K.M. Updike's Blog

When Death Isn't the End

It’s everywhere.

The falling, the leaving. The drying up and withering away.

The prairies turning brown and the cold nights and the changing of the sun making leaves shiver and yellow and soon, yes, the dying.

There’s spider webs strung with pearls in the grass.

There’s foggy mornings now, they say it means an early winter.

And there’s bemoaning the losing of things. The loss. The dying. The change.

The harvest comes in, in itself a sort of dying, the end of one long glorious way of life. The boxes of Colorado peaches end up on kitchen counters and outside the apples will soon be rosy and ripe.

Some say all things die in autumn, and that is why they despise it. But it is not so.

The leaves on the trees fall because they have come from the earth. And when they have become their truest color, the color they were in the end meant to become, they let go and it is like a homecoming, welcomed again into the good earth from which they came. They will rise again anew, unfurl their glory to the air in the trees and the sky.

The flowers fade and fall and go home, let themselves be taken back into the soil, the wind and the rain.

Things never really die. They simply live, become their truest color, and then go home again. Like you, and me. One day we’ll return to the earth, but it is not the end.

It’ll be a going home, too. To the story that will never end.

August

Seems when August hits the world starts pulling out its dusty brown sweaters and fall movie lists and you start dreaming of home baked goods, and hot tea by the fire.

Seems just everyone is tired of the pomp and romp of summer. They’ve filled with July lake days and hot summer sun, and they all simultaneously look over their shoulder and long for . . . change.

The fields are mown and hay put up. The sunflowers line the dirt roads like a welcome home, waving in the wind. The garlic is harvested and drying on the kitchen table—in the famous ice cream bucket the Midwest is known for. The tomatoes are just coming ripe and your sourdough starter has had a long sleep in the fridge, it’s happy now out on the counter.

When August 1st comes along it’s like the world wants to breathe one heavy sigh, weary from play, and rest is needed. All of June and July you’ve had morning coffee with the flowers and the garden, and the grass is greener than it’s ever been. And now it’s August, change is needed . . .

There’s room for quieting the soul in August. I needed to learn that.

Full of life and living, that’s what summer is. External and wild.

There can be quiet in the bustle of summer. A gentle, silence that can come from just being. Stillness in the wake of trying to make everything what you think it ought to be.

There’s room for loving the dried flowers on your sister’s table. There’s room for the soft words of ‘Sarah, Plain and Tall’ with your feet up on the picnic table while afternoon storm clouds roll in.

There’s room to learn to breathe again so you can see how golden the light on the maple out front.

Room to sit in silence and not reach for something with noise to chase the hard thoughts away. Room to hear God’s voice again. Coming still and gentle through the silence.

Perhaps the change we all really long for—is just a sure, quiet knowing again that God is here.

Bringing You a Cup of Joe

I ain't gonna lie—tired of shallow, curated, and aesthetically pleasing. Tired of perfect and tired of conformity. Tired of cheap and tired of comfortable. Tired of screens and superficial relationships.
Give me the woods, the prairies and uncertainty. Give me dangerous, risky things.

Like coffee on a cattle drive or coffee on the Oregon Trail. Or coffee in underground cafes in 17th century Sweden. Coffee frothing with story and the faces of the brave and the true. Coffee hard earned and joyously received. Give me authenticity and true friends to share it with. Give me something real to crave, to touch, to live for.

Give me something to embrace uncertainty and take a risk. To have a story to tell if only to myself. To choose something hard and earn it. To be a better person than I was the day before. To have coffee with people who want the same from life.

The thing is: I love coffee. But not in the coffee shop, recyclable white cup with the 100% recycled brown paper holder coffee. Its more like the early morning watching dawn coffee, the campfire coffee in a chipped enamel cup with a blue rim.

The sustaining coffee on cold days when your hands are too stiff to feel anything. The coffee of the woods and the prairie and the mountains. The kind of coffee you can't get in a shop or find the experience ready-made at the store.

