I’d just returned home from a gap year spent traveling abroad. In the program I was a part of, group meal times had been regimented and being celiac had only narrowed my options. My diet had primarily subsisted of different variations of gallo pinto - a Costa Rican dish of rice, beans, Lizano sauce, and plantains.

Easy enough to make.

Light enough to trick you into feeling full without actually providing much nourishment.

Naturally, the first thing I did after returning home from my single-suitcase adventure was flick through the hangers in my closet. After getting over the wave of disgust at the amount of things I owned and had forgotten about (“seriously?! if the kids at the orphanage had half this stuff, they’d think it was Christmas.”) I began trying everything on.

To my surprise, a particular pair of shorts that had been too small on me mere months ago slid down my waist. Confused, I reached for another hanger, and then another.

Shirts hung loose. Jeans bagged around my thighs.

It turned out that without trying or noticing, I’d lost over twenty pounds in a few months.

As an avid gym-goer and ex high school athlete, I’d always been fairly lean and strong. I was used to my body adapting with lifestyle and honestly didn’t think about it much.

But this? This felt…different.

There was a thrill in it. A strange lurch in my stomach, a sharper slope in my shoulders which to make everything feel effortlessly ‘oversized.’ Compliments from strangers and visible abs and something that felt a little like success.

And that’s how it started.

The first footstep into a two-year-long maze that nearly unraveled me.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

enter the labyrinth of self deception

I spent the next eighteen months quietly shrinking myself for the sake of “health.” Skipping meals at the caf, agonizing over the macros in every bite, counting the calories burned in every step.

If this was a marathon toward smallness, I was sprinting every damn mile.

Eventually, I stopped going home on weekends because I couldn’t stand my dad’s sidelong glances during mealtimes or the cloud of heartbreak in my mother’s eyes every time she hugged my skeletal frame. (Plus, just thinking about disrupting my gym routine spiked my heart rate). So I made excuses. Sailed in for a day and left before dinner.

This is what I’m supposed to be doing in my 20’s, right? Becoming the best me I can be? So what if it takes a little bit of discipline and hard work?

To the untrained eye, I was the picture of a thriving college freshman. I was on the Dean’s list every semester. I surfed with friends on the weekends. My name was on the clip-board sign up sheets for way too many campus clubs. I wore fun outfits. I got asked out on dates.

And for a while it was enough. Enough to distract me from the black stars that peppered my vision every time I stood up too quickly. Enough to hide the ever present MyFitnessPal pinned to my phone screen. Enough to quiet the strange hollowness I felt.

But in reality, I was nothing more than a ghost floating around in a thinly-veiled state of hyper productivity with an ever-increasing vigilance toward my frame.

How do you believe God loves you when you exist in a body you’ve learned to hate? How do you accept grace when discipline is the mechanism that brings comfort?

I was losing myself, and I couldn’t even see it.

Until the day that changed everything.

Ironically, the call came while I was grabbing a 4:36p snack at the caf with my dear friends (which was our usual Wednesday tradition to refuel and debrief after our grueling, 3 hour socratic sessions). I stepped outside to answer, expecting the 5 second, “Everything looks great!” type of conversation that usually accompanies bloodwork.

Instead, I heard the voice — the kind of careful intonation adults use when they don’t want to scare you, but want you to know they mean business. The cryptic, don’t-panic-but-also-everything-is-definitely-not-fine tone that seems to be a prerequisite for doctors.

“Wait, say that again? My kidney’s aren’t…working well?” I repeat what she’s told me and I know I sound silly, but I think a small part of me is hoping that if I rephrase things then maybe they’ll just be untrue. That this is just an elaborate misunderstanding.

A breeze kicks up, and I clutch my sweater around my body. I get cold easily these days. I’m using my other hand to cover my ear, attempting to block out the din of clinking forks and buoyant chatter around me. I suddenly find everyone’s rabid eagerness about the college life annoying -- nauseatingly shallow in comparison to the confusion I’m feeling.

“I can’t tell you anything definitive, I’m just saying that there are some markers that aren’t where they should be. You should go see some specialists.”

Of all the attempts at symptom management - all my past efforts to trick myself into an acceptance mindset, rather than one fueled by achievement - this was the moment. The hinge-point where everything began to change.

Sometimes it takes that impact, the humbling hitting-the-ground moment, to even realize you’ve been falling at all. Which is, I suppose, the glory of rock bottom. It saves you, if you let it, from your own self-preservation - the thoughts that attempt to lull you back into the security of your old, tried and true ways (Really? This all seems a bit overkill. I think I’m actually kind of fine). It drags every excuse into the light; it strips down all your actions to uncover your desires and intentions.

In short, rock bottom told me in one big, neon-shining billboard message what I’d spent my days busily avoiding: that along with my hunger cues, I’d sedated all of the things that made me me - my quick laugh, creativity and playfulness, and zest for adventure. My obsession with ‘personal growth’ hadn’t resulted in only a physical gauntness, but a spiritual and personal one too.

When all of the pieces came together, it felt like getting zapped awake from a dream. So I’m actually not okay. That summer, I began the painful work of seeing my life in harsh limelight of a thousand small concessions I’d let define me. Healing in the form of internal monologues and ordinary epiphanies like,

Wait, since when did I start my morning with black coffee?!

…

Oh, right. I think I’m kind of terrified of the milk in lattes…

….

Yikes.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

waking up

In the months and years that followed, I found wholeness and peace. Friends and family rallied around me. Scripture disentangled my worth from my productivity and self image. Slowly, I began recovering the parts of me I’d starved.

I found hope, and life moved on. What was once my shame became a memory.

Six years later, I write about this experience as non emotionally as if it happened to someone else…As if the terror of my own demands for perfection weren’t in fact mine at all, only the fragmented shards of a dream half remembered in the groggy kaleidoscope of a Monday morning.

Yet this vantage point was won through an excruciating discomfort I won’t easily forget. During that season, a therapist told me, “Opposite action, equals opposite emotion,” and I definitely rolled my eyes at the time. Like really? Don’t give me that load of crap. I’m actually hurting over here! But for the most part, the pain and simplicity of that has rung true.

It’s the follow through piece that is hardest - doing the very thing you’ve trained your brain to fear the most, in order to kill the fear itself.

Paradoxical, no?

Sometimes, there are still echos. Not in the way you’d think — gym routines or calories — but in self doubt.

It goes something like, “If I was so utterly convinced that I was something I clearly was not back then, what does that say about me now? If my vision of reality was warped then, who’s to say it isn’t now?” My foot slips into this philosophical quagmire when I scroll through my camera roll, see the protruding hip bones and tight-lipped smiles that made up that foggy year, and remember that I used those as a bank of evidence for how far I had to go to reach my ‘goals.’

Not just a mirror selfie: weaponized evidence, a radical distortion.

It’s then that I close my eyes and feel the dank swamp of doubt creep back in. How could I be so wrong? How could I look, but not see?!

What do you do when your mind becomes its own fun-house mirror, all warped and twisted?

And with just a quick scroll I’m out again, back in the swell of my ever-flowing life.

I've never felt as free as I do today -- so alive. Gym sessions aren’t punishments; they’re a daily necessity to still the waters of my mind, a sort of prayer-in-movement. Sore muscles and heaving lungs usher me into a space of worshipful calm. Journaling isn’t a charade of gratitude lists for my body. It’s a keepsake of all the things I’ve been able to do, learn, and enjoy as I move through my life.

And this, I think, is a kind of freedom.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

today

“Okay buddy. I want you to take a deeeeeep breath in….and ooouuuuttt.”

I’m exaggerating my breath, attempting to show the little kiddo in front of me a caricature of what calm looks like. It’s a weekday, which means I’m at the equine therapy center I work at, directing the controlled chaos that is five kids with a diverse cocktail of emotional traumas, physical disabilities, and cognitive differences - all on horseback simultaneously. Yeah, it’s a lot.

This particular kid always has a huge grin across his face. His wheelchair whizzes and whirs up the wooden ramp, and pretty soon, I’m hoisting his small frame onto his big horse. And now we’re breathing through it together again, hoping to coax the oxygen into his limp legs as they relax into the saddle.

I make a quick mental note (“I think we should focus on core strength and balance today”) before striding into the arena.

I have to smile at that — at me, here, sweat literally on my brow; the girl with the degree in journalism (& literature & theology), doing something entirely outside the curricula of any class even offered at my alma mater.

Yet, something I’ve always loved. Something that’s as second nature as breathing.

It makes sense, in a grand isn’t-life-funny kind of way, that I’d find myself here and not in some slick LA newsroom.

Because when I boil it all down, embodiment has always been the only way I’ve know how to interact with myself, God, and the world. That word “embodiment” used to be an intellectual plaything to me - a Rubics Cube to shift and solve with a thousand pretty phrases; with quotes from people like Kierkegaard, Augustine, Chesterton; with waved hands and breathless exclamations of “liturgy!” and “sacred practice!” and “whole-body spirituality!”

But now, I just breathe. I corral kiddos and horses. I sweat. I witness the mysterious synchronicity between humans and animals. I attempt to not get in the way of the healing and meaning of it all.

And my body ushers me through it — more than a shell, and somehow not less — where every swirl on my dirty hands is a prayer-filled mark of imago dei.

Gift. Vessel. Temple. Beauty. Dust.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

life and death and life again

Life is not aesthetic. It is not your goodness or lack thereof. It is a movement of the heart towards Love, which both requires and begets the sort of unabashed self-forgetfulness we were all made for.

To become one with this kind of Love requires a death. But it turns out that the tomb of our own striving is a great place for a feast.

In one moment you think you’re at a funeral. After all, you’ve lost it, all that stuff you held so dear. And then you realize that it’s carved out space you didn’t know was there.

Pull up a chair; you’re in the place:

Where you step out of the labyrinth of your own mind. Where a nail-scarred Christ fills your cup again and again and again. A grave made garden, honeyed with the scent of new life.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

the poetry of self forgetfulness

We are not journeying back to ourselves. We are not the center of every tale. Self-love is not our purpose, or the rent which we owe the world for taking up space. We don’t need to outrun our deficiencies, nor curate them in fear of being caught less than perfect.

Free yourself from the extremes. Crucify your frantic stewardship, your personal ascent dressed up as discipleship, and let yourself be sought by a God who never loses his own.

In the words of C.S. Lewis, “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.”

time isn’t flying, you’re just not paying attention

As a product of my personal angst, I’ve decided to permanently ban the overused “Wow, how is it [enter month] already?!” from my bank of smalltalk-go-to’s.

Time waits for no man and I’m sick of the flippant social dance we do in acknowledging its unforgivingly rapid pace. Surely there is a better way to soak in our fleeting moments? …to gratefully notice the mundane delights that slow us down - the ones that act like rumble strips to pause our oh-so-hurried pace?

In short, a collection of something real.

The 31 slashes on my fridge calendar, a kaleidoscope of colored events on my digital planner, and a journal dog-earred with new entries don’t hold the essence of May - or my life, for that matter. That lies here, in the hodge-podge of fleeting sentiments that constellate the hours and days.

So here’s what I delighted in this month.

a jaunt down memory lane

This time last year, I was traversing across Portugal and France with an absurdly talented painter friend of mine. One moment we were chatting about our mutual love of travel over Encinitas tacos, and the next we were sipping wine out of plastic cups while watching the sunset in Lisbon. Iconic, if I do say so myself.

During our two week adventure, we traipsed across four cities in Portugal. The adventure included laughing our way through the somewhat traumatic experience of getting our rental car rear-ended by a couple who didn’t speak a lick of English; peering over the cliff’s edge of the world’s biggest surf break; giggling as we tried to match the sophistication of a group of 50-something-year-old couples on a wine tour; craning our necks in side street chapels as they dappled our eyes in the inky light of stain-glass….

Flash forward to today, I’m sitting on my couch in a sleepy midwest town that is very much not Lisbon, feeling just as grateful for the colors and textures that’ve made this particular May memorable. In the words of Dr. Dog, where’d all the time go?

how it started

In my mind’s eye, May always marks the true end of winter and offers a teaser to summer’s zest. Spring is always an odd in-between time aesthetically because I find myself gravitating to both earthy, organic pastels and bright, highly-saturated hues.

So naturally, if you scrolled through my Pinterest on May 1st, you’d have seen an assembly of wildflowers, soft linens, pastel blues and pinks, hand-crafted and analog details. Happily, my actual camera roll doesn’t look too far off from these photos (with the additional conglomeration of random receipts and accidental screenshots, because ya know, that’s life).

in my headphones…

• I’ve had Noah Gundersen’s Rites of Spring album on repeat since it dropped on the 22nd. The first half of the album echos early 2000’s rock in a perfectly nostalgic pre-summer way; the second half is full of sad, harmonious, ballad-style that’ll be familiar to anyone who has known and loved his past tracks.

