Coffee and tea literally taste better in this mug.
On Cold Mornings, Doomed Goats, and Stories Waiting to Be Told
We woke this morning to the shortest day of the year in the coldest house of the year. The batteries in the thermostat had apparently died in the night, making it a toasty 55 degrees on the main floor and colder yet in the basement. A few space heaters (why do we have so many of these?) and a couple new AA batteries warmed things up fairly quickly, and the cold did allow me to see my five-year-old son looking extra adorable in his robe and slippers.
The fairly warm temperatures we’ve been having continued this morning, hovering above freezing and giving a foggy, ethereal glow to the moisture-laden air. The rooftops, the lawns, the roads, and the sky are all varying shades of white and gray. Much of our beautiful snow has melted under the constant rain we had yesterday and I fear by the time Christmas dawns it will be brown rather than white. That’s how it goes sometimes–our ideals and reality at odds.
As time winds down before Christmas I find that I have a couple more gifts to buy, I’m waiting on a few things to be delivered, I have a number of gifts to wrap. I’ve got bathrooms that need cleaning, sheets that need washing, boxes that need recycling. Probably most of this is true for you as well.
More uniquely, I’ve been invited to attend a goat slaughter and a five-hour worship service and meal (at which the condemned goat will be consumed) to celebrate Christmas with my new Bhutanese-Nepali friends. I’m still deliberating on the goat. On the one hand, I am curious about how it will all go down and I feel intrinsically that a writer should observe those out-of-the-ordinary (to us) things. Certainly I would find something of interest to report to you. But I’ve never actually eaten something I witnessed being killed. Seriously, not even a fish. I guess we’ll see how things pan out on Monday afternoon.
Tonight, however, on the longest night of the year, I will not be thinking about goats. I’ll hopefully be finishing up my last short story for 2013. Once that is done, every item on my 2013 to-do list will be checked off and my mind will be free to turn completely toward writing the novel I’ve been researching and musing upon and planning for the past year. The story has gestated and grown and morphed in my mind to the point where I am more eager to write than I have ever been.
I think about the anticipation of the child who would come to deliver his people, of thousands of years waiting for the Word. I think of the people who converged on Bethlehem–Mary and Joseph traveling to be registered, sages making the treacherous desert journey to see the fulfillment of prophecies, angels coming down from heaven, shepherds leaving their fields and flocks, and soldiers dispatched to murder innocent baby boys. And the most important–God drawing near, so near as to become one of us. To feel pain and sorrow and temptation and anguish. To make meaning from chaos. To be both conclusion and new beginning.
The coming together of God and man. The crux of history. The greatest story, which informs all of our small and secondary stories.
Throughout 2013 I told little stories. Now I am ready for a big story.
I’m Checking My Own List…Once
I know that generally the only lists on our minds this time of year are Christmas lists, Top Ten {insert pointless thing here} of 2013 lists, and lists of celebrity deaths (why do we do this every year?) but my December list is a little different.
I’m busy hacking away at my little “Finish in 2013” to-do list. I have one more short story to write, one more book to finish reading, an article to write, some brochure copy to revise, some bills to pay, and some edits to make. I’m winding down as fast as I can so that I can fully enjoy gearing up for my 2014 novel-writing extravaganza!
I love lists because I love checking things off.
And I really like the feeling of a closed door at the end of the year, nothing hanging on out there in my synapses that I still have to deal with.
A new year means a new chapter, especially for people like me who have birthdays so close to the beginning of the year (January 2nd, in my case). A month from today I will be 34, and I want to start the new year fresh and ready for the next big thing.
What’s the next big thing for you?
Why Today I Am Remembering C.S. Lewis Rather than JFK
Someone else died on this date fifty years ago whose influence during and after his life has far and away surpassed that of JFK. And this excellent little documentary film shows you just a small slice of why he is so significant. I encourage you to watch it. It is beautifully done and I was happy to see some familiar faces in it.
Trailblazing and the Seductive Pull of the Status Quo
In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, we encounter two opposite impulses embodied in Laura’s parents. Pa is a restless wanderer moving his family ever west in search of more space, more freedom, and complete self-reliance. Ma is obedient to her husband’s wishes, but her heart is still back in New England where her family remains. Just when the family settles in one place and the land is tamed and things are beginning to work smoothly, just when Ma’s workload gets a little lighter because the house is built, the barn is secure, and the vegetable garden is established, Pa announces the family is leaving that all behind and heading back out on the trail to chase the horizon.
As Americans, we admire Pa and leave Ma to fret about Indian attacks and the children’s education. Or we pretend we do. Or we do while we’re yet young and unattached. But when we have established homes and jobs and families of our own, the pull of the horizon must war with the pull of the earth beneath our feet. We begin to see the sense in staying where we are. We begin to see all that open land not as welcoming us but as waiting to destroy us.
