K.M. Updike's Blog, page 2

September 16, 2021

The Restless: Autumn Writing & Remembering of Other Worlds

I write more in the autumn, or rather when it is turning to autumn, and there are little yellow leaves in the silver poplars and the scraggly ash tree out the kitchen window. It’s no secret some restlessness comes over me in the changing light and the air that blows cool. It happened to me today in fact, all weekend my mind would not still, and nothing could satisfy it. I wanted to write, but I wouldn’t write. I wanted to create, but I wouldn’t create. I wanted to read, to find some wholesome beauty somewhere to feed my soul, as if there was something I had forgotten to do or needed to do but could not remember what or how, and there was no having it.


The Water Rat was restless, and he did not exactly know why. To all appearance the summer’s pomp was still at fullest height, and although in the tilled acres green had given way to gold, though rowans were reddening, and the woods were dashed here and there with a tawny fierceness, yet light and warmth and color were still present in undiminished measure, clean of any chilly premonitions of the passing year . . . the robin was beginning to assert himself once more; and there was a feeling in the air of change and departure . . . obedient to the call.


—Franklin Grahame


I haven’t taken up lens and gone out and looked at the world, been to walk in my fields or visited the rowan grove or the woodland. I haven’t been to look at the hills far and blue in the distance nor taken a satisfactory picture of anything. There was this great concentration of mind and body on work and people, and now that it is September, fickle September, there is a heaviness, a weariness of all that is out there and a deep need for everything in here, where I can hear the quiet of changing things and let the ringing in my head from voices and wants and cares, and the constant need to be entertained, cease into the far away call of the brush wolf and the wind in the grass, to eat the apples fresh from picking in the light of a half moon and a prairie excursion with the Other Girl. We are of Other Worlds, she and I. We speak a language too dear to be shared, my sister and me. We are the girls who find oracle in the feather of owls and mystery in traipsing across field with bucket and dog to find the cherry red apples in the easterly regions of the wind break. We know the things of the wood and the prairie, of the animals that live there, of the singing of songs in the light of the moon and the last red traces of the sunset, of the homage and meaning to put into song the feeling and quintessence of a place, a moment, a lifetime.

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I am here now, in that mysterious place of in-between, no longer summer, not quite autumn, and my mind is restless and I cannot settle when the winged creatures are flitting and going and the sun is changing in the tilt of the earth. So I wandered, as I’ve often wandered in the thirty years of walking this good earth. And I found I had forgotten, as I always forget, how nature has a way of bringing God-quiet to the soul. I was afraid these ways would grow old with me, and they would no longer work to ease the ringing in my ears made of voices and screens and headphones to cover more noise and more voices, that I would have to search out and move on and find something else to ease the burden life can become.

But I remembered how to hear it, remembered how to listen, and how could I be afraid of forgetting. I marveled I could remember, still, yet again and again. All seasons are simply that, a season to stay and a season to go, ever changing and always the same. God-quiet came and God-quiet hallowed, and I took the Other Girl with me with bucket and dog and crossed field and picked apples in the moonlight, with the grass seed getting in our socks and brushing our legs, and the geese bedding down on the pond over the hill, and autumn-scented evening breeze taking us home to book and chocolate and the reading of stories in arm chairs in a little room called Mole End.

And here I am again, that old lover of autumn returned, far more than cozy socks, hot drinks, pumpkins. Autumn is the sound the wind makes when the earth breathes cool and quiet, the feeling in the birds that make them gather and flock and rise and fall over fallow fields and ancient ponds for seed and sustenance. It is the light changing from searing summer to calming gold, it is the color of blue in the sky, the sound of wood chopped and stacked. Autumn isn’t a place, it is a state of being. It is our natural desires after the rollicking of summer to slow and still and find peace like the wild things of the earth. It is that movement in men and beast stirred by the changing sun and the earth turning, the burrowing in, the shoring up, gathering together that we all still know deep in our bones from the ancient of days, though we’ve long forgotten how to use it or remember that it is there.

Still it is within us, the Other Girl and I, we of the Other World: the search, the longing that nothing on earth can satisfy, the ear-mark we were made for another world. It is only the leaning of one season into another, the in-between of hot and cold, summer and autumn, the going out and the searching and looking through lens, and seeing, as if for the first time . . . this God-quiet of autumn.

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Published on September 16, 2021 18:07

March 8, 2021

Lessons From a Greenhouse

I’ll be going back to it tomorrow, working in the greenhouse.

Playing in the dirt and planting things, things my hands have always done as far back as I can remember. Stories told in the dirt-filled lines in my hands.

Two years and counting since I started getting paid for it, a job that makes me happy, and people I love to see, and things I love to do.

