A Long Winter’s Silence

photography of leafless tree surrounded by snow

I haven’t seen bare ground anywhere around here since December. It’s been a long, long winter. The last storm that I recall dumping this much snow was April of 2018, and then, we knew that it was likely the last snow of the season.

But when it snowed in December, then a foot or more in early January, I knew we had a long way to go yet. We had a short February thaw, a few days above freezing, enough to melt the ice dams and the gargantuan icicles that had formed on the corner of the parsonage. And now, we’re wearily awaiting the arrival of another foot dump of snow, just when the patio furniture was beginning to emerge from the drift it’s been encased in since New Year’s week.

We attempted a trip to Dell Rapids this morning for my physical therapy appointment to fix my frozen shoulder and abandoned just short of half-way. The first round of snow had already arrived, and visibility was deteriorating. But on the way back from the van, there it was: the clean hush of new-fallen snow. One of my favorite things about first-snows back when I was a child. That, and the way the sky glowed at night, once everything was covered. Out here, the glow isn’t as evident, since we’re no longer in a town, but the silence is still there, perhaps even more intensely.

The silence was a reminder to me that even in the middle of a long, weary winter, there’s still beauty to be found. And it was a reminder to me that the long silence I’ve experienced in my writing life just might have some beauty and wonder behind it as well.

I’m currently in a season of silence, surrender, and listening. Not much else to do, really. I start something, and it circles, wanders, goes back into something I’ve written already about a dozen times. And that’s where I generally quit. It all gets sucked back into the same rut, it seems, with no new epiphanies. So, I’ve held on to that idea of silence all afternoon.

My typical antidote for writer’s block is just doing the next thing, starting somewhere random and running with it, but unfortunately that’s led to about six months of wandering, circling, treading water. Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention, I’ve thought. Maybe I need more margin in my day. Maybe I need to read more. Yet none of this has really helped me regain momentum. So, today, I’m going to focus on what’s right in front of me: silence. And maybe that’s just what I need, because it’s what I seem to have been delivered in spades.

Today, I’ll write about the silence, I thought. So, here I am. A foot and a half deep in the white, clean hush of winter quiet, listening for what comes through, trying to be patient.

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In the Morning Mail

white and black cow head

One of the mixed blessings of having moved to Colton, South Dakota (population about 700 or so) has been that mail delivery in town …isn’t actually a thing. Mail is delivered promptly by 9:30am, Monday through Saturday not to a box on our front step, but to a box in the town post office, about a ten-minute walk away, if you’re going at a leisurely pace. Sam and I normally trade off going to get the mail, but since I returned from our latest mother-son road trip to Wyoming, I’ve been stuck on Mountain time and I’m still in wake-up mode. Not proud of that confession, but there it is.

So, one of us –lately Sam– heads off at 9:30 to the post office. It’s been hot here the last few days, but not too bad at that time of day. We had about a weeklong reprieve of pristine June weather –crystal clear blue skies and 70 to 75 degrees, the kind that makes the grass grow enough to need a weekly mow. But now, we’ve returned to humidity and 90’s since Wednesday. The kind of late June / early July weather that makes the corn grow, or so I’m told.

This morning’s sole piece of mail was a postcard advertisement for a farm open house. Not exactly a novelty around here, I thought as I turned it over. Most of our congregation by a large margin are farm families. For most of them to “See Baby Calves – Watch the Milking” as the postcard suggests would be what my mom would call a “busman’s holiday.” Or maybe something like when my dad came along with my mom (who got her driver license at thirty-something) to the grocery store. If he came in with us, it was usually to do sales research. He worked for a place that printed a lot of food packaging labels, so a trip to the grocery store meant the possibility of finding a new local customer. I could imagine some of the local farm neighbors dropping in to see what new equipment or technology this “modern dairy farm focused on sustainability” has –or doesn’t have. Size up the competition, possibly? Do farmers do that sort of thing? I haven’t been here long enough to know.