  

• “The Age of Worry” - a sweet song by Madison Cunningham

• “Side by Side” by Jacklen Ro

• “For Every Dusk” by Jose Gonzalez

• “Someday, Somewhere” by Palace

• “Warm Glow” by Hippo Campus

• “Meaning” by Tim Keller - 43 minutes of exploring what we’re all wondering: “Does life actually have inherent meaning? If it’s meaningless, is it possible to be happy?” As someone navigating my mid-twenties without the safety net of academics or the grid of a time-tested community (I’ve moved lots), Keller’s thoughts are incredibly grounding. Other sermons on this topic always leave me either unsatisfied or strangely guilty — as if asking about my purpose in the first place is some kind of betrayal to my faith. God gives life purpose, right? Why ask more? But the uncertainties and suffering of life don’t let us off the hook quite so easily. Fear of irreverence is rarely a good reason to avoid our doubts. It’s comforting to hear someone engage the idea of calling without the rudderless Christian-ese that leaves us adrift in our own depths. Keller blends the philosophical and esoteric with the realistic and down-to-earth. Whether you’re feeling apathetic, burnt out, clueless, or just confused by your life trajectory in general — give it a listen!

things I’m wearing & designs I’m liking

• Baggy barrel-cut jeans, slouchy cuts, fun patterns, stacked jewelry — anything that brings a sense of vibrancy, comfort, easy-breezy wearability. Bonus points for clorful stripes and funky patterns.

• Finally caved to the constant Quince ads and ordered some linen things. Did not disappoint.

• Yellow!!! A color I used to think was off limits for some reason…now that I’ve gone back to my roots and let my hair do it’s thing (bye bye, blond) I’ve found that I love the happy glow of warmer colors.

• This awesome genuine leather bag I got (for free!) from a garage sale in my neighborhood. It’s the perfect size for a small book!

articles, books and more

Between balancing freelance work, starting a new job, keeping up with people, and generally just existing - I haven’t had much leisure time to read. And after reading a book a week for the past several years, I’m not mad about it. Slow is good. Less is often more.

Here’s what I’m consuming these days:

• (fiction, finished) Broken Country - a quick fiction read that I finished in 24 hours while procrastinating on finishing Dostoyevsky…I’d give this a solid 3 stars; it served it’s purpose of narrative diversion.

• (fiction, stalled) The Idiot - I’m halfway through and simply can’t get myself to finish it. Someone please tell me it’s worth it because right now I’m lost in dozens of Russian names.

• (nonfiction, started) Room for Good Things to Run Wild - I’m only a few chapters deep, but ’s life story is already sparking reflections on my own life: thoughts about unmet needs (and the vices / distractions I turn to in a vain attempt to meet them), about longing for full-hearted presence with God, and about honest living.

• (nonfiction, shelved for next month) Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth - a title that keeps popping up in my Substack feed alongside raving reviews by writers I trust.

• (article) “The Imperfect Children of ‘Revival’” by Madison, published in ’s “The Church is Back in Style?” series — a poetic and honest look at the emerging generation of American Christians.

• (article) “The Ego Death of The Bible Belt” by . A mashup of Hayley Williams x Flannery O’Connor x evangelical culture?! Need I say more? Natalie’s thoughts here are poignant, wise, and incredibly creative. Her writing always encourages me to see things as not just isolated events, but a signals of a grander narrative in our social landscape.

• anything & everything by Andy Squyres — especially this post.

  

  

my continued chaos as an obsessive hobbyist

My enthusiasm for trying new things sometimes works against me. I find myself squeezing in every single thing I enjoy…only to find that, months later, I no longer enjoy them because of well, the squeezing. So this month, I’ve attempted to rescue my hobbies from the daily to-do’s they’ve morphed into, and return them to their origin: a relaxed cadence of spontaneity. I’m no longer forcing myself to wake up at the crack of dawn to write morning pages, or hop from a work meeting to a workout class. I’m learning to follow the scattered trail of muse. That’s looked like…

• Writing. I’ve spent a lot more time with pen and paper recently; the hiddenness of unpublished work has been humbling and good. I also rediscovered my typewriter, much to my next door neighbor’s chagrin (the keys are ancient, beautiful, and LOUD).

• Working out, as always. I’ve been prioritizing anything that gets me outdoors, which means less frequent gym sessions and more sun-drenched walks, hours at the horse barn I work at, and generally just more natural forms of movement.

• Designing. I’m truly embarrassed to say that beyond a few InDesign magazine spread projects in college, I’m not fluent in Illustrator or Photoshop. In fact, I’ve gone years without the Adobe Suite even on my computer. That all changed last week when my friend Dakota (aka / Thief of Boredom) kindly showed me the ropes with Photoshop. I created something I’m proud of (coming soon on !) and I’m feeling much more empowered to create all the things that’re bouncing around in my brain.

• Floral-ing. Fortunately the old saying is true: April showers really do bring May flowers. I got to help out a local florist friend with a massive wedding project and let me tell you, there is nothing quite as lovely as a 20’ uhaul full of flowers. While I don’t intend to ever be a real florist, it’s always such a joy to find new ways to work with my hands. I’m discovering that I absolutely adore a wild, dimensional, and textured style in my arrangements. Oh, and flower arches are really, really heavy.

thinking & writing about…

• AI. From college commencement speakers being booed to Pope Leo’s encyclical warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence — it’s a topic that’s very front-of-mind. I’m still untangling my thoughts. But they begin with, “I really hate AI”…

• Art x the economy. With generative slop, will “tastemaking” and slow-fashion make a real comeback? Is there a world in which style consulting is a mainstream career path (similar to Creative Director roles, but broader and more personal-brand focused)? What will the job landscape look like for Gen Alpha?

• Purity culture. How did it shape the early 2000’s, really? And how does it continue to impact the evangelical orientation towards sex and marriage? What’re the more subtle fall outs, and where have I seen them creep up in my own dating experiences?

• “Looksmaxxing.” With the rise of marketing integration into social media algorithms, influencer brand deals, and linking - we seem to be incessant ratrace toward the ‘next’ (the next skincare routine, workout style, outfit) with the illusion of fulfillment. And in our western, consumption-based culture, this isn’t a new revelation. But what’s less clear are the implications on our souls and bodies. How do we understand our worth in an age obsess with image-curation, and what role does tech/social media play in all of this? Article on this coming soon…

That’s it! I hope to share here more consistently in the coming months. It’s absolutely wild to me that 424 (!) of you read my words. Thank you for being here. Stay tuned for more posts on all things faith, culture, and creativity. ꩜

From her passion for Anglicanism, to her classy hand-sewn dresses, she’s a lady with distinct taste and - you guessed it - incisive spiritual reflections.

If you ever have the pleasure of chatting with her (and I hope you do), you’ll quickly find yourself transfixed by her wonder-filled wisdom.

Who better to introduce our first saint in the Books as Brands series?

And the designs? Well, truth be told, I couldn’t seem to find my ‘flow’ for this feature. Something about Mary’s life is so confounding - jarring, even - that I felt it incredibly difficult to visualize without oversimplification. Abstract, but earthy and unadorned. Layered, yet minimal and traditional.

The more I pondered her, the more I kept seeing a shimmering horizon of contrasts - mocking me like the heat mirages that dance on the desert sand. A few too many scrapped drafts later, and I’m realizing that maybe that’s the point. Because how can you even begin to display a life as complex and unorthodox as Mary’s?

Without further ado, let us enter the wastelands…

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

The earth was soft and light in northern New Mexico, and our steps were soundless as my father and I skirted through sagebrush and tucked our collars against a brisk November breeze.

We trekked through fifty-odd comfortably isolated acres of land in the high desert, east of the Rio Grande confluence gorge. My father had bought the property several years ago, and we both dreamt of building a sustainable, self-sufficient home there one day. Somewhere safe and quiet, for peace, or for survival.

I stared across the sloping, shallow hills, scanning the blue mountains that ringed the open valley. Dense snow shone on the Rockies to the north, and the lonely Ute Mountain peak cast deep shadows. My heart ached.

I knew that I romanticized the idea of living there. To me, it represented independence, seemingly far from the overstimulation of modern life and the long arms of overreaching institutions. Here was a small community with deep roots, with space for artistry and austerity, offering rhythms that the endless suburban sprawl of Southern California couldn’t provide. I could imagine desert life so intensely. I told myself that I needed that life.

What truly drew me to the land? As I reflected upon my desire, I became sharply aware of how much I idealized self-sufficiency. Independence and authenticity have always motivated me, often to a fault. Maturing as a young person during the late 2010s and 2020s obliterated my trust in authority and heightened my apocalyptic sensibilities. I feel that I can speak for many in my generation when I say that I desperately long for groundedness, simplicity, and escape.

And yet that desire is also layered with guilt. Life is 21st century America comes with so many embedded comforts, such abundance, that I could never properly acknowledge it all.

Am I ungrateful, or foolish? What am I actually willing to give up?

What does it mean to sacrifice?

In curiosity and perhaps also in penance, I read up on stories of the desert fathers and desert mothers of early Christian history.

The iconography of St. Mary of Egypt has always struck me. In most traditional portraits, her hair is a stark, scraggly white, though her features appear young. Her collarbone and ribs are sharp, and her ragged wrappings are cast over one shoulder, leaving her startlingly bare.

Born in Egypt in the fifth century, Mary abandoned her family at age twelve to live as a prostitute, wracked by insatiable sensual desires. Eventually, she pilgrimaged to Jerusalem, though she had no intentions of reforming her lifestyle.

It wasn’t until she attempted to enter the Holy Sepulchre that she was faced with the consequences of her impurity as she was cast from the door by a powerful force like a wall of wind.

Barred from her desire for perhaps the first time, Mary’s heart was turned. Upon seeing an icon of Mary the Theotokos (God-bearer), she repented, seeking forgiveness and swearing abstinence from the world. She could now enter the Holy Sepulchre, and received communion at the monastery of Saint John the Baptist.

An unknown voice told her that if she crossed the Jordan River, she would find rest.

Following this command, she entered the wilderness.

Years later, Zosimas of Palestine, a local monk, encountered her as an old woman in the desert, and she shared her life’s story with him. After living inhospitably for so long, she hardly resembled a human.

Mary had joined the tradition of early Christian ascetics who lived strange, animalistic lives in order to carry out their religious vocations. The bizarre lifestyles of the grazers, the stylites, and the desert monastics were as shocking to their contemporaries as they might seem to us now.

What can we learn from these people who made such staggering sacrifices for the sake of a holy desire to distance themselves from the world?

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

Mary achieved purity via total separation from society. And yet even after a lifetime of minimal human contact, she could still sit with Zosimas, wrapped in his cloak, perhaps beside a fire under the open canopy of stars, in order to offer her life to the millennia-long record of the saints.

Mary’s self-isolation was not a fearful escape or a way to hide. Instead, she left her indelible mark on history, impacting thousands across time.

Her asceticism was not an act of self-hatred, but rather an outward sign of deepest repentance and reverence. She did not seek self-sufficiency, but rather submitted herself entirely to the Lord, living for decades under His providence and sustenance.

“We can trust that our lives, wherever they might be embedded, will leave their mark and work towards good, and we don’t need to see the effects to believe that they occur.

Humility is a rare virtue, but we can practice it by detaching from ourselves and our desires even—or especially— amidst abundance.

Our plans for the future and fears for the present are devices of the world, and we don’t need to run away to the physical desert in order to reject them.”

Though we might want desperately to depart from this world (and Christians have always desired this, for it is not our home), we can adopt the postures of our desert mothers and fathers without severing ourselves entirely from society.

Wherever we might be, we can discover a wilderness. And hopefully, we’ll find within it a longing for our better home.

What would we sacrifice in order to enter into it?

What voice would compel us to cross the river, like Mary, to find that precious, glorious rest?

“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow” —Mary Shelley

The sky is the color of slate and the river is full of ice and I’m shuffling to keep my footing on the salt-stained sidewalk.

A few minutes ago, I unceremoniously shoved my fingers into mittens and rolled my eyes as I hid my headphones under the scratchy fibers of my wool beanie.

I’m not even trying to mask my annoyance. It’s way too late in this new year for it to be this cold. My exhales are puffing in front of my face like foggy, dancing ghosts, and I’m missing the Pacific something bad.

Some podcaster is chattering away in my headphones, but my mind is keeping pace with my feet: aimless, wandering. A chunk of ice floats by, and images of the opening scene of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein flash through my mind - man and monster chasing each other across the harsh Arctic ice.

Victor, a man whose scientific obsession leaves him with intense psychological torment.

His creature, a being so grotesque he’s rejected by society, but who is shown to be more emotionally alive than those who shun him.

What does it mean to be human?

I feel a little pit of something -- worry? dread? excitement? -- unfurl in my stomach at the thought.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

Last summer, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat sat down with Peter Thiel -- billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies -- for a conversation which has since gone viral thanks to this disturbing exchange:

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Thiel: Uh—

Douthat: You’re hesitating. Should the human race survive?

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would—I would, um—

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Thiel: … Yes. … But I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah—transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body.

* Collective gasp. *

There it is, plain as day: transhumanism is the goal of the grand AI experiment. Man and man-made, merged. This is our modern manifest destiny, our pursuit of immortality, our wondering what’s beyond the walls of Eden.

And no, it hasn’t been shaped by moral clarity or wise religious voices. It’s been manufactured by tech billionaires who’re traveling around the globe hosting lectures about the antichrist. And what will this antichrist’s agenda be exactly? If you ask Thiel, it’ll be marked by the attempt to slow the rise of technology. Huh.

I imagine Mary Shelley watching this exchange and sighing dramatically mid-pen scrawl. “Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries,” she wrote. For a book written in 1818, Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus is feeling eerily prophetic.