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You’re bound by a different time when your work follows the green growing things. You follow a different pattern of life. You go slow, you look deeper, you pay attention longer. It’s become a song in my heart, a tuneless song on the wind in the grass and the smell of earth. You learn to hear things differently, you learn to see things differently, when your hands learn new shapes, and your heart takes on the gentleness of handling life, real life. You learn to touch your soul softer, you learn to watch for hurt instead of make it, you learn to lean in a little closer.

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When you break a seedling by the stem, you break the life of it.

With the young at heart, hold them by the outer leaves, give them room to grow and strength to do. Cut a heart off from its life source and there is no hope of it ever recovering. Nurture the stem, the heart, when it is new and growing and thin with life, handle it with care. Plant it safe.

Damaged leaves will never repair themselves.

The damage done will not be healed. Dead leaves must be cut away. As in winter, old branches must be cut away. There is no new growth without removing. Remove what is old, what does not serve. Remove what is dead, what you carry around with you like baggage. Cut it away. You have carried it long enough, and what keeps you heavy holds you down, holds you back. Let it go. Make room to grow. Make room for beauty.

Remember your roots, little one.

The place where you stand, the solid ground no rain can wash away, only nurture. Plant yourself well in good, fertile soil. Amend it with beautiful words, things you love. Tend it with gentle hands.

Remember your heart to better love another’s. Tend the ground you walk upon, tend the soil in which you grow.

Live in the sun.

Rest in the dark.

Grow.

Bloom.

Make room.

Grow strong, little root.

Love, Kayla

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Published on March 08, 2021 14:35

January 18, 2021

Like Light and Death

The morning we went to the Verdigris River she took me out driving down Kansas country roads. The roads were white and we drove in squares and rectangles to get to the little spot on a hill overlooking the valley. We went to Miller’s Ford and I saw Osage Orange Trees for the first time, all the green Love Apples spread out for fall underneath.

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Deep October light made it all golden, fall in Kansas only just beginning, the leaves only just starting to turn, the air warm but playing in the undercurrent a hopeful cool breeze.

We stood on her graveyard plot, her and I. The one she bought for her and her brother for twenty-five dollars. A place to go to so even in her dying she wouldn’t be bothering her loved ones with troubles of where to bury her. She wasn’t intending to leave any time soon, there was so much life left, but she knew where she was going. She wouldn’t lie to herself about that, deny it, be afraid of it. It was just there, lying in wait for the right day. She’d grown accustomed to the sight of it, just waiting for her, she’d been so close to death so many times I stared at her wondering what grace must have been sufficient that she was here with me now, a Kansas ranch woman who captured the Black Hills on canvas and knew Lakota by heart, who’d lost big parts of her heart to people who hadn’t been worth it, and she loved anyway.

I looked at the view from her plot in the graveyard, thinking how tame a name Cemetary was. How we’d just civilized death to the point of being able to deny it, when this was what it was, a yard of graves. A place of death. Eminent. Guaranteed. And she prepared for it. I didn’t want to think about that, having driven twelve hundred miles to hug her again.

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I tucked the view of her simple little plot by the fence just right away in my mind, and I painted a picture of it on a small 3x3 canvas. It’s sitting with my painting of my prairie on my bedstand. Because you have to remember things like that, hold them close and think about them day in and day out, make peace with them.

It’s a good place, I told her. And it makes me happy to think she’ll rest there some day. It makes me long for a place so simple and clean to store death inside my heart. Death is just a stopping, an end, and why should we fear it?

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We picked up Sally and drove out on the prairie. Kansas has red and rolling hills, smooth and broken only by flintstone emerging from earth. The trees are clustered and gathered, as if they are pouring over the edges of embankments into rivers, and the noonday sun makes the skies blue.

When you search for peace it’s never usually this wild, desperate, fast-paced groping in the dark. Mostly, you just walk right into it, as if it were waiting for you to get there. And it looks like a day spent at the Verdigris River, skipping rocks in shallow pools with your friends who are thirty years older than you but you’re all the same age. Its dangling your hand out the car window as you drive through the water just to see if you get splashed. It’s leaves floating in a shaft of sunlight falling through sycamore branches. Sometimes it looks like a plot of earth all your own where someday your bones will rest final and finished.

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We had a picnic under an oak tree in the dry bed of the Verdigris. Sally found a deer head and she took it home, strapped outside the car to the wheel-less dolly. We drove up to the turnpike, and it overlooked the vastness of Kansas in mid-October, and I wanted it all. Its ins and outs, its secrets, its beauty, I couldn’t stuff into my heart fast enough to savor it. So I savored what I could: Sally’s voice in the back seat. Bev’s two brown hands on the steering wheel, the bluestem grasses swishing the old Toyota Sequoia, being in a place I’d never been before but knew by heart through the people I shared it with.