At any rate, it struck me as an odd thing, getting a farm open house invitation out here. Not sure how far and wide into Sioux Falls these invitations flew, but if I were to go, I’d be most interested in their claim to “capture Renewable Natural Gas from cow manure.” Farmers:1, Vegans: 0 on that scale, I guess. I am encouraged that this local farm is reaching out to the ordinary public, probably the sort that couldn’t explain how the meat that comes in plastic packaging gets in there, or whose kids might think milk comes from a plastic jug or a paper carton instead of from the underside of a cow (ew!). Yes, those kinds of people live in South Dakota, too. They’re just harder to find. And more education can’t be a bad thing in that case. Especially when it comes with free ice cream.

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A Rather Cynical Look at “Writer’s Block”

silver macbook on white table

Does anyone actually still read books in 2022? Forget books –does anyone even still read blogs in 2022?

Going even further, does anyone read anything longer than a web page in 2022? Maybe that’s the more appropriate question. I started reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows a few weeks ago (spoiler alert/confession: I scanned the final four chapters because I lost interest), and since then I’ve been questioning how much and how permanently not just society’s reading habits have changed, but my own have as well.

Sure, most of us spend multiple hours behind a glowing screen or carry one around with us all day, but does that kind of reading even count? One of Carr’s main arguments is that the convenience and pervasiveness of the internet has harmed our ability to focus on longer, more complex reading tasks. Instead of sitting at the breakfast table behind a newspaper (which is really, I suppose, another type of scan-reading), or instead of reading a book in the recliner on Saturday afternoon or in the evening after supper, we get our hits of information from short bursts of reading. Snatches of ideas. Little snacks of information rather than balanced meals of knowledge that come with reading whole books or reading multiple pieces on a given subject. In addition to losing our collective attention span, what we’ve lost –and what I see as the biggest danger– is context.

And just as deep reading in context is lost, what I see from my own personal internet habits since I’ve returned home for work is the ability to write well. I’ve seemed to forget how writing is HARD. Well, good writing is hard. First-draft blogs like this one are less hard, but even now, I’m realizing that while I started out with a germ of an idea, it’d have been far better to have built even a sketch of an outline. What do I want to say? What’s the point, anyway? I’m not sure I could’ve answered when I typed the tentative title.

I’ve abandoned Facebook for about two years now, but I’ve kept an on-again, off-again Twitter account, and that also is an entirely different sort of first-draft writing. I don’t really feel the need a plan to compose 280 characters or less on what I did last weekend or to blurt out a reaction to the latest outrage trigger. –Of course, I try to avoid the latter. A growing annoyance with contextless outrage posting was the main reason for abandoning Facebook and the reason I have an arms-length, skeptical relationship with my Twitter account. How much can you really change the world for the better with a 280 character post, anyway? I suppose it’s been done, but I struggle to find an example.

While I’ve heard many writers (especially in the early days of Twitter) claim that the 280 character limit is a helpful constraint and good practice at building maximal meaning in a minimum of words, what it’s done for me is far more insidious. I find that after dropping several of the writing habits I kept during my undergraduate classes and my MFA (daily journaling, regular deep reading, revision), I now tend to prefer the lazy route. Most of what I’ve written since May has been half-hearted morning pages every few days when I feel like it and a couple Twitter responses or posts a day. Not surprisingly, writing a longer piece now seems insufferably difficult. I started two pieces in the last few months in the old-fashioned manner, pen and paper to try and get my groove back, and I’m finding that what I end up with is something more like a jumble of disjointed notes than a cohesive first-draft of an actual essay. Things go all over the place. I typically hit my stride (and figure out my “what’s this really about”) around page three, … and then I lose the energy and focus to continue. I leave a bulleted list of possible future paragraph points and I tell myself I’ll come back to it later. And then when I do, I’m so disgusted by my lack of coherence that I abandon what I have and follow a different path.

Some might call this writer’s block. What this ramble is telling me, however, is not that I’m blocked. I’m out of shape.