Maybe Shelley saw it all along. Not in the omniscient sense (I doubt she predicted that we’d be asking robots to compose our emails), but in the way all writers do: by noticing something timeless about human nature.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

I feel my phone buzz, so I fish it out of my pocket and scroll as I walk.

I’m instantly peppered with images of bone-thin celebrities, their blood coursing with a cocktail of GLP-1 drugs created to defy natural hunger cues. My mind wanders yet again…We’re so eager to transcend our limitations. To override what our bodies tell us. To reach beyond what nature allows. To detest the very stretch marks and curves that make us distinct.

At what point does “improving life” transgress the sacred? the organic? the intended?

We’re shrinking our bodies with designer drugs, editing genes in embryos, and training chatbots to become our very own AI therapists.

Much like Victor, we’re often too dazzled by what we can do to stop and ask whether we should.

How will we know if we’ve left our humanity behind in our quest for efficiency?

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

As my generation finds itself increasingly reliant upon inhuman technologies to do our human tasks (and we’re very clearly suffering as a result), we’ll need something more than a clear political stance or easy moral delineation.

If we’re stewarding it well -- really listening -- the questions will take us down a path of essentialism, stripping away the excess (“Oh, I just use it for [fill in the blank of every task ever]”) to get to the most basic mysteries of our existence: Who are we, really? What happens when we export that humanity onto technology? Like the three-year-old I nannied, the frenzied pace of technological advance is incessantly demanding that we answer a stream of “but WHY?!”s.

[Why] is it important to maintain technology-free tasks in our workplaces?

Why are we so obsessed with innovation?

Who defines life, and what do we owe to the things we create?

Without a theological story to be the backbone of it all, I’m afraid that our answers will be the vague, made-up responses of a tired toddler parent -- full of sighs and dissatisfying vagueness.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

“I don’t know man, I’m just saying, why would God smite the entire globe because of some hut? What, like they put one too many layers of mud on it?”

My friend Wes is telling me about an alternative theory about the Tower of Babel -- something about frequency energy helping the pre-flood peoples build with high-tech efficiency.

Sound waves instead of steam engines.

Potential alien crossover.

You know, the classic good conspiracy moment to spice up a game night.

And at some level it makes sense to me because the Sunday School version of this story has never clicked. You’re telling me sun-dried, mud-and-straw buildings were more idolatrous than the Burj Khalifa, Dubai’s 2,717 foot high skyscraper? If ambition was the reason God destroyed the earth as a way of putting mankind back in their lowly place, what does that mean for our far more advanced (and atheistic) society?

Perhaps ambition itself isn’t the problem, but rather the attitudes and agendas we adopt in the pursuit. After all, most good things require large doses of ambition, stamina, and persistence - even pre-Fall. So do a whole host of good things like parenting, book-writing, ultra-marathoning. I can’t help but think that the more comfortable we get with distancing ourselves from the mundane in pursuit of the efficient, and less fulfilled creatures we’ll be. And even, less creative. Delight is quite inefficient.

Choosing to not sidestep the process of something - opting for sweaty hours in the gym instead of a hunger-suppressing drug, asking your friend to help you edit an important email rather than plugging it into ChatGPT - these things remind us that the result is not always the sole prize. The becoming offers its own kind of humble beauty, too.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

I adjust my scarf. The cold has seeped through my layers now. My nose is numb, my fingers stiff. Small reminders that some limits might be worth keeping.…and maybe that’s not such a terrible thing.

Problems and suffering (and yes, even the bone-chilling cold of long winters) are not roadblocks. They are fodder for the creative experience.

To create requires a death. Death of ego, death of productivity. Death of the things we thought we knew. Death of fluff and abstraction.

That process of shearing away to get to the heart of things rarely happens through ease. It doesn’t happen with another dose of a miracle drug or a bot-written coverletter or groceries drone-delivered to our doorstep. Even the art of ‘tastemaking’ comes with the kind of stylistic delineations that parallel death - mini-deaths - experiences that earn you to right to say, ‘not this, that.’ Choice of one and not the other.

I fear that in the wake of this stream of ready-made content and ‘hacks’, we’re losing the moments of resistance that are an unavoidable part of forming a unique take on the world.

I don’t have a simple answer for the question of imago-dei or the proper limits of our endeavors. I don’t know where the line between excellence and obsession ought to be drawn (who does?). But perhaps it all starts with the idea that every thing, when rightly viewed, can be a gift of our humanity - even the inefficient and slow and inconvenient.

This post is part of my Books as Brands series — a combination of designs and reflections where I’m reimagining the lives of saints, authors, and stories through the lens of branding. ⭐️ Stay tuned for an upcoming post from a guest author!

Perhaps it’s inherent stubbornness.

Or a natural cynicism.

Or a product of personality.

Sincerely, nothing against Hillsong in particular. I’ve just come to the realization that I’ve been moved by divine love in the chaotic vignettes of life far more often than in a room with strobe lights and fog machines.

In a refugee village in Tijuana and in Catholic eucharist and in a well-designed fiddle and in neighborhood walks.

Emotional, often. Stirring, absolutely. But in a mellow, yearning, stripped-down, heart-wrenching, honest sort of way. Because of this, I’ve often found “worship” to be an elusive and pesky term often associated with a type of genre that, let’s face is, has historically been known for cringey lyrics and lots of repetitive strumming. Yikes.

Fortunately for me, it’s a word whose definition has funneled out wider and wider with each rolling year of life I experience.

It used to be narrow and elementary:

“Worship is singing songs that sound like [fill in the blank of your favorite Bible camp song].”

But now it’s as round as a rain bucket, collecting every drop of goodness and turning it into something nourishing:

“Worship is every act of a life open to God.”

To ‘worship’ is to collect the nearness of God, absorbing it like a thirsty garden bed in the spring. It’s co-delight - you and the Holy Spirit in alignment. Nothing required but being - a radical (and somewhat ominous) thought for any western, productivity-oriented mind.

Which means that most things can become worship. If you ask Brother Lawrence, doing the dishes beats a loud drumset every time:

That’s good news. Worship (and just generally being a student of Jesus) doesn’t look one way. How we interact with the world goes far beyond belief or theology - it’s often a kaleidoscope of our own personalities, memories, and tendencies.

And yet universally, beauty arrests us.

Truth compels us.

Goodness woos us.

Music - both the sacred and secular (though really, need there be such a distinction?) - has a strange way of welcoming us to participate in the interconnectedness of all of the virtues. It doesn’t try to convince us of anything. It doesn’t busy itself with over-explaining or with drawing lines between the provocative, the profane, and the profound. It just expresses.

And thankfully, a new generation of Christian songwriters is carrying that faithful expression forward.

Artists like Taylor Armstrong, John Lucas, John Mark Pantana, Jess Ray, Ivan Theva, and dozens of others are drawing from the deep wells of their own spiritual experiences and transforming those narratives into something vibrant and new.

They are folks whose lyrics and instrumentation reveal a deep ease with their own artistry. They’re not trying to be something they’re not, or relate to God in ways that demand a performative novelty. They’re not making songs for everyone, and it’s okay if you don’t find yourself worshipping in the same ways they do, because hey, this is their story. Ironically though, you’ll find yourself in their words too. Isn’t it funny how it’s always the most specific and seemingly individualistic lyrics that cut the deepest? Like Jess Ray’s recent release “Find My Way Back” whose first line touches on the grief of her own fertility journey… I have a feeling many women will relate to that.

There is something undeniably sacred about the art coming out of this generation - it echos an un-self-awareness that reminds me of King David dancing like a fool in front of his subjects. That kind of artistic intuition is often hard earned and usually only comes to us on the other side of suffering. Those are where the deep wells are filled up.

To worship is to become one with God, and to be one with God is to be filled with inspiration, life, and and uninhibited abandon - all with a gaze directed at something more mystical than the physical.

So here are a dozen+ playlists I’ve cobbled together over the years that stir something worshipful in me. I hope they serve you, too.

They correlate with both the shifting emotions of life - everything from loneliness to celebration - and the waning hours of the day - morning, evening walks, and dusk.

⋆·˚꩜ ༘ *⋆

1. songs for waking up

“I awake, and I am still with you" Psalm 139:18

2. songs for peace

"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you... Do not let your hearts be troubled” John 14:27

3. songs to rekindle a faithful heart

"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” 2 Corinthians 4:16

4. songs to remember your belovedness

"Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb" Revelation 19

5. songs for grief, suffering, and heartache

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever." Revelation 21:4

6. songs for when you feel lonely or unwanted

"And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." Matthew 28:20

7. songs for the PCH & summer

"Let the rivers clap their hands, let the hills sing for joy together" Psalm 98:8

8. songs for big life changes

"The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged." Deuteronomy 31:8

9. songs that echo Eden

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener…” John 15

10. songs for when you’re trying something new (and scary)

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1

11. songs for easy listening

“You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you" Isaiah 26:3

12. songs for wrestling with unanswered prayer

“…I, the Lord, will bring it all to pass when it is time.” Isaiah 60:22

+ a 16 hr conglomeration of a-typical spiritual songs

Any songs I should add?!

Leave a comment

The unabashed pink of a ladybug’s shell as it makes its first summer scuttle across doorframes and porch steps.

This dormant knowledge that we too, like kids with binoculars, can scout out promises of heaven sandwiched somewhere between telephone lines and birdsong.

Whimsy, you see, is not its own end.

Yes, it is born out of deep love of the natural world, and the parallel discovery of our place in it. But it doesn’t stop there. Romanticism isn’t the goal.

It’s joy - that’s what we’re after.

⋆˚✿˖°

When I started thinking through how I’d like to represent the late poet Mary Oliver as part of this Books as Brands series, I instantly knew I wanted my friend Rosa Lía Gilbert’s words to accompany my visuals.

I talk about presence here a lot - about finding things that make me spiritually and creatively awake to the life around me. And so does Rosa, and so did Mary - both in words so vibrant and honest, you can’t help but feel mesmerized.

Rosa is the author of a beautiful bilingual poetry collection, “Under the Samán Tree,” and writes poems that are hope-filled and sojourn-minded. Who better to write about Mary?!

Without further ado, Rosa’s words…

March in Washington means the sun has ceased to exist for the last couple of months. Rays have been replaced by rain drops—constant and insistent.

Warmth by muggy cold fronts.

Sunshine by fog.

The instinct is to complain, to drown in the sorrow of winter much like the soil seems to be drowning in puddles.

The instinct is to ignore beauty, and I give into it far too often this time of year.

I raise the woven wood shades that cover my living room’s windows just enough to catch glimpses of the outside world. The gas fireplace is on and a freshly brewed cup of coffee rests between my hands.

Cozy.

Comfortable.

But as the first sips of my Americano linger in my mouth, discontentment seeps into my spirit. My three-year-old is begging to play with her magnetic blocks for the thousandth time this winter, and I can’t bring myself to build more towers. I look out the window, expecting a miracle, but it’s all the same.

Another day, another downpour. Nothing new to look at. The cover of Devotions, a collection of Mary Oliver’s selected poems, slowly fades into my brain. I’ve been reading from it here and there for the past year and I find myself wondering what Mary would do in this situation. Luckily, I don’t have to think twice before the answer arrives:

She’d be amazed.

She’d find signs and wonders within each particle of damp fog, think of it as yet another mystery unfolding, another way of stepping into the unknown.

She’d run outside in the pouring rain, see what poems might be waiting for her in the sloshy mud beneath her boots.

She’d wrap herself in wool, the real kind, not that faux stuff we’re sold nowadays, and brave the low temperatures. She would say (maybe) that at least the cold made her feel something.

And isn’t that enough?

Shouldn’t that be enough to jolt me back into existence? Into remembering I have but one wild and precious life? Instead I waste it inside, rotting away behind tall windows, glass blurring my vision and limiting what I should be experiencing in the flesh.

⋆˚✿˖°

In a 2015 interview, Mary shared that she “...got saved by the beauty of the world.” This is precisely what draws readers like myself to her—her ability to discover beauty and awe where others would walk past it.

It only takes reading a few of her most acclaimed poems to notice her affinity for geese. These large, bland-colored birds became a signature image in her work, revealing to us the way she learned to experience the world.

I lived in Ohio for two years and geese were commonplace. The goslings in the spring were adorable, and I got excited whenever I had to stop driving so they could safely cross the road. But, besides that, geese were mainly an annoyance. They scattered droppings everywhere—often I’d have to clean them off the soles of my daughter’s sneakers—and they were extremely territorial. I remember one year one of them decided to nest right by the town’s local supermarket parking lot. If we parked anywhere near her, we’d get hissed at by the overprotective goose momma.

Fun, I know.

But Mary found meaning in geese and transformed what some (myself included) would call a nuisance into something beautiful.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver, excerpt from Wild Geese

This poem doesn’t change reality, or at least not all of it. In suburban areas, Canadian geese are still considered pests—their aggressive behavior and bad overgrazing habits earned them that title—but I believe practicing attention and beauty as devotion changes our reality, our way of taking in and thinking about the world.

Instead of tasting it and spitting it back out, beauty gives us permission to savor and relish and enjoy it. Things around us might stay the same, unwanted seasons drag and hold on, but our perspective is given permission to shift.

⋆˚✿˖°

Walking in the way of beauty, allowing my spirit to bend toward its pull, won’t cause winter to disappear. To vanish into the vapor of Washington rains.

