But first you should know that when I was a teenager, my parents produced a tool for homeschoolers that went 1990s viral. The way we hawked this ware was by traveling around the country to homeschool conventions proliferated by attendees of every sort you imagine to be at homeschool conventions in the 90s. What I don’t think most of the attendees knew, though, is that parked behind these gigantic convention centers was a line of campers and RVs, filled with the progeny of the adults who worked in the booths. And when I say filled, I mean, busting at the seams. The quivers were full.

I hated the conventions, loathed pulling up to them in our Class C camper hauling a utility trailer behind us. But in those years of traveling, I saw more of these united states in my teens than most kids will ever see and I loved it.2The Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains and the St Louis Arch, but also rest stations and off the track diners and bad roads and good mechanics.

I have never gotten the travel bug out of my system since.

Going on a road-trip is my idea of a great vacation. I would rather spend four days in a car driving somewhere than twelve hours driving to and from airports, waiting, getting delayed, flying, landing, and navigating to a rental car. Arm me with a good audiobook and road snacks, and I’m set. Avoid the highways and cities, and I’m game. Mapless? I’m cool, I’ll find my way.

About ten years ago I started to dream about vanlife or building out a schoolie. Maybe it was a hyper-fixation or special interest, but it became a pulsing goal for the last five or six years. I’m constantly dreaming and scheming of ways to take our life on the road while still somehow maintaining roots here.

Nate grew up in a military family, moving across the country or world every two years for most of his life. For all my wanderlust, he has wanted nothing more than to be stationary and rooted.

In the beginning of our marriage, despite how we appreciated these qualities in one another (his stability, my adventuring), these two goals were at silent war with one another. I can look back now and see how many of the regrettable decisions we made early in our marriage were in some way shaped by these competing values.

Hence our biggest fight.

I’m not going to share all the details but I was restless and angsty, and spontaneously suggested we just go tour some campers or RVs, just to see what was out there. What he internalized was “We’re going to sell everything, uproot our lives, pour everything we have into a cheap plastic box on wheels, and end up broke and broken down on some rattlesnake infested desert road.”

I wish I could go back to those two coldly staring individuals and say, “Hey, how about both of you learn to externalize your thoughts a little sooner and better instead of internalizing everything to the point that it comes out sideways?”

One thing we’ve talked about for a long time is how difficult it is for a couple without children to shift the internalized and assumed priorities a couple our age has. Our peers are graduating their kids, marrying them off, some of them are still in the little stages, naps and tantrums and finger painting on the walls. We don’t have another couple friend our age who also doesn’t have kids. They’re all building these beautiful little kingdoms of stability, rootedness, home, legacy, and security.

But it’s also suburbs, big box stores filled with diapers and kids clothes, school pickup lines, chore charts, sports every night, and saving for college. This just isn’t our life, but for some reason, we constantly feel like we’ve slipped into a cardboard cutout of that life, a substanceless paper-doll version of that life. Flat, one dimensional, propped up but not held up by the things that hold up and give heft to our friend’s lives, the things that give their lives shape and reason.

The question we’ve had to circle around all these years is what instead does give our lives shape and reason?

Years ago I wrote a piece in response to a popular reformed preacher’s sentiment to “not waste your life collecting seashells,” and I think about it all the time. I wrote it when we were still hoping to have children and I read it differently now, eight years on.

The earnest evangelicals will make the argument that there are other ways to get children and therefore “leave a legacy,” therefore not wasting your life. But I have left that binary behind. I don’t think it’s a choice between loving the life you have and living some kind of backbreaking sacrificial life worth emulating. Some of the most preachy-about-legacy people I know are also the most stingy, hoarding their wealth, bragging about spending their children’s inheritances, and trying to find loopholes out of paying taxes.

Having kids doesn’t automatically make you less selfish. And not having kids doesn’t automatically make you more selfish.

The point is navigating what is a faithful life for me?

And no one can answer that question but you.

Last Saturday, after spending the entire day cleaning the house, Nate said, “Hey, wanna drive over to Harrisburg and tour camper vans at Camping World?”

And, reader, that’s what we did.

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Below is your monthly Link Love and there are some beauts in there. A piece on a semi-famous childless couple, a tv show that shot to the top of my favorites, an album I can’t stop listening to, an article with so many nuggets, I couldn’t pick one to quote, and more!

Hope you like what I found for you this month =)

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You will have arrived when you see the pointed carcass of a tree known to local foresters as Tree 103. Her crown lays to the east, her trunk showing the way, and her roots are still deep in the earth. She was once the tallest tree in New York state until she fell in a windstorm five years ago. My friend Philip found her and reported her fall to the caretakers of the old growth pine grove. When someone called the tree “dead,” a forestry professor at the local college said, “Maybe, but I prefer to think she’s just not vertical anymore.”

This is the story I open my book The Understory with. If you have read it, you know the book is about the death of what once stood tall and strong and now has become, as John Keating would say, “worm food.”

I write about soil, erosion, mycelia, bogs, and fires. I write about decomposing human bodies and regenerative forestry and walking a labyrinth covered by two feet of snow. I write about the things in my own life that fell and felt dead, but perhaps—I was willing to consider—they just weren’t vertical anymore.

They say when you write a book, you have to be prepared to live its message in ways you can’t imagine when you start. This has always been my experience.

I released a book about the need for human touch three weeks before our world went on lockdown for the pandemic, leaving people isolated, touch-less, and aching. My book felt like insult to injury and I never knew how to talk about it afterwards. Then I put out a book about asking questions and the truth is, I have never asked more than in the years since.

I thought that the experience of The Understory would be that I was putting to death so many things about my life, faith, and family, and they would all rise up again eventually in a different form—like new growth on a nurse log.

What I did not know was that there was so much more death for The Understory ahead.

I did not know she would be dead before her second birthday.

What you need to know is that I’m going to be very careful about how I write about this. You don’t need to know all the reasons why, though I do wish I could tell you. Instead, I’ll start with this:

A few weekends ago, I was working quietly behind the back counter in the Sun Gallery at and I overheard two strangers talking to one another, both not native to the area, neither one had been to Nooks before. Despite what happened next, I knew neither one had any idea who I was or that my book was sitting mere inches from one of them. I don’t make it a habit to announce my presence to people perusing the bookstore as announcements are not what bookstores (or books) are for.

Nonetheless, in a room full of thousands of beautiful books, one of the strangers reached for The Understory, tucked it in his hand, made his way over to the big blue chair under the many-paned windows, and spent the next thirty minutes reading. He didn’t check his phone, he didn’t gaze out the window, he didn’t look bored. I glanced up a few times out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t wonder if he would buy it, I just thought to myself how fun it is to sometimes get to witness something like that.

Especially because that little book had an awful entrance into the world.

It went something like this:

We had a pretty normal amount of preorders, which, if you’ve been around any authors screeding about their books releasing, you know preorders are important. The warehouses, to our knowledge, were stocked and ready to release the books into the hands of readers on May 20. I had danced for the algorithmic gods, given offerings to the podcasting queens, made sacrifices that might as well have been from blood but certainly from tears, and I felt good about this release. Maybe even great.

The thing is, I love The Understory. Of all my books, she’s the one I love the most and the one I’m most proud of for existing. I wrote her slowly, surely, sauntering through the forest, gliding through rivers and lakes, penciling notes into my tiny field notebook, trying to remember the scent of things, the feel of things, the largeness of them and the smallness of them, trying to capture all of that in a book that I knew didn’t fit the model of Christian Spiritual Growth Books That Sell Well.