So we stay in jobs we dislike for 30 years in order to feed and clothe our families and keep our health insurance (well, maybe not that anymore…). It would be a different thing, we say, if we were single or childless. We take the path of least resistance and claim that it must be God’s will for our lives because we encounter no obstacles (if that’s your view, go check out 1 Corinthians 16:9 and note the word and). We keep plodding through and put out of mind that there may be something else for us.
Is there something you have been putting off for fear that your life will be disrupted? Or that you may fail? The Ingalls family never quite made it to where Pa wanted to go. I’m not sure even reaching the Pacific Ocean would have quelled his wanderlust. In fact, they had to turn back east and retreat for a time. But that never seemed to stop Pa. And though they encountered hardship most of us can’t imagine nowadays, they also experienced the pride of being trailblazers.
It’s hard to balance contentment with one’s circumstances and the drive to get that dream job or live in that dream city or pursue that dream degree. The status quo is so comfortable, so cozy, so easy. Why would we want to mess with that?
Still, if you have gifts and you aren’t using them or you’re not using them to the extent you believe you should, maybe it’s time to venture out of your shell and take the plunge into the unknown. If an opportunity presents itself to you and your first instinct is to retreat into your shell and wait for it to go away, maybe it’s time to be brave and take on the challenge.
There will be obstacles. There will be long winters, rushing rivers, millions of grasshoppers, prairie fires and chimney fires, people who resent you, and family that doesn’t quite understand. There will be hard work and hard weather. But there will also be satisfaction and joy and adventure.
Case in point: I have submitted a few of my short stories this year to a number of contests and gotten a number of emails that include the words, “We’re sorry, but…” And yet, last night I got an email from one of those contests that told me I am a finalist! And that email was from The Saturday Evening Post. Even if I don’t win, I still got that far, I may end up in their anthology, I now have contact with the editor there who likes my work, and I can add this information to my bio as I query other magazines, editors, or agents.
But if I hadn’t taken the plunge and risked lots of rejection, I could never have gotten this far.
Is opportunity knocking? Why not crack the door and at least give it a chance to talk.
Remember Life before You Had the Capacity to Feel Embarrassed?
I vividly remember the first time I felt self-conscious. I blame the administrators at Bush Elementary School in Essexville, Michigan, as it was their tennis-shoes-only policy that created the problem. You see, as a small girl I refused to wear pants. I wanted to wear only dresses. And when I started kindergarten, I had starry little-kid plans to continue to wear only dresses.
BUT . . .
When we kindergartners came in from the playground in the morning, the first thing we were required to do after hanging up our little coats and backpacks was to change out of our “street shoes” and don our tennis shoes. (I guess much of the country calls them sneakers, so if you’re lost, that’s what we’re talking about here.)
At five years old, I knew instinctively that wearing tennis shoes with a dress looked DUMB. And I felt DUMB wearing them. I felt like a DUMB idiot. And I felt that every one of my fellow students must be snickering behind my back about how DUMB I looked.
As an adult, I can now accept that absolutely no one else even noticed what I had on my feet. My embarrassment was imaginary. Call it practice embarrassment for all the years of real embarrassment that were to follow.
Still, that’s when I stopped wearing dresses. It would be years before I wore them again. Now I am often one of only a few women in my church and at my place of work who wears dresses or skirts almost exclusively. (Of course, I certainly don’t wear them with tennis shoes.)
Why do I even bring this up? Because this past week we discovered that our little five-year-old boy has a plantar’s wart (we assume from the mats at karate). We’re treating it and it is slowly disappearing, but this weekend he had two friends at our house for a sleepover. Before the guys all left Friday evening for their fun night out at karate buddy week and a sub-literate kids’ movie, I handed my husband the tube of wart remover just in case they should need to reapply. One of my son’s friends saw it.
“What’s that?” the friend said.
“That’s none of your business,” my husband replied in an effort to protect his son’s dignity. My boy’s warts are his private concern. I would have replied the same way.
But not our little kindergartner. “That’s for the wart on my foot.”
No shame. No embarrassment. No self-consciousness. Take him or leave him, warts and all.
It is not the first time I have noted with a bittersweet pang the complete lack of self-consciousness my son possesses. Bittersweet because I know that one day it will come to an inevitable end, and on that day my poor little boy will feel profoundly embarrassed. We all have to do our time.
I hope after that, though, he’ll reach a point, perhaps in early high school as I did, where he realizes that he truly doesn’t give a crap what other people think of him. I hope he can see that every person he had thought was analyzing and judging him actually had no time to do so because they were all so busy having their own near-constant paranoid, insecure self-image crises. Because you know what? It matters very little what the world out there thinks of you.
