Rooted In

It starts tentatively. The tendrils emerge and begin to sink into the dirt. And then, they spread. It doesn’t look like much from the surface, but follow the threads of the taproot and see just how far the base can go.

Entire systems take their place in the network. 

I lay on my back, resting, held by the earth, and followed the root system to the water. There, that’s the creek behind my house. There, that’s the overflow pond for the mill. There, that’s the place where everything runs to the yadkin. There, that’s the edge of this lake, and that one. 

A tree’s roots expand far further than it’s canopy. Trees, even the ones you see overturned after a storm, only show their closest ball of dirt, their roots sink far further and much wider than you can perceive. 

Tree growing in a wadi along the road to Jericho.

Deep and broad, sinking and spreading, settling in and branching out. 

Entire forests talk with each other. 

I can feel the waterways moving together. 

We are all downhill and upstream from someone. 

I am settling in to where I am. There are so many unknowns, but here is one known: the trees taste the sunlight. And they rest in the darkness. 

I can feel the ground holding me up, and my roots sustaining me, as I feed back into the ground. The waters around me, they flow and rush and trickle by, and I am sustained by them. This network, of mycelia, of fungus, of ancient things releasing their lives back into the soil, this too sustains me, as we all turn back towards the earth. 

Another ring takes shape, telling a story of another year, new wrinkles that show where the laughter and tears have taken residence and made their home in my form. 

A Thank You Letter to Parts of Me That Could Use a Little More Love

Dear anger, thank you for showing me the injustice around me.

Dear grief, thank you for seeing the world in it’s brokenness.

Dear loneliness, thank you for reminding me how I need community.

Dear solitude, thank you for leading me to my own self.

Dear patience, thank you for showing up when I get too frustrated.

Dear weakness, thank you for giving me other people to rely on.

Dear limits, thank you for revealing where I need help.

Dear tummy, thank you for holding me up. Thank you for your soft reminder of the children borne inside of me, the way your gentle give and faint scars display the care you held for my children born and unborn. Thank you for holding the food that sustains me, the way you balance against my back, the breath you take in when I breathe deeply. Thank you for reminding me that softness is also a gift, that the place where I laid my children as they grew can still be a place of comfort and rest for them. Remind me to take this as an invitation for my rest and comfort, too. 

Dear feet and knees, thank you for holding me up. Even when you crack and break, or slip out of place, you return to supporting me. Thank you for reminding me that healing doesn’t always have to be linear. That support can be best as it curves along your contours. 

Dear self. You have done so much. Thank you for what you have learned, for who you have been in the past, and who you will be in the future. Thank you for learning to have grace for yourself, in the present and the past, for knowing that what you have learned has changed you, and for withholding judgment for your decisions from when you had a different set of options available to you. 

Remember to carry this grace with you, not only for yourself, but for those around you, your friends, kids, family, neighbors, and co-laborers. We are all still learning. 

Still Grateful

What are you grateful for?

6/28/22

I’m needing grateful to be a theme of my week. So I’m making it so. I wrote my midweek family message on gratitude, and in my preparation, I decided to get into the psalms, because they’re usually good at giving me grist for my family work. There are just so many emotions in there. And gratitude is one of them.

Something that I didn’t specifically share with the kids, but that I still alluded to is that gratitude happens, that people are thankful, even when the world is not perfect, when the situation is not the best for the folks involved, when there are still challenges to be faced and oppression still to be fought against. 

The psalmists drench their bed with tears and are still grateful. (Psalm 6:6)

The psalmists praise God from prison. (Psalm 142:7)

The psalmists cry out for justice, and with the same breath they call out their thanks. (Psalm 9)

I’m not saying that there is no reason to despair. I am saying that despair is not all there is. 

There is gratitude. I can, we can give thanks. To God. For things small and ordinary and large and momentous. 

I’m grateful for the prayers that I hold from the young folks I met on Saturday. 

I’m grateful for the temporary cool weather that has given us a break from the sweltering heat. 

I’m grateful for ice pops in a rainbow of colors and scissors to open them with and the ability to be extravagantly generous with them, sharing them with one pair for at least four return trips. 

I’m grateful for the first time I got to lead worship as an ordained elder in full connection, for the prayer I shared, and the story I told to the kids present. 

I’m grateful for a community that is willing to explore new ways of practicing ministry. 

I’m grateful for coffee, and leftover cake, and impromptu tea parties, and kids bursting with a surprise. 

I’m grateful for a night of unbroken rest, after two weeks of restless early mornings. 

I’m grateful for diverse stories, and libraries, and ebooks, and authors who give resources right after the dedication, before the story even begins. 

I’m grateful for colleagues who are navigating a bunch of different expressions of a shared situation, where we can share our experience and learn from various iterations around us. 

I’m grateful for people who use exclamation marks in emails, even if we’ve never met, with exuberance and extravagance. 

