Grieving, weakness, God, and my friend Rich

I am re-running this, because I know that my publisher put my blog URL on the back of Flame in the Night, and if anyone new here shows up because of that, I want them to know about the person I dedicated the book to.

I wrote this in March 2017.

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I've been realizing, as I recover from finishing my manuscript, just how many things I put on hold as I raced toward the finish line. (And then limped over it, having gotten a nasty chest cold in the last week of the work; between the book and my 3-year-old I managed to ration out just enough energy to finish.) One of those things, naturally, was cleaning the house. (You should've seen it.)

But I think another may have been grieving.

My dear friend Rich Foss died in January. I think it was January. It's been so surreal. It was expected, in a way; his health was bad at the best of times, and was getting worse. Then the blow came suddenly: he was newly diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder, when his immune system's continual fight against his chronic lung condition was all that was keeping him alive.

Rich was always a brave and honest man. He could barely walk; he'd had rheumatoid arthritis since he was seventeen, and by the time I met him his feet literally pointed in opposite directions. He spent the bulk of his time in a mechanized recliner, hooking himself up, with his wife Sarah's help, to three or four medical machines daily to stay alive. And I'd venture to say he spent the bulk of that time facing things head-on. (Not just his own things. All the things. But that's too long a story for today.) He had been talking openly about his own death for over a year, even when the rest of us felt that social impulse to tiptoe round it. He had known a long time that he wasn't going to live to a ripe old age. When the last diagnosis came, he accepted that it was the end. He went on hospice care.

But we did think he was going to live longer than two weeks.

When it happened, one level of my soul accepted it, in a stunned sort of way: this is happening, this is real. But for weeks afterward when I woke up, at the moment of coming back to consciousness, it would hit me with shock: Rich is dead. There was a part of me, down inside sleep, that still had no idea.

I used to visit Rich every Thursday evening, for years. We'd talk about this or that. But in the past two years we'd started to talk almost exclusively about the book I was writing. After the first few weeks of mostly talking about myself and my work I started to get uncomfortable: clearly I was monopolizing these conversations. I loved being able to talk about my writing--it's not easy to do so in a way people can even understand, when you're still in process, and Rich did--and Rich was always generous with his listening, but I needed to rein it in; even the most patient person would get tired of this week after week. I kept checking in with him about it, first in subtle ways, then asking him outright. Finally he managed to convince me: he was genuinely enjoying himself.

It felt like a miracle to me. That I could get what I so badly needed without having another person generously sacrifice their time for me; that I could get it while actually adding something good to someone else's day. Rich was a writer himself--if you can find a copy of his beautiful novel Jonas and Sally, I recommend it very heartily--and interested in Story, in the travails and dilemmas and emotions of human beings and how we resolve them, how we make the big choices, which is what fiction is about. As I went deeper into the book, themes developed in it that were very dear to his heart. He would tell me stories from his own life that re-echoed the themes, we would talk about what those things meant to us. Sometimes I would come to him with my latest thorny problem and he would give advice. Sometimes I would simply tell him the scene I wrote that day, and watch him react, and see that it was right. Sometimes what I was writing would lead into profound stories from memories he was sifting through and processing, knowing he was at the end of life. Sometimes he would cry.

(I think he would be all right with my telling you this. He was a very open person.)

Then came the time it became a miracle for him.

He used to be a leader, a writer, a mentor, a counselor. He was profoundly respected, it was clear at his funeral. But in his last few years he had no energy for the contributions he used to make; all his energy was spent in the sheer work of staying alive, managing his medical conditions--and that took work all right, a day-long routine of medical machines. One hour of conversation a day was pretty much what he had the energy for after that. And he needed more and more help--someone to come over & warm up his supper, for instance, which he could do but getting up and walking would wear him out. I did that often, I loved doing it, it meant a chance to talk with him, even if briefly. As things went more in that direction, I was stunned by how much that meant to him--that I wanted to.

It was getting harder and harder for him, being helped. He'd been helped all his life, of course, but he'd also been a leader. Now he talked about being an "outsider." Now most of the interactions in his day were someone coming over and doing him a favor. One that he wasn't able to return.

But with me he was. With me he had the energy (on a good day) to have at least a little bit of deeply meaningful conversation, because Story energized him; with me he was a mentor giving deeply valued advice and understanding, giving me something I needed very much. With me he was not just a receiver but also a giver, and he needed that. His soul needed that. We came to understand this end-of-life friendship as a deep gift of God to us both.

There was something about it that was very hard to understand, for me. It's this: God's power is made perfect in weakness. To receive, to be helped, isn't this a connection that has God in it? Simone Weil says "Compassion and gratitude come down from God, and when they are exchanged in a glance, God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and the eyes of those who receive meet." I think that's beautiful. And true. I knew Rich agreed with me on this. And I knew Rich was deeply connected to God. But to see just how much it hurt him, this profoundly respected man, just wondering if he was a burden to the friends who stopped by to hook up his oxygen or microwave his pizza--I don't want to go into detail, honestly, I don't want to make you picture this, that might be a bridge too far in terms of openness--well, I couldn't parse it. What about the power of God?

What I learned from his feelings at the end of his life was this: oh Lord, Heather, it is so much harder than you think.

I have not been tested on this. But I will be. Except for those of us who die very, very suddenly, every single one of us will be. And that is the other thing I have learned: in the face of someone who is in that place of vulnerability, when you have to help and yet helping is painful, that is the one response that brings connection and relief: I will be in your place someday.

(It's ironic. It's one of the themes in my book. The Jewish characters and the pain of their vulnerability, the way the non-Jewish characters have a profound "I had no idea" shock when they finally come to understand--due to the threat their rescue efforts end up placing them under--what their friends have really been experiencing this whole time.)

Why? Why does weakness, plain material weakness, hurt us so much? Why does dependence on other people hurt us so much? Why are we ashamed of it? It's one of those places where all I've been taught about God seems so right and so good, and yet it is so hard for it to come to birth in our daily world. (What Simone Weil said is beautiful, and I still believe it, but I love her all the more because, though the quote doesn't show it, if you read the whole essay you will see that she fully understands the pain involved, and the difficulty; what she is describing in the quote is literally a miracle.)

Why? I don't know. I don't know. There are only two things I know: It is much harder than I think. And I will face it someday.

Oh, and one more thing: I still believe. And Rich knows. Rich knows all of it now.

So here is the thing I can say at the end of this story, that I would not have dared to say at the beginning, because I fear so much to sound selfish about my friend's death. Ever since I finished the book I have been mourning what I used to think this time would hold. I was recording the book for Rich to listen to. I had just recorded Chapter 15 when he died. I went ahead and recorded Chapter 16, because I had other reasons for wanting a recording. It broke me up hard, to read it into the microphone, to feel no-one on the other end. I always believed he was going to read this book. I want him to read it, I want to put it in his hands. But they're gone.

And yes, I mourn the help he could have given me. There are very specific questions I want to ask him: should I change this? Is this over the top? And I don't dare tell people that part, out of context. But the help he gave me was the connection, the friendship, the gift, it was the help I gave him too. It was the help God gave us. It was the miracle.

In my head, he was going to live till spring came. We would talk. He would listen to the book and we would talk about it, talk about it. I would bring him the first spring flowers. And then I would be ready to let go. That was how it was going to be, in my head.

Oh Lord, Heather. It is so much harder than you think.

