied, “We all do. That’s the point of the song, isn’t it?” The reminder that we have something in us resonated in each song; they seemed laden with longings and desires and frustrations that often only music or art can give proper names to. These musicians humbly speak brave truth. After Slaten played one of his new songs, Arthur captured the emotion in the room: “I feel like we need to contemplate that song for like an hour. It was gripping.” The power of the song left us with a moment of pause before we applauded. In those brief silent seconds, we became aware of the lightning flashing far in the distance, of something hidden coming alive, of our story being changed. The story concluded with community. Chris’s last song began, “No story is over, no story is over.” And Arthur’s last song, and the final song of the show, echoed like an epilogue. “I’m waiting for the morning, waiting in the night, when that sun comes over the mountain, she’s gonna turn that darkness to light.” Though the sparkling candles and fireflies, the creaking wooden floors, the walls of books hovering close as old friends, and the friends familiar as family make a house concert at North Wind Manor magical, it was the particular magic of hope that made the evening special. As heads bobbed in unison, hope was easier to believe in. And such magic is not confined to one concert; it is exactly why the Rabbit Room exists. This community reminds us that we all have something in us that could make us stand up and dance, or sit in the stillness of peace, or tremble like thunder in the distance. This hope of community reminds us that the story is not over and that a grand beginning awaits us. Until then, the story is filled with these beautiful pages of conversation and communion.

I bet you’ve heard the song “Babylon” by David Gray. It’s the kind of song that immediately draws you in, and the first time you hear it you know it’ll be around for a long time. “Let go of your heart, let go of your head, and feel it now,” he sings in the chorus, followed by the word “Babylon,” which fits so perfectly in the groove and the melody that it’s hard to imagine anything else in its place. What a strange word to throw into a song about a broken relationship, right? But wait. Let’s put on our school caps and take a quick look at what’s unfolding in the lyric. The first verse (Friday night) is about the main character’s regret at the way a relationship has gone, specifically about “jealousy,” “bitterness,” and “ridicule,” while the second verse (Saturday night) is about running away from the girl, and realizing in a crowd of people that he just wants to be with her. The third verse is Sunday morning, and he’s turning around and coming home to find her waiting. Each chorus ends with “Babylon,” which, as you may remember, was the city of the Jews’ exile. The Psalmist, in one of the most painfully beautiful images in the Bible, wrote about how God’s people sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon when they remembered Zion, their true home. Now the word “Babylon” makes sense in a song about exile and return. Brilliant. And brilliant, too, that he doesn’t go out of his way to connect all those dots for the listener. Honestly, until I really stopped and thought about it (and spent some time poking around the web) I didn’t get it. But I didn’t care, because the song is so spot on, musically and lyrically, it didn’t matter to me. I don’t know what David Gray believes, or what he intended with the Babylon reference, but man, that song rings my bells. Let’s take a minute and listen again, now that we’ve dwelt on the lyric. In the past few years (thanks to my pal Josh Petersen) I’ve become a huge David Gray fan. His songs are—well, they’re songs. You can hear real growth in his songwriting and production as the albums go by, but I never lose the feeling that these songs are, at their core, the product of a guy sitting at a piano in a lonely room and trying hard to say something of what’s going on in his heart and the world around him. There’s real passion there, the sense that David is compelled to open up his soul and shout, to declare something. Sometimes, especially in the early stuff, there’s a growl to his voice that’s well suited to the dark commentary he’s making on society and the brokenness he seems unable to escape. But once you get to White Ladder, the record that more or less put him on the international map, the songs are more relational, more honest—still directed outward but from a deeper, more tender place. That’s when we get to hear “Babylon.” I don’t think it’s possible to open up the way he does and not wrestle with ultimate questions about humanity, about God, about the way love hurts and heals us. On the album Life in Slow Motion there’s a song—a painfully sad song—called “Ain’t No Love.” The refrain repeats the phrase “There ain’t no love