The first book I read was a general book on imagination. Then I came across several books on the topic of biblical imagination. Biblical imagination is not specifically the theme of my imagination exploration but as I have been reading I am not sure there is enough distinction to even say there is more than one kind. Biblical imagination focuses on how we use our imagination to understand the bible, the world God created and the people he created, etc and then use it to live out a more authentically faithful life. General imagination is doing the same things but thinks it is doing it without God or the bible. As a Christian one of my main goals is to understand who God is but I have found that any pursuit of understanding this world He created and this life He has given me automatically leads to a greater understanding of who He is and how to read the bible whether I name it or not. So not actually sure biblical imagination is a thing that needs to be specified. All imagination leads to a greater knowing of God if we let it. The question is, will you let it? Other’s will nuance their definition more and disagree with me, that is fine, I won’t even fight them, but for this space, they are the same thing.

So what am I thinking when I say I am fostering my imagination? My personal thoughts are that I am making space to explore ideas, new and old, listen, allow for wonder, ask questions, try new things, etc so I can know God and experience Him in a way that creates opportunities for me to understand the world, myself and others better.

When I ignore or shut down my imagination, when I shame creative thoughts, when I am afraid to try something new, and stop asking questions, I tend to become stagnant in both my daily life and relationship with God. My life honestly becomes boring and exhausting. People become annoying. Plus, I never feel like I am doing anything right.

When I am being imaginative, when I let my creativity run wild, I don’t even care if I am doing it right or wrong, I can pivot at a moments notice, I am learning, growing and becoming. It is all part of the beautiful story of my life. I am running through the meadow with God not sure where I am going but trusting He won’t lead me astray.

That last line reminds me of a story my niece told at my Father-in-Law’s funeral which was such a beautiful example of both who he was and who God is when we trust Him.

They were on a nature walk and came to a field full of butterflies2. My niece is terrified of butterflies and was afraid to go forward yet it was clear that was their only option. My father-in-law told her to get behind him and hold on. He would handle it. As they started walking forward he began waving his arms wildly and making noise to scare them all off as they walked through making it safely to the other side. Can you help your granddaughter overcome her fears and get her safely to the other side without a little creativity and imagination? I don’t think so.

More thoughts will come throughout the rest of the year and coming year on this topic as I have officially decided to name this substack “Fostering Imagination”! (Way to bury the lead half way through the post Melanie.) It feels a little scary to commit to an idea and think I might have to actually start sounding like I understand what imagination is and why it matters. But if nothing else I will continue to explore how I foster it and share stories of how it is shaping me. And I am guessing my 84 subscribers will not be upset if I go off topic occasionally.

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This Month’s Research:

“Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age” by Katherine May

This is not a Christian book but written by the same woman who wrote “Wintering” which I read last winter. I love her writing style and her observations about life. I don’t agree with everything she concludes as she goes about her life and I wouldn’t chose to explore everything she explores but at the same time I appreciate the way she processes them, the observations she is making. One of my favorite things about reading books by non-Christian authors, particularly those who have a bent towards spirituality as she does, is that you end up seeing so clearly how God is at work in everything and working in people’s lives even if they haven’t yet named it. Her imagination is working overtime as she engaged in the world trying to understand her life and she is discovering God in the process.

“We have to find the humility to be open to experience every single day and allow ourselves to learn something.

And that is easier said than done”

“Discipling the Diseased Imagination” by Justin Ariel Bailey

I am not quite done with this book but I am enjoying noticing how many of the themes I have explored this year, silence, curiosity, reading, storytelling, are integrated into each of his ideas as he engages faith.

“The imagination is the facility that enables humans to live creatively in God’s created world. It allows us to perceive the world but also to play with possibilities that go beyond what is given. This combination of perception, projection, and play allows us to make something of creation’s glorious potentialities.”

One of the things I love in this book is that he explores the question what if it is all just pretend. And while he argues that it is not, he also acknowledges that even if it is, there is value in the pretending.

“are believers imagining God’s presence, or are unbelievers imagining God’s absence?”

Cultivating Biblical Imagination with Caroline Cobb

This isn’t a book but a morning workshop I went to at our church at the end of July. Caroline Cobb is a musician who was in town doing a concert at our church. Although we sing several of her songs on Sunday mornings John and I did not go to the concert3. Although we heard afterward that it was fabulous and wish we went. However, when it was advertised that she was going to do a workshop on biblical imagination the day after the concert I could not sign up fast enough. Caroline is thinking about how cultivating a biblical imagination helps her in her work writing music and sharing what she is learning and exploring. It is where I first heard about “Discipling the Diseased Imagination” and the book I plan to read next, “Eat This Book” by Eugene Peterson.