Healing "tendinitis"

See end for an important update to this post.

I thought it was time for a post about what I've learned due to my injuries—but not what I've learned about life, the woods, and God this time. Just what I've learned about tendons.

This does mean that if your tendons are fine, you could skip this one—but maybe don't? I'm writing this in hopes of being useful to a few beleaguered people out there, and one of them just may be someone you know. And maybe you could point them to this post, today or sometime down the road. I hope so. Because as I've learned, injuries like mine—repetitive stress injuries of all kinds—can be truly horrible for people whose livelihoods depend on the very muscles and tendons they've been stressing. It can be extremely hard to recover, and extremely hard to find answers as to what, if anything, can truly be done.

And the truth is, there are answers now. They're new (in a way at least), and not very well-known yet. But if I can help spread the word, I may help restore strength to a few people who desperately need it, and I want to. I don't want anybody else to have to go through this.

1. It's not tendinitis, exactly

It's tendinosis.

This has actually been accepted medical doctrine for a while, but most people don't realize it because doctors have tended to use the familiar term tendinitis with patients, while officially diagnosing tendinosis.

So is this just semantics? Not quite.

The suffix "-itis" denotes inflammation. Tendinitis basically means an inflamed tendon. This does happen, but the newer medical research suggests that it's less common and much briefer than the condition I've got, and is usually caused by a sudden strain or injury—not by repetitive stress. Chronic tendon pain like mine, they now believe, is almost always tendinosis.

Now "-osis" suggests, not inflammation, but degeneration—actual changes to the tissue. That's why complete rest and anti-inflammatories were not enough to heal me. Something was wrong in the tissue itself, something that needed active physical treatment. I can't give a full explanation of exactly what was wrong (although if you have lots of time you can get one here) but here are the main things I understand: the repetitive stress I imposed on my hands & forearms caused scar tissue to form in my tendons. This scar tissue is matted and tangled whereas normal tendon tissue lies straight and smooth, and so it impedes function. This scar tissue also is far more sensitive to pain than normal tissue—and so using my tendon causes pain.

The scar tissue will never go away. I'll always have it. But there are ways to change it, re-align it into a healthier configuration that—though I'll always have to be a little careful with it—will allow me to work pretty much as I did before without pain.

Actually, there are almost too many ways…

2. Scar tissue treatments

The first time I ever heard of a therapy that could actively begin to reverse my condition was on the website of Dr. Schierling down in Missouri—and let me tell you, within an hour or two of finally deciding he was for real, I was on Google Maps looking for campgrounds in the Ozarks. (Fortunately, since our only option for travel to a rural area in another state would have been someone else's car, that didn't prove to be necessary.) It did take me a little while to decide he was for real—if you have a look around his website, you'll notice a few of his opinions are a little far out—but I do think that he is, and I think his distrust of the medical establishment is understandable in light of the fact that for years he's been using a therapy they didn't recognize but which did wonders for at least certain of his patients. He doesn't have to be right about everything—just as long as he's right about scar tissue, and how to change it.

Because that's the key. There are quite a few different versions of the technique by now, but the fundamental thing is this: what this type of condition needs is a direct therapy to break up the scar tissue that has formed in the tendon and remodel or recondition it. The scar tissue doesn't go away, but it can be changed enough by the therapy—and the stretches prescribed alongside it, which help the tissue to heal in the right configuration—to turn the tendon back into something that's usable without pain.

Like I said, there are different versions. And they're practiced by different types of practitioners. The first clue I ever had about scar tissue therapy, weirdly enough, was a guy telling in a forum how the only thing could ever heal his "tendinitis" was a strange balm bought in a little Chinese store in Chinatown and rubbed into his tendon by the seller, painfully hard (an extremely important part of the process, he was told.) Immediately following this story, someone else chimed in to say his chronic tendinitis never went away until he visited a bodyworker/massage therapist who gave him a similar painful massage.

I've learned since then that scar tissue work is indeed something that many massage therapists are trained in, though it's not well known to the public. (I have one story of a massage therapist who chose not to pursue training in it because she realized most massage clients don't want painful therapies. They want massage to feel good—it's seen as a luxury, not as therapy.) Which is too bad! It seems to me that in their not-officially-scientific way, they've held out answers for a long time, and science has only recently caught up. As many of us learned in math class, just because you're not able to show your work doesn't necessarily mean you got the answer wrong…

But like I say, science has caught up. There are now scar tissue therapies done by physical and occupational therapists, covered by insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

There are so many different versions of this, you guys. I don't know everything about them—I don't even know the names of all of them, most likely—but I want to give people a starting point for exploring and choosing. Most likely some of them are more effective than others, but it probably depends heavily on both the skill of your practitioner and how their technique connects with your condition. You can do your own research starting with the links here. So here's a quick overview with links.


Massage therapists:

Massage therapists tend to use manual techniques (as opposed to instrument-assisted techniques, which involve some type of metal or plastic instrument.) It seems to me there are advantages to this, and from my reading it seems a really skilled and experienced practitioner can feel how much scar tissue you have and where, as well as feel it breaking down. I gather that these manual techniques are sometimes painful and sometimes not—if you have concerns about that you'll probably want to ask your practitioner.

Here is an example of an apparently very skilled and experienced practitioner. She's in Australia:

http://www.marjoriebrook.com/private-practice/scar-tissue-release-therapy/

And an article by her about her technique, which she calls scar tissue release therapy:

https://www.massagetoday.com/mpacms/mt/article.php?id=14020

You'll find an abundance of different names in this business. These folks call it scar tissue massage:

http://www.medical-massage.net/scar-tissue-massage

It's also called scar tissue remodeling—a particularly accurate name, if I understand correctly, because the scar tissue is not destroyed but rather reshaped by the therapy. If I were still searching among different practitioners to find someone who knows some version of it, I would probably use the generic term "some form of scar tissue therapy" and maybe add "some therapy that can break down and remodel scar tissue." (I might also mention some of the names in the PT section further down, especially if I was talking to a PT.)

https://erikdalton.com/blog/scar-remodeling-adhesions-nerve-pain/


Chiropractors:

Like I said, the first place I ran across this kind of technique (scar tissue remodeling, in this particular case) was on a chiropractor's website. One interesting thing about this guy is that he learned of the technique (years and years ago) from another chiropractor who successfully treated him with it for the exact condition I have—tendinosis in both elbows. It seems to me that here is another very skilled and experienced practitioner—that does seem to count for a great deal in this business—and I can vouch that he responded to me promptly and helpfully when I inquired about coming down to see him about my elbows.

http://www.doctorschierling.com/

There are some other scar tissue therapy techniques practiced by chiropractors—I don't know many details about most of these.

Here's one called Active Release Therapy:

http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/vancouver-chiropractor-explains-scar-tissue-and-how-to-get-rid-of-it-2231274.htm

Another, called Rapid Release Therapy, which seems quite new and assisted by a type of instrument I've never seen before:

https://www.swinkchiropractic.com/rrt-soft-tissue-therapy/

And another, apparently more widespread, called the Graston Technique. The Graston Technique is a type of instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization therapy (IASTM) using metal instruments. More on that in a minute.

https://www.spine-health.com/treatment/chiropractic/graston-technique-instrument-assisted-soft-tissue-manual-therapy-back-pain

https://www.chiro-med.ca/scar-tissue-pain-how-the-graston-technique-works/

But first I want to give a shout out to a somewhat local chiropractic practice, in Peoria. I spoke on the phone with a man named Carl (I unfortunately can't find his last name) who works there—I believe his official title was as a massage therapist. He was so extremely knowledgeable and helpful—completely familiar with the different techniques, clarified things for me, gave me excellent advice—that I very much wished he was nearer (and that chiropractic was covered for me!), as I would have felt I was entirely in good hands. Believe me, that was not the case with everyone I questioned on the phone! Only one other therapist even came close.