Live honestly, serve God, love people, and stop worrying about what’s on your feet. Nobody cares. Every time you find yourself obsessing over what someone is thinking of you, go give that person a compliment. Because you can rest assured they’re worried about looking DUMB too.
Good Friends, Good Smokes, Good Times
A wonderful night, all around.
Kill Your Smart Phone
Tomorrow afternoon I will be leading a workshop at the Breathe Christian Writers Conference on developing a writing rhythm. I’ll talk about the importance of carving out consistent time to write and a space (or spaces) in which to do it. But the most crucial part of the discussion will be on what I’m calling creative sustenance, what others may call “feeding your muse.” And I realized in the course of preparing for this discussion that I have developed a holistic hatred of cell phones in general and smart phones in particular.
I’ve never enjoyed talking on the phone to anyone beyond my husband when we are apart (which really doesn’t happen nowadays, but it certainly did back when I was still in high school and he was off at college already) and I do enjoy an occasional call from a far-flung friend.
Honestly, though, it’s not phone calls that irritate me so much. It’s constant texting, email checking, and web-surfing rather than a.) paying attention to the real person who is talking to you right now, showing just how anti-social social media really makes us, or b.) paying attention to the world around so that you don’t, say, get hit by my Explorer or, heaven forbid, notice the way the trees are swaying or that lonely old man sitting by himself in the corner. Also, there’s that incredible phenomenon of people watching movies on phones or tablets, in public, without headphones. When did that become acceptable?
But for the writer the danger is really point B, and not necessarily because of the possibility of getting run over. It’s because to write about real life you need to pay attention to real life. If it hasn’t already happened, I’m sure someone will make a literary splash at some point for writing a novel entirely in texts, but for most real stories populated with real characters living in a real setting (all of which need to be conveyed in precise words on a page/screen) you have to PAY ATTENTION to the stuff that is real.
If you’re an artist of any kind and you find your well of creativity is running dry, it may be because you’ve been looking at little beyond a screen for too long. Get out in real life and engage. Talk to that old man in the corner. Something he says or the expression that crosses his face will likely inspire you to write a novel or a screenplay or a short story. Look at the tops of those trees swaying in the breeze and imagine what happens on a day where wind blows and leaves wrench themselves from branches and go skittering down the road.
Readers need you to notice for them (because they’re all staring at their little electronic idols too). And you can’t point out beauty and sadness and truth to them if you don’t see it yourself.
Measuring My Life in Woodpiles and Cucumbers
Despite the fact that our Midwestern home is kept warm in the cold months with a furnace that runs on natural gas, we are the happy beneficiaries of the many lovely aspects of a wood-burning fireplace. In the winter months, we often have a fire roaring and crackling away, with the whole family (animal members included) lolling around in the living room, basking in its warm glow. By the time spring came around this year, we’d burned through our woodpile and were on to the odious task of buying wood from grocery and hardware stores–wood that was never quite dry enough and since we burned it, it really did fell as though we were burning money.
This year, however, our fireplace fuel needs have been taken care of thanks to an enormous dead sugar maple that we finally decided to dispose of before it crushed our house during a windstorm. It’s a good thing we acted when we did, as the modern-day lumberjack who took it down informed us that about half the trunk was hollow (including the root system).
The guys cut the big branches down to fireplace log size and stacked them up on the driveway along the fence. And, as I requested, they left an enormous pile of smaller branches for me to break down into kindling, which is what has occupied a fair bit of my weekend already.
There is something so ancient-Anglo-Saxon-peasant about breaking up sticks and bunching them together in containers. Not that my Germanic and British ancestors would have used plastic flowerpots to store their kindling, but…you get the idea. As I cracked and hacked and sawed and snipped each branch into size and created my bouquets of branches, I felt I was doing good work. Work that had a practical application in life. Necessary work.
I took a break for a while to collect ripe tomatoes and cucumbers from the vegetable garden and thought about chopping them up along with some onion to make a cucumber salad, another act of breaking something down into useful parts.
I think about the apricot/plum and blueberry jam I just made, about the impending autumn chores of raking and cutting back the perennials, of the winter chores of shoveling snow and scraping the car. And I find myself very much looking forward to spending the cold months in my cozy house as we somehow cope with the fact that my son is now in kindergarten and we wait to see the tangible results of much time spent writing and editing.
Life marches inexorably on without our permission in some ways and cannot move fast enough to please us in others. So we practice contentment in all things and carry on with the tasks at hand.
Time to get back to my woodpile.
The surest way to get it to rain…
…is for me to water my garden.
What inevitabilities of life do you run into regularly?
Erin Bartels 
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