Saxon Henry's Blog, page 23
September 4, 2013
A Pillow Book: Honoring Earthly Things
5. A swan sleeping on a hummock of pillowy grass, its pure white head tucked beneath its wing in repose
Ferns licking their way up from the ground in copses of woods along the coastline
A pair of swans ushering two tiny babies bobbing along beside them to safety in the harbor where the Thames River meets the ocean
6. An osprey nest rising from a marsh looks as if a dollop of whipped cream has been dropped into the center of the circled gnarl of the sticks. I squint, wondering what I’m seeing whe...
August 28, 2013
Literary Adventures: There Isn’t a Train I Wouldn’t Take
by Saxon Henry
As summer wanes, I hop on a Metro North train bound for Croton-on-Hudson where I hope to glean sensory details for a book I’m writing. I decided to take the local to linger and write as I trundled along beside the watery vein of the Hudson River. I am following a path Edna St. Vincent Millay took ninety years before as she scampered to Mt. Airy where friends were gathered, falling for the man she would marry on a warm day in July as they played a game of charades—a day very much...
August 21, 2013
A Pillow Book: On Effervescence
3. Her eyes sparkled yesterday as if she felt especially beautiful in her satin dress of brilliant blue. She peeked at me from between the rooftops as I climbed the hill, her sunny sheen like a dazzling smile illuminating everything around her. She is dark now; it is too early for her to reveal herself. The streetlights twinkle on her surface as if hinting at the glittering eyes she will use to see her way into daylight…
4. Today, her effusive light was glinting like someone had taken chips of...
August 14, 2013
A Meditation on Rain
by Saxon Henry
A weather system is slouching towards the Northeast, throwing up waves of moisture and kicking storms in from the Atlantic. I live in a hulk of a building, the shell of my apartment composed of thick slabs of cement. I am glad for the sturdiness since I have experienced an earthquake and two hurricanes while living here, but I miss being able to hear the rain tapping on surrounding surfaces as it falls earthward, an effect the masonry mutes.
There was a time in my life when I was...
April 20, 2013
A Segue
I created The Road to Promise nearly three and a half years ago as a platform for material I hoped to publish in memoir form. I was thrilled at the support I received as I told the story week after week, and I gained a great deal of satisfaction sharing my experiences that took place during a challenging time in my life. I have marked my posts (all 96 of them) private because I am reworking the material first presented here for a new blog that I feel expresses my present-time point of view in...
May 8, 2012
A Slight Detour on The Road to Promise
April 24, 2012
Mniwakan Wacipi
After a 2pm session with Davelyn, Jim and I headed to the airport for a particularly long trek to South Dakota, which took us through Memphis and Minneapolis where we landed at midnight, rented a car and drove to Wagner. I’d had a tough time staying awake as we cut through the drenching dark of farmland on the furrowed lip of the Great Plains.
Knowing the connection-heavy time in South Dakota was going to take up a great deal of energy, I had been feeling desperate to get back into my writing....
April 10, 2012
The Voice Which Calls
Elmo and Edna continued to surprise me as I grew to know the brother and sister better. We’d invited them to dinner one evening, and as I spooned a generous helping of the chicken casserole I’d made onto her plate, Edna said, “We were poor when we were growing up; we would go weeks without a dollar in the house. Even so, mother told me to always give something—whether it was something I’d made or as little as a penny. She said it wasn’t the amount you gave, it was how you gave it.”
Like Edna,...
February 28, 2012
Here is the Spirit of the Lord
Norman Rockwell's "I Will Do My Best."
I walked the streets of Wagner feeling as if I’d been drawn into a vacuum; as if I had been shunted back in time to when I was a kid in Lookout Valley. Every time I tried to push myself to a better explanation, I always came back to the premise that it felt just like moving through a Norman Rockwell painting. With my past coming up so often, I couldn’t help but draw some parallels, one of which was the fact that southerners shared with Native Americans a...
January 31, 2012
The Heavens Cannot Contain You
Emily Dickenson wrote, “You cannot fold a Flood—/ And put it in a Drawer.” As I left Costa Rica behind and became more entrenched in South Dakota, I felt this was my task as I labored to make sense of the impressions and feelings I’d been gathering during our work in the mission field. The church in Greenwood was haunting me a bit because removing the stained glass windows had made me feel as if I had marred its historic beauty.
In her account of the Church of Holy Fellowship in That They May...