She shared this CS Lewis Quote:

“Reason is the natural organ of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

One of the questions we explored was: Why does creativity and imagination matter? As John and I chatted at our table group about this question I realized Lent and Advent are really about imagination. They help us understand and experience an aspect of the biblical story and the message of the bible by engaging our imagination, by asking us to sacrifice for a season, by setting aside time to imagine, prepare, listen, and explore the two most important stories of the bible, Christ’s birth and resurrection. Can we really understand that at all outside of imagination?

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Other Imagination Activities this Month:

Reading:

“Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke

I am not even adding a picture of the cover in this post because the book is ridiculous and I have no idea why it has garnered the sort of excitement it has or why it is being turned into a movie. It could have been good, I was excited about the topic and looking forward to what it might say about the influencer/trad-wife world. I was sure I was going to love it based upon the description and the hype. So when I started it I was enjoying the ride assuming it was taking me somewhere. But about a 1/3 of the way into the book I started to suspect it was not taking me anywhere and half way through it was clear there was not going to be a redemption arch for any of the main characters who were all more like charcactures. I was right, the ending was ridiculous, the whole book is an exploration in deteriorating mental health. I just wish that was the point of the book. Unfortunately I don’t think it was. You may agree or disagree with me as you wish. It seems online to have garnered both love and hate from all walks of life. No judgement if you loved it.4

New Experience:

Gallbladder Removal

Mostly this month was leading up to my Gallbladder removal surgery and recovering from my surgery. While the surgery went well the anxiety was an ongoing management task. It was just last summer that I had surgery gone wrong which has altered my life and so going under again even for a simple procedure felt a little daunting. I put logic brain in charge of my feelings and got through the surgery pretty casually. The aftermath clarified what was actually traumatic about last summer’s surgery, the blood clot. Because that was the conversation I had with the surgeon, told the nurses about while they prepped me5, and generally was monitoring every pain I felt outside of the incision pain wondering if it was the beginning of a blood clot. Logically I knew none of them were but I had to walk through the question for several days before I started to trust my body. Eventually I felt better enough that it stopped being a question. Then last Friday I had an emotional crash day. I hadn’t felt depressed like that in such a long time I was worried about what was going on. But when I mentioned it to my hyper vigilant husband he said, “today is day 9”. The day I got the blood clot last summer. He had been counting6. It is so fascinating to me how even when the active part of our minds forgets, the background mind is still there remembering, preparing and processing. I crashed because my mind and body were in protection mode. I bounced back literally the next day having gotten past that day my body feared. Our bodies and minds are fascinating. Unclear how getting depressed was going to save me if I had indeed gotten a blood clot that day but here we are feeling better and stronger each day and not worried about a blood clot at all.

Community:

Receiving a Meal

OK I haven’t talked about fostering my imagination through community yet but I think it is worth a shout out. I randomly mentioned to someone at church the Sunday before my surgery that I was having the surgery. Just casual like you would say I am going to Chicago for the weekend or I’m getting my teeth cleaned Wednesday. She immediately offers to bring us a meal because she clearly did not pick up on my casual attitude. My first instinct was to say no. I was certain I would be fine in a couple days and would not need help feeding myself. But I quickly decided to let her talk me into it because I thought, “why am I saying no?” While I was struggling to imagine my need this woman saw it and wanted to serve us with a meal because she could see what I was not seeing and as a part of her community she wanted to help. She wasn’t saying we are incompetent, can’t afford meals, can’t order food or microwave a frozen meal. She wasn’t saying my husband doesn’t know how to cook or that I don’t have any friends to call on if I am in need. She was saying, I see you, I have something I can give, I care, you are part of my community and you have permission in this moment to be served. Please take it. So I did. And it was delicious and made that night after the surgery that much easier to navigate. Could we have fed ourselves if she didn’t bring a meal? Yes. But were we so glad to have that taken off our plate? SO glad. Thank you so much Naomi.

How did you foster your imagination this month?

September is going to be a month of fostering my imagination through prayer. How does imagination enhance your prayer life?

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Our daughter has been dating someone new for the last 6 months. (Is he still new after 6 months?) I won’t know which guy is “the one” until she is walking down the aisle, but this guy is a contender. We have liked all the guys she has dated to some degree or another but they all have had what she called yellow flags which we suggested she monitor to decide if they were going to turn green or go red. As we all know, yellow usually turns red…

The new guy isn’t perfect, he has his quirks and issues like we all do, but no waving flags. So the question we’ve been asking her is, are these the quirks and issues you want to be dealing with the rest of your life? And, frankly, are yours the ones he wants to be dealing with?

After 36 years of marriage I have come to realize that John and I are perfect for each other because our quirks and issues blended together exactly right. My areas of weakness are his strengths and vice versa. His quirks and issues were exactly the ones I wanted to deal with the rest of my life.