The Understory is the book I wrote that feels the most like me and therefore I thought it would attract the readers who know me most but also new readers who didn’t know me yet but might want to.

And the other thing is, people liked The Understory. It won Book of the Year from Englewood Review of Books. It was on multiple Top Ten Lists, Best of Lists, named Best Book by booksellers who love really, really books. said of it, “I didn’t even know I was waiting for this book.” (swoon!) said it was “remarkably acute and resonant.” said it was “sheer magic.” called it “rare and beautiful.”

I believe, with all my heart, that social media doesn’t sell books, that word of mouth sells books, and that when we love a thing, we tell a friend who tells a friend who tells a friend.

I have staked my career on this belief, written about it copiously, mentored writers in this direction, practiced this belief with all of my energy, let its ethos run through my work in every way. If you have been reading Sayable for a long time, you know this isn’t a flash in the pan belief for me. It is a conviction of mine and one I wish more people shared.

So I did all the things but I staked my flag on that belief. I ran my launch group with that ethos running through it, pushing people out into their worlds instead of further into an online one. And I felt good about all of that. On May 20th, I felt good.

That week, though, people didn’t get their books as promised or they got a book, but it wasn’t The Understory as we had planned it.

Amazon, it turned out, hadn’t checked in their boxes of stock and without the book being checked into their inventory, it triggered a Print on Demand feature that many book publishers have turned on by default1 in case stock runs low. It’s meant to be a stop-gap, to give publishers time for reprints.

Everyone who ordered from Amazon got the wrong book. Many of those who ordered from elsewhere (I arrived to do a book event at an indie bookstore and they had two boxes of the wrong book delivered) got the wrong book. Nearly every time we thought that the right book was or would be in people’s hands, we found out it was the wrong book in their hands.

In a week I should have been celebrating, it was a nightmare. For the next four weeks, my agent, editor, marketing and sales teams tried to navigate this and attempted to make it right. I tried to get people the right book—at physical cost to my publisher and emotional/mental cost to me. It took everything out of me for that first month of The Understory’s existence. It took a full month for booksellers to have it in stock and able to be ordered (June 17th, by my records).

The wind had been knocked out of my sails but it’s a tough business to be in if you’re not a special snowflake or selling salacious secrets and I didn’t want to be a problem child. We—I, my agent, editor, and the sales team—agreed that we would let the summer pass quietly, let any buzz die down, and try to relaunch the book in the fall with much fanfare and hoopla.

The fall rolled around and perhaps it was just internalized insecurity, the adrenalin having worn off from the spring, or general fatigue (we’d just moved six hours south), but it didn’t feel to me that there was much interest in relaunching it. I realized no one was going to back this book but me and I would not shill my way to a sold book. I would not woe is me all over the Internet. I would not invent or inflate crises to get people to buy my book. I would not become a one-note-pony on people’s feeds. I would not beg my friends to talk about my book or spite my enemies by talking all the time about the good feedback I was getting from readers about the book. I would trust the book to the world and trust the word would spread through the mouths God gave us all.

I added links in my headers and footers on my Substack, pinned a reel in my Instagram, linked solely to Bookshop for purchase, and then peppered mention of it into pieces or posts wherever it felt natural or appropriate. It would be a long trickle, I decided in my heart, and I would be fine with that because that is in keeping with my ethos on book writing and publishing. I believe in the long haul.

I’ve disentangled myself from Amazon almost completely, work part-time for an independent bookseller, and I have tried and succeeded to put my money—literally—where my mouth is. And I was fine with it. I was 100% unequivocally fine with it! See my exclamation point? That’s how you know I’m telling the truth.

I was so fine with it that when it came time to pencil in May 20, 2026, The Understory’s second birthday, I felt happy about it, finally energized again and excited to do a big post about it, encourage new readers to Sayable to check it out, buy it from their indie bookseller or mine, tell a friend about it. I had a whole thing planned.

Several weeks ago, Shawn, my friend and the proprietor of Nooks, mentioned in passing that they were beginning to run low on inventory of The Understory and he hadn’t been able to order new copies. I chalked it up to a timing or shipping issue, joked about the war in Iran and the straight of Hormuz, and didn’t think of it until a week later when I remembered to ask him about it again. “Still not in stock,” he said. “I’ll message my contact and see what’s up,” I said.

Ten days later, I heard back.

It was the worst possible news.

But first I want to tell you about this. A few weeks ago a friend of mine got the actual worst possible news, I mean, like awful, awful news, and they got it in nearly the same 24 hours they got the best possible news. Like, imagine the best news you’ve ever gotten and the worst news you’ve ever gotten, and smash them into the same day. That was their day.

And somewhere in that awful, awful day, they’d looked up at their bookshelf and saw the gradient spine of The Understory and something about it called out to them. They hadn’t read it yet and it was just sitting there and they pulled it down. Hours later they were sending me photos from pages of it, underlined and starred passages about the existence of death and life coexisting. That’s what the whole book is about, these tensions of death and life coexisting. It’s one of the truths that helps me make the most sense of this world. It recalibrates me, reorients me, and restores me

And in this most awful day, those words did that for my friend too.

I get messages like this from readers and friends frequently. The Understory is not a happy clappy book. It’s not one you gush about to friends over wine and tapas. It’s a book you curl into yourself with, envelope yourself in your blanket of choice and your drink of choice, and cry it out with. It’s a book that’s meant to take someone who’s grieving but also grasping for hope in the midst of it and to help them remember that grief and hope always go hand in hand, even if one seems louder than the other. Its original subtitle was Field Notes on Grief from the Forest Floor and I was sad when we had to let that one go.

My point is, this book has meant something to someone, a whole lot of someones.

A few bookish nerd facts:

• Fewer than 4% of books published sell 1000 copies.

• Fewer than 1% of books published sell 5000 copies.

• When a book sells through its first run, this should be cause for joy for the author and the publisher. When it happens in the first weeks, depending on how many books the publisher ordered for its first printing, this is excellent news. When it happens within the first year, this is still great news. Within two years, this should still be good news. In fact, selling through its first run within two years means that though it may have a slower entrance into the world, it is still resonating with readers long after the flash in the pan first weeks of its existence. It means the book has longevity, not just splashiness.2

• Publishers are businesses and advances are gambles. If they pay upwards of five, six, or seven figures for a book, they have an (unspecified to the author) amount of time they want to have moved an (unspecified to the author) number of books. It’s literally their business to consider the bottom line.

When The Understory was released and all those issues happened, we made the decision to turn off Print on Demand for the book. I wanted people to have the real book in their hands because we put hard work into making the real book beautiful to read and hold and I wanted to try to sell through the first run of books my publisher had printed without the low quality imitation books clogging up the pipeline. I felt like these were two very reasonable goals and very doable goals.

I was right.

The good news first: we sold through the first print run of The Understory! That means that you—my readers—got The Understory somewhere in the top 1% of published books sold. And wow. That is amazing. I don’t even like to use the word amazing, but I’m only getting about four hours of sleep[lessness] each night right now and it’s all I’ve got.

We should be celebrating.

Instead, we’re not.