But living in attention will transform me.

It’ll quiet the chatter of resistance. It’ll let Mary’s words rise from the dew, quiet as prayer:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Thank you, Rosa!

Next week: As promised, sharing 11 playlists that’ve refreshed my soul the last few years.

Coming up: No guest! Instead, I’ll be writing the next post in this series about a book that feels very culturally relevant right now. More to come soon. ˖°

In the meantime, I’m curious: are there any authors, saints, or books you’d particularly like to see featured?! Comment below!

Leave a comment

Instead of residing in the familiar fugue state of early-morning wakefulness, I quickly wiped my eyes and reached over for my phone. Happy Thursday I guess. Disgusting, right? Those sacred, mindless moments interrupted with pixels…

But I don’t need to tell you this.

You absorb enough of it nowadays, the blue light fearmongering and digital detox sermons and apparent inability to sit with your own boredom.

All of this to say, it made me wonder, what is devotion, really?

This rectangular thing that demands so much of my consideration throughout the day…at what point does habit become worship? If William Blake is right and we do indeed ‘become what we behold,’ what step in that process am I in? Is there a metric for this kind of thing? For attention, and the lack thereof?

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

I used to love Christian devotional books. You know, the ones from your suburban Hobby Lobby with horrible graphics and countless cliches. But I’m not twelve anymore. Now, at the weary and weathered age of twenty-six, I tend to find them cosmically unsatisfying; the spiritual equivalent of an egg-white scramble. The formula seems to be: here’s a catchy intro! here’s a no-context Bible verse! here are three ways to live it out right this very moment!

Grating. Repetitive. Not much room for novelty or pondering. Where’s the nuanced, the in-formation? And what exactly am I beholding anyways?

Perhaps that skepticism is part of what got me here - eyes bloodshot, hair unkempt, thumb hovering over screen. Without mystery, substance, and intrigue easily accessible in most spiritual resources, well, it’s no wonder that my pinging, notification-frenzied phone is my unceremonious invitation to the day.

Underneath it all, buried under the guise of boredom is a longing -- a stirring for more meaningful modes of spiritual becoming -- compelling ones that replace zombie-like living with real joy.

I suspect there is depth here. A real, hearty hope that goes far beyond “enchantment” or “romanticism” or “reimagination” or any of the other buzz words we use to describe this struggle -- this feeble attempt at recapturing our imago-dei from the clutches of technological advance.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

I’m learning to simplify my life into one question, repeated over and over again: “Where is Jesus in this?”

Not in the idealized or wished for, but in this moment, this life, this body.

It’s no coincidence that Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are flocking to Catholic and Anglican parishes in droves. I think we understand that to truly revive our haggard, doom-scroll-fatigued attention, we will need to involve some sort of sensory experience.

Because Jesus is here. In the flesh. One with the world. Born of blood and tears and sweat, breaking bread and sipping wine, using muddy earth to help a blind man see. No intellectual distance or superiority. No hiding behind theology or pretty words.

To reach for communion and friendship with Christ is to welcome a oneness that involves our whole being, not just our brains.

If we let devotion begin with a measure of attentiveness, what kind of freedom would be unlocked in our collective spiritual experience?

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

My beginning is here, holding a finger to the pulse of my daily habits in an attempt to resurrect some sort of intentionality in my in-between moments.

Sleepily.

One shade of sunrise at a time.

If you clicked on this title while thinking, “Okay yah, but I’m not really suffering right now…”

1) Awesome, I love that for you

and, yet

2) You do feel that pang, don’t you?

…you know, the internal, combustible fire of discomfort sparked by mere existence? Whether you’re prone to the philosophical or not, there is a certain cosmic weight that comes with living.

And it goes beyond tight budgets

and infertility

and failed relationships

and career burnout

and backyard arguments

and far-away genocides.

It’s a kind of indescribable, soul-deep, not-okay-ness.

Some people call this the “here and not yet.” Others, “heavenly homesickness.”

Whatever the title, it’s a sentiment that I’ve felt keenly since childhood.

For me, it’s a kind of restless echo in my gut and heart and head; the repeated melody to a tune I can’t quite remember. It’s made me feel both adrift and at home; a foreigner and yet a familiar student to unanswered questions.

And here I am, typing this with headlines cycling through my brain like the row of open tabs on my computer screen.

Things like, “TEN PRAYERS FOR LENT” sandwiched between “MORE DISTURBING DETAILS REVEALED IN RECENT EPSTEIN FILES” and “UNREST IN THE MIDDLE EAST CONTINUES” on loop in my mind.

Right now, lament feels like an important thing to get acquainted with. Or at the very least, ask some questions of.

Don’t worry; there’s hope here, too. Not the flimsy kind either. The quiet, transcendent, starlight-and-substance type of hope.

I asked my friend and Fellowship buddy to share his thoughts on C.S. Lewis because -- as a philosophy of religion grad student and senior editor of a DC-based Think Tank -- to me, he’s kind of a local legend on all things theology.

He’s also a great dad and an earnest thinker. Oh, and a human who experiences suffering just like the rest of us.

That seemed like a good enough resume to me.

His reflections here on the nature of God and the reality of grief are raw and honest (which is really the only way to talk about such things).

Inspired by Noah’s words, I’m interspersing my designs (as part of my Books as Brands series) to give visual life to CS Lewis’s work. Follow along here to see all of the brand slides & rationale. + Scroll down to the end to see some book & poem recommendations from yours truly. ⭐️🕯️

Without further ado…

⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ

I’ll admit,

I don’t know how to lament well.

I attempt the James 1:2 approach, trying to “count it joy” when trouble comes.

Yet, at the time of this writing, two of my friends—a married couple with a newborn—are about to be separated for over a year by a military assignment. 365 days apart. A child’s first steps missed. Moments that won’t ever be bought back. How do you count that as joy?

Questioning God’s whereabouts in the midst of suffering is a practice as old as time. The Psalmists repeatedly ask why God hides his face, forgets them, remains far away. Job wonders where he can go to find God because he sure doesn’t seem present in his circumstances.

Jesus himself lets out a cry of abandonment from the cross.

Christians throughout the centuries have wrestled with both the problem of evil (or suffering) and God’s hiddenness. C. S. Lewis was one of those Christians. In his essays, lectures, fiction, and nonfiction, he became known for offering solutions -- reasons why God might allow suffering and remain veiled from us.

That’s what makes his book, A “Grief Observed,” so surprising.

In it, Lewis, the greatest Christian apologist of the 20^th century, questions what he thought he knew about God. Two decades before, he had written another book, “The Problem of Pain,” which tried to give a philosophical answer to why a good, all-powerful God would allow so much suffering in the world.

But then those ideas were tested.

Lewis’s wife died suddenly, and he was obliterated with grief. Bone-rattling grief. Grief so severe he sincerely doubted God’s good character.

“Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like.’”

^Ouch.

I love philosophy. I’m a philosophy of religion graduate student. But I know it has limits. It’s one thing to know reasons why God might allow a child to get cancer; it’s quite another when your child gets the diagnosis.

Philosophy seems inadequate.

In his magnum opus “The Brothers Karamazov,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky set out to answer the problem of evil as well. He worried, though, that he did too good of a job setting up the problem. He infused his narrative with real-life stories he’d taken from newspapers. Like this one about little girl senselessly tortured by her parents:

They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night . . . Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?

Yeah, try to explain that.

Dostoyevsky’s answer isn’t an argument, a theodicy, or even a theological treatise.

It’s a person: Father Zosima. A guy who has experienced suffering, who has taken on the suffering of others with compassion, and serves God anyway. He lives in the tension. That’s what makes “A Grief Observed” so surprising and refreshing.

It depicts one of the greatest defenders of Christianity, the one who spent his career pointing people’s hearts and minds heavenward, shaken by the seeming abandonment by God. Yet he looks that bewildering pain in the face and doesn’t blink. And he, too, lives in the tension.

Some years before, in his novel “Screwtape Letters,” Lewis put these words in the mouth of an elder demon explaining God’s hiddenness:

Sooner or later [God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. . . . He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away his hand. . . . Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Lewis didn’t just write this. He, like Doestoyevsky’s Father Zosima, lived it.

If you ask me, a Christianity with nice, pat answers to difficult questions is a hollow, shallow, ready-to-topple Christianity.

Give me the messiness.

Give me the people wrestling with God.

When suffering comes (as it will for us all) I don’t need the philosophy of “The Problem of Pain.” Give me the aching heart of “A Grief Observed.”

Courage, dear heart.

⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ

Thank you, Noah!

If you find yourself in a “lament” season, here are few book / poem recommendations that’ve supported me in my own journey:

1. For Those Who Weep Without Knowing Why (a liturgical prayer / poem from )

2. Confessions (book by St. Augustine)

3. God on Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer (book by Pete Greig)

4. Dark Night of the Soul (by St. John of the Cross)

5. A Quiet Mind to Suffer With (book by John Andrew Bryant)

Hand-drawn iconography and stamps.

Maybe a stripe-pattern and some serif fonts?

The Backstory

A few months ago, I had an idea.

As most good ideas have a habit of doing, it hit me at the most inconvenient moment (11:09pm, right as I was simply too tired to reach for my notebook).

It has crept its way into my evenings and weekends ever since.

The idea is more of a question, really.

It started as something like an intrusive thought.

In a moment of sentimentality, I was reading one of my old poetry books when I thought, “If Wordsworth had a brand in 2026, I wonder what it would look like?”

Weird thought, right? As a full-time brand designer, not really.

But then it grew…

A rent-a-picnic-basket service maybe? Images of charcuterie tucked into blue gingham cloths and whicker textures bounced before my eyes. Something to explore the Lake District which inspired William’s work, a brand that helps people embody the call in his poetry to “Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher.”

So here we are. Welcome to Books as Brands, a series of visual designs and Substack posts where I’m reimagining the lives of saints, authors, and stories through the lens of design. ⭐️

Why? Glad you asked.

1️⃣ Because the craving for narrative is universal

I’ve noticed a pattern when I talk about the books I’m reading (currently: The Idiot by Dostoyevsky) - the typical response is, “Oh good for you. I could never read old books like that.” Conversation over.

And while I don’t expect everyone to love complex books, I think we sell ourselves short in this department. We can all learn something from those who’ve gone before us - even the fictional characters.

In a chaotic, overly-politicized, hustle culture, good stories offer us a shared language of meaning-making and wisdom. The craving for narrative (and beauty, truth, and goodness) is etched into our DNA, book-lovers and haters alike.

2️⃣ Because literature should be accessible.

You shouldn’t have to have an English major to enjoy a “classic” book. The visual side of this project (shared here) will be a sort of “front porch” to invite anyone and everyone into deeper meaning (beauty has a way of doing that).

If the only reaction is a pause in someone’s scroll and a moment of exhale, great. I think our social feeds could use more of that.

Each Instagram post will be accompanied by articles here on Substack (featuring some amazing co-authors!). These pieces will NOT be recaps of dead authors (snooze fest!). They’ll be a place to dive into a relevant topic, with the question of, “What would [author, saint, or book] say about that if they were sitting here today?”

3️⃣ Because it sounded fun

Playfulness in creativity is so underrated.

If you’re anything like me right now, you feel chewed up and spit out by the news cycle and a lengthy to-do list.

After some soul-searching, I’ve realized I need a space to experiment and change mediums - somewhere to take the pressure off of writing / producing / philosophizing and just imagine.

Design does that for me. It gets me in a flow state.

All of this brings me to my first brand design:

A regenerative farm inspired by Anna Karenina.

The Book

I’ll admit, when I first picked up Tolstoy’s 800+ page masterpiece junior year of college, I truly expected to hate it.

It’s a classic by all accounts, and being in a classics program I guess I should’ve expected to see it on my syllabus. It was my first foray into Russian literature, a genre of authors I’d soon be telling everyone was my “all time favorite” (pretentious much?!). Being the slightly type-A student I was at the time, I gasped at the one-week turnaround, and used my Christmas break to read ahead.

Those two weeks changed me.

The more pages I turned, the more addicted I became.

I’d look forward to the moment I could curl up in my childhood bed each night and giddily flip the light on to read “just another ten pages.” And that was Christmas 2021: me, lugging around my huge Russian novel with pride, devouring every word, hastily coming to its defense anytime someone said something like, “um, isn’t that the one about like, adultery?” with a crazy-eyed, “noooooo, trust me, it’s so much more than that!”

Tolstoy created characters that are incredibly dynamic and oh-so-human.
They make mistakes...and repeat them again and again.
They learn.
They digress.
They grow.

Each taught me something about what it means to love and be loved.

Especially in a character named Levin, I felt the tensions between duty and desire, intellect and faith, rationality and intuition in a way I’d never experienced before.

He wrestles with life. A lot.
He wonders what his purpose is, and falls into an internal spiral about his worth and career (relatable!).

After a twisting and complex narrative, Tolstoy shows us (through Levin) that the ‘good’ life is not the version where every desire is met. Rather, it’s the one we’re already in…the one we let ourselves surrender to.

In this attitude, our duties become deep wells of joy and meaning. And inversely, the things we think we want - our desires and whims - can sometimes be the instruments of our own downfall.

For Levin, the quiet demands of maintaining his farm (something he once despised) slowly becomes the very thing that ties him to reality when his dark skepticism threatens to get the best of him.

