Heartstones, slugs, and snippets of things

For over a month now, I’ve been writing down snippets of things I want to tell you, so this update will be random and long and interspersed with pictures of life here on the farm (that we no longer farm much, since Ivan is into storage buildings and we rent most of our farmland out).

My baby sister (married, with the cutest, sturdiest, most dimple-chinned little girl ever!) has been calling me every weekday morning to pray. We started when she was struggling with post-partum anxiety, but I’ve been surprised to realize how much the practice is helping me.

And from within that experience, here’s what I want to tell you:

If you believe in God…or if you would like to believe in God…or if you are a very religious person who never doubts God’s existence but still wonder sometimes how he works and why–oh God why?–he works that way: and if you struggle with anxiety, depression, or any of the forms of mental anguish all humans face at one time or another, find someone to pray with. Do. Pray every day maybe, or five days of the week, or four.

My sister and I have both been amazed at how much our personal emotional lives and sense of well-being have benefited from this simple practice.

Here’s a quote I read this month that was particularly funny to me because I am still–in my own pick up and put down way–working on learning Pennsylvania Dutch, a modified form of German.

“A verb has a hard enough time of it in this world when it is all together. It’s downright inhuman to split it up. But that’s what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.”

~Mark Twain

Mark Twain, I feel your pain.

Why do you create?

Here’s an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Ivan that talks about why I write. I hit a heartstring when I wrote it, and the words came flowing from a place inside that felt deep. If you’re an artist or creator, you may understand. Or maybe it will make you think of other reasons for why you create.

Sometimes I get such a longing to create. I look out the window and pray from the bottom of my heart that God will let me create something–something good–before I die.

Just to capture some of the ephemeral, depthless, many-faceted beauty that is life. I want to take words, spin them around my finger, arrange them on a page, just so. Spread them, turn them, bring them full-circle, see the finished work, blown like glass from the end of a tube, faint blue, textured, translucent–a thing studied and complete, a world in itself.

One time, when you were helping me with my website when we were first married, you suggested subtitling it, “Writing with Purpose.” No, that wasn’t quite it, I said. I don’t think I had the language then to tell you why not. “Us” was too new.

But the reason it didn’t seem right to me is because it says nothing. ALL writing has purpose. Some may just have purposes of which we do not approve or to which we are indifferent.

And my writing, I don’t really write to be “purposeful” in the way that is commonly thought of the term. I don’t write to sit squat and sturdy in the middle of things and be used, like a brush. I write because I want to capture something I cannot quite express, something that hangs always beautiful before me, so breathtaking, alluring, mesmerizing–something that may be God or may only be an unplumbed reality created by him–but which thing I I glimpse slightly, and fall down and worship.

My dad’s older sister died this month, too young. And a week later, Annalise turned four. We traveled to Indiana to attend the funeral, and I took a picture of my parents with the children by my grandparents’ grave.

The generations march on.

Time ebbs and time flows. As the Ecclesiastes writer says, there is nothing new, not really, just an endless (until the time God chooses to end it) passage of birth, life and death.

A life well lived, we pray, with Jesus as the heartstone.

Excerpts from the family journal:

June 9

The difference between a girl and a boy:

Annalise found a slug on the sidewalk near where she was coloring with chalk & came in, concerned, to tell me about it. “There’s something on the sidewalk. Come look.”

“Is it a bug?”

“No, it’s something that goes really slow.”

I stepped out in my bare feet to look, identified the slug, and headed back to the house as Annalise informed me that she didn’t want to (accidentally I presume) color the slug. Then I felt something squish under my toe and, shrieking and exclaiming, pulled off a slug and squished it with a stick. No sooner did I start walking again then I stepped on another one and again pulled it off and squished it with a stick. Tiny slugs were all over the sidewalk, it seemed.

Just then Teddy came trotting happily for the house, grinning wide, something clutched in his little hand. Awww, I thought to myself. I wonder if…

I opened his hand, and sure enough, there was a slug.

June 18

Annalise, about an object in one of her paintings: “That is not people cuz it’s just peanut butter.”