I want the coffee you can't get any more, the dangerous coffee, the coffee the king of Sweden feared would make his peasants revolt. The coffee of cattle drives and the outback. The coffee of revolutions. The simple coffee, homemade and home-shared at Christmas time. The real coffee of real life.

“So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.”

— Wendell Berry

Ask a friend over for coffee.

Drop a bag of coffee off at the neighbors just because.

Take a friend a coffee while they’re at work.

Drink your coffee outside on the front porch in the early, frosty morning, listen to the sounds around you of your one wild and beautiful life.

Morning rituals are nothing more than a celebration of a moment focusing on the now, the slow, the meaningful. Whether they are the morning before work or the afternoon Fika, be alive and taste real things.

Take your coffee without cream or sweetener.

Make your own coffee.

Earn your coffee, earn your comfort before you take it. It is sweeter repose.

Do something hard every day.

Brave the cold to watch a sunset.

Say good morning every day to the person you find hard to love.

Do something everyday that “doesn’t compute.”

“As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.”

— Wendell Berry

Just so you know, you're welcome at my fire any time. You're welcome to my coffee made fresh everyday. You are welcome to this life of wanting real things.

How to Start a Fire

It’s all the rest of a campfire after a long day.

It’s the warmth of a candle in the window at night.

It’s building a fire in the old wood stove on a cold winter morning or making cowboy coffee after chopping wood.

It’s all knowing you chopped the wood, you stacked it, and now you’re here with it.

Most of the year I’m thinking about planting things. But when the air turns cool and soft, I get itchy for shoring up and battening down the hatches, hibernating like a bear with good food, and a good fire, the quiet ritual that has purpose with everything done.

Gather wood for winter.

Chop wood to start a fire.

Start a fire to stay warm.

The whole point is that’s work. It’s the purpose behind it all.

Now we’re in the depths of winter, all this snow on the ground, calming the landscape, making the golden light more golden, the blue and the stars and the moon crisp and clear.

Winter cold makes fires warmth all the warmer, makes the waiting take a little less time, makes the heart slow, makes thoughts gentle, gives the hands purpose.

And it’s all about the waiting, isn’t it? The rest of winter, the dreaming of spring a sweeter dream because of it.

“ Modern comforts aren’t necessarily bad. But when they shape the entirety of our lives, we forget...

That we’re still a part of nature . . .

That seasons exist for a purpose.
We’re not supposed to operate at the same pace 365 days per year.

So that’s what I’m reminding myself during our snowy week:

To lean into the slowness...

To sink into these long, dark nights...

To relish in the soups and homemade breads.

To soak in the blaze of the wood stove.”

— Jill Winger

Coming up next . . .

The story of me, coffee, and morning rituals . . .

Want to buy me a coffee?

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Christmas

I sit here on a crisp January morning, and Christmas is long gone. Gone from the windows and the table. Gone with Frank Sinatra singing “Whatever Happened to Christmas?”

But it’s still there. Still in my mama’s hands as she takes down the last of the decorations. Still in the window where the Christmas tree stood, a beacon looking out at the world by which we remember how to live.

It’s still in my youngest brother’s face, in the Whoville cookies we made that ended up Whoville by happy accident. In the gingerbread men my sister made that tasted just like the Christmas I needed.

In the songs and the stories we sang and lived. Christmas is the chance you get to remember how you want to live the rest of the year. Yeah, we can do without all the cliché Christmas music most of the year, the tacky decorations of commercial Christmas, but what we can’t do without is how it reminds us how to smile at the little things, be quiet in the depths of winter, to fill our souls with goodness, to listen more than to speak, to love more than trying to be loved.

And so Christmas Day has come and gone, but may it live on and be Christmas in our hearts. The traditions we hold to are pleasures and sweetness, but they hold us together. Like the sugar cookies and the chocolate covered peanut clusters. The decorating of the Christmas tree after Thanksgiving. The reading of Christmas stories that make us girls cry and the boys roll their eyes, the advent candles flickering new life on the sill, my grandma decorating cookies with us.