They showed me death again, the memorial for an old cowboy who’d died doing what he loved, made by the people who loved him. He’s still out there, in Kansas somewhere, riding his horse the way he used to. You don’t need to see the end to live a good life. And death seems to be the thing I meet with everyday.

That evening she cooked me a chicken and made a salad, and I took her picture to remember it all just that way. We took turns praying over the meals we ate together, and every time the gratefulness heaped over the rims and wanted to run down my face. Every time the heads bowed and the hands folded and we came to God, we just dropped everything right there, and we were all there. In a little apartment on the Kansas prairie in a town so little it didn’t matter to anyone except those who lived there, there was a whole lot of living and a whole lot of dying to things that didn’t matter any more.

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When I left Kansas at the end of the week, I packed my car up in the dark before dawn. She packed my little cooler with hot egg and ham sandwiches and made me hot coffee in the camo thermos I bought at Dollar General because I’d forgotten to bring mine. She thought of everything and sent me off. Just like my grandma had. She waved her phone flashlight in my rearview mirror until I turned the corner and I told myself I wouldn’t cry, but I did when I was crossing the river one last time.

I stopped to take pictures of Kansas in the morning. Kansas glowed. And it’s strange, but I felt I couldn’t capture the colors right, they were different than the colors back home, light I was familiar with. It made me uncomfortable, the light there. Not in a bad way. But in the way you think about death and don’t want to think about it. It’s just there, like the light and the colors of Kansas. You can’t change it. You can only look at it and hold it and wonder about it. You can’t really capture death or light, and they seem to be such complete opposites when you think of them. They are two things you really can’t change. You can bend them and twist, elude them and pass them. But they are startling realities. There is no way to stop the sun shining or death from coming.

I don’t mean it to be morbid. I mean, maybe, death was supposed to look Kansas in October, in a light that drove you from comfort to come find what made it home for those who shared it with you, what made it peace in such a strange and unearthly way.

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Published on January 18, 2021 13:45

October 30, 2020

I Don’t Need to See the End

I really didn’t think I’d make it this year.

I never take vacation, never go on long solo trips by myself. I dreamed about it, but there is a very dim line between wanting to be alone and being lonely. Long trips usually mean a car full of siblings stuffed so close one must resort to covering ones eyes and making believe they are not there. I did not know how trips alone would be simply because I’d never taken them. I did not know if I’d relish the quiet or be lonely. Quiets aren’t often lonely, but certain things can be. My first solo trip was across the state of Wyoming to work on a ranch I’d never been to, with people I’d never met, and spelled adventure certainly but not a trip to see a friend and a wonderful new place I’d never been. It was all new, this freedom to go where I wanted, do what I please. Usually I was sharing it with somebody else.

I woke up slow on a Saturday morning and knew there wasn’t really a rush to get out the door. I made coffee and finished packing my car, made sure I had all I needed. Had breakfast with the parents. I decided that this was what was called “Making your own way in the world.”

Mama wished me well and watched me drive away as she always does. I didn’t really tell anybody I was going anywhere. I unplugged from it all, facebook, instagram, and I just went. I got a mocha in a little Nebraska college town and drove.

They were harvesting the corn. Long lines of grain trucks rolled by slow and easy, and shorn off fields with only the highway cutting through looked pretty much like a way of life well lived and good. A week later when I came back they were harvesting potatoes under steel gray skies, great mounds piled high on the roadside and trucks still making passes, trying to beat the snow coming sure.




























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There were sometimes on the back roads on the way to Grandma’s it was only me and the coal trains and the thunderous sounds off the tracks. Then cattle and lonesome blue ponds in afternoon sunshine, deepened by October. Amidst some hard changes at work and the after effects of a summer no one couldn have imagined, a clear path down an empty road came like a whisper, a beauteous stillness, and my heart kind of sighed happy.




























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There really wasn’t room to be lonely. There really wasn’t time. There were audio books and my favorite playlists, but voices weren’t things I needed. The emptiness of the road was all that seemed to satisfy the noise in my head, and with each mile it disipated—the sounds, the rough memories, the losses, old ways, old thoughts—just passed right on by. I left them far behind and I wouldn’t be coming back for them. They’re lost somewhere in the sandhills and the endless corn fields now fallow with autumn.

The only thing I dislike about driving is you can’t just keep on watching the prairie go by. But the thing I like about driving is you have to stop and take a longer look.




