As to what’s caused that, I’m not certain that I can solely blame the internet. Sure, my habits there don’t help matters at all, but there’s something else going on, and I think the answer lies in a lack of discipline overall. I’ve reestablished the habit of a daily walk, and found I’d forgotten how much the combination of physical activity, getting outdoors, and being able to listen through the noise in my head helps me see things more clearly. I’m forcing myself as I write this to finish my idea, something I rarely do any more through my morning pages. I know that morning pages aren’t supposed to have a point, necessarily, but I’ve been so frustrated with the lack of direction that’s shown up there that I’ve nearly abandoned the practice. It’s not the morning pages, though, just like it wasn’t just the internet or even just social media. It’s a bigger problem of losing the practice of doing deep work. Of paying attention. Of remembering why I do this. Without ideas, writing is pointless, and I think therein lies my problem: good ideas come at a cost. They require focus and discipline and work to wrangle them into words that have power to change things for the good.

At the risk of unwinding my whole point here with cheesy nostalgia, here’s where I insert the clip from my childhood memories of Debbie Allen from Fame since this came to mind, and I’ll end my ramble here for today.

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Speaking Grace With Wordless Fluency

person wearing white pants and white socks standing beside brown broom

In 2007, it felt like life had hit me like a tidal wave (or two) as I sat in the tsunami’s wreckage in a tiny upstairs apartment in Oostburg, Wisconsin. We’d been through a job loss –my husband was laid off his teaching job, the one we thought would be for years to come as we grew our family (this happened Feb. 10, 2005, two days before my 33rd birthday), the birth of my son (March 2005), a cross-country move to Phoenix, Arizona and back (July 2005 to August 2006), endured a year of stress and adjustment and isolation (the ensuing time in Phoenix), and finally, another cross-country move back to Wisconsin in fall of 2006, after my husband’s teaching job in Arizona turned out to be the worst job he’s ever had.

I survived that year by going on long walks when I had the chance, by spending time online with other mothers, by long naps, and a lot of the time, by just going numb. I was depressed. Overwhelmed. Disappointed.

When I am depressed, I get frozen in place. Where some might become angry or irritated, I become unable to move. I go numb. And that’s where I was, sitting in the wreckage on my couch, computer in my lap and kids playing in the next room in 2006. It was all I could do some days to just make dinner, to get the laundry done, to keep the kitchen clean. The girls’ room was a study in chaos. Where two years previously, we’d devised a system for them to learn to pick up their toys before bed, I just couldn’t maintain it in the current situation.

I hadn’t realized how badly my mental and emotional health had affected my family’s physical situation until my in-laws came for a visit. I’d picked up the living room. The kitchen was usually fairly ordered, as it usually took first priority in terms of living space. But the girls’ room was still mostly a disaster, despite our half-hearted attempt to shovel the toys into a pile at the end of the day every few days when we could no longer walk through the small room.

My wake-up call, my “rock bottom moment,” happened when my husband and father-in-law decided to move the girls’ bunk beds to another arrangement in their room. They moved the mattress, and under the bed frame were about a month worth of Sunday school papers, broken crayons, books, fruit snack wrappers, cereal pieces, crumbs, and miscellaneous small toys and stuffed animals. It looked like an episode of “Hoarders: Lite, Closet Edition.” I was horrified. Embarrassed. And in despair, because in that moment, I realized how badly I really was doing but had no idea how to remedy the situation. I felt like I was drowning, but I wouldn’t have been able to even give the sinking feeling in my soul that word back then, staring emptily into that pile we’d quickly swept into the corner of the room and a into a garbage bag.

And now, many years later, I see the same despair in my son. He’s going through a rough season himself now at age almost-sixteen, and he’s reflecting my own type of depression. He shuts down and “just can’t.” I’ve gone down to check on him for the last month or two, mildly horrified at the condition of his room. Laundry (clean or dirty? Who knows?) in mounds on the floor, bed sheets that hadn’t been washed in weeks, dishes piled on the corner of his desk, wrappers and papers and garbage piled well above the trashcan in the space between his desk and the wall. If you have teenage sons, I’m sure you can imagine the smell.