The email I got reported that no unsold copies of The Understory exist in the market any longer3 and my publisher has decided that they will not do a reprint.4 They gave me two options:

• Turn back on Print on Demand, thereby opening up the tap and allowing bookstores to once again order and get the POD form of book.

• Either that or they’ll revert the rights back to me, taking the book entirely out of print. I’d be free to shop the book elsewhere or self-publish it, if I had the time, energy, or money.

Before its second birthday, The Understory was dead.

I am no stranger to dead things. I have held them in my arms, I have flushed them down the toilet, I have buried them beneath the dark earth on the front forty of my father’s property. I have stared at dead friendships harder than almost anyone I know, refusing, as Terry Tempest Williams said when accused of being married to sorrow, “to look away.”

I cannot look away. I find it sometimes easier to look at death than to look at life. I find it easier to walk alongside others in death’s throes than in life’s first breaths. Someone describing our house to someone else once said, “It’s a house where you can grieve,” and I don’t know why I remember that but I do. You don’t write about the understory of the forest without thinking about death, without holding it in your hands, without getting a bit obsessed with it. The forest is nothing without death. It’s why I open the book with the story of Tree 103.

But now I’m staring down the pipeline at this death. The death of this thing I really love, this book I am really proud of, this thing that I really thought would make it. Up until this week, I thought it was making it. In fact it has made it, by the sheer fact that we have sold through its first print run. Even during that fitful first night of sleep, I was telling myself, “You sold through the first print run!” in the same breath as “Your book is dead.”

Death and life, coexisting, as they always, always, always do. And it just doesn’t suck any less, not even a little bit.

Someone tells me a few weeks ago that The Understory was their favorite book of 2024 and they keep it now still, nestled against their journal, in their basket of morning things. It is dirt crusted and tear-stained. They have dog-eared and underlined it to near shreds. I offer to send them a new copy from the box of books I have stashed under my couch (books I now just realized are the last of their kind). No, thank you, they say, this book is my favorite book. The book I have now.

I get this. I have those books too.

And the truth is, The Understory is one of those books for me in her own way. I will never talk about my other books in the way I talk about or think about The Understory. They exist on different echelons for me. A different me wrote them. It will always be The Understory that I feel like tells the most truth.

This book is my favorite book.

And now, a victim of capitalism or the bottom line, idealogical differences or a really shitty start in the world, I don’t know what it is that motivated the decision to nix it so early and no one we’ve talked to has heard of something like this happening so early in the life of a book, apart from moral failure. I’m pretty jaded about the whole thing and have been for a while, and honestly, partly because of how awful those first weeks and months of The Understory were. I don’t want to be dramatic, but it was pretty traumatic for me.

Actually, it was ugly traumatic for me. It took it out of me.

At the end of 2024, I called my agent (and friend) and said, “I think I’m done with Christian publishing. I think this experience has taken it out of me. I don’t want to play these games anymore.”5

You pour years of your life into this thing. You scribble in margins and edit and edit and edit. You read and research and note-take on every scrap of paper. You pay out of pocket and out the whazoo to quote the other poets and songwriters you love. You cite voraciously and meticulously to avoid even the slight appearance of plagiarism. You labor over the final draft, then the layout and design, then the marketing plan, you get anxiety stomach before every single podcast interview, you squeeze into Spanx for author events, sweat through your clothes during signings—thinking to yourself, is this what I signed up for?—you hold your breath to see how it’s going to land, you hope your friends like it, you even hope your enemies like it, you hope someone likes it. You go through all that and then you’ve got to fight tooth and nail to get people to care about its birth into the world but really, they all have their own births and deaths and weddings and funerals happening in their own worlds and yours is just one little one and not, after all, that important in the grand scheme of things.

Unless you’re a money-money maker, which I, sadly—whether by ego, principle, or design—am not.

So, in a twist I never saw coming, instead of a birthday on May 20th, I had a funeral.

My friend John says the book still has a pulse, but my other friend Shawn (who’s a bookseller) says, once booksellers see a book is on backorder, they mark it off their list and don’t order it again. The only way to resuscitate this book is for me to shock some life into it and even then, she’d need round the clock care and, well, if a book’s head nurse is its publisher, my nurse has called time of death.

It’s humiliating to write this, even more humiliating to think of sending it into the world to my friends who love me, my enemies who hate me, and mere passersby who will judge me.

I don’t want to send this into the world but I also feel like it’s not honest of me to not send it out. I’ve devastated and you’re my people and you deserve to know that, especially because so many of you put blood, sweat, and tears into telling everyone you know about The Understory, too. It’s your loss too. And I freaking hate that for us.

I’m sorry I didn’t do more to keep her alive. There’s nothing to be done for it now, but I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.

We’re a few weeks out now from all this and I’ve processed it ad nauseam with my closest friends and cowriters, and I feel good about the decision I made.

Until the eleventh hour, I was going to get the rights back, reshop it to another publisher who might want it, try to CPR some life back into it. But at the last minute, I felt this calm wash over me and I knew I needed to be done. It was not a decision motivated by anger, ego, or money. It was a decision motivated by the absence of all three. “Holy indifference,” my friend Sara who’s gone through the Ignatian exercises called it. “Consolation,” she called it when I told her it was done.

We turned Print on Demand back on. Some might say this means the book still lives, but behind the scenes, we know the death knell has rung.

This is literally the message of the book and if I were to keep trying, it would be like trying to put the trunk of Tree 103 back on her splintered stump. I’d have to stand there holding her up for eternity by myself and I have other things I want to do with my life and other things I want to write and say. I can’t do that. I won’t.

Despite the peace I do actually feel about this choice (alongside the grief which is going to take a long, long time to abate), I also feel pulsing within me that I owe you, the readers of Sayable and The Understory, the truth.

I believe, as I said above, that it is word of mouth that sells books and good books sell slowly for a long time. I believe we do not need to do songs and dances, great graphics or podcasts, invent stories of pain or trauma, scratch the backs of influencers or other writers, I believe that the pressure on authors to be on social media shilling their books constantly is one of the worst things that has happened to books and specifically to authors who want to write good, slow, beautiful words. I believe that a good book, written well, that says true things will find its legs in the world, but I’ve never had to prove it.

And I’ve never had proof that everything I believe actually doesn’t work. And I’m pretty grieved about this. Not just because of my own book but because I feel responsible for all the ways I’ve told you it works and you’ve internalized it and modeled your publishing journeys on it. And I hate that.

I’ve had a lot of thoughts about why it doesn’t work the past several weeks, but I can’t share them here, not now. The point is, publishing is a business and writing and reading is a labor of love. Love and business never mix with good results.

And because of that, bad books will sell like hot-cakes while good books go out of print.

Maybe The Understory isn’t a good book and I’m deluded. But in the past three days I’ve gotten three messages—unprompted—from friends and readers. One from someone I haven’t talked in more than a decade, one from someone on a train on the other side of the world, and one from someone who has it shelved alongside Robin Wall Kimmerer and Wendell Berry. Those people love The Understory. It’s not dead to them.

Maybe, I’m telling myself, it’s just not vertical anymore.

Fin

Only ~50 copies of the original book exist in the world to sell. Right now, they’re in a box under my couch, but I’m going to haul the box down to and these copies will be for sale exclusively through them (though you can still order a POD version through other booksellers).