So if you have tendinosis or other chronic pain and are in or near Peoria, go to Benningfield Associates and ask for Carl.


Physical and occupational therapists

And now we get to the therapy that I actually ended up going with. But first let me mention the generic term usually used by physical therapists: soft tissue mobilization. There are manual versions of this technique, as seen below:

https://ptcentral.org/services/soft-tissue-mobilization/

But one version that seems to be catching on and becoming more widespread—and of course the advantage of this is that you're likelier to find it near you, and covered—is called ASTYM. That acronym is a different version of the other that you saw before, standing for instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization. (This is important to note because due to the "stim" sound in the word, people tend to assume it's some kind of electrical stimulation therapy like an EMS unit.) It's an instrument assisted scar tissue therapy similar to the Graston Technique—I don't know the details, of course, but the obvious difference is that it uses plastic instruments, somewhat different in shape.

It seems like one of the advantages of an instrument assisted therapy is that it can be more generic—easier to teach a wide range of people, more replicable. This is probably why it's more widespread, and it solves the problem of finding a deeply skilled and experienced practitioner—you can be pretty sure of getting good therapy as long as someone has had the official training. And, of course, unlike massage therapy, it's more universally recognized by the medical community, and more likely to be covered.

And here it is:

https://astym.com/Main

https://www.therapeuticassociates.com/programs/astym/

Along with a more scholarly article about IASTM techniques in general:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10833196.2017.1304184

My therapist—she is technically an occupational therapist, because apparently, at my hospital, occupational therapists work on hands and arms—has been in the field for 12 years but was only trained in ASTYM a year-and-a-half ago. She says it's given her better results than anything else she's ever done. She spreads cocoa butter on my arms and works them with various shaped plastic instruments, covering the whole forearm but with special focus on the elbow tendons and also a few particular areas of the wrists, hands, and shoulders (just one tiny place on the shoulder, actually, which is apparently a trigger point for certain forearm or hand muscles.)

It doesn't hurt—in fact it feels pretty nice. She and I can both feel a certain roughness or "grindiness" under the skin when she hits an area that has a lot of scar tissue in it—that's actually the feeling of the scar tissue breaking up. It's not a painful feeling, it's actually rather subtle, and she can feel it better than I can. It takes maybe half an hour for both arms—she follows it with a short ultrasound treatment on each arm to stimulate healing—and she says it takes 8 to 12 treatments for full healing. (I expect in my case it'll take the full 12!) I've felt a huge amount of improvement. This week she instructed me to try weeding half an hour each day—carefully, wearing braces and icing my elbows afterwards—and I did it with no ill effects. This would have been completely impossible before we started the treatment.

Yes, I would like it to work faster. It's still possible (I mean very easy) for me to overdo and set myself back, and I did so this week—but so mildly. I didn't get pain, just a bit of warning discomfort, and I skipped the half-hour of weeding for a couple of days and am back where I was.

It's working. Lord willing—and accordingly to the usual progression for ASTYM—I'll be better by the end of the month.

And that's amazing.

Important update for the sake of anyone who visits this post for tendinitis/tendinosis information:

Boy, I'm a bit incorrigible in my wish to tie a nice bow on things before they're finished, aren't I? Here's the truth:

ASTYM didn't end up fixing me. It did a lot, and I suspect that in people with lighter repetitive-stress injuries (OK, people who hadn't injured themselves as relentlessly as I did), ASTYM would have done the trick. But as it was, my therapist told me we seemed to have reached a "plateau" where the ASTYM treatment seemed to be merely maintaining the status quo rather than improving me further, especially as we gently introduced more freedom to use my hands for both light and heavy work into my daily routine. Insurance doesn't like "maintenance" treatments and, frankly, I'm not crazy about them either. I wasn't even working that hard yet! And pretty soon some of the pain even came back...

So we went with what for us had seemed like the nuclear option. (A day's travel to the boonies is NBD compared to losing the use of your hands, I know, but we don't own a car.) Hungry World Farm kindly let us use their farm car and we drove to Missouri to Dr. Schierling, who was exactly as he appeared to be on his website--friendly, professional, and wildly experienced with, & interested in, scar tissue. He explained that in his experience, though the more widely-accepted therapies are very gradual, breaking up scar tissue is frankly "the harder, the better." It's perfectly understandable why the medical establishment would find this a hard kind of therapy to sell people on--Dr. Schierling is very upfront about how much it hurts and what you look like afterward, and that is why what he tends to get (including from out of state and even overseas) is desperate cases like me.

It hurt. A lot. I'd do it again tomorrow if I needed to, though that would mean hopping in a car this instant to get there by then. The fun thing is that Dr. Schierling turned out to be a World War II buff, and explaining to him the history behind Flame in the Night was very effective in taking my mind off the pain while he worked! (I also gave him a copy.) I looked head-turningly terrible on the drive home--as Schierling explained to me, scar tissue contains capillary blood vessels and you're not really breaking it up hard enough if you don't see bruising. A very unusual kind of bruising--just beneath the skin and bright red. I had it on my shoulders, the sides of my neck, and all down the inner sides of both arms.

(Whereas the official ASTYM treatment for elbow tendinosis basically restricts itself to the arms only. That's one reason I now strongly lean toward relying on a practitioner's experience rather than official training: you may need someone who knows where & how to look for something slightly out of the norm. Schierling relied on testing my range-of-motion and pinpointing places where he found it restricted, and also on his process--a rubbing/scraping similar to other instrument-assisted therapies but a lot harder--by which he can feel the presence of scar tissue and see the bruising as it breaks up. I watched him do my forearms, where we found very little scar tissue--the skin got red just as it would if I rubbed it hard, but there was practically no bruising.)

And here's the incredible thing: one session. (And three very intensive days of all-important stretching exercises--every half hour except sleep time!--afterward. That counts, oh it counts, especially as I was hosting a family reunion during them. Ah, timing.) One session! I had two or three months of trepidation afterward, gently introducing myself back up to a full working schedule, but especially as I began to prune fruit trees and do other farmwork and my arm strength renewed, it was clear--I was completely well. I'll never be as much of a fool as I was before, pushing and pushing myself with no break, but I've relaxed. I type, I scroll, I work--I feel fine.

Thank God.

Broken hands and new roads

I was going to write about family separations at the border. I was going to. I didn't know what really could be said about it; in fact I don't know what to say now. I've tried and tried to write a blog post, to be honest--about that, or about anything.

The fact is, my hands still don't work.

I tried to write a blog post about that--to share what I was going through in the middle of it, rather than at the end as people always seem to do. I didn't know what to say. I've been wordless. Once--when the pain had started to come back and I knew I had nothing to lose by the experiment--I typed a sentence. What I mostly learned is that I've half-forgotten how to type.