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Me and Nebraska go way back. My mama’s girlhood was spent here, on the farmland and with the cornfields, a simple life. I’ve got this little ache in me that knows this is where I come from, and the people here are my people.

Sometimes all I have to do to remember the humanity in the world is drive through the heartland with the fields of golden grain and the old family farm houses, and see that there is still a good life to be lived. I don’t know why, but it’s got to be something in my blood that runs deep.

I spent that night at my grandma’s, a Nebraska farm girl born and raised. I didn’t get out the camera, didn’t take any pictures. It was just me and Grandma, and it’s never like this, me being able to sit alone with her and just listen and just talk. And maybe that’s why I had this warm feeling in my heart all evening, just sitting and watching Hallmark movies with her.

When you’re young and you look at old folks you almost see a meaningless existence, the slow old bones, the complete lack of ambition and imagination to do absolutely anything. You almost want to pray, Oh God, don’t let this be my fate, because how would this ever be enough? How can they live this way?

But sitting there in my grandpa’s old green recliner from the 70s, the one in old photos of him sleeping, stretched out, and me curled in his lap, I’m watching my grandma beside me and looking at a woman who never held back on life, not a bit of it.

And there’s something I knew then that I’ll never forget, and it goes along with everything I’ve been thinking lately about growing old and passing things on to the young.

Someday there will come a point in life when we will just sit and be and watch a Hallmark show. And it will be enough.




























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It’s like in the John Denver song, “My life is worth the living, I don’t need to see the end.” I don’t have to look ahead in my life to when I’m old and grey and my bones are tired and wonder if it’s worth it. John Denver said it right, I don’t need to see the end to know my life’s gonna be worth living, old or young. It’s all there, in my grandma’s blue eyes, in her smile, in the age old wedding ring she wears like it’s a part of her hand.

The next morning, in the dark before dawn, my grandma held me, and she prayed for me, and I cried, and there was part of me that didn’t want to leave her there alone. But her prayers went with me into the sunrise, and followed in my footsteps wherever I went, because that’s what a good God does for the young of His people, He gives you the old to send you away into life with prayers, because they don’t need to see the end either to know the good of life that will come to you as it came to them, when they were young and restless, and the old of their day sent them off with prayers, too, so long ago.

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Published on October 30, 2020 15:22

September 27, 2020

How to Live Slowly By Braving the Hard Work

There’s been a slow pulling away this year, a slowing down of the urgent need to photograph everything beautiful. A sweet surrender of life away from what the world expects of you, of sharing every moment. Lately its just been me enjoying life with myself, and not through a sense of obligation.

Right outside the front window a pheasant is scratching in the underbrush, picking at scraps, wandering the grass. The ash trees are speckled with yellow and the prairies have all gone to their dull golden color I love so much.

And I’ve been doing things, dreaming things, thinking things. And its like my friend Bev said about texting everything and sharing everything because its so easy, when you finally see someone, hug someone after miles and time apart—you’ve lost some of the preciousness of catching up.

So this me catching up, because despite how much I would love to travel and meet up and hug you and sit down to a real talk, the world makes it awfully hard.




























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And besides, it is autumn and writing words always comes sweeter in the autumn. Once the first frost laces the prairie I’m all for hoodies and the old boots, for home and the fall garden harvests, books and putting stories on paper I’ve been daydreaming of all summer . . . I’ve got a few of those lying around, too many to make into actual books, so I’m taking a stab at short stories for most of them. They may turn into novelettes because I’ve never really been good at short stories, parameters or limitations in general. So we’ll see what comes.

The summer was wild and beautiful and I loved every burning minute of it, and how I came by 85 bags of raw Icelandic wool is one of the finest tales I have to tell.




























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It started in April when we “ooed” and “awed” over the glorious wool my boss had in the garage. Fine owner and breeder of some of the oldest and purest breed of sheep, he had tons of wool. Beautiful grays and silvers, blacks and browns, the colors, I’ll have to show you the colors.

Donna, Gary, and I dreamed about building a spinning wheel while potting up plants last spring. But the world exploded and everyone and their dog was home and fixing up their houses and their yards, and we courageous souls of Agriculture ran the entire months of May and June, helping new gardeners, planning landscapes. It was a good year to end on, for Alan and Janet.




























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Early morning, before an adventure with siblings, Facebook Marketplace offered me something. A spinning wheel. A beautiful antique spinning wheel from New Zealand dated 1983, only an hour away.

The lady had tears in her eyes when she sold it to me. I paid her in cash, but she told me I’d driven a long way and wouldn’t let me give all of her asking price. I sent her a picture of the first yarn I spun, rough as it was, ‘cause she’d asked me to.