Through the ups and downs of life and marriage there have been times where I have not wanted to help direct and support him in his areas of weakness and I am sure he would say the same. But at this stage we know both our lives flow better when I help him with his weak spots and he helps me with mine. We feel loved and comforted and safe and happy pretty much every day in our marriage when it functions that way.

But I told you last week I was going to write about the fact that we might only be half way through our marriage! Crazy, right? We got married one year after high school graduation so our marriage also represents the entirety of our adult life. And we could both live 36 more years1.

At 55 I am more than 1/2 way through my life but not a lot more. I still plan to work 15-20 years and then there could be potentially another 15-20+ years to…? When I look at all we have done in the last 36 years, the good and the bad, the joy and the sorrow, the triumphs and the losses. The daily every day. It has been wonderful and a joy to share with John.

Also, it has been exhausting.

When I think about how many more fights we might have, how much loss comes with this next half of life. The disappointments, the failures, the grief. And really, how many more new generations of people who will change the world and culture and how many more times we will need to adapt, learn more, think more, be more! I need a nap.

But also, how many more joyful encounters we will have, how many of those future generations will be part of our life, how many more great nieces and nephews and, prayerfully, grandchildren might come along. More friends to make. More to learn and grow, more adventures. More opportunities to love and receive love. More time to better get to know each other. More time to know God.

Which of those attitudes I focus on as we move into this second half of our marriage and adult life will determine how I feel in this second half. So obviously I am going to chose Joy and Adventure, supporting each other along the way.

Here is to 36 more years with John embracing our quirks, loving one another and standing side by side in this ever changing life and world we share.

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Healing Walks

I am a little over a week out from gallbladder surgery. It was a largely uneventful surgery and my recovery is moving along nicely. The fact that I delusionally hoped it would be a 2 day recover instead of a 2+ week recovery not withstanding.

Today I was finally able to walk more than a few blocks from my home, I have been taking multiple short walks around the block this past week waiting for the pain to normalize2 and my gut to decide what sort of schedule it would like to follow. My spectacular bruises around the incisions are yellowing and I think there is hope I will actually forget I ever had this surgery.3

I have 2 trails both a little under 1/2 mile from my front door to chose from on my longer walks. One direction walks me through the neighborhood to a trail entrance which cuts across our little downtown area taking me to my church and back in 2 miles. The other is in the opposite direction and takes me down the main road, through a lighted intersection and past industrial buildings. But once I reach the trail this section is much more charming following a lake and wooded scenery that makes you feel further away from the city than you actually are. I usually take the city trail for the simplicity of my life but today I wanted to see the lake. I brought my phone so if I had a break down my husband could find me and pick me up. Knowing I have a back up plan always makes me braver.

As I walked, sans anything in my ears because I am learning to embrace silence, I saw someone go by on one of those electric bikes and had a fleeting thought about wishing I had one to get to the trail faster. But immediately realized my goal was not to get this walk over with. As if walking to the end of the lake trail and back was some imperative of my day, a box I needed to check. Walking is the entire point of taking a walk! Such a weird thing to have to remind myself. So I walked on.

About half way I was noticing the soreness of my healing muscles a little and decided to pep talk myself by saying, “you are strong!” But I immediately questioned that thought. Because what I was implying to myself was that somehow I was innately strong and needed to push forward in this innate strength. The reality is that while I do have strong walking skills, it is because I have spent the last year building them as I slowly healed from last years surgery. And the reminder I need right now is not that I am strong and can push through, what I needed today was a reminder that building that strength is a process that happens one day at a time, that I need not push to some level of wished for strength but simply be present in today’s strength. Experience tells me each day my strength will grow as I return to my walking habit and pretty quickly I will be back to a point I can push myself faster or harder. But today success and strength simply look like getting there and back.

Is this becoming an walking newsletter?

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A couple weeks ago we moved her to St Paul. As we were enjoying the city and imaging the life she will live there I thought, “we could move to the city and become city people.”

We’ve been in this house 8 years which is getting close to our average so I guess my brain is starting to think about changes. I know it isn’t time for a move, good chance we will live here longer than anywhere else in our life. But, what I have started wondering is, what is next? And the many options on how to build an empty nest life have felt both overwhelming and exciting.

We plan to continue working in some capacity for another 15-20 years but what will that look like now that we don’t have kids to raise and will hopefully only be supporting ourselves by the end of next year? We could both take remote jobs and travel while working, we could move to the city, we could move up to our cabin. We could both change careers and build something new before we retire. We could start new hobbies, take a class in something interesting, try new things, meet new people. We are no longer tied down by children who need stability. We don’t have to stay in this lane we stepped into when we were in our 20’s. It is never too late to reinvent ourselves. So we find ourselves asking the question: Who do we want to be in this next phase of our life?