There's hope for the hands. They actually are improving still, I'm able to do careful light housework without compromising them--it's so good to finally be able to do something, anything, and to get the place clean again--and after a great deal of research we've chosen a method and a place for therapy which by all accounts has a good chance of working. As for me--I've been wordless. I don't take back my previous post, all the meaning I've found in this, but I've been in the place of "I don't know what this is anymore." Sometimes when I look at my a-few-months-younger self, I see someone who couldn't bear to have plain old meaningless ordinary troubles happen to her. I mean, I did learn the things I said. But I set out to learn them. I don't remember asking God what this was. Maybe because it seemed pretty clear. I may have guessed right.

But I probably should have asked.

We're scared of the emptiness. Of not knowing what this is. Of course we are. That's what stories are about, in a way--why we like them and need them. It helps to watch other people go through it, see how they handle it. Robert McKee, the Story teacher, calls it the Gap--the moment when the familiar solutions stop working, when the character is forced to choose a new road.

Can I, for instance, learn to write by voice recognition? Write fiction by voice recognition? I would have called it impossible, but last night I wrote the first page of a short story. It flowed and grew and made me see things, the way good rough-drafting does. I couldn't believe it. I was just trying to write down a few lines I'd thought of, awkward as I expected it to be. Instead I wrote--spoke--a scene. Someone killed a rabid fox. I saw it happen.

In a way, I don't know why I'm boring you with this. To type or not to type? These things are so personal, huge on the inside of a life, very small when looked at from outside. Like a tendon in the foot or in the elbow, just part of the equipment of everyday life, disregarded.

As a child I wondered why prayer requests seemed to be always about health. I wanted people to be more spiritual, or more selfless. I was healthy as a weed.

I was going to write about the family separations. I still don't know what to say, except that when I think about it, really think about it, I feel like I'm trapped under the oak that fell last week just downslope from my spring in the woods. And I experience a burning anger toward Trump--utterly useless. And of course I think of other family separations, of the police official at Vénissieux who asked, annoyed, why all these people were yelling so much. To which a priest replied, "If someone took your children, wouldn't you yell?"

By the priest's account, the official looked thoughtful, and said yes. May God be with the people in parallel positions today, and give them courage to choose new roads.

Broken hands

I'm very sorry for my long silence. I thought it would be shorter than it was.

The short version is, I lost the use of my hands for two months.

Sometime before Christmas I told you all on this blog that I had hand pain and needed to take a break. I had not only stressed and inflamed many of the muscles of my forearm, but also one or more of the tendons that connect those muscles to the elbow. Unfortunately, I was pretty stupid in dealing with it. The story of my stupidity is pretty boring, I suppose, but basically I kept making what I thought were radical, difficult changes in my routine and they kept turning out to be too little, too late.

The last of these changes was to stop using my right hand entirely. I not only used the mouse with my left hand, I typed with my left hand, and I chopped up vegetables for supper with my left hand. You can see this coming, can't you?

I got tendonitis in my left arm too.

I barely know how to tell you what it feels like not to be able to use your hands. It feels like death. Because, I think, death—not a loved one's death, not a stranger's, but my death and yours—feels like helplessness. Death is the moment when it doesn't matter if your life's work is sitting unfinished on the desk, when the world doesn't care. The moment when you can't do anything about it. The moment that most of us, deep in our hearts, don't believe is coming.

I remember the sensation of stopping. The impatience in my soul, the forward momentum—I have to finish this edit I have to clean the house I have to start working on the new farm and show these people what I can do I have to plant my garden I have to—it died hard. Several times. The first time was at Easter. April 1st. I thought I'd be out for a month then. I thought that was a huge deal.

I didn't want to stop.

We found ways. I stored my laptop outside our apartment, bringing it in once a day to deal with urgent email using voice-to-text, manipulating the touchpad with my chin. My husband started doing all the dishes, and chopping vegetables for me when it was my turn to cook. I tried to come up with recipes with little or no chopping. I told my son gently and continually that I was sorry, I couldn't move the little car around, or build the Lego train with him, or get his wagon out of the shed. I accepted not planting my garden—and then my husband offered to plant it for me. I accepted things being done other people's way or not at all. I watched weeds grow, and did nothing. I watched dust thicken, and did nothing. I watched grass grow up around piles of split firewood that needed stacking. I could not change the world. I could only accept it.

I learned to sit. I learned to let my mind wander, and not try to force it into important and purposeful paths. I couldn't do anything important and purposeful, anyway; thinking about it only hurt. I learned to sit and accept the world, let it come into me, whether it was important or not. The movement of the leaves in the wind. The tiny flowers in the grass and the bumblebees visiting them. The ants, the woodlice, the holes in that dead tree that the woodpecker made. I learned to sit in the woods and let them breathe around me. I learned to sit among the trees and not tell them over and over that I was wasting my important time by being with them. I learned their names. I carried my field guides in a bag I could sling around my neck almost without using my hands, and I learned what an ash tree looks like, and an elm, and a basswood. Once I started seeing the shapes of leaves, I couldn't stop. I know so little still, but I feel like I've learned so much. I know where there's a spring now, two slender tunnels opening out of the clay inner structure of a hillside, one slightly larger, one slightly smaller, like mother and daughter. I go to that spring every day. I pray, some. I also just sit. I watch a chipmunk run up and down, or a bird whose name I'm not sure of in the fading light go about its peaceful business. It doesn't have to be something important. Several times I've seen a pileated woodpecker—rare in these parts—but I don't go there to see it. If that was why I went, I wouldn't go. Not after the first time it failed to show up on my timetable.

I don't know how to explain what has happened to me. There was a time when I loved the woods, yet when I could have gone to them, I stayed inside on the computer, reading funny stories about other people's bad books or bad behavior. (You may not be familiar with this particular pleasure; it's relaxing, because it tells you it's all right, at least you're doing better than someone. Might be best if you don't give it a go.) I'll tell you the truth: I never once got angry with God about what was happening to my arms, and that's not because I'm a good person. It's because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I had done it to myself. Yes, I partly did it to myself writing Flame in the Night. But if I had finished my writing and gone to the woods instead of sitting at the computer, clicking on little pictures of cards or scrolling and scrolling while laughing at somebody, I would be fine.

I'm not saying it was a punishment, either. It was a kindness.

Oh, it felt plenty mean sometimes. Like being pushed down and down. Every time I began to feel the joy of recovery, to believe I would be better, I relapsed. I let the joy tempt me into doing too much. Putting a few books away. Taking some notes by pencil. I felt the pain come back, and sat there watching my son play, wondering how many days I had lengthened my sentence by, and trying to look like I wasn't about to cry.

It was two months, in the end.

And it was worth it.

There are practical things. The benefit to my son, of having been called upon to be kind and gentle with me, to see that I'm not all-powerful; of having had to do things himself that he'd rather depend on me to do. The garden, which in spite of the weeds is a family endeavor now, my husband and son proud of what they've done for it—no matter if I go back to doing it all in time, I will remember and so will they. The bonds of need and help and kindness reaffirmed between me and my husband; I have felt so loved. But beyond even that, something has happened to me. Sitting in the woods; reading books, real books, at times of the day I used to spend online; not really wanting, anymore, to read about what's wrong with other people. (I'm not saying I never will again. But you know how they say that if you stop eating sugar, you stop craving it? It's like that.) I'm better at waiting for others now, not trying to fill every minute of my important time. I notice things more. I let the quietness come into my mind, the silence I used to run from so hard—I don't quite remember why. I think there were bad thoughts in it, regrets and fears—or I thought there were. I guess I've found some. They weren't so awful, once I stopped running.