Christmas is this great swelling of past, present and future into one whole magnificent conglomeration, a simultaneous ending and new beginning. Christmas never dies. It only has a slowing decrescendo and a rising crescendo, but it is never gone entirely.

“Let the bells keep on ringing
Making angels in the snow
And may the melody surround us
When the cracks begin to show
Like the petals in our pockets
May we remember who we are
Unconditionally cared for
By those who share our broken hearts
As gentle as feathers
The snow piles high
Our world gets rewritten and retraced every time
Like fresh plates and clean slates
Our future is white
New Years resolutions are reset tonight”

— Snow, Sleeping at Last

“It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.”

— Charles Dickens

“When the year dies in preparation for birth
Of other seasons, not the same, on the same earth,
Then saving and calamity go together make
The Advent gospel, telling how the heart will break.
Therefore it was in Advent that the Quest began.”

— C.S. Lewis

“The Christmas candle burns hot, gives its light, gives its Light—and the world lights up, and Christmas goes on forever now.”

— Ann Voskamp

Coming next . . .

How to Start a Fire

The Glorification of Snow and Cold

“Winter is a time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and a talk beside the fire; it is the time for home.”

— Edith Sitwell

“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Even in the dark, black wood, I love the storm, the abundant rain, the cold, the ice and the snow; winter has for me an eloquent language and attracts me, charms me, has always given me delight.”

— Odilon Redon

Not many words today, just a gentle love of the quiet blanket snow puts over the earth, and its ironic because today we have fifteen inches of snow and the wind is raging outside at thirty miles an hour and stronger. It’s been blowing for three days, making mountains and caves of snow while in other places the ground is bare, and it is still so beautiful.

I can’t help but think this was what we were made for: taking not only the good but also the seemingly bad and giving thanks for it, reclaiming it as beautiful.

All trees and flowers must rest in winter, all weary souls find quiet in the cold and the darkening days. Snow must come to feed the earth, to feed us.

We must know the cold, for without it we would not know the warmth. Contrasted with warmth, the cold makes your blood run, cold makes us know how alive we are.

In the next Winter Merrymaking: Christmas

All In Good Knits

I remember being five and bringing two pencils and some string to my mama and asking her to teach me to knit because I wanted to be like the old fashioned ladies.

Turns out that’s where it started—this long fatal love of old things. It’s why I bought a spinning wheel because I wanted the unmitigated pleasure of doing things like the old fashioned ladies, I wanted this portal back to the places I had come from, the lives lived before me. I had an identity there. And I wanted to be a part of it.

Maybe it was daddy who loved history and my mama who loved reading, but even today I’m still gone back in time most of the time. My first heroes were Indians and cowboys. My siblings and I dragged wagons up and down the hills of Wyoming pretending to be on the Oregon Trail.

I put on my mother’s old prom dresses and pretended I was at a ball in old fashioned times. My chief aspiration in life at the age of eight was to be an Indian and ride horses bareback while hunting with a bow.

I still read books and journals about the Oregon Trail, I read the letters of early homesteaders, explorers of Australia, I read about the Apache tribes that frightened me the most, I pour over old photographs of coal miners and Shetland crofts, and I’ve got this long history with knitting I never even knew about.

All my grandma’s knitting and crochet things came to me when she passed on. I held in my hands literal history with crochet hooks and stitch markers and circular knitting needles. I held bits and pieces of my grandma in those things.

How I came to knit is a story about friends and my sister in the hospital and all this seventeen year old me who’d rediscovered an old childhood wish and went back to it because returning to childhood seems to be the thing my soul needs to remember to re-member. Constantly backtracking in order to move forward.

So I constantly go back to different times where I was not alive but am ever seeking to bring to life again. Constantly returning to old ways of life because somehow, back there, it’s where I find a way to go on.

“And then I knew that I was present in
The long age of the passing world, in which
I once was not, now am, and will not be . . . ”

— Wendell Berry

I often wonder if I know what it really is I’m doing here, with knitting and crochet all about me, always on my desk, my nightstand, the crate stuffed to overflowing beside my bed with yarn and projects set aside.