Technically we already reinvented ourselves when John went to college full time in his 40’s and I got my real estate license after being at home for 17 years. Not sure in the middle of raising your kids is the best pivot point but it was the right one for us. What I am observing lately is there have been a lot of pivot points. We have just gone from pivot, to pivot, to pivot for 15 years, some planned, some not. And so this season of our life isn’t so much about reinvention but about gathering together all the ways we have changed and figuring out where to settle, to stop moving and go about the rebuilding of our life. For a long time it was just change, adapt, heal, become…over and over. Which one of the many new directions we have discovered will we now chose to follow?

As our life settles down, the chaos gets contained, the grief dissipates, the healing starts to feel more complete, the responsibilities shift and a little normalcy lands on our doorstep, I am wondering what is this season going to look like. Not because I want to mix it all back up again (even if a move into the city sounds like a fun adventure) but because with so many changes over the last 15 years, I don’t know which direction to settle.

We have started imagining how our life could look over the next 2 decades. We would like to take care of ourselves enough to still be active into old age. We want to keep our careers flexible enough to travel. We want to stay connected to our family. We also want to have new experiences and try new things. We want to experience the fullness of this world God has created and we want to be content in the corner of the world He has placed us.1

One interesting thing I have observed lately is how many people our age are starting new things. I like to say John is in his artist era and as we meet other artists at various shows and about town we are noticing most of them are around our age and in a second career. They maybe dabbled while raising a family but with this new season of life and time to give to something else they leaned into their art, their creativity, their imagination. Our culture tends to celebrate young success but the reality is that for most of us, this moment, in our 50’s, is where we really start creating, really start finding our passions and defining our success. This is where our imaginations begin to flourish. This might be the beginning of the last season in our careers but it might be the best season. This season is full of momentum, of passion, of clarity and so much more.

So while I am overwhelmed by the unknown of what is next I am also excited by the possibilities.

As my 20-something niece often says,

“Let’s Gooooo!”

What questions do you have about what is next in this season of your life?

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This past month I have been using my one note app to jot down thoughts as they come to me so I have something to write about. Problem: I do not write detailed enough notes to know what longer thought I might have had for any of these.

“Discipline the diseased imagination.”

What was I going to say about that? Where did it come from? I don’t think it was out of my own brain, I think I heard it somewhere. Where do you suppose I heard it?

OK I just googled it and found Discipling the Diseased Imagination1. It’s a book! Why does discipline and discipling have to be basically the same word? Very different mindsets when I think to discipline my imagination vs disciple my imagination.

It is now in my amazon cart along with a couple other books on imagination I have wanted to read this month. I have decided that this month I am fostering my imagination through educating myself more on the academic thoughts around imagination, aka read some books on the topic. More on this at the end of the month.

Update: I was telling John about this post and this note and he recalled that I heard about it from some guy I was talking to after an imagination workshop that we went to. Which makes sense.

“How do you do it all/keep it together? O fall apart regularly”

Again, no note on where it came from, who said it, what I wanted to say about it. Just a random note jotted down. Pretty sure the O is a typo and it is supposed to be an I. Are these notes really better than forgetting all together?

When I googled this one I got a whole list of ways to keep it together when you are falling apart. All of which I find annoying. But as I ponder this note I appreciate it because it seems to be saying falling apart is actually how you keep it together.

I am fairly certain I heard this on a podcast? It might have been a singer/songwriter? My brain has some fuzzy images. I think I typed this in rush hour traffic2?

I think any woman who has ever been asked how she does it all, whatever it is, keep a clean house, cook wonderful meals, maintain a career, all of the above, knows the truth of this answer. We fall apart regularly. The house gets messy, we eat popcorn for dinner, miss a deadline, and then we turn off for a day or a few days. Sometimes planned, sometimes not. And then we wake up the next morning or a few days later and get back to work. And it is OK, somewhat built into the experience of the success3. 24/7 competence is just never the truth. This is a big part of what fostering imagination this year is all about, spending time in that space we fall apart to rebuild ourselves and put it all back together.

My friend Jen posted about how her July sabbatical went recently and after I read it I told her I thought it sounded like she spent the month fostering her imagination so she could return to her creative work fresh. Sometimes we need to let it all go for a little while, be a mess and try new things.

“Cheerful Seriousness” but this time I added more! “CS Lewis wrote to someone” Apparently I didn’t want to use a CS Lewis quote uncredited and made sure to add that detail. And then I remember actually going back to look up and add the full quote to this note a day or so later because I was curious about the context. Which was in a letter he wrote to someone…”Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.”