Or I wonder if the silence itself frightened me. Nothingness, emptiness has always felt like my enemy. Doing nothing, being nothing. I wonder if it looked a little bit like death. I'm not saying I'm not scared of death, or even that I'm less scared. But I do know that it will come someday, and that seems like a step in the right direction. And in the silence--would I have run so hard if I'd known?-- is not nothingness at all. In the silence, where I die a little from my quest to be and be and be something, where I open myself, the lives of others come in. The lives of trees, humble people who stand where God planted them and drink sunlight, and make air. The small, humble animals, rummaging around the woods for their daily bread. Perhaps the silence will let the lives of other people in better too; I haven't had much chance yet to find out. Maybe that's not what God had for me this time. I already knew that listening to people was important. I could have spent two months doing that, and felt I had justified my existence. But there are very few people here now, and what they need from me is work. So I went to the woods. I went to the woods and sat at God's feet, instead of running around and around looking for something to lay at them.

I'm starting to use my hands again. A little. The other day I pruned back a potted heliotrope, scraggly and distorted from a winter of neglect. I cut it back hard—within an inch of where it comes out of the soil, sparing one bud to become the new stem. I layered good compost all over the soil around its roots. We think of these plants as flowers, but the life is not in the flower. The life, the strength, is in the root. I watered it deeply, let the nutrients from the compost leach down to where the roots drink. I prayed, You've cut me back, and You've nourished me. Help me grow straight now, and flower.

The other place in the mind: learning to draw at 36

When I was a kid I always wished I could draw.

"Before": a self-portrait I drew a month ago

I remember, in one of the couple years here and there that I homeschooled because we were traveling/moving too much that year, how one of my textbooks--a math textbook, I think!--randomly had little pen-and-ink drawings of deer and other animals in it, to fill up the empty spaces. They were my favorite part of math class*, and I remember trying to learn to draw that year. I wasn't very good at it.

* My mom and I have a story about me and math. I came home from elementary school and said "I hate math." How my mom later told the story: she was surprised when she got my grades and it turned out I was performing just fine in math. What I said when I heard the story: "Mom, I said I hated it, not that I couldn't do it!"**

** (You're absolutely right, that is not where a footnote goes. Onward!)

Actually that makes an excellent segue back to drawing: I'm not very good at math now. I could fill out our tax returns but I am extremely happy to let my bookkeeping husband do it, and as for trigonometry, forget it. I'm not very good at math because I hated it from day one--I haven't learned, and I haven't practiced, beyond the necessary. (And I don't regret that!) Innate ability counts for something, but experience and practice count for a lot more. (Something we've taught our son maybe a little too hard--you should hear the way he says "EXPERIENCED.")

But with drawing, people--including me--tend to figure that innate ability is the only thing. That either you can or you can't. Imagine if we had that approach to reading! I ended up figuring I couldn't.

But I can.

Sometime in the fall, the Boy and I were at a thrift store with a little time to kill in the book section, and I found a book I remembered from my art classroom in high school: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. (BTW please don't jump up and debunk left/right brain just yet. I'm getting there.) I bought it, partly because "thrift store, why not," and partly because that little secret wish leapt up in me again. I decided to give it a go this winter, and try to learn.

The message of the book is essentially this: most people try to draw with the wrong side of their brain. The left side of our brain, the side that does both language and math, is obsessed with symbols. It gravitates toward drawing symbols--stick figures, trees with green balls on top, the idea of a house without finicking over every crack in the façade. You can play Pictionary with it, no problem--communication is its gig. But it doesn't draw what it sees. Or if it does, it doesn't see what's really there.

I copied this Van Gogh sketch upside down

The right brain, on the other hand, takes in what it sees without naming it, simply. It sees line and shape and color and lets them be themselves. So that when it draws them, what it draws looks like what is there. So that's what we have to do, to learn to draw things that look real: immerse ourselves in right-brain mode when we draw.

Now I know, because Ye Olde Internet Debunkers have been on about it for quite awhile, that the popular conception of right vs. left brain has been proven wrong. The book's pretty old. But what's interesting to me is that on a practical level it doesn't matter: the book is right. It describes a set of symptoms--a sense of wordlessness, of timelessness, of deep focus on a thing in itself without impatience or the need to name or define it--that point to a distinct mental state, which is the state needed to draw well. And in order to draw, I don't need to know exactly what my brain-scan would look like in that state--I need to be able to get there. (There's a super interesting analogy to spiritual things here--maybe I'll explore it eventually. There's a connection also with learning the wilderness--you need that same state.) That's what the book offers--exercises for getting there--and they work. I felt those symptoms, and I felt them when I was finally drawing something decent for the second time in my life. (By drawing upside-down, to cut down on my brain's instinct to name things.)

That's the funny thing--it was the second time. Once in high school, at my missionary-kid boarding school--just once--I was alone in the dorm all one Sunday morning. (It was allowed. Long story.) It was glorious. Remember high school? Well imagine you lived with those kids as well, and unless you were a jock you can probably imagine why it was glorious to be alone. It was spring, and I went out and lay on the green grass under the lilac-trees for a little while; then I went in and got a postcard I loved, of a kitten in light and shadow, and I copied it in pencil and then in watercolors. Time flowed sweet and silent as I painted. I was a third of the way done with the watercolors when the dorm vans pulled in carrying the crowds home from church, and that's how the picture--ten times better than anything else I ever drew--remains to this day. It felt like a magic moment, one I never could recapture. I never tried.

That's the thing about the right brain--or whatever it really is, that timeless mode. I remember the taste of it in that moment, the freedom. Freedom was a prerequisite for me then--I couldn't have drawn like that with all those people pressing on me, with their adult expectations or their hair-trigger teenage scorn--but also a result. And as I did the beginner exercises in the book, the ones intended to get you into that mode as you begin, I could taste it again. The book has you visualize images of it, and for me they were green, all green, rock and lichen and leaf and pine, and me climbing. That's the other place the timelessness came for me, always when I was a child--out in the woods, in the mountains, in caves even, in all wild and rocky places where I could use my body and trust it and let my mind be one with it, knowing my foot was firm in the foothold and my balance was clear and strong.

I drew this over this weekend. Me!

It was good, remembering that. I did feel like I was opening doors in myself to long-missed rooms.

The book claims that our education with its focus on symbols and definitions closes those doors, that we're moved more and more away from that experience and the particular skills it brings. But that they can be opened again, with time and practice. The book seems to envision a kind of equality of right and left--I wonder if that's affected by the idea of two paired sides, and whether it would be changed by whatever the real science is on these two (or more?) different ways of thinking. I wonder what would be the full list of skills that the "right-brain" mode enables--hunting? working with animals? my mind always goes to outdoor stuff--and whether more crossover between the two would help the problem I've so often seen in farm interns here, where they're so taken up with the image behind their eyes that they don't see the plants in front of them, don't learn from observation.

(I remember being that person. I remember push-cultivating a row of the garden and not seeing that the weeds hadn't died, because push-cultivating kills weeds by definition, right? Except nothing kills weeds by definition. And if any of the Logic Guys I knew in college are here, don't start in at me about weed-killer. You spray that weed-killer on some weeds and see if they die, and then we'll talk.)