They’re—obviously—limited first editions and I’ll sign every one of them and (as long as supplies last) include an I Am Here print in mail orders of them. I would be honored if you’d sell them out. Once they’re gone, all future copies ordered will be POD. I will sign all of the books we ship out or sell through Nooks through the end of this week.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

But, as I quote in The Understory, “God can do new things with dust.”

In years one or five of our inability to carry a pregnancy to term, our family was navigating other chaotic or delightful experiences, and I didn’t feel the monotony so hard. Also, there was still hope.

Our last pregnancy loss was also our last attempt at hope. After that final loss, a corner had been turned, we both knew it. My health, our marriage, neither would be sacrificed on the altar of children. I expected hope to die with rage or resistance, but it surprised me by dying with resignation, slow and easy, dissipating. Gone almost before it had time to exist as anything real. Like my many pregnancies.

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Once I heard someone use the phrase pregnant with hope and I thought that seemed about right. Hope is a thing swollen with seed, mostly water weight, somewhat substanceless, and yet still there. Still beautifully and mystically there. And when it drains from you, it gushes and goes red, nearly formless and then flushed down and away, disappearing. And you can barely talk about it because no one wants to hear about the absence of the thing, they only want to hear about the coming of the thing, even if the thing is still just the hope of it.

It has been six years since we carried that hope like seed and most of the time I don’t think of it. But sometimes I do.

Monotony in a marriage is difficult to describe. If you say it too loudly people think you hate your partner, are bored with them or of them. But if you don’t say it at all, it seeps in like smoke under a door, choking you slowly, putting you to sleep. You must find a way to say it without overstating it and find a way to say it mostly to one another as though it’s an escape room you will work together to find the clues out of or a puzzle you’re committing to finishing together.

We are on the same team and this is our team project.

If you have children or if you are a busy sort of person who always has Mary Poppins bags on your person, teeming over with projects and people and Important Things to Do With Your Life, you may not understand this monotony of marriage.

You are taking kids to soccer and to the pediatrician, trying to figure out how to get them to do their chores or be nice to their siblings or be nice to you. If you have a partner in this, you are figuring this out together. You are so tired at night but so thankful for the quiet that you can’t figure out whether to sleep or read and if you decide to read, you fall asleep anyway. There is a kind of monotony in this too. But there is also endless, endless, endless possibility for delight.

There are crayon drawings tacked floor to ceiling and cookies to bake and first smiles and steps and words and wounds. There are inside jokes and knowing glances, smiles across their sweaty heads, shared delight. There are imaginary friends and real friends and girlfriends and boyfriends. There are new clothes for growing bodies and hand-me-downs you never want to get rid of. There are room redecorations and rooms emptying and then filling again. There are graduations and weddings and new jobs and grandchildren. Holidays are chaos and sometimes they are terrible but also they are still a little magical. The delight is exponential.

When you do not have children and will not have children (and will not answer those who ask about alternative means of having, obtaining, adopting, or otherwise getting of children), the delight is stopped up, like a cork in a champagne bottle, the end of celebration.

You have to find other things to celebrate and it is terribly difficult to find anything worth celebrating as much as children are worth celebrating. I don’t say that because I’m some kind of natalist but because I truly believe there is nothing more beautiful on the earth than a small human who is experiencing everything for the first time. One doesn’t have to be a parent or even want to be a parent to believe that.

A few months ago we were driving, I think, maybe we were sitting on the patio, it all blurs into each other these days, and we asked one another the question: “What three things make you feel most loved by me?”

There were the somewhat predictable answers, “When you scratch my back.” (me) “When we have sex.” (him) And there was a second answer for each of us, different than the other. But there was a shared third answer and it shouldn’t have surprised either of us.

“When we do projects together.”

We’ve renovated a house together. We’ve built gardens and decks. We’ve led groups together, packed and unpacked houses together. We’ve planned road trips together and gone on them together. We budget, go to therapy, watch shows, build friendships, all together. We sometimes play games together and sometimes get coffee together. We walk and used to kayak together. We eat poke bowls and pizzas together. We problem solve together.

We are very good together.

I know this to be true. I don’t know if I could be not-a-parent with anyone in the world except for with him.

Our first fight before we got married was not about whether we would have kids but when. The expectation was always there that it would never just be the two of us, there would alway be more, just someday. I know too many people who married someone because they felt something nice about the other and thought the other would make a good parent, but when the kids were gone eventually, they looked at this person they’d procreated with and thought, “Who is this person I’m yoked to for life? I barely even know them.”

Life without children means you have to know your partner in a way children can often times shield you from knowing them. Maybe your children don’t feel like a shield and you would give anything for twenty minutes of not having a small sweaty being between you both in bed, but if being a parent has become your whole personality, it’s hard for anyone to befriend that, even—maybe especially—your partner.

The other side of it though is without children, you are wildly exposed to this other, this person to whom you pledged your troth without even knowing the definition of the word. You are yoked to this person not as a fellow parent or grandparent, co-creator or co-provider. You are joined with this person as your only roommate, friend, lover, chore partner, problem solver, project teammate.

This person and no other will be the main object of your love and your wrath, the primary witness to your insecurity and grief, the one upon whom you practice your most unformed thoughts and share your most unshared secrets. This person must be astoundingly strong and terribly, terribly vulnerable, and if they cannot learn and relearn and relearn to be both, the marriage will fail.

If, however, it can bear up under all that, it will be a good marriage. But even good marriages can be monotonous ones.

There is a line from a Richard Wilbur poem that I think about near weekly, “The punctual r*pe of every blessèd day.” The cleverness of the poem is that it is about the most beautiful thing in the world, love, and the most mundane, laundry, because the two must always coexist and if they don’t, then love isn’t true.

It is in the monotony that love is proven true. This is what I have to remind myself on days that feel exactly like every day that has gone before, on days when I look at the stretch of life ahead of me—a life without children and grandchildren—and find it hard to envision if there is goodness and meaning in a life like that. Love and laundry, I tell myself. Just because it’s mundane doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

A few days ago I asked other serious couples what they do for fun and the answers were walks, games, coffee dates, projects, gardening, movies, spending time with friends kids, and I thought to myself, “That’s it. We’ve done it all. We’re doing all the things we can to interrupt this punctual r*pe.” I felt disheartened.

And then I remembered no one else in the world is married to the man I am married to. And just like the beauty of a small human discovering the world, I wondered, what if the most disruptive delight of my life is to merely keep discovering the world and behold him as he discovers it too?

It feels less magical when you’re in your forties and the world is at war and the political administration has you in a chokehold and when there are massive and painful griefs you’re carrying quietly, but two nights ago we sat with some of our best friends and ate blackberry-rhubarb pie and talked deep together, and last night I sat with a couple new friends and talked about a polarizing novel together, while most of our partners gathered at another house and talked tech and AI, and tonight I’m going to chat with a few friends about a book we read recently, and in a few weeks we’re sending out the first iteration of our idea of a snail mail club, and once a week I get to work in the Sun Gallery at my favorite indie bookstore making graphics and talking about books I love, and the other day I introduced him to a local and laughable tourist trap, and there is a dahlia about to burst in a pot in our backyard, and my favorite thing is when a carpenter bee flies around Rilke’s face and he follows it with his eyes, curious and alert, and when a friend’s kid sings about the earth and his knees in preschool graduation, and when another friend of mine talks about the little seed in her belly, the bloom of possibility, pregnant with hope.