This note I remember was referenced in the book I am reading, “What grows in weary lands” by Tish Harrison Warren. I don’t remember why she referenced it but I really liked the idea behind it. I went to look up the full quote later because I like context for random quotes but not sure it really adds anything for me. And actually now I think this is the one I jotted down in rush hour traffic.

To be able to enjoy and smile and laugh while also being serious about something, being serious about God. We can look for the fun in our serious work, we can be happy in hard things. I feel like it is true and I can laugh about serious things which I like to do. I suppose that is what I was drawn to in this quote, letting fun and seriousness comingle.

I sort of think this quote would have been more helpful in the context of why she put it in her book but this is the problem with audiobooks. I have no idea how to flip through an audiobook, find that part and then highlight it and type it in here. I would need to buy the book.4

“Numb out, Flame out, Go deep”

I believe this I noted was also from “What grows in weary lands”. Or was it from another podcast? Or some substack I read?5 Let’s just say they both came from the book but if one of the 100 of you who read this happen to also read the book and fact check me will you leave a comment so I can make any required corrections? OK thanks.

I do know this quote was in reference to something going on in her life and this was the list of choices she reminded herself she had. And none of them were the wrong answer. I didn’t write that part in my note but that is what I remember about that quote. Often when given a list like this I assume “numb out” or “flame out” is the wrong thing to do and I will be further failing in my life if I end up doing one of them. But what if they are all the right answer? What if I can go scroll my phone, fall apart, or I can do a deep dive on what my problem is and what I need to heal from it, are all the right answer depending on where I am and what I need most in that moment? That feels very affirming.

I don’t know about you but I do not believe I have ever gone straight from overwhelmed to pull it together without first visiting the numb out or flame out or obsessive researching stops along the way. There is no direct path from break down to reinvigoration. We need a stop at our version of the shut down. Sometimes we give it a fancy name like hiatus or sabbatical or retreat. Sometimes we just go sit down in our favorite chair, pull up Instagram and try to forget our life exists for a few hours.

“We could potentially be married 36 more years”

Our anniversary is in a couple weeks and we will be married 36 years. A couple weeks ago we were having a conversation about enjoying how long we have been happily married (I know, you are gagging now) and John said we could be married 36 more years. I immediately said no I did not plan to live to be over 100 but then we did the math and realized I would only be 91 in 36 years. And suddenly the idea of being married 72 years is not crazy when you got married at 19 and that means we are potentially only half way through our life together. I am planning to write more about this quote in a couple weeks for our actual anniversary but that is the sneak peak at what I am thinking about.

I guess when it is my own actual thought I can recall where I wanted to go with it and write a whole thing. (I have not yet written the whole thing but I do still believe in my ability to say a whole post about that thought.)

Now what?

Now that I have shared those notes do I delete them or put them in a notebook somewhere to archive? Still trying to decide what my digital organization system looks like and how it even works. This weekend I did something that I think will cause certain emails to go directly into relevant folders and not cause me to miss the emails I actually need to respond to. I like my business journal articles but I don’t need them in my face each day, I will go find them when I have time to review them. (How does one keep up with all the information out there to keep up with? Seriously. Anyone?) I will find out on Monday if I did that correctly, weirdly excited about that…If I did, I have a few other folders to create and send emails to. Anyway, digital organization, somehow I need to mark that I told you about these and start collecting new random pieces of information with no context for a future post.

What I did today:

Sunday after church we went to a tiny art fair at a coffee shop near our home called, “Makers Market for Weirdos”. (The name of the art show not the coffee shop). It is more our daughter’s vibe than ours but after spending so much time with her we knew we would enjoy seeing what they had. I ended up buying a drawing of a uterus that had been done with flowers. I was drawn to it. When I bought it I told the seller I had a traumatic hysterectomy last year and this felt healing. He said he drew body parts for that very reason to help people who struggle with parts of their body improve their relationship with it. There is something very biblical about learning to love the broken parts of ourselves and let that brokenness be redeemed through beauty6. I couldn’t find his Etsy site since I didn’t get his name and he signed it with his initials but there were many other options of flowery uteruses online if you need a body part redeemed as well.

Hope you enjoyed a few random thoughts from Melanie today. Any notes in your app you are questioning this week?

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My Usual Journals:

Prayer and Processing:

The first is more of a prayer journal. I write prayers in it, record thoughts about bible reading I am doing, explore faith questions, etc. The other is a general journal for recording stuff I am processing or just want to remember. Mostly frustrations I am trying to work out but also celebrations I want to name. Prayers are sometimes written in there too but mostly that is just my download journal. I might transition to my prayer journal if I get to a point where I really want to converse with God about the topic instead of just navel gazing about it. But I am a big fan of navel gazing. These 2 journals were one journal until about a year ago when I realized sometimes before I am ready to pray I need a place to vent. And I wanted to do that in a separate journal.