that’s guiding me,” and in an interview I found online he said, I’ve never had a religious inclination. This sense that there’s some sort of love that shapes our lives is surely wrong. It’s far deeper forces than that. It’s survival and nurture and instinct, it’s animal and it’s very core. That’s what our existence is and I think that notion just struck a chord with me. I confess, it’s unsettling to hear him sing this song on the live record, especially with a crowd cheering and singing along. I don’t think there could be a deeper force at work in the world than love—not with all the beauty and kindness at war with the ugliness and hatred that’s both out there and inside of us. But I’m left with a bit of disbelief that he could be the poet that he is, that he could have such a wild imagination and the ability to express things so beautifully and yet remain convinced that there’s no mystery at work in the world, nothing behind the veil to explain something as pure and as moving as music itself. A further irony is that he recorded that album in his studio in England, a studio called the Church, housed in an old stone church building. He even said in another interview that the songs on that record, written quite literally by the light of the stained glass windows overhead, had a “hymn-like quality.” Then on the same record you get lyrics like this one: Slowly the truth is loading I’m weighted down with love Snow lying deep and even Strung out and dreaming of Night falling on the city Quite something to behold Don’t it just look so pretty This disappearing world We’re threading hope like fire Down through the desperate blood Down through the trailing wire Into the leafless wood Night falling on the city Quite something to behold Don’t it just look so pretty This disappearing world He seems to acknowledge that there is such a thing as beauty—beauty strong enough to stop you in your tracks—and truth to weigh you down like snow on a city, love transcendent enough to get you to sit down at a piano and try to find words for it. That’s a religious inclination if ever there was one. His latest album, Mutineers (a few albums after Life in Slow Motion) is another masterful batch of songs, and the production is courageous, which tells me that he’s working hard, pushing himself artistically and lyrically. And right out of the gate, we hear a bright new hope in “Back in the World.” I don’t know what happened in his life between Life in Slow Motion and Mutineers, but it seems significant that the opening track is a joyous admission that there’s been some turn, a change of heart that has brought him back to life somehow. Every day when I open my eyes now It feels like a Saturday Taking down from the shelf All the parts of myself That I packed away If it’s Love lifts us up from the dark Is it God by another name? Who’s to say how it goes? All I know is I’m back in the world again Like the lift of a curse Got a whole different person Inside my head No more trudging around Stony eyed through the town Like the living dead If it’s Love put the joy in my heart Is it God by another name? Who’s to say how it goes? All I know is I’m back in the world again Back in the world again I can’t listen to this song without smiling. And part of my enjoyment comes from the reward of listening to the story that unfolds in the music of an artist willing to bear witness to the great mystery of his own heart. It may not always make sense, especially to him. But our stories are always in flux, progressing from stage to stage, often from anger to regret to forgiveness—like in “Babylon”—from disbelief to wonder, from loss to discovery. When an artist has the privilege of a long career, the listener gets to experience that progression along with him, to see the unfolding of a life into, as C. S. Lewis said, either light or darkness, grace or denial, a hardening of heart of the beautifying of one. A few weeks back David came to Nashville and played a wonderful set—though a thunderstorm cut it tragically short—while I sat with Josh and my sons and felt, from 100 feet away, the honesty and passion that he poured into his performance. As a singer-songwriter, I was deeply moved to keep working at my craft. I have a long way to go. As a man watching the show with his boys, I couldn’t deny the sense that there is a great love that’s guiding him, and guiding us all. So, David, in case you happen to read this, thank you for the work you so obviously put into your art, for your willingness to ask questions, for the gift you’ve been given to see that there is, in fact, a tremendous beauty in the world. It’s calling to you. I know, because it’s called to me through you. Keep listening for it. ———————— I’m not sure if it’ll work or not, but I put together a little David Gray primer of a playlist on iTunes. Click here in case you’re looking for a good place to start.