It’s not all my magic, but it’s magic nonetheless. And I’m discovering it all with him.

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This past weekend I witnessed this.

I have wondered if I can write about this gain without writing about this loss—which is not for public consumption—and I think it’s possible. I’m going to try today. Mostly because I am able to see how this devastating loss fits into a bigger and more whole picture of something I lost years ago and it is one I can write about.

But first you should know that I am still grieving hard. I am going to be grieving for a long time. This experience gutted me in a way that I have only felt a few other times in my life. I’ve slept fitfully and less than four hours a night for the past eight nights. My stomach is twisted and my throat is lumpy. My heart hurts and my body feels numb.

Someone who is walking through this with me offered comfort on Sunday, saying there is still a pulse here, even if it’s weak. I rejoined, though, that I’m still deep in a pit, digging the grave. I’m able to see that sometimes what feels true isn’t true, but that doesn’t mean that my feelings don’t matter and don’t need attention that is true. In other words, if I pretend there is a pulse and mask the stink of death, I’m not dealing in truth and I’ll pay for it later.

Which is where this whole thing started.

This is all very vague and I’m not trying to be vague. That’s bad writing. Good writing is specific. Now the specifics.

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Verdict: I hated it, one star.

But that’s not the point of this piece.

A few months ago, I was sitting around a big round table of Very Serious Writers and we were probably talking about Love is Blind, because I maintain that the most serious people I know are obsessed with reality TV (Ask me why. I have reasons). But from across the table, I heard one of the chieftains of our Very Serious Writers mention a book I’d finished weeks before and hated. You may have read all my reasons why here.

The next day, same time, same place, different table, I ranted yet again about the book and later Nate said, “Hey, you were kinda hot about it, like maybe a little too hot.” He was right and I pulled the one to whom I ranted (spoiler, it was ) aside and said, “Hey, I was too hot about that. I’m sorry. Forgive me?” We laughed and then we exchanged two or three sentences on that a subject that is up there with the problem of evil for most talked about subject in the history of the world.

Who decides what is good art and what isn’t?

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If, as the long unattributed quote, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is true, then the only one who decides what is good and what isn’t, is you. And I believe that’s true. Except we live with some of the worst wealth disparity in history and the rich are only getting richer, and money is almost always the bottom line. In a slush pile there might be a hundred drafts, one of which could win the Booker or Pulitzer for its writing and story, but ten of which have high concept, highly marketable, hot cultural topics and less than stellar writing. Many editors will go for the latter because it will sell more books, ie., make money.

Case in point: I’ll bet a good percentage of you haven’t seen Angel Down circling the rounds yet, right? Angel Down just won the Pulitzer, with a high concept and good writing, and so you’ll start seeing it more and more, but until this week, pretty much crickets.

A few weeks ago, probably in anticipation of The Devil Wears Prada II releasing, the first movie started showing up on our streaming platforms and Nate, who had never seen it, pressed play.

There’s one scene in there that’s pretty iconic, especially if you’re a girl who probably owned the same blue sweater Anne Hathaway’s character, Andi, wore in that scene (🤚🏼). Andi is scoffing at the minor differences between two turquoise belts when Miranda Priestly looks down Meryl Streep’s perfect porcelain nose and says,

“Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.

You go to your closet, and you select…I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it? who showed cerulean military jackets. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of ‘stuff.’”

Spoken as one who has always taken myself a bit too seriously to care about clothes, point taken.

But I do take books seriously. I do take writing seriously. And I think good writing matters, especially as we are headed into whatever the next iteration of book writing and publishing is now that we have AI ideating, drafting, writing, and editing at the touch of a button. Experts say that within three years, we will not be able to tell as readily as we can now that something was written by AI. Running it through AI detectors will render a 0% back.

That scares me a little and I think it should scare all of us.

This morning I remembered the cerulean blue sweater I had back in 2006 and how it was made of cheap acrylic or some poly-blend, pulled off a second hand rack because that’s all I could afford, and probably “knit” by machine in a sweat shop in south Asia.

I thought about how two hundred years ago Edmund Cartwright invented the weaving machine and hundred and fifty years ago, when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and then how less than a hundred years ago, clothing was standardized and then shipped over here from sweatshops and how we often only wear something an average of 7-10 times before we pass it on or throw it out and it ends up in landfills so large you can see them from space.

I thought about how my favorite cerulean blue sweater from twenty years ago probably still exists somewhere on this planet in some form, resisting the creep of disintegration and decomposition, steaming in a mountain of cast off clothing.

That’s what high fashion and good taste got us to:

Eventual trash.

Now, there’s a part of me that would argue that there’s more worth to words than to clothing, but there’s another bigger part of me that knows they’re the same thing at their root: self-expression. Or, art.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but someone, somewhere made that thing you find beautiful with their own mind and heart and hands and vision. And so I have to believe that what actually makes something beautiful is the maker, not the beholder.

And that when we talk about what’s good or bad art, we have to talk about how difficult it is to make good art and not just consume everything indiscriminately.

I hated the book I read last night but I truly believe the author of it loves it, and that does make it beautiful, in its own way. I thought the writing was meh even if the story could have been great. Other people disagree. They think the writing was excellent even if the story wasn’t.

More and more I’m less and less interested in agreed upon dictates of what is or isn’t good art because it is, like the problem of evil, an unanswerable question more suited to philosophical discussions and not any real resolution. You can like something I don’t. You can yuck my yum. I really don’t care, not really. Liking different things is what makes us interesting. I’m more interested in all the things that happen between the ideation of a thing and its final resting place, the landfill.

Because in the end, Pulitzer prize winning books end up there too.

What makes a thing good is that it changes the maker and it changes all those who come in contact with it, and all those changes are toward putting more goodness into the world, even if the art itself “goes gently into that good night.”

On this definition, the book I read last night was good, even if I don’t like it, so was Theo of Golden, so is Angel Down, and East of Eden and The Brothers Karamazov and hundreds of thousands of other books I love or hate. So is the novel I've been working on for a year and a half, even though most of the time when I think about it, I think it’s awful.

And even that, if you think about it, is good. It means I’m getting somewhere, I’m changing by degrees, even if it sucks along the way.

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I did tell you lately that I’ve lost my nerve and that is the truth but it isn’t the whole truth. I won’t even tell you the whole truth today because there are, my therapist tells me, some things that shouldn’t be externalized for the Internet before they’ve been externalized amongst my nearest and dearest. Yesterday I called a near and dear one and externalized my latest existential whirlabout and she listened and said “Me too,” and we agreed that it’s okay to sometimes say things aloud even if they are about other people being unlikeable and especially if they are about ourselves being unlikeable. But when I hung up, nothing had really changed, other people were still doing unlikable things and I was still pretty unlikeable too. This is often why I don’t externalize things even to my nearest and dearest, because mostly it feels like putting bad gases into the atmosphere even if they’re scented with delectable fragrance as they go.

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In my freshman year of college, I was 24 years old, fresh off the plane from having lived in Central America and gotten terribly sick. The world when I came back to the exact same place I’d left six months earlier felt at the same time brighter and also more terrible than I imagined.

While I was bent over the toilet in my Guatemalan cinderblock garage be…

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Whenever I see the headline, “How Christians should respond to…” or “How Christians should think about…” I think how nice it must be to have all of life neatly lined up like shoes or ducklings, all the shoulds and should nots.