Some time yesterday, I started to see it differently, though. I remembered that pile of detritus under my daughter’s bed and decided the situation in my son’s room wasn’t calling for shame or condemnation –several weeks of trying that had failed, anyway– but grace. I know now that what I needed back in the middle of all my own wreckage was grace. I found it in the long-suffering of my husband and in a daily dose of prayer and Wellbutrin, but it didn’t come easily.

So I stopped looking at the condition of my son’s room as a judgement on my poor mothering skills (“how could you let it get that bad?!”), but an opportunity to show my son the grace I needed years ago, but had to fight for. Here, I could fight for him when he couldn’t fight on his own. What might have started with laziness or complacency probably became overwhelming, and that I can understand.

So, yesterday afternoon while he was at school, I went down to his room and took out the garbage, stripped the bed, changed the sheets, washed all the clothes on mounds on his floor, swept under the bed. I’d offered to do this work before, but he’d refused my offer. Whether that was due to my disappointed tone or due to his refusal to be shamed into action, I don’t know, but when I picked him up yesterday after having cleaned his room all afternoon, I told him my own story and what I’d learned from that experience: that sometimes you just need a fresh start, to be rescued when you can’t do it yourself. I reassured him that I’d left his notebooks alone, I hadn’t thrown out anything but what was clearly trash (empty cans, wrappers, plastic cups, packages and boxes), and that I cleaned up the room for him out of love, not out of judgement. I did it because I wish I’d have had someone back then to do that for me.

He seemed relieved.

And when I think of how ashamed I was back then as a depressed and overwhelmed mom of littles, looking into the piles of junk under my daughter’s bed unearthed for everyone to see; when I think of how I still am ashamed at the condition of our yard, of the laundry that piles up next to the dryer, and I have to fight that sense of inner condemnation as I buckle down and just get the work done, I realize that maybe that’s what grace is for: to let ourselves receive it and pass it on to someone else who needs to experience it rather than have it explained to them.

Sometimes that looks like six loads of laundry, three garbage bags full of trash in the dumpster, and a fresh refill in the plug-in air freshener. Sometimes it looks like remembering to take my meds every morning and making a plan to take care of myself. Sometimes it means listening to a compliment and letting yourself believe it. Sometimes it means remembering that God does not operate by human-made formulas, but by love and grace and justice that we may never understand. Justice that gives itself up for those who can’t give of themselves. Especially on the days when we “just can’t.”

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Noise, News, and White-Noise Anxiety

2020 has been an anxious year.

I don’t think I’m alone in that observation, either. Between every tempest in a social media teapot to the tempests in a test tube (Coronavirus), I don’t think many people are hanging on to this year as an example of living their best life. But then, when I look back, it’s often been the times when you struggle to find peace, to find beauty –and then find it– that I remember with less than the pain that they should bring. There’s something precious about joy that’s fought for and won. And this year, if there’s ever been a year, has been one where joy hasn’t come without a fight.

I’ve been so grateful to live where I do these days. June is still my favorite here. Temps in the low 80’s (usually), abundant sunshine, just enough rain and thunder to break up the monotony, and everything greens. Scientists in New York and other cities pointed out that during the time when we were all sheltering in place that there was a noticeable quiet. They could hear bird song again over everything else that was normally drowned out by the shuffle and bang of vehicles and machinery. Animals wandered the streets without the usual interference of people and bicycles and cars getting in their way, threatening. For the birds and rats and deer and opossums of the city, 2020 has been a less anxious time.