There’s a little local yarn store in our small town and I picked up two springs I needed for the brake band, and it was mine. A gentle, slow anticipation, long lasting and glorious met me that day.

I asked my boss what he was going to do with all that raw, beautiful wool he had before he sold the store for good. He shook his head and said he’d probably throw it away, he didn’t have room for it at home. But he looked at me and asked if I wanted any, and I smiled and told him the story of the spinning wheel. He smiled because he loves things with history, because I loved them, too. He said just bring my truck and he’d put a whole pallet on there.

So I did. And then he gave me another.

I’ve washed it and dried it and hung it for the winter, I’ve spun from roving, but there’s just something about spinning straight from fleece, uncombed and uneven. It makes me feel real, actual, how honest it feels there.




























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The whir of the wheel and the treadle, the wool in my fingers and the fibers catching and spinning.

There’s this going back to old ways I’ve always longed for, and I'm looking at my hands and stiff wrists and touching wool spun like in ages past, and I just can’t believe it did not give some amount of unmitigated pleasure to those long before me, to spin, to knit, to make, to create, else how could I be sitting here loving it?

And perhaps I’ve rediscovered something that was forgotten or lost altogether. Now I understand the slowness of life, the time and how precious it is to be present every moment, in every step.

Perhaps there were some bound to the slowness of their time, but they brought us gifts today by living their lives just as they did with what they had. By braving the hard and the ugly because for them it was the only way.

And here today, I’m thinking this is the way it ought to be. Me, sitting at a spinning wheel or chopping my own wood or building my own fire to warm my house, remembering the old and long gone, and thanking those that lived there for coming before me, for doing to the hard work, for making and creating, and for the joy it brings to do it again, and again.

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Published on September 27, 2020 11:49

January 11, 2020

I Threw Away Fourteen Years' Worth of My Writing

I went through my writing stash a couple of months ago. All of a handwritten decade’s worth.

Everything. From the time I was 14 and read that a writer shouldn’t throw anything away because think what treasures it might hold.

Ten folders stuffed to bursting, two boxes, and some besides, filled with all the wild, imaginative ideas and ponderings. The magical one liners and mysterious single sentences, half written hopeful stories, the learnings and the failings, and the never giving up.

I kept one stack. One stack I could hold in two hands without spilling.

It fit so nicely, so . . . small, in that corner of my desk.

A few scraps of notepad paper, a couple of notebooks gone flat from use, and pieces of pages rescued.

I filled a three foot toilet box with all the rest. I tossed the box into the dumpster.

Was I sad?

Would I be staring into nothing tomorrow wondering what I had done?

There was a girl in those raggedy pieces of scribbled on paper. There were notebooks with stretched spirals and torn pages filled with voices and heartbeats made of midnights and the yellow light of a hidden lamp and gel ink pens. Thrumming minutes of inspirational ecstasy, thumbprints of discouragement and utter despair, poetry I’d forgotten I’d written.

I could still see that girl, and all the old stirrings each word had made shimmer.

She was still there, shy, out of place, peeking from behind the pages of the magnum opus’s of girlhood, who could reach out and touch the essence of what made writing life.

I loved that girl. She didn’t know it then. She didn’t know I’d be sitting here fourteen years later wishing I could have her back, if only just a piece of her.

Had I thrown it all away?

It wasn’t like I was trying to move on. Be rid of them. Forget them. I’d held them this long because I loved them. They gave me something to go back to. To smile at. To remember. To give me courage, to show myself how far I’d come.

What did I mean by suddenly throwing them all away?











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I say it to myself with a little shrug and tears in my eyes, “I didn’t need them any more.”

Yeah. This from the girl who struggled never to grow up because she didn’t know what lay beyond and so didn’t want to go there.

This from the girl who tossed the stories out, who made room, and didn’t know why she’d thrown all those words away until she was sitting here writing new ones.

Here it’s a truth for me, realizing I’ve come a step forward, and all this meaning is slipping down soft on my face.

They aren’t gone. They are of the sacred place now where all words go that have shaped us and made us. They’ve served their purpose, long and well, and go on thrumming still.

And here’s me thinking someone else’s words are the words that change you. Who knew the words you wrote in a little dark bedroom late at night when you were fourteen could do all this unnoticed, quiet shaping of you?

Some people ask, “Why all these stories and endless words written down? What for?”

I’ve always told myself writing saved me from myself. But now they ask, I can tell them something else, too.

The words you read first did the changing of the one who wrote them.

That is only the very least of why those who wield words keep them always about.

They hold fragments of moments, of the past, tomorrow, and the next tomorrow. Of growing, changing.

Words speak you into life.

Why stop when you have all of time in your hands?