I don't know the answers to all those questions. But to the last one I'd lay money on a resounding YES. I think this other place in the mind, whatever we call it, is indeed something we've tossed aside too lightly, neglected to our cost. The ability to look at the world and see what is there rather than the definitions we rightly or wrongly impose on it--how many mistakes might that have prevented, at the very least?

But it's not lost. It's right there, a path we can walk down if we choose. Who know what we'll find?

For example--as it turns out--I can draw.
_____________________________

The heart of the story ("My God, why have you forsaken me?")

In the end
Everything will be
All right
And if it's not
All right
Then it is not the end

That's how a worship song written by a dear friend of mine goes. Ah, but you should hear her sing it--and her church sing it with her, sounding like they believe.

It struck a chord with me, because for a long long time I've cherished a concept I call "the middle of the story." It's about... well, I should just show you.

The truth is I'm exhausted again. Hopefully this is the last of it. But I looked through my archives and found a write-up of the only sermon I've ever written, and here it is. The topic I was given was Jesus' cry from the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

________________________________________


Let me tell you a story.

Once there was a man who was a friend of God. God promised him he would have a son, and be the father of many nations. He waited many years, and trusted God as much as he could; and finally the son came, and was to him like a gift of laughter. And the son grew up happy, and loved, and one day God said to the man: take your son up on the mountain, and kill him.

And the man didn't understand, but he did what God said; he took his son up on the mountain, and he tied his son up, and he got out his knife. And God said stop. God said kill the ram instead. God said, you've passed the test; through you and through your children all the nations of the earth will be blessed. And the man and his son went back down the mountain; and what God had promised came true.

Let me tell you another story.

There was a man, the great-grandson of the other man, who was given dreams and visions from God; that God would someday lift him up high above his brothers. His brothers hated him for it, and sold him to slave-traders, and lied to their father and said he was dead. He became a slave in a foreign country. His master's wife lied about him and accused him of the most unpardonable thing a slave could do, and they could have killed him. And they sent him to prison to stay there the rest of his life; in prison, where God's promise could never come true.

Then he was summoned to interpret the king's dream; because he was known for interpreting dreams. The king saw that what he said was true, and he had him sit down at his right hand and oversee the country to save it from famine. And his brothers came to him, and he forgave them; and his father came, and he saved them all from the famine that had come on the land. And what God had promised came true.

Let me tell you another story. A little story.

When I was seventeen I spent my first summer on my own. My parents were overseas. I lived with a friend, a friend who said we could share the rent, and who didn't tell her landlady about me. I was a stupid kid, I didn't know what was going on, I couldn't find my picture ID for the tax forms at my job and they wouldn't pay me till I did; I'd been working for six weeks and I only had fifteen dollars left when the landlady threw me out. She gave me four days. My parents were overseas and my friend was out of town and I didn't know what to do. I went around to churches, to friends, anywhere I could think of and I got the brush off. I went in to work and there had been a fire. I had put chemical-soaked filters into the trashcan I'd been told to put them into, and they'd spontaneously combusted and destroyed two months' work. And there I was. And I said God, I don't know what you're doing. I guess you don't owe me anything. Whatever.

And the next day I went in to work, because they hadn't fired me. And it was weekly prayer-meeting so I told them what they could pray for me about. And one girl said hey, there's an empty bed at my house, my sister's gone for the summer, we could work something out. And two days later I moved in with her.

Her name was Grace.

And it was my first experience of the real world, and the first time I truly saw God come through. And without it, I probably wouldn't be up here today.

That's my story.

An author once said that God created humankind because God likes stories. I thought about that; it sounded cool; and then I thought about it some more and it sounded like a condemnation of God. Stories are fine when you're listening to them, they're wonderful, but I've been inside a story. It's something else to be inside a story. What is a story about, when you're inside it; when you're right in the middle? What is in the middle of these stories? Pain. A girl feeling alone, abandoned, afraid she'll have to sleep on the street. A man enslaved and in prison, falsely accused and condemned for the rest of his life. A man standing on the top of a mountain with his son tied up in front of him, his heart screaming “God, what are you doing?” At the heart of a story is pain and darkness.

Let me tell you a story.

God became a man. And that man was a teacher. He taught the words of life, he taught the way, to those who would listen, and he lived it too; and people followed him. He knew that it wouldn't last. He knew that he had to die, for our sins and because of our sins. He knew that those in power did not want to hear the words of life, would rather kill him than hear.

This man was not only God; he was also a man. No one can understand it. And like every man and woman he had to choose, it was his choice: to trust God or not. He cried out in the garden and he trusted, and he said Your will be done. But that was not the heart of the story.

They beat him and they laughed at him, and they spat on him and he couldn't wipe it off. He was exposed, nailed to a beam in front of everybody, and everybody turned away. There was no one there who believed that God was with him; no one. He was the scapegoat, he was hung on a tree and accursed, and even God turned away from him. And he cried out a desperate scream: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

At the heart of God's story is pain and darkness.

The cross of Christ is our salvation in a thousand ways. But for now, for today, let me tell you one small way. Because when we are honest about that moment at the heart of the story, that moment of pain and darkness, when we are honest we admit that there is no way out. That at that moment no courage can sustain us. That at that moment no amount of believing that God is there, even if we can't feel him, can hold up our heads. That at that moment we are alone in the dark. Think. Remember. Maybe you haven't lived any moment like that; but I think you have.

Jesus showed us the way to life, in everything; even in that terrible moment. And what did Jesus do, in the darkness at the heart of the story?

Jesus did not turn away.

He didn't say whatever. He didn't say, I should have known. And he didn't lie. He spoke what he felt, what his heart knew, what was all around him; he cried out the absence of God. But who did he cry it to? To God. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? He cried out like a child to his father and mother, to the only good he knows: where are you? The cry of absence is a cry of trust; because he cries as if God is listening.

And God was listening.

And God was with him, and faithful, and never let him go; and though he went down to the darkest place God raised him up. He brought him to the end of the story, just like he brought Abraham, and Joseph, and me. And in the dark at the heart of our stories, it is still as dark as it ever was; but we're not alone. He has gone before us, showing the way in that darkness. "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

The battle of the pipe and other Christmas stories

Well it's been a memorable Christmas for sure.

I was more tired than I thought I was—a lot more tired. Thankfully my hand pain is gone after some enforced rest, and the rest of me is mostly recovered as well.  And a good thing too! We had a pretty normal Skype-all-the-grandparents Christmas, and then things got adventurous.

We've become the caretakers for the empty houses here over the winter. In the big triplex down the hill one family is still living, but here up the hill it's us and four empty houses. Draining the water out of all their pipes (a technique that would allow you to shut off the heat in an empty house) wasn't possible, so they're all being heated to 55 degrees or so. Nobody thought it was going to be a big deal—we were in for another mild winter, we all thought. Yeah.

Not so much.

The Christmas season was merry, all right, but it was also a constant war against the cold, which we mostly thoroughly enjoyed winning. Going down the hill twice a day to light fires in the wood-burning furnace of the big house, to keep it from freezing while the other family was away from Christmas; pulling a

The boy's first artwork

wagon through the fierce cold to the far woodpile to keep our own woodpile stocked. Then coming home and playing swordfight with the Boy, who just got his first wooden swords and is obsessed with being Saint George and killing dragons. (He's also having his first art experience, thanks to his aunt and uncle who sent him a paintbox. I never could get him to color, but he likes to paint between the lines with me guiding his hand.) We could feel the cold pressing in at the windows, but we kept our homefires burning and our Christmas lights lit, and the Boy danced to fiddle reels on our Irish Christmas music CD. (He can't keep his feet still during them. Must be in his blood!)