His doubts become the thing that leads him to understand the depth of the divine.

Strife with his wife helps him realize the expanse of his own love for her.

Duties, doubts, strife. Ordinary life, some might say. All laced with golden threads of redemption and long rows of wheat.

The Design

All of this - the paradox of life and love, backsliding and attempting to find happiness - is brought to life in the final scenes which are set in the farm lands of Russia. 🌾

So to me, a Tolstoy-inspired brand in 2026 would make space for those who (like Levin) are tired of swimming upstream in their own minds.

The digitally fatigued.
The overworked.
The cynical.

I imagine:
- A farm / retreat center for discovery and serenity.
- Hand-drawn icons & a soft logo; contrasted with classic serif typography and minimal, organic lines.
- Bright reds hinting back to Russia, with the grounding hues of earth & sky interspersed.

the Levin Regenerative Farm 🐝

see the original brand kit here

Be sure to subscribe to LifeConsidered to get this series directly in your inbox 💌

Can’t wait to share more!

Sure, the migration pains were expected. The chaotic range of emotions were easily-predicted rights of passage, part-and-parcel of the adventure. Those, I anticipated.

Yet even so, my winter initiation stung with a foreign harshness that left me acting like a crazy person when spring finally did come — flinging my windows wide and running around barefoot at the first signs of a thaw.

In those first months when strangers would ask where I was from (apparently I “have an accent” ?!), I was always met with either pitying gazes or brash, slack-jawed stares as soon as “San Diego” left my mouth.

“Why on earth would you leave somewhere so beautiful?!” they’d exclaim.

Ironically, it was I who came to the defense of my new home. “You know, I actually really like it here!”

It became routine. Partly out of the sheer rebellious desire to subvert expectations, but mostly because I am a very deep believer in perspective.

The way you describe your life has a certain kind of power. It doesn’t just reveal what is; it shows your analysis of it. And that itself makes all the difference.

Life, and what you make of it

If you don’t believe me, ask someone who has suffered deeply. There’s something different about those people, the Joni Eareckson Tada’s of the world. If they’ve really surrendered to the hope-filled chaos of their situation, they’re often much more peaceful humans than their comfortable counterparts.

My theory is that sufferers bear a unique vantage point to the world which forces them to be both relentlessly honest and doggedly optimistic.

Their struggles have pressed them up against the very heartbeat of an aching world. It begets a delightful and rugged optimism that will never cease to mystify me.

And no, this isn’t gaslighting or toxic denial.

It’s hope.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops - at all ….”

—Emily Dickinson

I’m not saying that because I left clear-blue beaches to live in a wintery tundra I somehow deserve sainthood. Freewill is no martyr.

I did just indulge in a long car-cry about this very topic, egged on by another sunless gray day and the tantalizing memory of the Pacific.

But between the flood of tears, I did notice the crystalline softness of the snowflakes dropping all around me. It’s funny how it hurts more in those moments: the times where, despite your best efforts to be solely sad, you see some sliver of glory that makes you keenly aware that beauty is there too.

What I am saying is that much of life is determined by the gaze with which we look upon it.

And much like a garden, this ‘gaze’ is cultivated in our inner world. Are they flourishing places, our minds? Well attended to, nourished with good, true, and beautiful things?

Thankfully, this tending of our souls is refreshingly practical.

Welcoming Winter: 7 Practices

1. Waking up softly

Hands down the hardest part about the days leading up to the winter solstice are the long, sunless hours.

Shuffling in a dark kitchen for my morning coffee, only to know I’ll be bookending my day with that same darkness when I finally close my laptop at 5pm…Yeah, it’s depressing.

I’ve found that how I wake up greatly changes my outlook on the day, and even my circadian rhythm.

This alarm clock coaxes me out of bed with soft birdsong instead of a monotone beep, and mimics the orangey glow of sunrise (turns out that not jolting awake to an air-raid siren iPhone alarm will actually make your day better. Who would’ve thought?!) It really has made a difference for me.

P.S. Please save your pennies and do not fall for the $200 Hatch one.

2. Moving

We’re not static creatures. We shift and change and grow with our passing years and experiences.

As we pass into the threshold of a new season, I find myself craving new forms of movement. This winter, I’ve been loving hot yoga and heated pilates classes. There is something magical about sweating in a 94 degree studio (made even more wonderful by the horrible contrast of driving to the gym in subzero temps). I love how my muscles respond to the heat, relaxing and allowing me to bend more deeply into new shapes and flows.

3. Romanticizing

It’s easy [for me] to get sucked into digital discontentment during these seasons of forced hibernation and slow evenings. Less time outside too easily translates to more screen time. Easy to compare my life to others on social media, or even to past versions of myself while scrolling through my camera roll.

Instead, I’m attempting to steward these in-between moments. I’m organizing my closet for the second time this month; I catch myself smiling as my hands pass over vibrant colors and diverse textures, thanking God for every wool sweater and every ugly alpaca sock.

I’m also taking long hot showers and lighting candles.

Thrifting funky quilts that I can snuggle under while sipping tea.

Counting the books on my bookshelf and re-reading a favorite.

Blasting my frozen windshield with heat as I drive over to my friend’s house for a movie night.

Playing a new song (or two) ad nauseam before tucking it into a beloved playlist whose cover I’ve carefully christened with a photo.

Making snow angels in my bikini before I run back into the sauna where I know I’ll be greeted by friend’s laughter, sweat streaks, and the clean smell of eucalyptus oil.

I give credit to Gen-Z for rebranding good old fashioned, unsexy “gratitude” into “romanticizing your life.” I like it.

4. Inviting light

Light is the most powerful natural signaller for our brains to release either cortisol (AM) or melatonin (PM). Sadly, winter doesn’t offer us many sunsets or rises. Day melts into night in the subtle lengthening of the shadows. I find it really disorienting to not be able to “mark” the passing of a day during the long winter evenings. Red light therapy has been a needed substitute for those hues naturally produced during the warmer months.

No need to buy a pricy red light face mask or get strict about it. Just swap out your reading light for a red bulb to get an ambient glow at night. Or better yet, make it a habit to brighten your space with candle light after sunset.

5. Lingering

I’m making more soup these days. Soup that simmers on my stovetop for hours, building my anticipation with it’s increasingly rich aroma. I turned off the clock on my oven and I don’t wear a watch, so I naturally avoid ticking off the moments or over-scheduling myself.

I’d like to reside here more, get comfortable with the open stretches of under-stimulated living: hours of music-free work next to my big window, built-in afternoon prayer moments, and one or two completely obligation-free evenings.

What a perfect time for ego-death? For a manual rewiring of my fast-paced, efficient brain? Thank you, winter.

6. Making an escape plan

Hope has a lot to do with anticipation. As a kid, the twenty-five days before Christmas seemed to stretch on endlessly. And sure, the excitement was more of a lust-filled curiosity about the boxes under the tree than any sort of religious piety. But I do miss that feeling — that intoxicating, eager energy which only waiting brings.

So, I’m planning small trips. They’re road marks to break up the long months of winter and opportunities to dream about warmth, adventure, and the familiar hugs of friends and family.

I mark my calendar and wonder, Which film camera will I bring with me this time? Which book will I want to read on the plane? I count down the days, and suddenly I realize that winter won’t be forever. Somehow, that makes me unclench my jaw.

7. Learning

This season will not come again. Soon, summer will bring the sun and with it farmers markets and bonfires and book clubs and backyard concerts and swims at the local waterfall.

What do I want to build now? It’s a question I’ve been asking as a way to honor her — that summertime Lily who is missing the slowness of the evenings I enjoy now.

I really can’t think of a more perfect time to both prune and to plant: to reflect on what has been, and vision-cast for what is to come. To learn, to grow, to evolve with intention.

• What areas of my life can I use this time to steward in a new way?

• What’s something I’ve wanted to learn for a while, but keep putting aside?

• What’s a question I can invite God to answer as I make time to meet with him?

This winter, I’m putting my hand to the entrepreneurial plow. I’m learning about accounting and LLC taxes. I’m connecting with new clients and branding my work. I’m digging into client projects, while reading books about typeface design and color theories. I’m praying this prayer.

All this tilling and toiling, with deeply-rooted hope for an abundant spring.

Have you wanted to finally finish Crime & Punishment? …wanted to learn Spanish? or teach yourself how to knit? or write poetry? or take ballroom dancing lessons?

Now, friend. The time is now.

Oh, and maybe don’t share it on your Instagram Story. Sometimes the best pastimes are the private ones with all their singular boredoms left intact.

Tune in to the seasons, listen to your life

Unfortunately our lives aren’t books with nicely-organized chapters and clear plot lines. They’re messy. And confusing. And chaotic. And fleeting. As such, the quality of our lives are not determined by big theatrical moments. No, our happiness largely depends on the little joys we find scattered within our days. Coffee chats with friends. Meaningful work days. Yummy meals and clean laundry. The smell of tea when it’s perfectly steeped.

Our lives are days,

and our days are mere moments.

It is here that we get to begin to shape the stories of our lives — here in a broken world full of uncertainty and stubbed-toes and politics and doom scrolling.

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

—Frederick Buechner, “Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation”

Here (and no where else!) is where we get to curate our lifespans through the environments we build and the habits we repeat.

And in the end, I can’t help but think that we who know Jesus ought to be the ones deriving the greatest joy in seasons which seem most bleak. After all, we’ve read this tale before haven’t we?

The surprising discovery of light in dark places.

Redemption threading a golden line through suffering.

Honey and locusts in the barren desert.

Thankfully for those of us who still wrestle with a melancholy hatred for winter, there are not many “ought-to’s” or “should’s” in Scripture. There are, however, huge margins of grace for weary souls — a warm hearth for our sorrows to snuggle close to, rest upon, and wait for spring.

Graveyard robberies dappled in moonlight.

The crackle of lightning over Scottish moors.

The bloodshot frenzy of a young intellectual tormented by his own visions of grandeur.

Mary Shelley lived for the drama. And if I’m honest, so do I. It’s why I’ve found myself returning again and again to my dog-eared copy of her 1817 masterpiece Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus.

It’s not just any old gothic horror: it’s a jumbled catalogue of scientific inquiry, existential angst, and provocative social commentary — all wrapped in a story as gritty as they come.

So when I curled up to watch Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 adaptation last week, I promised myself to set my expectations low…to not be one of those annoying people who triumphantly parrots “well the book was really much better than the movie.”

And yeah, while it did stray from the original at some minor plot points, I was too engrossed by the sheer delight of it all to even care.

It was an absolute visual feast.

From the meticulous costume work and hypnotic green-tinged cinematography, to Jacob Elordi & Oscar Isaac’s dynamic performances, every aspect of the 2.5+ hr runtime was completely spellbinding. I felt that Del Toro’s creative liberties to the storyline (Elizabeth’s relationship with the monster, Victor’s backstory and home life, his dying patron) actually worked to translate the narrative to screen in a way that drew me further into the turbulent inner worlds of both Victor and his monster. So much so, that when we paused for the inevitable two-hour-mark pee-break (apparently I have the bladder the size of a pea), I actually said out loud, “I’m so sad, I don’t want this to end!”

But what kept me glued to the screen wasn’t just the stunning scenes.

It was what drew me to the book in the first place: the elusive, haunting, universe-sized questions it left unanswered — and the ways those questions are eerily similar to the ones we’re facing in our culture today.

Something I appreciate about Shelley is that she’s not trying to convince us of something. At least, not overtly.

She set out to write a good story, and like any good story writer, pulled from the universal human experiences and tendencies...and then took them one step further.

Her characters aren’t byproducts of a moral she’s trying to get across, as if they were mere chess pieces on a board of “literary themes.” No, their angsts and mania, unmet desires, obsession, confusion, and complex heartaches…those are what fuel the story. Those are what compel us to dive into madness with Victor, to sting at the pang of rejection with the monster. It’s shown, not told.

This is where we meet my one major qualm with this movie: it felt a little too on the nose. I cringed a little when William used his dying breaths to mutter, “Frankenstein, you yourself are the real monster,” and when Elizabeth runs to the arms of the grotesque monster, so quickly recognizing his innocent nature as a foil to Victor’s arrogant one. I don’t know, maybe it’s my literary snobbishness coming through. But it felt a bit conjured, like “We get it, okay?”

In those moments, the magic slipped a little for me.

Still, these heavy-handed beats were rare missteps in an otherwise masterful adaptation. When del Toro trusts his audience—and he does, for most of the runtime—the film becomes something far more interesting than a simple morality tale. It becomes an invitation to wrestle with the same questions that have confounded readers for over two centuries.

It’s interesting to note that the concept of God seems to be pretty absent in this film. Instead, we see a mysterious firey demon figure that appears in Victor’s dreams. Victor bargains with this frightening apparition, begging it to give him his heart’s desires. When Victor does achieve his goal by creating the monster, the interactions with this thing become increasingly more terrorizing and nightmarish.

Given that belief in God was a common artifact of the European culture at that time, it wouldn’t be outlandish to include religious undertones to the movie. In fact, it feels almost subtly assumed that as a man of science, Victor couldn’t possibly be religious.

When he first unveils his work to the public during his disciplinary tribunal, those who’re casting doubt upon his work are the stuffy, wig-doning academics… archaic, patronizing figures who seem to be behind the curve of progress. They cite God as evidence to support their rejection of Victor’s efforts, calling his work “an abomination toward heaven.” Victor immediately claps back with a brazen call towards communal “defiance” in a higher power.