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Published on January 11, 2020 15:51

August 10, 2019

Letting August In

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It is as if the entire month of July everything is happening.

Summer is at long last true summer and there are lake days, “high days and holidays, and bonfire nights.”

It is as if in July there is only ever today. No looking back, no looking forward, only today. One ever-blooming day where everything and nothing is happening all at the same time.

There is only this moment, this one hot, glorious day where everything is alive and teeming, so full of life.











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It is as if July is one beautiful day on a beach. One perfect, laughing, warm day. Your people are there, the best people. There is sand, endless miles of water, lapping and roaring and there is peace, but an excited peace, the kind of peace that comes with knowing this is the day you have been waiting for. And your skin, oh, your skin is warm. So warm. It makes you deliriously happy and deliriously contented.

And then August slips in, and its as if August is the setting of the sun on your one beautiful day of July. A cool breeze sweeps off the waters, and a thin light of twilight comes over you like a cool sheet at bedtime.

The brightness of day fades, sweaters are donned, but no shoes. Colors deepen, and slowly, the happy shadows, dancing, silhouetted against the sky, the water.

You are running the still warm sand with your people, and the bonfires are just being lit, and the sharp goodness of the smoke blows around you—when you pause—as if something has tapped you on the shoulder. Gently, softly, like a tug at the hand, it holds you back.

But when you turn and look there is only empty beach, the breeze, and one wisp of thin white line across the waters where the ocean and sky kiss.

It’s as if you suddenly remembered something you’d forgotten, but you’re not quite sure what it was.

But oh—then you do. And it makes you smile before you run away with summer once again.

August, the first gentle reminder of something that seemed so far away no one thought it existed any more.

The looking back month.

The remembering month.

The penny whistle notes lilting, haunting, music you’d once known but lost.











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The wind is laced with something you thought you’d left far behind. Something you can feel, quiet and sweet, like the touch of seasons, drifting, playing, singing, whispering everywhere.

But it doesn’t make you sad, this knowing change tugging at you from the breeze, the end of the day.

It only ever makes this day with no yesterdays or tomorrows longer and more delicious.

This is how you let August in, let it slip in around the edges of the hot, dry days of goodness, and the cool, heavy nights of stars. For when you let August in with grace and the opening of hands, you learn what it means not to fear the tides that change and sweep by, that bring for a time something light and gracious, or something deep and foreboding.

When you let August in you are letting in the winds of a new season. A season that will hush and pull, blind and free us, change us.

The season will change regardless.

The days will change, unaware of our tight fists against fear, the unknown depths of tomorrow, and how it may hurt. And change is a hurt that is not to be reckoned with. Change is a hurt there is no cure for. Change is a cruel master.

Change is needed.











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Because when there is no change—you would never know August. You would never know the last hurrah of summer on the other end of September.

You would never know the deep darkness of January, the rest of a snow laden earth.

You would never know the cold and what it teaches you of warmth. If you never knew cold, you would never know warmth.

If you never knew August, you would never know July. Or June. Or spring. Or October and the golden colors of autumn breaking out over prairie and forest.

If there was only ever July, there would be no love of it.

If you did not know the hurt of losing, you would not know the joy of having.

If we did not change, there would never be the bittersweet being of knowing better.

So we let August in, to change us, to rest us, to remind us, to let us let in change.

For change is a like a long, hard, painful tug that dulls over time, but pulls you to know things you hadn’t seen before.

Change is like the needed painting of a room. There’s a disheveled mess for a time, but then it is clean and new, and known anew.

Change is bloody fists in a fight—confused and pained. Change is an ever, on-going battle to stay the same and to be different.

Change is the seasons—showing us the lovely ways in which to graciously let go.

Change is wishing July to stay forever, that August would never come, and letting it come anyway.

Change is knowing things will and must change. Knowing the good will come, will be there in the opened hands, in the struggle, in the bloody fists, in the cold, in the hard and the unknown.

The goodness of August comes in the knowing that it will be, regardless. That it will come not to take away, but to give.

The goodness of August is letting August come anyway.











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Published on August 10, 2019 20:41

July 27, 2019

Making Home

When you make a home, you fill it with the breathings of your heart.

When you make a home, you make it a haven, the place where you just be.

It’s not just the floor you walk on, the doors you close, the bed you sleep in, the table where you eat.

When you make a home, and when you really make a home, home really comes to mean something else entirely.

Home becomes the place your soul resides.

Home becomes a life meaning.

Home is what you take with you wherever you go.