Monthly Thankful List:

Several years ago I hung up a white board in the space between my living room and kitchen where we record things we are thankful for. As I went about this month thinking about journaling I realized that is a journal of sorts and the one I most faithful write in. It is a place to note observations from the month and explore the question of how we have been blessed each day. While I want to write things like, “The warm breeze blowing across the grass at sunset”, most days I write things like, “Warm day”, “Soft grass”, “Friends”. But as I come to the end of the month I see each of those little notes creating a story of a month that passed and the beauty and blessings I experienced along the way. I do not save any of these lists. Don’t take pictures to look back on. I ruthlessly erase them on the first of the month and start over. My imagination for gratitude is an ongoing and often repetitive practice, many months I write the same things. The warm summer days find their way onto every list, my gratitude for those warm days lasts all summer long. I am not looking to come up with 1000 unique things I am grateful for, I am looking to foster a practice of being thankful every day in all things. I’m imagining a life of gratitude not a list of the most creative ways to observe the world. If you write poetry then make a beautiful list of phrases to inspire all of us, but if you don’t, just slap your one word gratitude on a list and see what builds from there.

Calendar Diary:

Last year I started keeping a little diary in my calendar. It is a great place to add a one or two sentence summary of the day. I find it really helpful to look back on and see how my week/month/year unfolded and how I have changed and grown. I had done an end of month summary last year in my old calendar which had an end of month summary page. This year my calendar is more pared down. I love the calendar itself but do miss some of the end of month summarizing the other one called me to do. I guess I will be in search of a new one again next year…

New ways I Journaled this Month:

Q&A a day a 5-year journal:

This month I pulled out a journal which has been sitting on my shelf for years, since 2017 according to the handful of entries in it. It is a 5 year journal, sort of a line a day type journal but there are specific questions you answer each day. You get to reflect on how you perceive the world in different ways over a 5 year period. The nice thing about the questions is that it is easy to go back and answer a few days if you don’t pull it out every day. Case in point I caught up several days today. The “what is in your refrigerator?” question was a little tricky because I just restocked and don’t know what I had in there 3 days ago so I just went with the basic, “not much”. Which was broadly true. Next year I will stand with the door open and record the details. That’s the beauty, I get to put together 5 years of reflections that will come together to reflect me and my story in a unique way.

Photo Journalism:

My favorite journal experiment this month was a sort of picture journal. I borrowed my daughter’s mini photo printer to see if I would like it/use it enough to justify buying one for myself. And the answer is yes. I didn’t use it a ton but used it to print out a picture or two from my day and write a short reflection. I started this at the cabin and John laughed when he watched me print a picture and then pull a glue stick out of my bag to attach it to the journal. He didn’t know that ever since art month I keep a bag stocked for junk journaling and of course it always comes to the cabin with me.

Now that I have discovered this medium I find myself thinking about what pictures I am taking that I can reflect on in a journal. And what other keepsakes might end up getting added to it. For now, taking a picture that will be a visual part of a journal entry has been fun. And this style of journaling has me reflecting both as I sit down and as I go about my day. What might I say about that picture I just took? In the past I have taken pictures because I had a reflective thought but then did not know what to do with them so they just become interesting pictures that may or may not have been profound when I took but now just languish in my google photos folder.

I will be doing more of this throughout the rest of the year. I have a couple pictures I plan to print out tomorrow and journal about. Same day would be my preference but a couple days later is still fresh in my mind. This way of combining story telling and journaling excites me. Can’t wait to see what I create the rest of the year.

There are dozens of other ways to journal and maybe over time I will try some more options. I have done bullet journaling but while there were aspects I liked, the truth is I don’t feel a deep need to track very many things and a general calendar is a better fit for me. From what I am gathering, if I wanted to start keeping track of things like reading lists a common place journal might be similar. Future research on that one.

Do you journal? What kind of journal do you use? One of these? Something else I should try? Do you have more than one type of journal or a master journal for everything?

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Continued Imagination Practices

What did I read this month?

The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynn Reid Banks

Earlier this month a friend mentioned she was building a library for future grandchildren. She had picked this book up at a half priced books and was reading it for the first time. I had also never read it and knew it would probably be available right away on the Libby app so I said I would read it too. It’s a pretty quick read and I finished it in a couple short sittings. It’s not a book that will become a top recommendation for me but I did enjoy the book and the development of the boys as they slowly understood the seriousness of having a real life cowboy and Indian to take care of. That growth in childhood comes in many forms and this is a great story to pass along the lesson of responsibility.