Do I really understand what it is I am holding? Or better yet, do I always remember what it is I am doing? That is the real question.

When I am picking up an age old art for the restlessness of my hands and my mind, for the goodness of having created, do I really remember what it is I have in my hands?

Francis Meadow Sutcliffe Photographer

Unknown

Unknown

It’s a comforting thing, to sit before the warmth of a roaring fire, listening to something good and soft, all the while your mind at ease and your hands occupied. It’s cozy and calming to make art while relaxing. It’s trendy to crochet. It’s handy to know things. It’s productive. Unique.

Those things we taught our fingers to accomplish and our minds to fashion into something we’re proud of? They were done long ago by my grandmother and her grandmother. They were done by the Herring girls waiting in the wharves for the next catch of Herring to arrive. It was done by the girls in the Outer Hebrides while they carried baskets of peat on their backs. It was done by Vikings in Norway. It was done by the Sami tribes in Sweden in colors and patterns too immaculate for words.

These things we do so lightly now were once the livelihood of millions in ages past, and when I saw the picture of the two Scottish girls carrying peat and knitting while they walked, it brought a whole new meaning to the word “work.”

They worked for their today and knitted for their tomorrow.

“When we engage in fiber arts, we are creating something, but we are also participating in historic traditions tens of thousands of years old. You are not only making art for your soul and for future generations, you are embodying the work of our ancestors.”

— The Woven Road

There is a soft music all its own in the knowing you are picking up where your grandmothers of the lost ages left off. There is a gentle sort of goodness that comes when your fingers slip the yarn and the needles click and your grandmother’s notions aren’t lying around forgotten.

It takes you backward, slows time, this picking up of needles and wool again. It takes you back to a time where work was hard, the winters dark, and the fire warm, and life was just a little bit more focused on the today, the present moment, the needs of right now.

And I want to tell them, I want my grandmother to know, the Herring girls, the old women knitting Aran sweaters, I haven’t forgotten. I want to keep them alive through this knowledge, this gift that teaches my fingers, my mind, and keeps it alive to the past and watchful of the future.

The names of my great great grandmothers and fathers are lost to me, but by the picking up of something that connects us all, I will know them. The gifts are still being spread, still warming souls, and making smiles. It didn't end with them in the wake of modern technology. The old life, the one we used to know, it's still being knit together and casting a big blanket of warmth on the world.

Winter is the time for merrymaking with all the quiet, gentle things in the world. And maybe its a time to go back to the past. Sit before a fire, your clothes smelling of woodsmoke, your hands a little sooty, red from the cold, knitting away.

Bronislava taught me to knit mittens and socks.

Clare taught me to crochet. I still wear this ear warmer I crocheted all those years ago. It’s the coziest ear warmer to date.

Engineering Knits is partially responsible for my recent collection of old knitting books.

This is my recent collection of old knitting photos, books, inspiration, and patterns. It is ongoing, but please partake.

Simply in Stitches artfully and sweetly guided me through my first sweater. This pattern I have already knit several times.

I’ve carried bales of peat, thrown them into backs of pickups, loaded them into tiny cars, they aren’t as light as you think. She’s doing all that, walking however far, and knitting.

All the patterns I’ve collected over the years, some humor, wishes and want-tos, ideas and saving for laters.

Herring Lasses off Duty. -Unknown

Coming next in our winter series . . .

The Glorification of Snow

Feed the Birds

The geese flying south is a sacred moment in our household. Our home on the prairie stands in an optimal space between river and cow ponds and fields. When we hear the geese passing overhead, the darkness falling, it is an occasion to leap from our chairs and race to the door to watch, to listen to them departing for southern lands. It is some kind of signal, some kind of passing of one season into another, and to witness this is our greatest desire. To a part of this change our chief ambition

Sometimes, they fly across the moon when it is full.

But after they are long departed on their journey south and we no longer hear the whistle of wind on their wings, it’s time to welcome another kind of bird back to our little windbreak. I call it little, but it has a history of seventy years or more and it is quiet a proper, grown up windbreak.