Read the first part of this series here. A few years ago I had the opportunity to attend my first writing conference. Having never been to one before, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but I ended up gleaning a lot of great advice from the experienced writers, editors, and publishers who were gathered there. One moment that particularly stuck out to me was during a panel discussion, when one of the writers dropped a comment that has been on my mind ever since. He referred to the work of writing as being a creative “long obedience in the same direction” (which is a quote from Nietzsche but has also been popularized by author Eugene Peterson). I think I picked up on the comment because I’d been coming to the gradual realization of how truly vocational and unglamorous the creative life can be. I’m not saying it’s miserable–it’s just that the reality is a lot different than the starry-eyed literary visions of my youth (“I’m going to hide up in an attic, write some poems, and then people will know that I am SIGNIFICANT!”). But as those naive longings have faded into a more realistic picture, I have started to appreciate the idea that the creative life truly is a “long obedience in the same direction.” In a way, that actually makes it more attainable, if you have the self-discipline and drive to persevere. It also takes a whole lot of pressure off of an artist to “make it big” in one burst of genius, one book, one album. In this vein, I appreciate what musician Dave Barnes said in an episode of Nick Flora’s Who Writes This Stuff podcast. They were talking about the challenges of their respective careers as indie artists, and Dave made a comment about how “a lot of the great careers are gradual careers.” He pointed out that it’s easy to get jealous of other artists who rise meteorically, but the fact is that many of these careers are truly meteoric, and these artists fizzle and fade. Better to be the artists slowly but steadily toiling at their craft and building a fan base on the long-standing quality of their art. It would seem then, for all the rabbits (hehe) in the creative game, it is still the tortoise who tends to win in the end.

When a musical is constructed with attention to detail and integrity, the dialogue, acting, and music score spin their own complex stories that weave together the overall plot. They underpin the narrative, offering a profusion of information that envelops the audience in details. In the same way, costumes, sets, lighting, props, audio, and every other aspect of the show tells the story through its own medium—echoing, reinforcing, and building upon the themes of the master narrative. As Myth’s opening night approaches, wardrobe scrambles to finish each outfit. Besides the costume designer, three girls and I form the wardrobe team. We come to rehearsal as often as our schedules allow and help the designer with whatever the costumes need, whether that be cutting, hemming, beading, or even hot gluing. Each costume tells its character’s story, some in color or shape, some in progression throughout the show, and each character’s clothing is proportional to their cultural rank and importance in the story. The costume designer creates each piece with calculated detail so the audience will know not only how integral each person is, but also who they are. Over the past month, what began as haphazard piles of fabric, trim, and rented articles of clothing have slowly transformed into racks of woven, sepia-toned stories. First the three fates, only distinguishable from one another by their hair; next the chorus, variant yet uniform so they cannot truly be told apart, and looking as though they could at any point dissolve back into dirt; then the principle characters: Hera, Athena, Apollo, and others who will contrast the brown with their disparate whites, blues, and golds. The wardrobe domain lies behind the stage door, so everyone crosses through our space as they come and go from rehearsal. Next to boxes of shoes and sewing supplies stands the steep, black staircase leading to stage left. Following it up, every wall is covered in scrawled signatures from past performances. They slowly peter out as they move closer to the proscenium. From the top of the stairs several black curtains obscure the stage view, but stepping delicately around them presents one with a striking view of the set. The design is simple, and the pieces remain onstage—but the overall impact is powerful. Walking behind the set, I crane my head back to see the pillars on Mount Olympus. Wooden platforms rise in jagged layers, covered in the same brown paper that makes up the backdrop. Everything is large, dwarfing the smaller actors, but somehow fitting for Zeus and Hades. The magnificence of the set is tempered, but maybe also increased, by its propensity to blend in with itself. Once the story begins, the set becomes a character, never changing, but always presenting a new face. Lights, too, work with the set: casting moods, focusing attention, obscuring what the audience is not meant to see. Numerous other designers weave story and character into their work on Myth. The prop master. The sound engineer. The hair and makeup designer. Every actor who steps into someone else’s skin for three hours. Even the stage manager, who insures that everything flows smoothly. They all spin sub-narratives into Myth’s master narrative. Of course, the chief/master storytellers are Driver and Greene. Walking back around to the front of the stage and into