The First Time I Saw Him by Laura Dave

I read, “The Last Thing He Told Me” several years ago and enjoyed it. So I had put this book on hold when it came out and I finally made it to the top of the list. It was as enjoyable as the first one. Not too light but not too deep. Fun story, good writing. I would read the first one before coming to this one. But if it has been a while since you read the first one, as was my case, she does enough summarizing that I was able to recall the first one even though it has been a number of years. I would like to just sit around reading books like this all the time. I have filled my libby app hold box with a few options I hope fit the bill. One came in the last day of the month and so far is exactly what I like.

What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience by Tish Harrison Warren

I heard this author on a podcast talking about what led her to write this book and so related to the season of life she expressed that I knew I wanted to read it. I have been listening to it and it is excellent. She expressed a frustration with how to engage her faith, the prescribed quiet time of both our young adult lives: Read the bible, journal, figure out what my take away should be, how do I live in light of this new information (rather than how do I understand and know God better in light of this new information). I still have a love for reading and journaling but I have felt lost in how to engage the bible the last few years. Probably needs a longer post to explain why but suffice it to say, she was expressing the exact things I was feeling. She found the dessert fathers and mothers during that time and this book is how she learned to re-engage her relationship with God. I am not quite done but enjoying the book, the processing and her writing style.

I am listening to it and am not sure I am getting as much out of it listening to it. I love an audiobook novel or memoir full of stories but find non fiction is generally harder for me to concentrate on. So, things I am learning about myself.

The Bible Project

This isn’t reading per se but seems to go here. I decided, related/unrelated to the above book, to watch some Bible Project videos or listen to their podcast as my devotional act rather than reading a specific devotional (I did “My Utmost for His Highest” daily for years and if you are looking for that kind of thing I highly recommend. It just seemed like it was time to mix it up). I started with the 10 commandments series which was great. They somehow make the academic aspects of theology not quite as mired down in the mud as it often feels and explain and apply things in very understandable language. Recommend. John and I have been listening to the podcast series on Redemption while driving to the cabin, also great.

Art this month: (beside’s my photo journal, multi-tasking these categories now.)

My mom turns 80 in a couple days and my sister and her entire family (11 people in total) flew into town to celebrate at the end of July. It was a whole weekend of party activities. My part was planning a dinner at a winery. At the last minute I decided to bring a few flower arrangements to set around the space adding one more little touch. Flower arrangements are something I like to do but am never sure I am any good at it. They tend to feel off in some way I can’t name. But I did 5 little arrangements in little vases I had and I think they are some of my best creative work. Maybe I need to start putting tiny arrangements around my house instead of using the full size vases.

Curiosity/questions:

The question I spent a lot of time asking myself this month is: What is the over/under on deciding you are miserable enough to get your gallbladder out when you are not so sick you are regularly going to the ER but are mildly miserable all the time? (And the side, probably more honest, question, how traumatized am I by last summer’s surgery and am I ready to risk another?) This has been an ongoing question which I mentioned a few weeks ago. Having waited and suffered way too long with my need for a hysterectomy I decided to be pro active this time. The tests assure me it isn’t going to heal itself and I am ready to have more reliably good feeling days1. I’m rebuilding my trust with a new surgeon that assures me he knows what he is doing and that doing this electively rather than out of the ER is the safer method.

Experiences:

Spending a few days with my sister’s family this month during my mom’s birthday weekend. This wasn’t a new experience necessarily but it is a rare experience in MN so it feels fresh and new each time. Love each of them and their unique personalities.

Storytelling:

Speaking of my mom’s birthday weekend. On the second night we went around answering questions about mom. When it got to me answered my question but then said I really wanted my dad’s question (these were randomly assigned questions) His was, share a memorable meal you ate or cooked with mom. I shared a couple stories of cooking with her. We all laughed as I regaled them with my attempts to cook with mom as an adult and the clarifying experiences they were as I realized how vastly different we approach things which basically helped me understand why we fought throughout my teen years2. Good times.

And speaking of stories, I have been thinking about a woman at our church who died last month. She had been a quiet but wise presence through much of my adult life. I met Mary 22 years ago when they joined our small group of people planning to start a church. She was in her late 50’s when we met and I was in my early 30’s. Most of us in the group were in their 20’s and early 30’s, trying to figure out our life, raising children and being women of faith. Mary became a quiet example to all of us. Not because she was a teacher standing around lecturing us but because she simply lived a faithful life, loved us, encouraged us, and allowed for us to make our mistakes and recover from them. She had made her mistakes and recovered and I guess she figured we all got to do the same thing. One of my favorite Mary stories was from early in the church life. Mary was always very frugal. The kind that washed out her zip lock bags kind of frugal. And not because she couldn’t afford new ones but because it seemed unnecessary to spend that money when she could just wash them out. We had ordered ice cream from a specialty maker someone knew for a neighborhood launch event. But Mary noted it would be significantly cheaper to just buy a few gallons at the grocery store. We agreed and Mary called the ice cream maker to cancel our order. But when she called, before she could cancel, the woman enthusiastically told her she had just gotten back from a special trip to Wisconsin, driving all day, to pick up an ingredient she needed for our ice cream and it was ready for pick up. Instead of canceling and saving the money Mary said, “I’ll be right over”. She never sacrificed loving and honoring people for her frugality. Remembering that story helps me imagine the person I want to be. Re-using things when I can3, and being generous when it comes to supporting and loving the people I encounter each day.