I am grateful.

even this can be gratefulness

re-membering

Today is the seven year anniversary of our miscarriage of my first pregnancy. The loss is still there, but it’s not like I need a day off and flowers for it. (Not that a day off and flowers would be sufficient for grief and loss, but… it would be more than I got when I miscarried. Hunh. Anyway.)

trees on my walk

And here is the interesting thing about this anniversary this year. It’s also the last full day of my eldest born daughter’s first year of school. Calendars have layers upon layers upon layers. 

In the years to come I also want to remember last night. Because last night marked an incredible change and neither I nor the other person involved knew it for what it was. 

Last night I hugged someone who wasn’t a family member. 

For the first time since early march 2020, probably Sarah Howell the day I got my first tattoo, I hugged someone outside my family. 

And the main reason it happened is because I said I was moving. 

I was reflecting with a friend recently about how open or not we’ll be with people around us and hugging them. And I told her I was going to be very discerning… and I think that’s true, but I forgot that my discernment is not always what I expect it will be. 

But here is what it means to live in a place where half the time you lived there was during a pandemic. Your neighbors know you because you walk down their street every single day. They will know that you were the one who has the kids who started on your back and they moved to the stroller and now they can walk beside you.

But you won’t know your neighbor’s name because your mind is a sieve for names. But you will know them, and you’ll appreciate how the seasons change and how the porch is decorated for the holidays and how they care for their plants and keep their yard cute and inviting. You’ll remember a conversation you had with her over a year ago about how she retired from nearly 40 years of teaching but didn’t get to say goodbye to her last group of students because they all went into lockdown.

And you’ll stop on the evening walk when you’re by yourself before the sun sets but after the kids are in bed. You’ll say “oh I guess I should tell you that we’re gonna be moving” and she’s like “oh well then I guess we will miss you” and then she’ll ask about your neighbor who lives across the street from you and who they go to church together so they know that your neighbor has incredibly aggressive cancer and you didn’t know exactly what was going on because who knows how to talk about these things when you don’t exchange phone numbers when you arrive and you didn’t know that was what you would need to do because they’re just across the street surely you’ll have a conversation again, you can see into their kitchen from your bed and so she’ll say do you know about her and she’ll still be crying because she’s just said hello and she’s gotten to see her  friend and she’s been there and she still tender and so she will come to you and she will mutter “don’t worry I’m vaccinated” and she’ll pull you into a solid embrace.

A hug that lasts five or ten or twenty breaths. 

…

And she’ll go back to talking to her neighbors and her husband, and you don’t know her name. And it will occur to you as you begin to crack as you walk past the magnolia that you see every day that this was the first hug you’ve shared in fifteen months from someone who’s not in your family.

And you’re leaving in less than a month and this. All of this. Happens the night before the seventh anniversary of your miscarriage. 

And maybe the hug was just as much for you as is was for her. 

tattoos and why I’m ok sharing a hug again (tattoo by mallory blaylock)

Singing Through It

Heres a thing about me that you should know. 

I like to sing. 

It’s like… essential. 

It’s how I process and express joy, sorrow, despair, frustration, anger, hope, happiness, peace, rest, playfulness, and encouragement. 

I can track friends by which songs they remember me by.

I wonder, in part, if that is why I chose to be a Bard in our roleplaying game. I tell stories and sing, as a character. I have created a character that is who I want to be. 

I miss singing with a congregation.

I’ve not sung with a group of people in over a year, and I can feel it in my bones. This, as much as the Lord’s Table, is communion to me. 

And I want to state, our church is beautifully mundane in it’s singing. We’re not going to go on tour, or have someone come record us for our brilliance, but we are a group of people who gathered to sing and worship and praise and have communion together. And I miss that.

Not so much some of the different navigations that I had to attend to. But that, the singing. The worship. The coming together and joining our voices in shared statements of what God is actively doing? 

I miss that so much. 

In my aborted procedure two weeks ago, I was trying to stand the level of pain I was experiencing, and so I started to talk to the women preforming the procedure about the sermon I’d preached a couple days previous. I almost started singing, to keep my mind off the pain radiating down my hips towards my knees and through my core. I rubbed my fingers in circles against my thumbs, and if anyone had been paying attention to the motion, it was in cadence with the songs in my head. 

I’m going to have a different version of the same procedure tomorrow… in an OR, under full anesthesia. It’s expensive (there goes our entire stimulus), and also I don’t look forward to being intubated, because I really really care about my voice, and how I sing, and that I can sing mostly any time I want. 

But I’d also rather not bleed so much each cycle that I have to make all my plans centered around whether that will be a lost day. And I’m ready to not bleed so much that my iron stores are dangerously low. But it’s womens’ health… so it took two years of bleeding like this to figure out how to work towards health, especially since I “look” healthy. (PS, y’all know weight is not an indicator of health, right?)

So I’ll rest, and pray, and sing tonight… and drink a full glass of water before bed, and rise, waiting, not especially ready, but prepared, for what I’m facing tomorrow. 

And tonight, when I sing my children their lullaby from Veggie Tales, (a surprisingly new tradition), I’ll sing it with all the heart I wish I could put into the song that I long to sing with a gathered community. 

But I don’t know how long it will be until it is safe to sing together again. Probably around the time we can share at the Table again.