They don’t even know which way the wind’s bound
So how could they know your name?1
I sat across from him, taking in his white robe, shorn head, affable smile.
“Are you familiar with spiritual direction, Adrienne? Do you have something in particular you’d like to discuss today?”
I don’t share the deep knowing pulsing through my veins. Not yet. I don’t say, Here is what my spirit is telling me lately…
I say, “Yes, I am familiar.
and: “I’d like to talk about why I keep trying to hustle for my worth.”
He smiles, shares his own version of “the hustle,” attending vespers and returning to manage the front desk at the guest lodge until eleven, or even midnight for late arrivals, awake again at 6 for morning prayer. He goes on to say how mothering is akin to monastic life, the constant dying to self, the ritual and rhythms of it, the availing of oneself. He is kind. He is chatty.
I am longing for someone to guide me into the quiet.
I take a deep breath. “I carry my belonging with me, though. I don’t have to hustle for it.”
He shifts in his seat. We have nearly twenty minutes left for divine wisdom to present itself.
“Well,” he says, a wry smile on his face. “It’s good that you know that.”
To say something and to know something are not the same.
When I arrived home from three days of creative and spiritual retreat, my Monday began with an email grenade. A professional missile. Within a few days, it was managed, but it shook me so very deeply. I was forced to see the truth of my paper thin skin. The lies from years ago still etched there like graffiti on bathroom walls.
I don’t mean to be cryptic. What I’m saying is: I’m so much more fragile than I want to be.
Lara, don’t you let ‘em get your head down
You’re carrying the fire, don’t forget now
You’re living in a land that’s all but run down
So how could they know your name?
My belonging—I carry it with me. I know this. And yet I don’t.
It’s understandable I hope, dear reader, that even writers lack the words sometimes. For example, when I skidded into the third bout of burnout in twelve short months, I offered a prerecorded message to any human kind enough to ask me how I was doing. It sounded like this:
I am so overwhelmed. I’m just really overwhelmed right now.
Just put one foot in front of the other2
The best of friends did more than blink back at me, but I didn’t hold it against anyone who didn’t know what to say in response. I’m told the standard answer to this question is: Fine thanks. You?
Just remember this won’t be forever
That’s what I would tell you. If your stomach felt tight with despair just swimming in the conversational ebb and flow, the bright lights and bright smiles. If I asked you, offhand and unprepared, how you were doing, and I didn’t mean it at first, I would mean it the moment you looked at the floor before you answered. I would do what others have done for me. I would sweep you into the nearest pew and tell you:
Two birds of a feather
I’ll love you forever
And we’ll keep each other looking for the light
I would pass you this song over text to say that you, Despairing One, are blessed.
We who dance are also doomed to mourn
Let us keep the feast, for by it we remember
That our sorrow keeps us tethered to our joy
Tethered, you see. You are not lost. You are finding exactly what you are meant to find.
How to account for the life lived in the gaps between posts? Address it head on? I can’t bring myself to pretend you’ve been waiting for me or wondering. Draw back the curtain on my disillusionment toward the internet, toward public-facing writing? I may as well charge you to read while I’m at it.
What have I missed since I last checked my phone?
My god, that must have been ten minutes ago!3
Good, hard days. That’s what was sandwiched into the blank space between posts. Same as you, I know. The only way I could manage to coax myself back onto this stage was to hold up the frame of the latest Arcadian Wild album, which has soothed me so reliably these past few months. Isn’t it wonderful? Copper threads of mandolin chiming through dark modernity.
My death comes by a thousand cuts, and I paid for the knife
Bleeding for a way to escape my ball and chain
The fatal clutches of father screen time
I haven’t had the words, but I have encountered the beautiful redemption of art meeting me completely in through these lyrics, expressing all the things I haven’t felt strong enough to say.
Why don’t you look your life in the eye?
My commitments no longer fit into the square of Google Calendar. They stack up and stack up like a weight on the back of my neck, just exactly where a yoke might rest. The weight of mothering tipping me sideways in such a way that I believe I must fill the other bucket to the brim with career pursuits just to balance, to remain upright. The pivotal work sits untouched for weeks, months even. An exiled part of me is keening but I am too obsessed with forward movement to listen.
I’ll tear it all down if you ask me4
This prayer, this song, it shocked me back to life, spoke for a part of me I couldn’t even begin to hear.
I’ll tear it all down if you ask me
Just say the word and hold on tight
I’ll build it back up if you ask me
As long as you’ll be by my side
I’m not an internet writer. I write on the internet occasionally, but my writing doesn’t exist for scrolling and clicking. The novel, though, is the good and holy work that nobody sees, a quiet earth-bound seed. Sometimes tending such a thing—three, four, five years at a time… the time it takes for others to sprout an idea into a something printed and bound on countless shelves—feels so invisible as to be imaginary, just a big ruse.
I’m writing a novel, so I say.
Making up a story, taking turns each one word at a time
The morning light cuts through the mountain air like a knife
To carve our names on the old ponderosa pine
It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done, carving word after word after word. And in these moments of defeat, all I can do is set it on the altar.
I’ll tear it all down if you ask me
Just say the word and hold on tight.
It was a consolation to say such a thing. You can have it, God. This reckless dream. These weary hours of shaping tendrils of thought like fog, losing the way again and again.
Big Sky, MT on repeat in the background, I rolled white butcher paper over the floor and sketched out the story as I knew it then, four years in. Cast off crayons tracing the arc, a scene blooming behind my eyes, their song and my story coalescing into a new path forward.
I’ve been writing toward that moment ever since. And I forgive myself for not arriving yet.
Because this is not about the story I’m writing. This is about the story He’s writing in me.
You turned my green to golden (5)
I’m rising early again. One teaspoon of ceremonial grade matcha powder and one cup milk, robe cinched tight around my waist, green glass candle flickering on the desk and I’m back in the story.
You asked me when I learned to fly
I replied, “You were watching the whole time.”
Isn’t it amazing that He can hold all this? His story framing my own, His truth shining through Arcadian Wild and Ephesians and good friends and fresh mercies. It all matters to Him, my existential aches and my joint pain, my broken sleep and broken promises, my art and my pile of laundry.
Take a look at my heart (6)
That is why I’m here, I suppose, interrupting the peaceable gap. I am here to say He is making all things new. I am one piece of the evidence.
There was a good reason
Big Sky, MT by Arcadian Wild
Oh friend. How this resonates. ❤️ You are Beloved, always. Thank you for sharing this tiny glimpse into the unseen places of your beautiful, very full life. I will forever read every word you write, on the internet and bound in paper 😉
Beautifully written Adrienne. I've been reading your post on and off for most of my day, savoring your words and listening to the songs. I've been thinking lately of a word to describe how I'm feeling lately and I think "despair" is the most accurate. I felt like you wrote this for me, thank you! - btw: Thanks for introducing me to The Arcadian Wild 🧡