The-e-en the pipes started to freeze.

There's a weakness in the plumbing system here, a spot near the pump that supplies the whole complex where the pipe is too narrow and exposed. It used to freeze up about once per winter. Now, with less usage and such harsh cold (and with the house that sits over that spot much less heated) it started freezing up daily. The week after Christmas, turning on a water tap felt like Illinois roulette. Water? No water? Great, I was gonna take a shower… The only thing to do for it was to go over to the empty house, boil about a gallon of water in the bunch of assorted kettles we gradually gathered there, then go pour it little by little over the relevant place in the pipe.

The homefires

My favorite moment in the great pipe battle of '17 (it was done by the time '18 rolled around, thank God) was the second time the pipe froze up. Paul had fixed it the first time of course, being a champion at taking responsibility and also “the fixing man” as the Boy would say. But the second time it happened I was home alone. Hm. Wait, or take initiative? He had told me in great detail the story of how he'd fixed it… but as for the placement of the pipe, I only knew it was “under the house.” My first assumption about placement turned out to be wrong—I could tell, because there were no tracks in the snow there! I followed the well-beaten trail I did find into a shed built into the back of the house, and behold, there were many bootprints in the dust in front of a low square door. I got the water flowing again, and very much enjoyed telling Paul how I'd tracked him to the place.

It got less fun the next day when it happened again; we took turns fixing it for the rest of the week until Cal, the pastor who's involved in the Hungry World Farm project and is also an electrician and all-round handyman, came by to see what he could do for a longer-term fix. I ended up contributing to that one, too: my string of outdoor lights (little incandescent bulb in flexible plastic tubing), which I normally use as a cheap alternative to the kind of heating mat greenhouses put under certain seed trays to aid germination, is now wrapped around that pipe with insulation and plastic wrapped around it. Just enough warmth to keep things flowing. The battle is won! For now…

This one is Beowulf

Well, I know this is more like a family letter than a blog post, sorry. I'm still working on getting out of vacation mode. (I was so tired, you guys.) The race to the finish for my deadline was stressful and complicated (due to more factors than just the deadline… I'll tell you someday), and after it I checked out completely. It honestly took days of lying on the couch before I felt myself again.

But one more thing I want to leave you with! One of our Christmas presents from Paul's mom was a CD of Paul's grandmother, originally from Hungary, talking about the Hungarian dances that several families used to do together every month when she was a girl. (Our kid's got more than one kind of dance in his blood!) We listened to the CD one night during family time, and the next morning I asked the Boy (since he's curious about languages) if he wanted to know what Hungarian sounded like. We went on Youtube and discovered this incredibly charming little kids' cartoon series based on a book by Hungarian author Erika Bartos. It's about these tiny bug kids (the main characters are a ladybug and a snail) and their adventures in their little forest world, and it's the most wholesome, colorful, fascinating-to-young-children thing you ever saw. And it's translated into English too! The Boy and I were so charmed, though, that before we discovered that fact we watched about fifteen episodes in Hungarian…

In Hungarian:

In English:

Sorry it's been so long; I had hoped to blog this weekend. But I'm still working toward my December 20th deadline, and I also have hand pain now, so I need to not type more than necessary. I've actually learned a lot this week about the muscles that control the fingers—did you know some of them stretch all the way down your forearm? (Maybe I would have known that too, if I'd paid more attention in Bio!) I actually looked this up online to confirm it, rather than find out—I could tell. Whenever I flex my right index finger, an area of my forearm near the inside of my elbow hurts. I showed my four-year-old the picture, and also my arm as I bent the finger—he noticed the slight motion of the muscle flexing under the skin! Learning through real life is so great. I think he'll remember that one. I know I tend to remember facts I learned in ways like that.

So I'll be taking two days off from both typing and browsing—more if necessary—starting when I post this. Thankfully the timing's right: my next task is to go through the whole manuscript to look for any small changes I want to make, and I do this in a new way I've learned: by reading it aloud and recording it. I find that reading aloud is the only way I see both the forest and the trees—I read every single word, and at the same time I'm swept up in the emotional journey. It's perfect for the last sweep, helps me to find false notes of any kind. And it doesn't involve typing!

So, next week my hands will be better and I'll blog properly, Lord willing. Thanks for your patience!

The harvest is over, the summer is gone

I just got the official title for my book yesterday. I'd been calling it A Flame in the Night; the publisher decided to go with just Flame in the Night. It'll also have a subtitle, which they say is important now for making it more findable in internet searches: A Novel of Resistance in Vichy France.

I also have a release date--well, not a date but a season: Fall 2018.

It's awhile (thankfully, because there's still plenty of work to do to make the book perfect) but I'm already excited...

I had a whole complicated post planned for today, but I don't have time to write it, because the weather finally remembered it's almost the end of October and we're finally getting frost. Followed (allegedly) by an actual hard freeze tonight, so it's time to get everything in. I spent Thursday morning gathering my squash and digging most of my sweet potatoes, and yesterday afternoon pulling turnips, digging carrots, and picking my little handful of late-planted pumpkins, still mottled green and orange, in hopes they'll ripen up further inside.

The soil is moist and soft and cold, and clings to the roots as they come out. In the woods in the distance you can hear the chattering of a couple hundred migrating grackles. This has been my favorite time of year since I started farming--especially in the two or three years I ran the CSA section of our now defunct communal farm. The last couple weeks of the CSA, packing boxes filled with squash and potatoes and onions and garlic, hearing those birds chatter with hundreds of voices in the bright woods. They'd fly up in black clouds from one section of woods to another. I'd watch them, relishing the nip of cold air after pouring so much sweat all summer into the land, relishing down to my toes the sensation of slowing down, the anticipation of a warm fireside and immobility. Sweet, sweet immobility.

We used to work so hard, you guys.

I remember the first year I did that job. It was a year of upheaval, the farm manager quitting before the season was half done; I had to take over the CSA garden in mid-season as well. The CSA shares had been paid already. My job was to make sure we didn't have to refund the money. I was theoretically a half-time worker. I remember working eleven hours one day. I worked till my vision was blurry, till I was literally stumbling with weariness. It's hard to explain that sheer bodily exhaustion, in a world where work is mostly made of mental labor and coffee and stress. Which I know is hard too. But that draining of your body, it's different, because you can reach a point (and I routinely did, that year) when there is literally nothing left. You can't do anything more.

I mean maybe if a bear came out of the woods. Maybe then.

And I used to get through it by dreaming about fall. The last CSA share, the first big freeze, were my continual daydream. Something about that combination: abundance and rest. I used to sing the hymn to myself all through September: "All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin..." That was the key, safely gathered. Everything neatly in the fridge, in the root cellar, in the pantry--then you could relax. It wasn't a tidy process. The weather people would announce a freeze and we'd scramble--the potatoes aren't all dug, quick, the squash are still in bins outside the barn and also we need to empty the hoses so the freeze doesn't burst them--we'd scramble, check the temperatures, make our calculations whether we had time to get things up to a heated building, or whether the temperatures meant our produce would be all right if we just shut the doors of the barn. Once during a scramble--a really hard freeze was coming, I guess--I carried fifty pounds of garlic up our steep woods trail, in two very inconveniently sized bags. Which kept slipping. I weighed them when I got to the top; I wanted to at least have some bragging rights to show for that. I don't remember why I couldn't use the truck.