It has become an unmitigated pleasure of mine to feed the birds. I think it started long ago when I heard a familiar song and learned my first sparrow, and it only manifested itself very recently into my own version. When I moved the birdfeeder to the north side of the house to make the birds feel a bit more protected, and I could watch them, the song came alive for me, and suddenly I was my own little bird woman.

The birds who greet us now outside the dining room windows are smaller in size and I could fit them in my hand. House sparrows and song sparrows. Chipping sparrows and Dark-Eyed Juncos. This year there is a White-Crowned Chickadee that I have yet to get a picture of for he appears and disappears without any warning. But I am so pleased one or two have stopped by.

This is the bird of my childhood high in the Wyoming hills. They played on the porch railing dusted in snow and that is where I first learned to love the little birds, winter watching from the windows surrounded by pines.

There’s a woodpecker, too, whom I’ve heard multiple times but never seen at the feeder until this year.

Sweetest of all are the quiet gold finches, who have gone almost gray in the winter light. They are smaller than sparrows and more shy. Gold finches and Junco’s prefer to scratch about on the ground for the seeds the others have spilled in their hurrying, twitching little ways. But sometimes they come to the feeders to pick for their own.

And then Dad threw out some old chicken feed one fall, and when the first snows came we stood at windows and gaped because the pheasants had come, pecking at and scratching the snow for the feed underneath.

Our house suddenly became a Scottish hunting lodge with the appearance of pheasants. We have kept scratch grains on hand every since. I’ve yet to get a decent picture of them, they are so flighty themselves and never wander close enough to the house, running for cover at the slightest noise.

I sing that song every time I go out, or it’s humming in the back of my mind. The trees become St. Paul’s Cathedral and the window where I watch them is often teeming with sparrows, magpies, pheasants, rabbits, and sometimes deer.

Claude Monet said, “I wish I could paint the way a bird sings.”

And I’m here wishing I could do that, too, live my life the way a bird sings.

So I fill the feeders and spread the scratch grains for the rabbits and the pheasants, and it fills a void. It’s the stuff that makes you believe in good things again. It’s a pathway to seeing beauty, and beauty is the pathway to believing in a good God.

Listen to “Feed the Birds” because it’s beautiful and endearing.

Then the album I most recently discovered “The Lost Birds” which is an ode to birds that no longer exist, and the podcast which is the story behind the album.

I wanted to read and gather some book resources. But since this was rather a spur the moment decision, I have only a few suggestions for you.

Finally, take a look at Monet’s painting and tell me what you see . . .

A beautiful book about wild things and mad farmers. There is peace in this book.

A lovely book on all the birds she’s met throughout her life, haunting, lovely, and sad.

The Magpie - Claude Monet. “I wish I could paint the way a bird sings.” One of 140 snowscape paintings done by Monet. It looks a little simplistic upon first glance, indeed, I believe the first time I saw it I glanced at it once and wondered if I even liked Monet. But now I can see the winter light and the blue shadows, I can hear the magpie calling in the still cold, and his desire to paint like a bird singing becomes all the more real.

Coming up . . .

Yarn tales of winter and knitting with my grandmother’s hand-me-down needles . . .

The Coming of the Dark

My sister says it’s going back to the way it’s supposed to be, setting our clocks back in November. It’s going back to true time, true light. The dark comes earlier and the sun rises sooner. Maybe it’s the way it was always meant to be . . .

It happens in August, autumn tapping on your shoulder. Then the September light falls and shadows appear where no shadows were before.

By October the air has turned and there’s a chill running through you. It’s time to start storing up and burrowing in. You can feel it everywhere you turn. The shift in the sun, the change in the wind. The wild geese flying, the blackbirds gathering, the darkness gently slipping in.

The earth is tilting, the sun sinking further and further south. Far north, the snowy lands fall into perpetual darkness, and I am far south wishing for snow . . .