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Once I told my sister, when we were miles from home, walking down a city sidewalk, in a city neighborhood, that I thought perhaps I understood all the wanderers and the sailors, the explorers and the journeymen—the ones always with restlessness under their feet, always in need of a road ahead of them, home one day and gone with the sunrise the next. I thought perhaps I knew them now—being one of them myself, always afraid of the constant, slogging on day after day through the same mundane life. Always longing for a place unseen, a land unknown. Always longing to see the world anew.

Perhaps now, after the leaving of home and the living away and struggling hard with change, I understand:

It wasn’t so much the fear of a mundane, monotonous life that drove us away from home . . .

It was the fear of not loving home enough.











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There’s a struggle in me against change. And a struggle in me with a need for change, and oh, the years it took to convince me that this was a gift.

There are souls that struggle for routine, for the day to day sameness. There are souls that struggle just to find a balance.

It’s the difference in people’s souls, no one difference better than another, no one difference more praiseworthy than the other, just the whole of our own beautiful souls that make us who we are, that make us all just one glorious union of human.

But there is one thing in me that never changes and is never struggled against.

Home.

I know of soul needs that are far different than mine, I know of soul needs that I struggle to understand.

But there is a constant here. In all the wild and different world where souls are shaped, there is one thing that is ever true, for all our souls.

The never ending need for Home.

And the shape your soul determines the shape of your home.

And there’s a real legitimate fear of forgetting how much you just really love being home. And it’s a fear we maybe shouldn’t ever get over. Because maybe no matter where we are in this world, we ought to carry home in our souls.

All those wanderers, maybe they knew what they had when they left home, and it wasn’t the search for another that took them away. Perhaps it was the longing for the reminder of where home was. And maybe it wasn’t so much what they were leaving, but what they carried away from it when they left.

Maybe they knew the better for all their wandering that home is not just a shelter you make from storms and torrents, a stronghold against beasts and tyrants. Maybe they knew home is what souls are made of. Home is the place you carry inside you wherever you go. Home is the thing you make out of your heart.

Home becomes the place where your soul resides because your soul is your home.

The wanderer and the “cricket on the hearth”, the traveler, the changer, the homebody, the settler, the king, and the quiet, we are all homemakers. No matter the road, no matter the place. Home comes from our souls and what we build in our souls is where we will build our homes.

I know there are places for our souls where the peace is immeasurable, the defenses unbreakable, and the goodness seaworthy and time tested, and I know there are some souls that long for such a place with such a peace where the wild world is shut out, and home can seem like such a place.

But where do these places come from if not from the soul? And how does the soul know how to build such a place if it had not been built there already?

All long for home.

All lose sight of it now and again.

All wander for a time, searching for it.

But it is what we always return to, home.

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Published on July 27, 2019 13:46

January 14, 2019

The Art of Listening to Nothing

There is a slowness to these winter days, a watching from the windows and a gentle whispered hope for snow.

A pause to look for the stillness that comes with snow, to wait for the slowing down of life that comes in this solstice.

For in all the wild, traipsing world that doesn’t stop, there is nothing quite like the sound of snow.

It’s there, like the music of falling icicles, this one soft answer in all the quiet:

“Be still, and know . . .”









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It’s here I feel it most, in the deepness of midwinter. Perhaps that’s why I love it most, this silence when the world is cold and the deepness of the snow makes your tread slow.

The cold snow and the silence of a winter day, in the nothingness of no sound, this is where you can begin to know what quiet is. This is where you may begin to hear the still and often noiselessness of how peace is meant to feel.

The scurry of summer is over. The hushing of autumn’s rest is sleeping. And winter stillness has come at last. The trees fall into a silent sleep, and the furious whirling of the world has paused to heave a breath. To take a moment.

I am so alone here, and I am so alive. I can breathe here. I can slow.

In these shadowy, slow days there is time. Time to find peace and make peace. In these drifted, chilling hours of storing up and building fires, there are places to make cozy and warm, and there are places in the soul for which to do the same.

There is time to listen. Time to notice, time to feel without fear how the length of days draws shorter so that we may grow taller. Time to feel the cold and its magic.

Cold, bringer of silence and stillness, enticing in its peace, and hallowing in its danger, changer of echoes and silence to all-encasing sphere. How often the cold makes quiet, how often the cold turns your breath to clouds, how often seeing your breath is all but this slow and silent exhale to watch it again and again, to listen for the sound it makes curling and unfurling into cold.

What is slowing but this gentle moment of making time, clearing space, and listening?

What is winter but a soothing quieting of the world, a snow white urging to slow?

What is cold but shivering enlivening to know that you are alive?

And somehow you do know it—I am breathing. I can see it. I am alive.











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There’s quiet that can shame you and there’s cold that can rip you raw.

There’s quiet that can burn your insides and there’s a cold that cannot quench it.