And yes, as a Christian, I’m quite biased. But I would’ve loved to see Guillermo’s script delve into this idea more. I found the lack of overt spiritual symbols a bit odd and disappointing. Instead of God, Victor places his fear and hope into this Greco-Roman statue demon. It makes me curious to know why Del Toro chose to add this angle. Is it a cop-out, a way to explain Victor’s obsessive nature while simultaneously avoiding any mention of God? Or is this figure meant to symbolize the manifestation of Victor’s inner dialogue? It felt a bit haphazard to me, like it was chucked in there to add some pizzaz and other-worldliness.

Some of the more subtle nods to Shelley’s style come through in Part 2, during “The Creature’s Tale.” It’s no coincidence that the monster’s first read is Paradise Lost — one of the most epic renditions of man’s fall from grace. Milton’s work does the heavy lifting the film’s script wisely leaves out by inviting us to ask questions about what makes humans human.

As we watch the monster begin to grasp what it means to be created, to be loved, and to be abandoned, we see another character parallel: Victor and Lucifer. Their downfall is classically Edenic: blinded ambition, untethered from any sense of moral boundary.

And just as the Tree of Knowledge is morally neutral—neither good nor evil in itself—so too is science. Victor’s crime isn’t that he pursued knowledge. It’s that he pursued it without temperance, without responsibility, without love. He reached into the charnel house not as a healer but as a god, and in doing so, created something he immediately despised and abandoned.

“All my speculations and hopes are as nothing; and, like the archangel [Lucifer] who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell...I trod heaven in my thoughts.”1

It’s no surprise, then, when the monster becomes the dark gravity of Victor’s life…a constant pull of death, vengeance, and bitter ill-will that begets their final chase around the North Pole.

Overall, I think the film (like the book) does its best work in the spaces between the dialogue: in the creature’s face as he watches the De Lacey family through the cottage window, yearning for connection he knows he’ll never have. In Victor’s sweaty brow as he stretches sinew across strange bones, and in the desperate shrillness of his voice as he refuses his creation’s one request at happiness. In the final confrontation on Walton’s ship, where Victor, facing death, finally understands that he has denied his creature the very thing that makes life bearable: the possibility of being known and loved.

As the credits roll, I’m reminded of the harsh beauty of narrative…of its ability to carry us to both conclusions and questions in the same arc. It’s here in the wondering where our minds (and hopefully our hearts) are expanded.

• What does the creator owe to his creature?

• Can we be held responsible for the unintended consequences of our ambitions?

• What is true deformity? …and what does it mean to be human?

• What shapes a soul—the circumstances of its creation, or the world’s response to its existence?

Honestly, my spine shivers at not just the thought of sewn and piece-mealed bodies, but at the real horror: the idea that the very achievement of our ambitions can become our downfall. If we lean in and listen closely, both Mary and Guillermo will show us that our limitations, though often seen as constraints we must cast off, may actually be our saving grace.

We’re living in Victor Frankenstein’s world now. We’re building artificial minds, editing human genomes, playing with forces we barely understand. And like Victor, we’re often too dazzled by what we can do to stop and ask whether we should, or what we owe to what we make.

I like to think that Mary Shelley knew this — anticipated that her story would be so much more than a creepy tale. Maybe Del Toro sees the timeliness of this, too. And if his Frankenstein accomplishes anything, it’s this: it makes us feel the weight of creation, the terror of abandonment, and the long shadow cast by our own ambitions. Not through moralizing, but through something more powerful: a story so good, so beautifully crafted, that we can’t help but see ourselves in it.

Even if we’d rather not.

…the last time you noticed the texture of the air as it enters your nose, your throat, your ever-expanding lungs (do you smell it? that musty fiber of leaves caught in your neighbors lawn mower, the smokey exhaust of a passing car…)?

…the last time you saw — really saw — the shimmering of shadows on sidewalk?

When was the last time?

Today I found myself sitting across from my spiritual director, her serene smile pixelated on our Zoom call, trying to make sense of the Grand Canyon of distance I sometimes feel sprawling between God and I during prayer.

Why, I wondered, does ‘listening prayer’ feel vague and elusive?

It’s a phrase thrown out by trendy Christian authors, but one I’ve never really heard properly explained. Maybe it’s too mysterious and personal to put words to. I get that. But I am at a point in life where theories are vexing and the honesty of specificity is comforting.

What does it mean to parse out God’s voice from mine?

To wisely discern, versus to anxiously spiral?

To engage in faithful spiritual practice, versus to toil at my own righteousness?

And if I’m here, and I’m listening, and I’ve showed up, and I don’t hear God…what then? What does that mean? Why aren’t we talking about that?

There’s far more to unpack here, the least of which is my often-transactional view of conversations with God and the pressure of the “oughts” I put on our time together — I ought to feel xyz, I ought to be in Scripture each morning, I ought to be always advancing in spiritual maturity…Where do those come from? Not God, I think. I imagine Him laughing at our made-up rituals. He’s much more easy-going than we imagine, much more capable of transforming our simple silence into fruitful growth. After all, he’s the vine and the vine dresser (John 15:1-12), why wouldn’t we trust that that is enough? Let it be enough?

But setting these thoughts aside for a moment, I take a breath and return to Christy’s angelic gaze as she gives space for this processing, this being. “Oh Lily, how human you are!” she says triumphantly after a pause, laughter lines playing around her lips. I laugh too. Yes, yes I am aren’t I. What a beautiful thing it is to let yourself stumble upon the answers to questions you didn’t even know you were asking — to feel your own fallibility as you float in the wake of a God who is anything but.

To be, in short,

oh-so-human.

The question persists though. How does one listen to God?

For starters, one must quiet the mind.

To quiet the mind, one must quiet the body.

And to quiet the body, one must notice.

This is a truth so universal that cultures throughout history and across continents have adopted it into their religious context and given it fancy names like meditation. Really, though, it’s quite simple (and also Biblical, just read the Psalms). It’s a truth that says, tap into your five senses. Embrace your limited experience of the present moment. You cannot meet God in the future, because you are not there yet. Be here, and find grace all around you.

Easy, right? Not so much. In a world full of algorithms and trend cycles and chaos and output, settling your mind might be the most counter-cultural act of your day.

Christy suggests I try out what she calls a “sensory practice,” which I immediately rename a “delight walk”: a slow, plodding journey around my neighborhood to breathe and observe and awaken. To lay aside hustle, abandon the need for God to speak only in lightning strikes and floods, and welcome his still small whisper (1 Kings 12:11-12).

“Expectation,” she says, “is quite different than expectancy.” I let that sit in my mind for an exhale or two. I’ll be thinking about that one for at least the next week.

Our time crawls to a close, and as my mouse hovers over the red “Leave Call” button I think about how funny it is that mere observation is often the very road that leads us to a destination of joyful worship…That our emptiness is the space where Christ can fill us.

And yeah, this paradoxical idea isn’t new to me.

I’m a creature of repetition — I encounter the same spiritual truths again and again, little circular lesson that begin with “I thought I already learned this!” and end with, “Oh how little I knew.” In one moment, I have prayer all “figured out,” and the next I find myself in a context in which I need it in a new way.

So it is with silence, solitude, and slowing down.

So opt out of the chaos for a second.

Take a walk.

What do you notice?

Breathe, observe, rinse, repeat.

Meet God today.

For context, I grew up Orthodox Presbyterian, meandered my way into Anglicanism during college where studied theology formally, then spent a brief stint in a charismatic community in Appalachia, and have been in and out of non-denominational churches ever since.

So you could say that I’ve sort of seen it all when it comes to Christian faith traditions. While that definitely doesn’t make me some kind of expert on all things religious, it has made me feel a bit like a modern day spiritual pilgrim.

Through all of this, I’ve never been to a Catholic service.

So why did I attend mass today?

Well, it’s complicated.

The “why” pt 1: a personal note

I recently moved to the midwest which I’ve quickly discovered is an abundant haven for three things: football fans, corn, and churches that seem to have either very Baptist-like vibes (think grey hair and potlucks), or youth-group level hype. Nothing wrong with either of those cultures, just not for me.

So, with no Anglican churches within a hundred mile radius, I somewhat reluctantly found my way to the backlit stages of a young, mainstream evangelical church. Great people. Solid teaching. I’ve even joined a small group and met some folks who’ve since become dear friends.

But a year later, and I still just can’t seem to find my footing on Sundays. No matter how often I close my eyes or how boldly I try to raise my hands or how diligently I take notes during the sermon, there is always something lacking in it all for me. I feel distracted, dissatisfied, and hyper-aware. And I dread it each week.

For years now, I’ve felt a stirring within myself to explore Catholicism. It’s an impulse I’ve kept deeply hidden and haven’t felt the courage (or energy) to explore until last Sunday, when I suddenly felt my combustable church-angst nearly bubble over. The purple strobe lights and repetitive words during worship set? Yeah, they were going to make me implode. Again, nothing wrong with that for anyone else. No judgement. Spaces like that have impacted me greatly in past seasons of life. I just finally had a personal moment of self honesty where I thought, “Lily, you hate this. This is not the type of environment where you’re finding peace with God. Like at all. So stop trying so hard.”

This realization was quickly followed by a hesitant, “…and maybe that’s okay…?”

The “why” pt 2: I’m not alone

It’s not that I don’t see my emotions intersect with my spirituality. In fact, I find myself welling up with tears on a weekly basis during random moments where I’m hit by the conviction that God is real. And you know what brings me there? Poetry. And pretty buildings. And meeting people who have suffered — truly suffered — and have that gritty kind of faith that feels real and worth having. And sacred rites. And contemplative prayer.

So maybe those moments aren’t so “random” after all.

I have this itch to know that I come from a greater spiritual history that extends beyond my own individual experience of God. I want to feel safety under the cascading umbrella of the traditions and saints who’ve come before me. I want to know that others asked the same questions I do today, wrestled with the same doubts, mysteries, and paradoxes. And dangit, I want it to be beautiful.

I’m not alone. Research shows a huge trend in Millennials and Gen-Z converting to Catholicism for that very reason. Because let’s face it, Catholics seem to have a better hold on the transcendent ideals. Goodness, truth, and beauty are literally etched into the walls.

A 30-year-old New Yorker put it this way: “The church really communicates a degree of reverence that I didn’t find in the more liberal, laissez-faire approach of nondenominational churches.”

This, coupled with the fact that my personal favorite authors (O’Connor, Chesterton, Teresa of Avila, Augustine) all happen to be Catholic, was presenting a pretty good case for trying out a parish.

So, all that to say, mass was different than any faith setting I’ve experienced so far…

Without further ado, here are 5 things I noticed about Catholic mass as a Protestant:

1. I looked up. A lot.

I think I gasped when I walked through the doors. Or smiled. Can’t recall which. Either way, I probably looked like a weirdo.

Why? Because from the outside, it was just a brick building with some cool bell towers. But the inside was alive.

Buttery yellow walls intersected by arcing white spires.

Sunlight filtering through twelve gigantic stain-glass motifs.

Wrought-iron stations of the cross propped up by regal columns.

I was giddy with the delight of it all. I felt like I was in on some secret — like I had pried open an oyster and was stepping inside this glowy pearl of ancient tradition. The hugeness of it all set me strangely at ease. Bye bye drop panel ceilings and folding chairs! Never a bored moment here! I was finally in my proper place in the cosmos and was feeling grateful my wandering eye had many places to rest.

Don’t get me wrong, the humility of one-room churches is its own kind of stunning… the ordinary communion of sourdough and five dollar wine around a friend’s kitchen table… the welcoming ease of hitting your knees on coffee-stained carpet. Jesus spent a lot of time in places like that.

We can’t forget that gathering and togetherness was the primary mode of ministry before apostolic succession or gold-trimmed spires or theology books.

But wow, intentional beauty offers something irreplaceable to the heart. By creating that space of awe within us — a tiny exhale of wonder — it reminds us of the complexities of our own souls. Without words, it speaks to us of how depraved yet angelic, fragile yet important, fleeting yet eternal we are. Those are truths that simply can’t be hammered home in a good sermon. They must be experienced in the senses by subtle glory-filled glimpses.

On a practical level, beauty also demands our attention. After all, it’s hard to think of anything other than the loving gaze of our creator when you’re staring at a ten foot tall crucifix image of him. And Catholics, well, they just get that.

2. It was long.

The whole shabang was 80 minutes to be exact (no mingling time included — everyone scattered pretty immediately).

Ionically, I found my attention held throughout. Maybe it was because I liked the flow of everything. Or maybe it was because I had to pay really close attention if I had any hope of correctly lip-reading the priest as I stumbled over the onslaught of new liturgy. (Try kneeling, crossing yourself, and saying scripture all at once I dare you). Overall, it was a bubble of time that made me feel very uniquely set apart from the normal routines of my life.

3. There was no sermon.

Speaking of flow, the sermon portion of the service — commonly referred to as a ‘homily’ in Anglican traditions — accounted for only about 30% of the total service time. Which if you think about it, sort of makes sense. If we take Jesus seriously at his words, “you’ll know them by their fruit,” (Matthew 7:15-20) then our faith should look a lot more like doing than thinking. God is an experiential God. The Gospel stories are literally just various versions of Jesus saying, “Come and see,” and “Go and do.” I’m pretty convinced that God cares far more deeply about our activation than our right thinking. Of course, you can’t have one without the other. But there is a reason Jesus told us to be like children — the most dependent, playful, and open-minded people in any culture — and spent the majority of his time calling out the Pharisees — the academics, authors, and thinkers of his time.