Life is not very much like that after all, despite what they tell you in Bible College, despite what they tell you in their articles, despite what they tell you so you’ll vote their way, despite what they tell you because when you do as they say to do, they remain powerful and you remain stuck.

I’m not going to say there is total moral relativity. I do believe, like MLK Jr., that there is a moral arc to the universe, but I also believe it’s a bit like a rainbow, impossible to hold in one’s hand.

In the introduction of ’s new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, he quotes Emmanuel Levinas, a survivor of the Holocaust.

‘In the last analysis,’ he observes in Totality and Infinity, such philosophy imagines that ‘everything is at my disposal, even the stars, if I but reckon them, calculate the intermediaries or the means.’ Even the stars; even other human beings; even God: all is available for knowledge to master…How can I encounter the Other without reducing the Other to something available to be grasped, without shutting down their irreducible otherness or alterity?

When I found my home in the less than luminous neo-reformed spaces, we were fond of saying something like, “Who would want to worship a God they could understand?” The point being, God is inscrutable and somewhat unknowable and this is why we worship him.

But then the rest of the time we wrung our hands around shoulds and musts and tenets and distinctives. God could not be known, but as for me and my family, by all this [waves hands around] we would be known.

There is something about the unknownness of God, the inability to grasp our hands around God’s flesh, thrust our fingers into God’s side, that is appealing to me. The mystery of it all. But the mystery disappears or perhaps just dissipates the moment I try to put flesh on God, namely my own flesh. “Be the hands and feet of Jesus,” we might say. “Be the only Jesus they’ll ever meet,” we definitely said.

I understand why it’s appealing, though, it is awfully, awfully hard to get people to follow you when they can’t see, touch, or taste the carrot before their very eyes.

shared a roundup of resurrection poems on Easter Day and I’ve gone back to read through them slowly a few times since. Today I read this one, from Michael Minicucci:

How beautiful is that reminder? “Faith is always a place we wash up on weary, and without our weapons.”

Every should is a weapon, I think. Every reduction of the Other is one, too. Every time we try to be Jesus or the Father or the Holy Spirit instead of getting out of the way, that’s a weapon too. I don’t know how we learn to set them down and wash up weary, but I feel close to it most in the moments I marvel at the moral arc instead of trying to stand in its way and grab ahold of it.

Below is your monthly Link Love and there are some beauts in there. Hope you like what I found for you this month =)

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The best hours of my fretful sleep patterns come between five am and eight am. I know people who are already awake and doing their best work at five am, but my best work is impossible unless I sleep and I find it difficult to do deeply until after five. I always wake hard though, startled, head thick with vivid dreams, the tendrils of which I carry with me through my morning, wondering how much of it all was real. I woke hard Sunday morning with the words, “Moving at the speed of trust,” still floating in my frontal lobe.1

The night before we watched a new documentary on an old cult, called Trust Me: The False Prophet. If you’ve seen it, you know how brilliant the title is, how many meanings it holds for the participants involved. If you’ve seen it, you know how the filmmaker—the most trustworthy of them all—never says the words because her work is not to have the women trust her, but trust themselves. If you’ve seen it, you know the exact moment you see mothers and daughters and wives and children wake up to their autonomy, resilience, and ability to trust themselves. I sobbed near the end. I thought it was a true crime documentary but it was so much more.

I count on my fingers to our therapist a few weeks ago:

1. This rupture

2. This rupture

3. This rupture

Three relationships, one half my lifetime, one a few years, and one a few months, the tendrils of each rupture still carried with me today, woven into my bones and inert muscles.

One a mentor, one a friend, one a mentee. Above, beside, below. In the church this is the way we tell women to be with other women, find a mentor, be a mentor, have a friend. They teach classes on this. They write books on this. They sell out conferences on this.

What they don’t teach you is how to befriend your own self, how to trust your own heart, how to ask questions of your own experience and intellect and soul, how to wait for the answer that was always there, echoing within you. Instead, we hear, “Trust me.” We say, “Trust me.”

Trust is earned, though, not required. And when it is required, it renders itself untrustworthy.

I have been untrustworthy.

I have also struggled to trust myself because what I felt deep within me did not meet and meld with those who demanded my trust of them. There was always a gulf and I blamed myself for this, thought if I just trusted them more, I could fill in this chasm with the soil of certainty. Instead the space only grew.

The other day, a pink square with red writing on it comes across my feed. It says, “I think midlife is just being who you were at 16, but loving her this time.”2I think I agree except that at 16 I already didn’t trust myself. Neither did I at 13, nor even at nine, or even three. I remember being one year old and screaming for help because I did not trust myself to help myself. Is this a learned behavior or an innate one? Most of this past decade has been tuning out the thunderous static in my head and closing my heart to what they say and slowing my breathing and asking myself the question, what do I say?

Sometimes the answer comes in the night and even though God and I struggle to be on speaking terms these days, I cannot control what God does in the night or between five am and eight am in the morning. Even the Bible says God counsels in the night and who am I to object?

Perhaps it is God and not my dreams that are carried with me in the tendrils of my day. I like that idea. God as silken thread, God as ribbon rainbows, God as fiberoptic flutes through which goodness flows in the form of light.

When I forget to be still, to tune out the thunder, I judge myself hard. I judge myself for not trusting people who say they are trustworthy. I judge myself harder for not trusting people who don’t say it but just act trustworthy which is to say they are trustworthy. I judge myself for not moving faster, not sharing more, not saying yes to the invitation to friendship. For being afraid they want me to be a mentor or they want to mentor me or they just want to be my friend because remember the ruptures? I am still hurting.

A friend asks me, “Do you trust yourself?” and I say, “I am learning to,” but I have always been learning to and I want there to be a terminus to it: yes, I do trust myself.

I felt surprised when the Artemis II capsule Orion splashed down in the Pacific, when plumes of red dropped her into the deeps within a mile of the projected target. The space they’d been allotted was 5,524 square miles and they fell within one mile of their target within that allotment. But it wasn’t even that that surprised me the most. What surprised me was how it was all over so soon.

Hadn’t they just shot through the stratosphere, into the solar system? Hadn’t they just shown us the collective work of healing from the pit of grief by naming a new crater Caroll? Hadn’t they just shown us all the colors of the moon? Hadn’t they just gone farther than any human has gone before? How could all of that happened in less than ten days?

I’ve gone to see Project Hail Mary twice in the theaters and I’ll probably go again. It’s a movie that should be seen to be believed and be seen on the big screen just because.

I remember when Nate and I listened to the audiobook, we were driving from New York to Florida the morning after our stepfather stood up, held his chest, and then died. And how the day before the funeral, I got the call that my brother had been removed from his home, would be arrested, and from there it all splinters, everything splinters.

Two of those ruptures from above, but more of them everywhere, blinding lights of anger, rage, grief, sadness, fear. I remember making impossible decisions, I remember looking for the light, groping in the dark, I remember becoming an enemy not because I wanted anyone to trust me but because I wanted women to trust themselves, children to know trustworthy adults, and men who said, “Trust me, I know it wasn’t that bad,” when it absolutely was that bad, to shut the hell up.

I still want them to shut the hell up.

I want everyone everywhere who says that to shut up.

But even more than that, I want this journey to be over.