the audience, I pause to watch the writers at work. As managing director, Greene is always on the move. He knows the name of every actor and crew member, and stops to chat with almost everyone he sees. He answers every question, keeps everyone happy, and exhibits full dedication to his work. As artistic director, Driver constantly paces the auditorium making sure the choreography looks good from every angle. He works with the actors, coaxing them on with questions and cues, stopping and reworking scenes until his visions are realized. He does not micromanage, only gives direction while maintaining the integrity of the story. With Myth opening this weekend and tech week already underway, all the storytellers are in a frenzy. These are the last few days to polish and hone their work before sharing it with an audience. These are the last few days to weave their individual stories into the tapestry of Myth. And I have the special privilege of watching while each storyteller ties off their threads and steps back in preparation for opening night. As each designer extricates himself or herself from the loom, I begin to realize that all their individual threads, all their works, are inseparably knotted to one another. Then I realize that I’ve been staring at the back of the tapestry (full of tangled loops and thread breaks and technicalities), and completely missed the woven picture. Everything we have been working toward, all our stories, are on the other side of the loom—the tapestry face we present to the audience. And somewhere in the tangle of threads rest a few small knots with my name on them—a few stories that I have woven into the Myth tapestry. Every stitch the wardrobe team makes, every snap and hem, becomes a part of the narrative; and we are all the storytellers. [MYTH’s world premiere is this Friday night. Click here for specially priced tickets for Rabbit Room readers.]

This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24 I’ve known that Bible verse as long as I can remember, because I’ve always known the song. It was the first song my son Benjamin learned to sing, and the first song my daughter Livi learned to play and sing on the piano. Because “This is the Day” lives with us, pulsing through our memory, we will always have a cosmic context for celebrating the arrival of a sunrise. In the Spring of 2013, when Sing the Bible was still just a dream, we hoped to create an entire CD of Scripture songs as memorable as “This Is the Day,” with the added ambition of humor and artistic depth. Families had been memorizing Slugs & Bugs songs for years, but if we succeeded, they would soon be memorizing God’s Word at the same time. Two years later, we’ve sold almost 20,000 physical copies of Sing the Bible with Slugs & Bugs plus thousands more digitally—making it our fastest selling Slugs & Bugs CD ever. On a personal level, my own kids (and I) have memorized more Scripture than ever before, and (unbelievably) they still enjoy listening to the songs in the car. They now remember Galations 5:1 and Deuteronomy 6:5 as easily as I remember “This Is the Day.” In the wake of all this excitement, deciding to make Sing the Bible Volume 2 was a no-brainer. Volume 2 will help kids build a framework for how Christians act when we submit to the Holy Spirit. Let your light shine so that men might see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven. —Matthew 5:16 And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. —Mark 16:15 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves. —Philippians 2:3 Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. —2 Corinthians 9:6-7 Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. —Matthew 6:25-26 Do everything without grumbling or arguing so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the Word of Life. —Philippians 2:16 In addition to these practical Scriptures, there are additional songs that are broader in scope, though extremely effective in lifting up important elements of a Christian life. Here are just a few: Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. —Isaiah 40:28-31 Oh, what joy for those whose disobedience is forgiven, whose sin is put out of sight! Yes, what joy for those whose record the Lord has cleared of guilt, whose lives are lived in complete honesty! When I refused to confess my sin, my body wasted away, and I groaned all day long. Day and night your hand of discipline was heavy on me. Finally, I confessed all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide my guilt. I said to myself, “I will confess my rebellion to the Lord.” And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone. —Psalm 32:1-5 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. —Ephesians 3:16-18 Taken together, all of the verses on Sing the Bible Volume 2 will amount to a musical handbook for the Christian Life. I’m excited about the prospect of helping families (including mine) learn verses that will help them “shine like stars in the sky” (Phil 2:16). Right now we are in the middle of the Kickstarter campaign to fund this new record, and we’d love for you to be a part of making this dream a reality. Click here to visit the Kickstarter page and read more about what we’ve got planned. Thank you so much for all the support you’ve already shown for Slugs & Bugs, and thanks to the Rabbit Room for helping spread the word. I love this gospel-loving community, and I am so grateful to Pete and Andrew and all the contributors and readers that the Rabbit Room represents.