All that said, the brevity of the homily felt like a refreshing realignment that gave Scripture and embodied practice the main stage. The gravity of the worship didn’t ride on how charismatic the preacher was that day (as it so often does in the evangelical church). Instead, reading, singing, kneeling, silence, the passing of the peace, and holy rhythms of veneration were the main mechanisms for worship. A lot more moving and a lot less of the sit-down-and-take-notes part. Seems like a pretty natural hierarchy, right?

4. Everything came back around.

Everything circled back around. The Old Testament reading reflected the message of the New Testament passage, and the homily tied into what we were doing with our bodies. The message reflected Scripture without complicated diagrams or a three-bullet-point outline projected on a screen. It was all just narrative. The priest spoke to us directly without notes. Scripture was the backbone, and cultural references were just the extra spice. When we got to the “Christ died…” part of the response to the question, “Christian, what do you believe?” we bent our chests forward and heads down, as if entering the grave with Jesus. When we said “he rose and ascended to the father…” we too rose and lifted our eyes. The whole experience felt circular. The narrative echos tickled my writer’s brain and made me feel like I was in a really well-told story.

5. I felt embarrassed / convicted.

Not for what you might think — my terrible singing voice squeaking at the insanely high pitch the old lady at the piano was leading us to…or my furtive left-to-right glances to see when I was supposed to kneel…or the way my cheeks flushed red when I was one of the only people to not go up to receive eucharist (because I don’t know, am I allowed to do that here?!)…and the rapid fire realization that oh my god, I think I was supposed to do something with that holy water…Honestly, none of that really commanded my focus. The newness kept me engaged and made me imagine I was on a fun adventure. What was slightly embarrassing: me remembering that past Lily furtively prayed for Catholics as if they weren’t saved, who pictured mother mary lifted high like a golden calf surrounded by eery votive candles and Latin chants and creepy screened confession booths etc etc. While some of that might be true — there are statues and odd half-singing half-speaking recitations — it’s all about perspective. Because fair, if I didn’t know some of the history behind these things that we were doing, I’d be pretty freaked out. But there is intention in every single part of it:

• The swinging of the incense over the Bible at the altar signifies that the words of Christ are like a sweet smelling aroma of wisdom to us (2 Corinthians 2:15, Philippians 4:18).

• The bells wake us up, alerting us that something important is about to happen in the service.

• The act of crossing oneself brings to life the mysterious concept of a trinitarian God.

• Kneeling while confessing our sins helps us acknowledge their weightiness.

• Saying “peace” to our neighbors reminds us that we’re not alone in our spiritual journeys.

I knew all of this going into it, but if I hadn’t, I’d have been pretty lost. Because unlike the Anglican churches I’ve attended in the past which have painstakingly detailed pamphlets with each call-and-response printed alongside explanations for all the practices, this place provided none of that. I was on my own. No apps or lyrics on a screen here. Everyone had the prayers and liturgical responses memorized.

I’m still unsure how I feel about all of this. In some ways, I appreciate the fact that there is a sense of ambition and diligence required in order to get into the cadence of it and understand the heart behind each odd thing that happens. I’m not for watering down truth just to make people feel comfortable the way the ‘seeker friendly’ movement of the early 2000’s emphasized. There is virtue in the well-worn course of time needed to ingrain the rhythms and words onto your heart. But on another level, the knowledge gap required to actually enjoy what was going on felt expansive. I kept thinking holy cow, if I didn’t know some of the history behind the things we’re doing, I’d be totally thrown for a loop. The Gospel is simple, and sometimes all the trappings take away from that. Surely there is some kind of middle ground…right?

I don’t know, verdict is still out for me on this one.

In conclusion…

So in conclusion, no, I’m definitely not Catholic. Nor do I intend to convert any time soon (praying to Mary was just real odd, sorry).

In all seriousness, I think the moral of the story here is that comfort rarely provides very fertile ground for growth.

Someone much wiser than me said, “Lily, Jesus never loses things. Especially his children, who are the most precious thing to him.” There is no risk in following the questions of your inner voice or tracing the recurring patterns you notice in your life if you’re doing it with God. God is truth. Trust him enough to believe that he isn’t threatened by any lie you might stumble upon along the path, and that he cares for you enough to guide you through it all.

Ask questions. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Let God expand your imagination.

It was that time of day when my mom bustled around the kitchen with flour on her nose, plunking down pots and pans with violent determination. Apparently, this was called “cooking,” but to me it looked more like a beautiful warzone where dog-earred recipe books were the unlikely soldiers on the frontlines of the latest dinner adventure. It was late enough in the afternoon where our childish attitudes were well-worn enough from the day to no longer be tolerably cute, and we were ushered outside like clockwork, trusted to devise our own fun. It was an unspoken rhythm I found oddly reassuring. Plus, the dancing mirage of afternoon shadows was coaxing me outdoors.

Where does a twelve year old brain go when it’s overstimulated and free from the walls of domestic life? My feet always took me to the farm driveway.

One quarter mile of taupe-colored gravel — “sandy rock chips” my dad had called it as truckloads of the brown stuff were unceremoniously dumped in front of the garage.

To me, it was so much more than that. It was a runway for my overactive brain to float and flitter with the cicada sounds.

One thousand, three hundred and twenty steps worth of imagination space.

The delivery guy had gruffly pronounced that it was a “sand mix,” but I knew he must be wrong because it didn’t remind me much of the ocean. This wasn’t the soft mounds I waded through in my flip flops each summer as I trailed behind my grandpa on the Florida beach. This was the tougher stuff — the kind of path my brother and his friend transformed into a crucible of barefoot manhood. I loved watching their faces contort in half-swallowed grimaces as they tried with all of their scrawny might to ignore the pain of sharp edges on soft arches. “See, it’s not that bad!” they’d croak in adolescent shouts. No, no scent of salt and sunscreen here. Just the musk of Ohio dirt and charcoal dust and kid feet.

I crane my neck like I always do to catch the sun rays flickering off my unruly blond hair. Mom laughingly begs me to stop wearing it in a pony tail twenty-four-seven — “It’s beautiful. Just run a brush through it, will you?” she coaxes — but the pine trees don’t mind the way it tangles down my back. At least, they’ve never told me so. You see, I wonder about trees. Some people think they’re awfully somber and stern, and most people don’t think about them at all. But something about the way the bark tickles my skin when I climb and the way the leaves rustle together like waxy cymbals has me quite convinced that trees are sacred things.

Today, the sky above me is the same color as the robin eggshell I found yesterday — a powdery sort of blue speckled with clouds that curls into grey when my eyes finally reach the horizon line. Suddenly my gaze jolts down to my feet, where I feel something wet and lukewarm dripping. Ah yes, the contraband coffee I’d stowed beneath my jacket before leaving the house. My friend Solomon was always drinking coffee, and he was a lot cooler than I was, so it seemed like a good thing to learn how to love. It smells a lot like how I imagine the underground tunnels in “The Princess and the Goblin” did to the princess — earthy and acidic and gritty. I wonder why adults like it so much. I also wonder if Princess Irene felt excited or scared when she first stood face to face with a goblin?

It’s funny to me that those two emotions often travel in a pair. Excitement and fear… they like to wrestle around in the pit of my stomach before I do something brave, like rowdy guests I don’t remember inviting into my small frame. The taupe liquid (I admit, I added a generous amount of cream) is sloshing onto my feet in little brown specs now. My own fault really. I should’ve known that walking and lumpilly-shaped ceramic mugs don’t go well together. I sigh.

To me, the driveway isn’t the goblin realm I’ve found in fantasy books, or the firewalk of manhood it is for my brother. And yet it holds its own sort of magic. Here I only have one rule: to be a patient witness to whatever secrets nature will throw my way (a bunny dashing across the road or a patch of clover growing between the rocks) and to resign to whatever ambling thoughts decide to walk alongside me.

I reach the end of the driveway and turn back home.

Josh Nadeau recently posted a little writer’s competition with the prompt, “Tell me something beautiful - make the ordinary sing.” When I sat down to write, the image of my childhood driveway immediately popped into my mind. “That’s weird,” I thought. But pretty soon a thousand small memories made it clear. Suddenly I was there again in my imagination. It was full of peace and wonder and ordinary drifting thoughts.

I think everyone should have that — a place that held the many versions of yourself as you became a not-quite-adult little human. I have a hunch that those places are holy.

So as much as this is a specific memory of mine, I guess it is also a broader case for childhood haunts. They really only exist in retrospect. There’s both magic and sorrow in that.

But hopefully, they also awaken a sense of gratitude and sentimentality within our souls every time we revisit them.

Hopefully, they remind us just how small we still are.

And hopefully, as you read this you found your own “driveway” — your own symbol of your younger self. Maybe a tree you’d always climb. Or a bike route around the neighborhood that made you feel adventurous. Some moment or thing that brings back the warm memories of a home cooked meal, childish thoughts, and fresh air…..

I’m forever grateful for the wide open space to amble and wander. It taught my mind to do the same.

Instead of the usual line of bumper to bumper traffic, people are scattered across the highway like carpenter ants. Some are scurrying on the periphery of the chaos with arms extended, iPhones out keen to capture the mayhem without getting caught up in it.

Others are moving in packs, exercising their right to protest through peaceful chants and raised flags.

To my horror, still others are digging through the rubble on the asphalt, collecting huge chunks of concrete to hurl at anyone in an LAPD uniform, the National Guard, and (of course) ICE agents.

Rubber bullets are pelting through a fog of smoke and tear gas at a strip mall.

No, I’m not describing some post-apocalyptic thriller I just watched. It’s the news. And I’m seeing it all through the 5 x 3 inches of my phone screen. It’s far away, but real. And it’s hitting home.

It is strange to feel emotional proximity to a place I no longer live — to feel sentiment for streets I don’t walk, for people I no longer see or have never even met.

The issues there feel very present in my heart here.

But beyond that feeling of deep unease and the occasional firey political conversation over a drink, these events don’t change any particle of my life here in the midwest. Not really. Not in any measurable way. Here, none of my neighbors are getting pulled from their homes. The hispanic family that runs our local taco joint isn’t getting handcuffed.

At first there’s a pit in my stomach and I’m angry. I’m angry at the show of military force that feels so unnecessary and even intentionally provoking.

Angry that an estimated $134m of my taxpayer dollars are going to fund this.

Angry at the fear that is running rampant through the city of angels, tearing apart families confused by an immigration system so fraught with inefficiencies that many aren’t even sure if they came to the US lawfully or not.

I’m angry at the politicians on the right and left who’re using this as yet another ego grab — yet another opportunity to use either militaristic or falsely altruistic language to disguise their true narcissistic motivations.

And yes, I’m very angry at protestors throwing cement rocks at law enforcement and touting a kind of burn-it-all-down mentality that feels miscalculated, historically ignorant, and emotionally volatile.

And then just as quickly as it came, the emotion fades to muted background noise.

Here I am, sitting in a quiet midwest neighborhood seeing it all through pixels and headlines.

It doesn’t feel quite real.

What should I make for lunch?

There is a dangerous disassociation that I’m noticing in myself and my generation. It’s not just that we’re not proximal to issues — that not all of us can just go to Gaza or Los Angeles to fact check Apple News.

And it’s not just that we’re too gullible to what we see pumped into our social media feeds (though we are).

No, this issue is beyond both location and technology.

I think it’s one that is buried deep in the human heart.

Let’s call it an epidemic of “sedentary rage.”

Now more than in any other generation, we have a front row seat to witness heart wrenching disasters and conflicts happening in places thousands of miles away — with absolutely nothing required of us in response.

So naturally, compassion fatigue begins to set in, and its arrival triggers a domino effect of emotions.

Fatigue, because you can’t care about every issue. People who try usually end up in a constant state of frenzy about something or other, alienating themselves from people around them and reality itself. (We all know a few and they’re not the most fun to be around, let’s be honest).

Our fatigue stems from non-specific hopes — we hope that those women we saw on the news who got trafficked in a tribal conflict in Ethiopia are freed, we hope that aid gets through Gaza, we hope someone puts a stop to the concentration camps in China.

Those of us who are especially optimistic may let these hopes take on real shape and form, searching for ways to act or at least reposting something to our Instagram Stories (because we all know that’s *super* effective).

But mostly, we just let them exist as vague sentiments towards vague injustices.

Then, hope subtly blurs into despair.

Soon that despair snowballs into bitter resignation — “well I guess this is how the world is, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Frustration builds as we’re presented with issue after issue, without any sort of actionable response — nothing to do to keep the darkness at bay. We’re unsure of the outcome and sit only in the present reality of clickbate and crisis and rubber bullets and flames and long captions and outrage.

It’s not ill-intended or even lazy.

It’s just sedentary rage in an age of information as TV reporters spew the word “unprecedented” in every other sentence.

It’s frustration immobilized by inaction, angst painted over in broad strokes of hazy confusion.

So what to do?

I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.

But the older I get, the more I’m convinced that collective wisdom is the safest antidote to sedentary rage.