There was something about it, though. The years I worked so hard, by fall I felt this sensation of power in my body, even alongside the tiredness; going up the trail carrying nothing was so easy as to be a pleasure, feeling that extra energy coursing through your veins. Like a runner's high or something. And the weariness lent such a sweetness to the anticipation of being able to stop, to rest. Even thinking about it was lovely. How could simply not moving possibly seem so sweet? The way a warm and lighted house seems sweet from outside in the cold and the dark. You take it for granted, when you've been inside it for hours and hours. Not so much, out on the road.

What was I working for, pouring my sweat into the land for, those years? I was working to save the farm. I knew I had done my part, a distinctly measurable part, to save the farm that year. I was proud of that. I also knew the saving was temporary: we don't go under this year. But it seemed hopeful. The new farm manager was making good changes, sensible ones--and he was a guy you could work with, too. It makes a difference. But what can you do in a system completely stacked against the small farmer--what can you do when Mother Nature decides to get in a few licks as well? Disease reduced the yield of the strawberries. The bitter, bitter cold winter my son was born half-killed the blueberry bushes. The raspberry canes started dying the year after that, from a combination of an aggressive fruit fly and disease. There's a verse from Isaiah that I learned from our farm, that I never would have understood without it: The harvest is over, the summer is gone, and we are not saved.

What was I working for? I'm not even sure. The farm went under. Almost everyone is gone. But the land is still here. The garden I tilled for the CSA, I still grow food in it, for anyone who can use it. The soil is moist and soft and cold, and clings to the roots as I pull them out of the ground. Big lumpy sweet potatoes, flattened and bulging in odd places, like flexed muscles, out of that soil I've come to love. Because I do love it. Having your hands in it till they're drawn to it, rootlike, pouring your sweat into it day after day, will do that. I know that soil. It's my friend.

It could be that I worked for. I'm not sure.

A different kind of hard

So I was talking on the phone with a dear friend the other day, and I found myself saying this: "When you're doing the work you're called to do, it is hard--very hard sometimes--but it's a different kind of hard."

It made sense in the context of what we were discussing--work that's driven by guilt, or the guilt of not doing it, work that crushes rather than fulfills. But afterward I kept thinking about it. What did I really mean? How could I explain it better?

See... I'm lucky. I get to do the work I choose to do. Due to some choices I'll discuss sometime, I live an extremely quiet life where I stay on the same land basically all the time because I can't afford a car. In the same bargain (so to speak, and leaving out a lot) I also received three or four quiet hours a day in which to write. I think I got the good end of the deal. But I didn't realize just how true that was till halfway through writing this book.

It's a long story. Maybe I'll tell it to you sometime. But in writing this book I found my calling. Found that I'd been writing, not because it was my skill, but because I was supposed to. It came out of nowhere. It was... really hard to explain.

But here's the thing. It was hard. Very hard. When I entered the phase of the book where I was truly doing my real work, here was my routine: Sit at computer playing digital Mahjongg, trying to force myself to get up and go to my writing room. (A small bare room in the empty apartment next door. While our friends still lived in the upstairs part, I got my husband to sabotage my computer's connection with their wireless. No internet.) Go over to my writing room, berating myself for not going sooner. Sit down at the desk, open my laptop.

Stare at the screen for twenty minutes, scared to death.

Start writing.

The writing wrung me out, mentally and physically, exhausted me. I felt the story in my body, my characters' tension and fear, the hard spiritual work of making choices that they could never step back from, choices in the dark. It was like wrestling. In my mind I stopped calling the little bare cave my writing room. I called it my battle room.

If I was saying it now, after thinking about it, I would add this: it's a different kind of hard. Like battle, or surviving in the wilderness. Not hard like being abused. It's completely different. Work you're not called to, done out of guilt, can crush you. Beat you down with your inadequacy, your failure to ever measure up. Because how can you measure up, when it's not your work?

(I mean, when we're failing to do our true work, when we're procrastinating past the point of shame, when we've let that beat us, we can feel like that sometimes. But when we're doing it--never.)

I think of the descriptions of wilderness survival in Hatchet and its sequels. You're very rarely comfortable. (Mosquitoes. Everywhere.) You have to put your whole strength, your whole mind, into what you're doing. There's hard work and discomfort and pain and fear and sudden danger. There are continual small joys, the deep, ever-fresh pleasure of food for real hunger. There are also breathtaking, transcendent moments of beauty and awe that you wouldn't trade for anything. And you can't decide when those moments will come--you have absolutely no control. They are given you--by a hushed lake under the stars, by a sunrise, even by a wild animal leading you on your path. They come from outside--from God.

And the whole time, in the good moments and the bad, you are alive.

It's like that.

There's something else it's not like, too. I've been listening to the Story Grid podcast recently, and Tim Grahl, who's starting a nonfiction book on how not to let procrastination and shame overcome you in creative work, describes a terrible moment in his life. It was the moment when he had gained everything he'd been working toward. He'd struck out on his own as a writer and book marketer, he'd built his business, he'd marketed a book into bestsellerdom, he had made it.

And it turned out he was completely miserable.

Now I've already made this pretty long, so I'll cut to the chase here. Doing the work you're called to do is also not like being on drugs.

"Success" is a drug. And what I mean by that is fame is a drug. I mean, I wouldn't know, but I can darned well guess. Because I know that even attention is a drug, at least in the form of "likes" and upvotes--anonymous attention, not flowing back and forth face-to-face, just a little signal in a vacuum that says you are now a little bit more worthy.

You get a "hit." It feels incredible. It fades.

You want another.

I read an article on Cracked.com (just so you know there's language & stuff) about stupid things we believe about rich people. The writer says money doesn't make rich people happy, which we all know and few of us believe. To make her point, she gives us a sentence about "Rich people never have to worry about money, they have so much money they don't have any real problems," etc, and suggests we replace the word "money" with "cocaine."

Because money, in that kind of quantity, is also a drug.

And what do drugs do? Weaken you. Destroy you.

I know it in myself. The mood in which I go to the internet looking for a hit is a terrible thing. I can well imagine why Tim Grahl wasn't happy. You work and you work towards success, and you think that you will make it and then you can bask. But you can't bask. The hit fades. And you feel miserable.

Human beings weren't made to bask.

I don't know everything about how, not having read the book he's just starting, but I gather Tim fought his way through from that bad place. One of the things he says he wants to tell everyone is that meaning and joy are found in the work itself. In the doing, in the struggle. And that's what I find too.

You're rarely comfortable. There's hard work and fear and failure and having to start all over again. And there are transcendent moments, unforgettable, unexplainable moments.

And in the good and the bad times, you are alive.

(But at least there aren't any mosquitoes.)

Makes me think of G.K. Chesterton's poem The Hunting of the Dragon, about how beautiful the world is in the midst of the struggle, and how it fades in our eyes when we've been too long at rest:

Beauty on beauty called us back
When we could rise and ride,
And a woman looked out of every window
As wonderful as a bride...

...For the hunting of the Dragon,
That is the life of a man.


There is no heaven on earth, no nirvana-like state of resting, unchanging bliss. There is only the struggle. But if we are blessed to be given the good struggle, in which the work itself is its reward, let's not flee it. It is the good. It's a gift to us, a gift of meaning. It is the kindness of God.