There’s quiet where the fear leaks in and everything you’ve ever hidden can be heard, and ridiculed, and assaulted.

It’s hard to take the quiet. It’s hard to listen to silence because there’s an onslaught of vicious thoughts just waiting for battle, a need to be needed and among others. It’s hard to step into a place where you are alone with only you to think, to fight, to stand ready, to battle the interminable. It’s hard to take the quiet with all the self-hatred, all the anger, all the fear that permeates.

But simply and terribly there is this . . .

Quiet is sometimes a stepping out of the comfort zone of distraction.

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

Quiet is not a matter of finding, quiet is a matter of becoming. Quiet is a state of being. Quiet is a matter of being still. Because in the Hebrew ‘be still’ means to slacken. To let alone. To let go.

To know’ is yâda‛, to ascertain by seeing.

“Let go, and see that I am God.” See me in quiet. See me in the cold. See me in the slowing and see me in the listening. See me in the letting go. See me in the being still.

Be still and listen for Him. For He is exalted on earth, in the wilderness, among the nations and the unbelieving, in the chaos and in the deafening, fear-stricken silence.











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God comes in the quiet and in the chaos. God comes in war, in the breaking of spears and the spilling of blood, in the sea of Egyptians, in the encircling of enemies and doubts and fears, and He says,

“The Lord will fight for you, you need only be still . . .”

Quiet is not a place where the mind is empty. Quiet is a place where the mind is given over to slowness, to focus, to the deep and intense sense of hearing, of listening, of being aware, of seeing with the soul all that remains unseen. It is a place where God breaks through.

Becoming quiet becomes this real and heart-aching search for a God that breaks the quiet adulterated with the heavy darkness of your anger, your self-hatred, your sin with His broken, crucified, risen presence.

The way to letting God fight the cold of your past and the shame of your quiet, is not by climbing ladders of importance, nor the drawing of swords, nor the bundling up of your soul tight against the onslaught of a weary world trying to freeze you helpless.

The way to God is the slow and steady pace of a winter day. It is in the looking out of windows and watching the snow come down, drifting. It is the standing still and raising of face to feel this sound, the sound of peace. It is the practice of listening, of being quiet, of relinquishing the noise and chaos we’ve given place to in our souls slip away in all their ringing, clamoring bluster, and saying,

“I will let You fight for me. I will be still. And in this I will see that you are God.”

Because God comes in the silent places, the unlikely places, the mangers of animals in the dank of stables, and the dinner tables of thieves, the battlefields, the dens of lepers, the houses of the mad, the prisons of the anxious, the depressed, and the worried, the tombs of the dead.

He comes to impossible places, He comes to the wild, chaotic torment of your quiet. God comes in the moments where you’re crying out for Him to break His silence. God comes when you cannot hear Him, when there’s just too many hurting moments where you scream, “Where are you, God?” God comes. God comes and He turns your soul to snowfall, gentle, to the stillness of the cold, to the quiet and slowness of winter.

Let go. Know. Be still. And see that He is God.



“Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
”

— C.S. Lewis

Let me know this in my bones—that slowness is an exhale in the cold where quiet is unequaled.

Slowness is a place where I am still and watching as I breathe.

Quiet is a place where I am alive and I am listening, to all the wild and quiet moments, and I am still in both.

Let me know it in my soul, that in fact, the art of listening to nothing is the art of seeing God in everything.

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Published on January 14, 2019 17:44

January 10, 2019

A Prayer In Winter's Dark

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When all this darkness fills up day and when the light-less moments feed off our souls,

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 learn to see the darkness as a way 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, of ourselves, of others, 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 this 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.













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May this cold chill the gloating voices of guilt, the ugly taunts of shame, the puncturing nails of anger, the blackened hands of all judgement, the grits of impatience, and the hot coals of jealousy.

May these deep snows fill our paths not to slow our journey, but to slow our efforts to be perfect, to perform, to slow our pace, to calm our raging hearts, to rest our weary bodies, and in so doing rest our weary souls.

May the wind blow through us and not against us. And when it blows unhindered through a howling darkness, all those icy, chilled off corners of our hearts? All those places we haven't found the courage to let go of? All those patches of black ice dotting our souls? All those angry, tight-wound pillars of cold we haven't been able to crush but have ruled our lives with malice and hate, abuse and injustice, destructive mental health and depression? May the cold winds that blow this January take these places with them.

May we learn to feel the cold not as a thing of torment, not as a feeding ground for depression, but as a place where we can hear and see the silent exhale of all the toxic, all the harmful.

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. 

Love, Kayla











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 for K, N, and Mama

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Published on January 10, 2019 10:50