Which makes me realize what I have here. The sound level here really didn’t change at all. Perhaps fewer trailers full of screaming hogs being carted to their futures as bacon and ham. Fewer trucks clatter-banging over the railroad crossing just down the street from our house. The train that hauls corn and ethanol back and forth from one end of town to Worthington didn’t seem to pause much. Then again, the 6:30am train horn doesn’t wake me for long any more. I can’t really say I noticed. And the wrens in our back yard have always had enough aural space to be heard. Their only competition is the wind in the trees and grass today, and really, that’s more of an accompaniment than competition.

It’s startlingly easy to lose track of the outside world –that is, the world that the news media thinks is worth covering– on the porch. My “outdoor office,” I call it. Looking into my computer screen, I can see CNN’s concern about the President’s slurred speech and stumbling down a ramp, and I see Twitter trending things like #ww3. Close the computer, though, and it all goes away. Or, rather, my awareness of it does, for a little while. Not much has changed from last June to this one, judging by the sound level and wildlife count …and the height of my lawn, which always seems to need a mow.

Which brings up the question in my mind: what matters to me, anyway? What should matter? I read a book many years ago called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, written by a guy named Jerry Mander. No kidding –that’s his actual name. In the book, he makes the case that television news distorts our impression of the world. Before television, we got the news from word of mouth, news often days or weeks old. Later, we developed newspapers, delivering day-old news at our doorstep each morning. Now we can flip on our screen and watch “news” as it happens. The book was written in the 1970’s, before we might have even been able to fathom the permanently scarring effect of watching 9/11 unfold on live television news. Relevance changes when you’re watching things happen. And relevance changes when you can see the whole world in a little lighted box. The potential answer to the question, “And who is my neighbor?” changes when that lighted box expands your virtual neighborhood to an entire world –places we’d never set foot. No wonder it’s so easy to feel anxious about it and so difficult to know where to start in terms of making it better.

In a way, it seems like television news has made the world’s business our business, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Yes, it’s putting my head in the sand, but sometimes I’d just rather not know. I believe that the abundance of knowledge is what produces that buzz of white-noise anxiety that’s ramped up in the past few years. Knowing is a burden –that’s a Biblical concept, according to Ecclesiastes 1:18. The thing I question is whether or not that burden keeps us so overloaded with things that we can’t possibly change that we have no emotional space left to listen to the burdens of our physical (dare I say real?) neighbors. It’s a sticky question, and the “what will people think?” side of me is hearing you accuse me of not caring. But that’s not it, really. We’re not off the hook. Where is lasting change most immediately and effectively made? Locally. Not on social media or through an institution (though those things have a place). We can fly somewhere else for a week or two and do a “mission trip,” without really knowing a place or its people at all. We can send money somewhere and never know the impact it will have. But we can also get to know our actual neighbors and shoulder the burden of their everyday apocalypses. Cancer. Loved ones dying. Job loss. Illness.

Read in context, Acts 1:7-8, the “Great Commission,” addresses the disciples’ anxiety:
“When they were together for the last time they asked, ‘Master, are you going to restore the Kingdom to Israel now? Is this the time?'”
I think perhaps they were concerned with what they saw as priority: kicking some Gentile butt and making sure that God’s victory was clear in terms of enabling Israel to come to political power. Jesus responds:
“He told them, ‘You don’t get to know the time. Timing is the Father’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.'”

In summer Bible camp, one of our leaders pointed out to us that this commission to make disciples goes like a ripple in a pond. Jerusalem was their immediate neighborhood, and the commission started there. The vision of the disciples could never be as immense or grand as the vision of God. He just showed them where to start, and assured us that He’d take care of the rest. We don’t get to know the time, though the signs of a world on fire are everywhere. But we do have power to start in Jerusalem, our own backyard. And for me, that relieves a whole lot of anxiety.

Until, that is, I realize that actually have to pay attention and do it. But then, that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in, right?

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Coronavirus Diaries: Easter Sunday, 2020

He is risen, the robin sings.

Her song declares the truth of resurrection,

notes carried through the snow-laden wind.

 

A late, April, Easter morning

sheltered together and apart against the virus

we hear the same revelation

and await the emergence

from so many kinds of tombs.

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