And by “collective wisdom” I don’t mean group-hangs with people who vote like you.

I mean taking a deep breath while looking at the headlines. Logging off every once in a while, taking it all in doses. (I know I know, not everyone has the privilege to unplug from issues. I get that. But distance is a way we accept that we are not God. We do not have ultimate capacity to both know the evil that exists, and perfectly respond to it with the proper grief. We don’t have room for that in our crowded, futile, human little hearts.)

Then once you’ve breathed, ponder. Ask a friend a question about what they think about it all. Do some more research, yes, maybe even listen to a podcast. But don’t let yourself get either consumed or complacent. Be present with the responsibilities you have and the people right in front of you. Think before you repost something (a lesson we all learned in 2020 after calling all the lab-leak theorizers crazy and dangerous, only to find out they were right…#humbling). Pick up your phone and call your grandparents or that neighbor from ten years ago who you used to chat with around summer bonfires. Swap ideas and don’t be afraid to dialogue with people who might not see the world in the same way you do. After all, two people can watch the same news clip and see two very different stories.

So ask.

And listen.

And breath.

And maybe even laugh.

And pray.

And then release, and be where your feet are.

Maybe there is a world in which we do our due diligence — educating ourselves and confronting issues instead of shying away from them — while also embracing the fact that there is so much mystery and nuance in this world. A world in which we make room to lament, while also gripping to hope — a hope that paints a picture of a place where tears will be no more.

Thank you God, that justice is a guarantee even if we can’t always see it served out in our lifetimes. And thank you God that we don’t get to define it.

Desperate to escape my house after working on my laptop all day, I disregarded the weather alert on my phone and hopped on my bike.

A half hour in, I felt rain start to spit violently onto my sweaty jeans. The wind pressed me backwards like a giant hand reaching down from the gray sky saying “HALT!” My thighs burned and my tires felt like they were revolving in sludge.

Before all of this — before the obvious signs of impending deluge — I noticed that everyone else seemed clued in about the storm before me.

And by “everyone” I mean nature.

Gnats gathered in droves and flies buzzed around wildly (a sure sign, my mom once told me, of coming rain). Rabbits scurried across the bike path in zig zag patterns and squirrels hissed from branches above me. Even the trees seemed to have an eery quality about them, as if they were bracing for something…

Isn’t it crazy that nature has this symbiotic relationship to itself? Without meteorologists or weather apps to warn them, birds are so clued in to the changing electricity in the air that they prepare themselves minutes — even hours — before a storm touches down.

I was lugging my bike up my front steps (finally home) when it hit me that I want to be like that with God.

I want to be clued in to the work of the Spirit before it happens, able to recognize signs around me as the patterns and messages of an intentional world.

I wonder what kind of intuitions are already threaded deep into the fabric of our beings — what kinds of knowledge and premonitions that we might have access to — were we not so worried about reacting and scrolling and being “informed”? What are we missing out on, hurried by our own worry, that’s plainly written in nature? After all, are we not more important (and wiser) than the birds? (Matthew 6:27)

My prayers are often born out of these little curiosities and passing thoughts. So I suppose that this is my prayer today: that I’d learn how to “walk in the Spirit,” (Galatians 5:16) tuning my being to be in-step with the story of nature and her Maker.

For now, I’m going to sit in my doorway and listen to the rain.

So I figured, why not read 30 books this year? 40, perhaps?

But then something happened.

The books happened.

Goodreads will tell you I’m 10 (and a half) books in. Pretty great for the 9th of April I’d say. What it won’t show is the hours of speed walking through midwest neighborhoods, Beats headphones vibrating, a narrator sending words into my brain at 2x speed.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being busy. I really do.

But this is when it hits me. And by “it,” I mean the words I’m listening to.

I slow my steps, roll my shoulders back, allow the blur of my tunnel vision to soften into the shapes around me.

It’s quite inconvenient really. I was on a roll.

You see, I’ve been reading a lot of books from Christian mystics and contemplatives (book list below). And the message again and again seems to be, “Slow down.”

What good is it to saturate yourself in the best content if it doesn’t actually change your way of being in the world, let alone the way you see it? I mean actually change you in some small fractional way.

So what exactly do I mean by “slow mysticism?”

Mysticism is not blank-brain or wishful thinking.

It is not the moral ambiguity of relativism.

Neither is it the tranquil nothingness of eastern dualism.

It is paradox: the ability to hold seemingly contrasting truths in the same hand.

If we’re honest, all of Scripture relies on this supernatural balancing act, coaxing us to realize that faith is much more than intellectual assent (ie virgin mother. human divine, Jesus. filling by emptying. being born by dying). Rather than cerebral intent, faith grows from a deep heart understanding that accepts things it cannot (yet) quite rationalize.

It is the felt awareness (and acceptance) of the fact that we see “partially and imperfectly” (1 Cor 13:12). It carries both sorrow and joy in the same soul.

Mystics are often people who’ve both suffered deeply, and loved honestly.

They’ve experienced a “dark night of the soul” that has exposed them to the worst parts of themselves, and left in their place deep heaven-shaped scars on their hearts.

In the words of Richard Rohr, the contemplative life requires you to live in the “naked now,” accepting what is. Non-polarity thinking teaches you how to live with creative tensions, paradox, and how not to run from mystery. It transforms — slowly and without much effort of our own — all of these patient yearnings into compassion, mercy, and kindness.

Meaning, you can only see others and situations with eyes of grace if you yourself are open to divine love.

CS Lewis puts it this way: “You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.”

And the “grain of the universe” is faith, hope, and love. It is what we were designed for. And love, at its elemental definition, is union. Love is our constant invitation into connection with God and self. Faith, too, relies on the echo of resonance — the conviction that something matches “with the grain of the universe” so to speak — and requires our trust.

But the reality is, these three virtues feel quite inefficient and often quite painful. There is no way to accept love while also trying to contort or control it. It’s much easier to run through life. But as you do so, the faces around you begin to get grainy and pixelated by your own concerns, your own aims, your own agenda. (And as anyone who has ever sprinted will tell you, it will also make your shins begin to hurt terribly.)

I don’t think we were built for express living. We Americans should know this better than anyone.

We don’t have time to cook dinner, so we stuff drive-thru hamburgers in our mouths with one hand on the steering wheel. We work longer hours to achieve higher status while our relationships pay the price. We scroll and frantically curate our lives, all while feeling increasingly detached from any real sense of community or “tribe.”

Good simply doesn’t cut it. We need to fit more in, in less time.

But it’s costing us our virtue — and our lives.

Roughly 50% of adolescents in the U.S. are chronically ill, trapped inside school buildings that look a lot like prisons. CEO’s are working at all hours, but 96% of them feel their mental health has declined rapidly in their role (and two years ago, a study reported that 19 executives actually died in their offices — a record high).

Even the western church’s obsession with identifying problems in ourselves (and fixing them with moral tactics that sound more akin to Oprah than Jesus) is causing us more stress, not less.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m not a very loving person when I’m exhausted.

You get the point.

Love = union.

Union = slowness, surrender, honesty.

Faster does not always = better.

The incredible mystery of it all is that loving union with God and self is often not achieved through concerted effort.

It isn’t a matter of “more.”

More productive days.

More reflection.

More being “good.”

More spiritual routine.

All of these things are sometimes beneficial grids to help us build up to loving union with God, but when done in a hasty manner without time to exhale, they more often leave us restless, judgmental, fear-driven, anxious, and exhausted. More efficient or “good” at the spiritual life, but less in tune with the Spirit and our imago-dei souls.

So now I’m aiming to hold conflicting emotions together instead of parsing them into bits and pieces.

I’m intending to be more than do in my spirituality, believing that even if I just sit silently in God’s presence, I’ll walk away transformed in some tiny way because the Divine One is just that good.

What if I created as much as I consumed?

What if I sat and breathed between tasks?

Maybe the days would go by slower, take on their own shape and texture as I invite God into the in-between moments.

Maybe I’d notice people I hadn’t before, and my new sense of open-ness would attract unexpected conversations with strangers in coffee shops. Who knows.

For now, I’ll start by taking my headphones off and putting pen to paper.

————————————

• “The Universal Christ” & “The Naked Now” — Richard Rohr (didn’t agree with all of Richard’s conclusions, but felt refreshed and challenged by every word)

• “Thirsting” — Strahan Coleman (my favorite modern mystic)

• “Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality” — Tyler Staton (currently halfway through this)

I’ve seen the signs.

The breeze tussling my hair instead of freezing it.

The scent of dirt, earthy and sweetly bitter.

The trees flaunting rain-soaked bark.

These promises of summer’s arrival feel explosive in my chest, sparking a feverish expectation.

It’s a welcome change and a feeling that’s been dormant during the sleepiness of winter months.

There are many reasons I could give to explain why I haven’t been sharing here: sickness (norovirus, influenza, *and* pnemonia in one month…), writing my first book (as a ghostwriter for someone else, don’t get too excited), figuring out how to salvage my sanity during weeks of sub-zero temps (secret: it’s hard), travel (family diaspera), etc.

But those don’t really matter.

Hibernation has been shaping me in ways I can’t quite put words to yet.

What matters is that spring is here.

I see it all around me and I feel it in my soul, too. Words that’ve been buried deep within me are scratching their way to the surface, demanding to be unearthed like the loosening soil. They are coaxed as if by their own necessity. Reawakened from my secret journals and private ponderings.

Something I’ve realized during this season of (seeming) stagnation is that these stretches are rarely—if ever—actually stagnant.

Life rolls on.

There are meals to be cooked, friends to love, careers to churn away at, teeth to brush.

In all things, we are pushing away death.

We push back at the inevitable cobwebs of time with belly-aching laughter and lonely tears and long candle lit dinners and heated games of Catan.

We’re always intaking, pondering, wrestling.

We’re always creating, cultivating, building.

Even when it feels a lot more like the unromantic day-to-day existing.

A lot of my writing in the past year won’t ever see the light of day. It will not be read by others or celebrated or even acknowledged. I think that just a few months ago, that would’ve seemed like artistic failure. A loss of something. An identity crisis. What happened to the days where catching inspiration seemed as automatic as breathing?!

But I’m loosening up. Getting older. Realizing that secrecy is quite beautiful and stagnation has a subtle undercurrent.

It just takes a little time to see the ripples.

I’ve put a lot of creative energy into building a relationship I very much cherish and creating ‘home’ in a place that often makes me feel like a foreigner.

I’m listening to an ungodly amount of audio books.

I’m spending my first waking moments sitting in the same chair, clutching the same mug of coffee, and offering my same groggy attention to an ever-wakeful God.

These moments are an un-making of death and are perhaps the greatest of creative acts.

They are slivers of redemptive light disguised as ‘just living.’

Hopefully, I’ll find the time and desire to write here more consistently.

But maybe I won’t.

I’m discovering that creativity and productivity are often at odds, and I’ve begun to accept the ebbs and flows of that tension.

If you too are just existing — in “observation mode” as one of my dear friends calls it — that is okay.

And do you know why?

Because spring is coming.

And it is here already, blooming up in places we least expect.

In my pain,
I retreated to my mind 
to escape the sorrow of the world.

I traveled to the faraway corners of my soul
and found it was a beautiful place full of 
dancing words and delicate ideals.

A river ran through it called Bubbling Curiosity,
and the sky greeted me by name as Deep Tranquility.

Here I laid my hurts aside and came to life again.
I met the starry-eyed child I'd once been
while the blood of worldly wounds dried on my heart.

I went to my mind
and found it was a beautiful place.

The sun is warming my back and my lungs are expanding with morning air. The air! This is the first morning it is cool enough to give my breath life. It hovers around me like a little autumnal ghost. I giggle. The seasons are changing and I get to see it.

Soon it will be too cold, I think. Soon I’ll be crunching over the frost-covered spindles of frozen ground instead of lush grass. The leaves on the oak tree are already turning a subtle amber. Then snow. Snow will come sooner than I want. But not yet. Not yet, I tell myself.

This is what I do every morning. Walk out my door. Stuff the key into my sweatpants pocket. Shuffle across the street. Walk between the two oak trees and cut through to the back of the garden. Let my thoughts wander.

I cross behind each plot — one, two, three — before cutting through the middle. This is my favorite spot, the one where the most vibrant flowers are growing. The sunflower stalks are long dead now, withered and brown. But these ones — mums and echinacea and another flower whose name I don’t know — these ones are in their prime with buds always angled towards the sun. Their colors are so saturated I can hardly believe it. I feel like I’m seeing them for the first time every morning. Which is why this is my route.

My coffee is lukewarm now (and everyone knows lukewarm coffee is worse than no coffee at all) so I unceremoniously flip the mug and water the grass with the brown waterfall.

I love this walk. I love this walk because it is secret and serene and simple.

The key is to take nothing.

I walk slowly, nowhere particular to go. I wear whatever clothes I woke up in, not minding what my neighbors think. I leave my phone behind, and with it any need to be available. Sometimes I talk with Jesus and feel as if he is walking beside me. But mostly, I feel him in the peaceful silence. Even the expectation of how He will show up is something I try to leave behind.

Less is more, that is the only rule of all sacred mornings. The less I take with me, the more I notice around me.

Winter is coming. But today I’m not worried about that. Today, I’m wearing coffee-stained sweats and smiling at the sun for just a few moments before the day begins. Today, I am home.