I want to have gone farther than I’ve ever gone before and then returned to earth, to the perpetual plod of the everyday, to feel grounded to the land beneath me. I want to trust the gravitational pull of being here, with all its terribleness and tyranny, with its wars and politicians who can’t keep it in their pants, but also with its goodness and light, its tomatoes and books and grand canyons and honeybees and various shades of ocean water and humans doing beautiful and hidden acts of altruism and making art and sharing it with the world and people who ricochet around the moon and come home anyway, who wrap their arms around one another the day after they land and say, “We are just a mirror reflecting you.”

Which is, I think, another way of saying, “Trust you.”

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The speed of trust is slower than I thought it should be, slower than I was taught it would be, slower than I wish it was. The speed of trust comes, like the poet said, “taking the time it takes.”

Trust does not come by demands for trust, trust that seems given to those who demand it is not real trust, it’s perverted, twisted, turned allegiance, sometimes blind. Probably blind. Blind trust is said to be what faith is, believing in what we cannot see. But if God is true and the world is made and everything in the universe is God’s and therefore ours too, then the evidence is everywhere, but mostly within us. Within you and within me because we are God’s too and God is within us.

I can’t prove that to you but why would I try? That’s just asking you to trust me and I won’t do that, not anymore.

Instead, we go, slow, turning off the thunderous noise, tuning into the stillest and smallest sounds within us, moving at the opposite speed of light but perhaps at the speed of the truest kind of light. The light of God within us.

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I moved to Texas three autumns earlier with the dogs of unbelief yipping at my heels, and there was a place and a people there who offered a seeming relief to my persistent doubt. God, it seemed, could be encapsulated, theologized, understood, and defended. The gospel, it seemed, was a simple matter of math: We, sinners; God, angry; the cross, a bridge; Jesus, the cosmic sacrifice. All of it equaling eternal union with a God who forgave Jesus in lieu of forgiving dirty, sinful, wormy us. I woke up to this gospel and it enlivened me, for a while.

But Texas threatened to suffocate me in its dusty earth, spun up by constant highway construction and little rain. I hated it there from my first breath of Texas air until my last. Sometimes in the armpit of summer, I would echo the Israelites forty year wander: why did you bring us here to die? Except I knew if I hadn’t gone there at all, it was my faith that would have died.

Instead my faith floated and floundered and sometimes flew. My love for Texas, though, never grew, not even by a little.

In the fall of 2013, I was in the middle of a broken engagement that wasn’t entirely broken except that I’d given the ring back the week before, ostensibly to be resized or cleaned or something, except that I knew I’d never put it on my finger again. I was thick with grief and indecision and would be for another four months. But a writer’s group I was a part of was holding their annual writer’s retreat and I’d been signed up to go.

I drove through the kind of blinding rain that in the north is normal but in middle Texas is deadly, the kind that causes flash floods and terrible mudslides. I drove six hours from Dallas to the sort of places with thousand acre ranches and ten foot fences and speed-limits east coasters can only dream of. My tires were near bald and I probably should have slowed down but I drove through tears and the sounds of Bebo Norman, who had always been my breakup buddy. I arrived near evening to the top of the canyon.

I did not know what was waiting for me next.

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When I was a child, we would spend hours at the public library. I was homeschooled and the library was one of the places we could spread out and exercise independence in public. I would beeline for the back corner, the YA stacks.

My friends were reading Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club, slim paperbacks in pastel pinks and baby bl…

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The attic space had three windows, but two of them…

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I have watched readers of Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, and Leif Enger rave about this book. I’ve seen trusted voices interview the author on their podcasts and in their publications. I’ve seen fellow writers Threading and Facebooking their love of the book. I shelved multiple copies at a few weeks ago and it never sticks around for long.

People are saying the book made them cry, it made them laugh, it made them reconsider their lives and want to be like its protagonist. It made them want to change their lives, starting now.

Me? I could barely get through the first ten chapters, almost DNFed it multiple times, until getting to the last five chapters and skimming my way through to its predicable conclusion. At a writers retreat a few weeks ago, I caught myself almost yelling about how much I hated the book to my friends and had to apologize for my intensity later. I have not felt so strongly against a book in my recollection. I read another book almost immediately after I read the first one, a book that also had an elderly protagonist, one a bit less likable, but also one with some unfinished business to do, and it’s the only book I’ve talked about more than the first book since then.

What is it about the first book that has hit such a sore spot in me? Why can’t I shut up about it to everyone I know? And why—this is what I’m really asking myself—do people just really love this book?

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There is a line near the end of Mary Oliver’s poem, Heavy, that I think about often. Heavy is a poem about grief, about the pain of it, the length of it, the bending, near breaking of it. But the line, the line I think about a lot, it is one about laughter, the surprise of it, how it “comes, now and again, / out of my startled mouth.”

I love that line. Grief is many things and sometimes it is the surprise of laughter in the midst of all that darkness.

I thought of this while we watched Hamnet again. There is this final scene. Do you know the one? I hope you know the one. Where the grief across the face of a mother is so potent, so full of angst, it is palpable. You can taste it, the tears, the dirt lined crevices of her face, the ache you know sits just behind her tongue, in her larynx, her throat, caught, it seems, and never to release.

And then, in the next moment, the very next moment, her face widens and she laughs. It isn’t even a smile, peaceful, placating. It is a wild and unbridled laugh, the kind that can only come from a place where the ache has just recently been voided.

It is a vulnerability to laugh from a place like that.

We have two friends who we love and we go out to eat sometimes over exotic or ordinary food. One of them has asked me to pray over the meal twice now, to bless the food we are about to receive.

“I can’t,” I’ve told him twice now, each time the can’t stuck in my larynx, near where the grief is also stuck. Because the truth is, I can’t. It isn’t that I won’t or shouldn’t or don’t want to or am afraid of what the words in my prayers might look like or sound like to me or you or God, it is that I simply just can’t.

A few weeks ago, a night or two after he last asked me to pray and I said I can’t, we were all gathered together with writers we love, all of us reading aloud some piece or poem or prose of words we’ve cobbled together. I was one of the last to read. I couldn’t.

But then I remembered another line from Mary’s poem, “So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?” And I remembered a piece I’d written almost exactly a year ago about practicing and so I read that. The whole time I read, I felt my windpipe closing, a live coal caught in my throat, burning and blocking, the strangulating work of trying when everything in me said, “I can’t.”

This, I suppose, is the work of practicing.

A few nights ago, I was near sleep and something alerted me awake hard. The dogs were sleeping, so was Nate, the fan was sounding and so too the humidifier, no traffic sounds on the street below us. I lay there in the nighttime sounds and did not know what had woken me.

I should remind you now that I am not given to belief in the miraculous. I find stories of healing rare and wanting and, to my shame, the story of the resurrection improbable on some days. I have never experienced God’s provision in some inexplicable way, nor have I heard God’s voice, but once, and even that came in the words of a poet, not the scriptures. When I hear others speak of God’s protection or provision or providence, my brain translates without my trying: luck, fate, or accident.

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When I was a four year old child and probably when I was 25 and 35, I thought wisdom, when finally arrived, arrived with the full and final answer. I thought wisdom was being sure enough of yourself that you could impart surety to others. I sought this.

I don’t mean I sought this surety for myself. I mean I sought it in others.