The frosts put all flowers to sleep. The leaves drift or cling relentless, the trees slipping out of summer cloaks, baring themselves to embrace the cold as it comes. They have never been more alive than now, there is nothing more alive than anticipation.

The dark rises, the coming of the night a small urge to tuck in and batten down the hatches. To retreat indoors to the rest of darkness.

I long for the cold to shake me from the hot dreamy haze of summer. Since the end of August I have wanted to shed this old skin of me like a snake and crawl away until I myself again. Until I can hear again. Until I can listen again.

I have lost all sense of beauty and wonderment in the heatwaves of summer. It is one long, yawning dream, and I want the abrasive cold to stir my blood again, to make me alive again.

I go out with lanterns, like Emily, and break the darkness with the light. All my life I have wanted to be the prisoners put in an inescapable prison who still found a way out. There is darkness, I shall light a candle. There is death, I shall be alive. There is cold, I shall build a fire.

There is a sense of danger in the darkness, the turning of the season, the calling to changing of ways. A danger of being shook beyond your ability, to face some fear that has been rattling your cages. A call to change direction. To stir. To quiet. To remix. To stop and feel.

What is it really? This calling. How do we know it? Feel it?

Do we know it simply by looking at our calendars?

Or is there something far off in the ancient days that stirs our need for this change?

By some deep, primordial mystery, by the blood in our veins, with eyes sensitive to patterns and art, we know the changing of the light. It wakes us in the morning and sends us to bed at night.

The darkness makes us see all we could not see before. When the lights of the world go out, the darkness reveals what is underneath, the hidden things. The darkness we know of old, it can also be a light . . .

May we learn to see the darkness not as a depravity of light but as a depravity of all the eye can see.

May we use the darkness to stop looking for outward things and a way to start looking inward. May this darkness bring you comparison not to bodily form, but to the shape of the soul.

May the enveloping darkness reveal to us all which remains unseen, the concrete fade and the abstract arise. May we see not the superficial of life, but the depths and the worlds within each other. 

May the darkness give not to moments where our thoughts are tinged with regrets, but to moments where we see patterns and movements, purpose and conviction invisible in the light of our lives.

May we learn to use the darkness as a time to use our hearts and not our heads to see the world, and in so doing find the light that was hidden before. 

May the cold freeze our fears and turn our tears to light-reflecting prisms.

May it numb our heart aches and fill our lungs with refreshed life.

May these deep snows fill our paths not to slow our journey but to rest our weary bodies, and in so doing rest our weary souls.

May the wind blow through us and not against us.

May we learn to feel the cold not as a thing of torment, but as a place where we can hear and see the silent exhale of all distress.

May we learn to see the darkness not as a place to fear, not as place where howling monsters arise, but as a place where we are free in the presence of the holy. 

Coming Next . . .

All things little birds and how a song inspired me to feed them . . .

A Winter Merrymaking

This little place has made me so happy, I think I shall revive.

I seem to work best when I am seized in the moment and so I shall.

I have just scribbled down in one sitting a whole list of winter revels. This is no ordinary list. In it I will prescribe good winter medicine for the soul, the things I love about winter and why it is my favorite season, and all the things I look forward to when the weather changes.

It is a lonely business, loving winter, even here on the plains where winter is quite the common occurrence, I find very few kin who enjoy being cold, who love driving on snowy roads, or snow-walking at dusk when the moon is rising, or searching out the truth of silence on a winter prairie. Indeed, loving winter may be a solitary business anywhere you go. But still, I find it a most liberating experience.

Winter has had a profound affect upon my life. I can remember never being bothered by it as a child, but the meaning of it has grown with me, and I hope these sequences of winter frolics will bring you a deeper understanding of the cold, dark season where stillness is the highpoint, and the winter-quiet of the mind the effect.

Here are a few things to look forward to:

The darkness rising, feeding the birds, some wholesome knitting, a lot of snow and Christmas, wood chopping and the like, coffee and tea—the stuff of revolutions, rituals, solstices, what happens when there’s no snow.

Let us make haste to the merrymaking!