In fourth or fifth grade, my mother sent me orienteering. They gave us cheap plastic compasses, thin paper maps, and whistles we would wear around our necks. I remember getting lost and it being thrilling. It was the unknown of that thrilled me, but it was also the possibility that we would surprise a bear or the sun would set or, perhaps, that we would locate ourselves in the thick Pennsylvania woods and break, sweaty and exhilarated, into some clearing not with a story of being lost and then found, but of being lost and finding ourselves.

When I was a young adult, my family moved to a new state and my mother bought a road atlas where the roads were enlarged enough to run your finger along as we, once again, learned to become lost and locate ourselves again.

I have lived and traveled all over the world since and never felt lost. There is an internal compass within me, an innate sense of which direction I face at all times, even with my eyes closed. I know how to get home—even when I haven’t known where home was anymore.

But wisdom, she is an illusive thing and not a fixed point. She cannot be found with a compass or map. She cannot be lost, and yet, can only be found.

And so it was that a week ago, a scheduling mishap put us in the way of it.

“How have you learned to make peace with your doubt?” I asked, facing someone double my age and triple my sage.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a short bit about the ache I have regarding being mothered in these days. A few days later, someone shared a link to sharing some of the same sentiments. I loved it. I immediately subscribed. Liz is a religious ethicist at Northwestern, “despite having no religious affiliation of [her] own.”

In her piece on her mother, Liz writes she is, “religiously curious,” a sentiment I share despite having spent all my life in the church. If anyone should have answers about being religious, it should be me and people like me. Raised with felt-boards and storybook bibles, creationism, James Dobson, Bob Jones, Vision Forum, among the Gothardites and religious right, but also Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames and a constant terror of dying before I ever got to live.

Weighing out an eternity spent singing How Great Thou Art on repeat in a crowd of white robed saints or burning alive in perpetuity, I’ve never been sure which seemed worse.

Judge me if you want, I’m just telling you continuing to stay curious about religion/faith is practically a miracle at this point.

A few days ago, Nate and I were in the car and talking about church, religion, faith, and prayer, and he said to me, “I think you have to be an incredibly resilient person to have stuck with it after [specific year’s long experience with a particular brand of faith], most people would have just turned their back and gone on their way.” I don’t know if I’m resilient but I don’t have a lot of quit in me and maybe that’s the same thing.

A friend told me yesterday, “Even if you become an atheist, you’ll still be my friend.”

“I don’t think I could ever be an atheist,” I replied. “I have too much faith to be an atheist and too little faith to not struggle with doubt all of the time.”

Staying curious about religion (faith, Jesus, God, etc.) is the only way I’m able to stay here.

Once I’d subscribed to , I was happy to see this piece just a few days later. What If Trevor Noah Is Right About the Left and Religion? As of writing this, her post has 6k likes and nearly 800 comments. It is resonating with many people and it resonated with me.

The post is long and you should read it, but the salient point is that the Left lacks the tools and training for imagination that the Right has by nature of religious upbringing. Christians are taught to believe in someone we could not see, touch, taste, feel, etc., and taught to believe in the possibility of outcomes we cannot see, one terrible (hell) and one beautiful (heaven).

She writes,

“Faith gives you capacity to believe ‘this current state isn’t the end’ without needing a peer-reviewed study proving the future will be better. It’s not irrationality. It’s a different kind of rationality altogether, one that can juggle complexity and ambiguity and hope all at once without dropping any of them.”

I would add that we were always very clear about what hell was (hot, burning, flames, torment, very, very bad) and always very unclear about what heaven was (not cherubs; angels though? with many eyes, maybe? clouds probably. Jesus on his throne, definitely. singing, endless; white robes, something about being prostrate for eternity. how can we know? who can know? no one can know.). So while we may have had the training ground for imagination, the binary was very simple and also very lopsided: put yourself in a constant state of repentance that will render you anxious, ashamed, feeling unloved by God for the mere possibility of…something. Or, alternatively, HELL.

Perhaps some Christians can work themselves through the binary and find a mid space where hell is merely annihilation (you’re punished until you’ve paid your price for all the sin you did) and heaven is actually a new earth, this one here, but better (a la N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope). But, as children, when our brains are at their most pliable and when most core memories are formed, the nuance is nearly impossible. So I would agree with Liz, Christian kids are taught the impossible is possible and have it branded into them in such a way that they contain the “cognitive and emotional framework that lets you stare directly at how bad things are while still organizing toward how things could be.”

It’s true. And it’s in this exact place that my struggle with doubt was born as a four year old child and remains and why I am still curious about religion despite having had every reason in the world to forsake it and pursue reason alone.

It is a kind of near self-gaslighting that we participate in, right? We stare right at the badness and think, “But still! Good!”

I heard an interview with Alex Honnold a few days after he scaled Tapei 101 without ropes or harness on live broadcast. He was asked, “Don’t you have any fear?” And he said something like, “Of course I have fear. Of course I’m afraid of dying. I don’t want to die. I want to live. But I also want to climb really tall buildings without safety harnesses.”

You have to do some real mental gymnastics to acknowledge that fear, let yourself feel it, and then say, “I’m going to do it anyway.”

That’s what being a Christian is like for many of us. Not all of us, I know there are a lot of very good people out there who never doubt the existence of God, the goodness of God, or the love of God. But for many of us, our faith is not a happy-clappy kind of easy believism, our imagination is not exercised toward goodness, it is extremely occupied by how bad things are and then forcing ourselves to say, “But good,” despite still actually believing maybe not good [?].

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I don’t know if the Left lacks imagination or needs more of it. I don’t even know where I fall on the political spectrum despite where I may have voted the last several elections. But I do know that the kind of imagination the Christian Right has is not the kind of imagination I want for my life anymore. Despite calling itself “imaginative,” it actually lacks imagination because it limits itself to mostly two options of everything: good or evil, red or blue, faith or doubt, friend or foe, heaven or hell, in or out, with me or against me, the list goes on. We see evidence of this binary everywhere on the Christian Right.

Someone will probably chime in and say the binary exists on the Left too, but I keep thinking about this thing Ezra Klein said in a conversation a few months ago. He said,

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Growing up in Quakertown, in a state named for Quaker William Penn, in southeastern Pennsylvania, a place proliferated with the anabaptist (Brethren, Amish, Hutterite, every kind of Mennonite, and Quakers too), the lore of pacifism was commonplace to us. We understood the role these kinds of believers took during the history of our country’s most glaring blight: enslavement of people made in God’s image. The underground railroad, religious exemption from the military, a refusal to “take either side” because both sides were complicit, either in direct enslavement (the south) or in profit from enslaved people’s labor (the north), and more. In every way, these peaceful people were anything but passive. They operated vast systems of rescue and recovery, opened their meetinghouses for prayer and makeshift hospitals, and practiced non-violence, even as violence was done to them.

They were known then and now as “The Friends.”

You remember the Quakers too: Susan B. Anthony, Levi Coffin, John Woolman, George Fox, Johns Hopkins, John Greenleaf Whittier, and so many more.

Over the weekend I finished a book called Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. It has no author byline except “The Friends of Attention.” The title and subtitle speak for themselves, but it is the “friends of attention,” I want to talk a little bit about today. Especially one term they spoke about and why I think it’s such a helpful metaphor for those of us who feel captive to the attention economy.

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We are there for a lot of reasons that aren’t anyone’s business but our own. But we’re also there because we finally grew tired enough of the spiritual flailing we’ve both bee…

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