How was your month? How did you use your imagination?

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I was remembering on tonight’s walk the phrase “solvitur ambulando”. I learned it a couple years ago, who knows where. It means, “It is solved by walking.” That is what I was doing last summer/fall when I started these walks. Solving. My pain, my recovery, my understanding of my life, my experience, my future, my fears, my frustrations, most of all my lack of control over my circumstances. Somehow each evening walk solved a little something inside me.

My morning walks are more like missions. Get up, wear work out clothes and supportive running shoes, get to the church and back with some haste, hop in the shower and get on with my day. Things are solved on those walks, which sometimes still include a little running. (I don’t know what the Latin for running is but I do know that I have processed a lot of trauma through running.) But the night walk, there is something special about it. No pressure, no rush, nowhere to go, no time crunch. I usually walk in small circles so I can do one loop or 5 loops depending on how I feel, where my mind takes me and what I need to solve. Tonight I did 2 loops and decided to write this. I got out the basic structure and was inspired to do a few more loops. I stopped when it seemed I might be at risk of working up a sweat.

I didn’t go out the door tonight with a deep need to solve anything, no frustration that needed to be walked out, or any particular hurt to heal, just a desire to walk, but with a knowing that it would also solve. Something known, something hidden, something tired, something lost, something coming. A few laps around my neighborhood does not change any aspect of my life, and yet things can feel solved. It is a reset of my mind, a winding down of the day, a separating from life for a moment to be present in my body.

Whatever is happening in life, good, bad, hard, easy, happy, sad, solvitur ambulando at night.

Trust me. Worth it.

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Other ways Solvitur:

When we mentioned this phrase to a friend a couple years ago he took it to AI to see what other Latin phrases might be helpful. Here are a few of my favorites:

Solvitur scribendo “It is solved by writing.”

Clearly I think things are solved by writing. This entire substack might just be me solving things by writing.

Solvitur legendo “It is solved by reading.”

The answer is always in a book. Either information or escape. Both solve.

Solvitur ridendo “It is solved by laughing.”

See my last post2 on why I believe this with all my heart. It’s pretty much a life theme.

Solvitur amando “It is solved by loving.”

Always. So beautiful. Ultimate truth.

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July marks the half way point of this year. I love goals and lists and planning so it is irresistible for me to not spend at least a moment or two reflecting on how things are going at the mid point of the year.

In January, along with a planning calendar, I bought a fun notebook, which was going to house all my notes for the year, one notebook to rule them all instead of a couple for the various topics in my life which I always mixed up and so really just had 2 or 3 random notebooks with a jumble of different topics. I abandoned 2 or 3 partially finished notebooks to start fresh in January. Something I do not typically do. I like to finish a notebook but told myself it was OK, I can make independent decisions and I can decide to leave half a notebook blank and start fresh in January.

What was fun about the new notebook is that the spiral was at the top instead of the side so I flipped the pages over the top rather than flip through it like a book. How fun! How creative and unique! I was going to love this notebook!

I hated that notebook. If I needed to refer back I couldn’t just flip through a few pages, I had to literally flip over and look at every page along the way. It was just awkward. There is a reason the book style is so popular. That notebook is still really fun but just not at all practical as my daily notebook to organize my whole life. If you are looking at a notebook like that just know it is not a daily, organize your life, type notebook. I’m sure it has a purpose but I don’t know what it is yet. I bought a regular notebook to take over as the one notebook to rule them all at the end of March, which was probably 2 months past when I decided it wasn’t working.

As I was reviewing the notes in the old one a couple weeks ago to determine if I needed to continue keeping it handy or could put it on a shelf, I came to page one where I listed my goals for the year. I made very broad goals mostly related to relationships this year rather than the SMART goals they teach you to make and as a result I am largely on track despite not looking at them or remembering them for 6 months. I was intrigued by one particular goal.

“Embrace being me”

Probably inspired by my decision to get a unique notebook. (Or maybe the reason I got it?)

I’ve been thinking about how this idea is playing out for me this year. It is a little bit of a twist on “who is Melanie” saying I am someone good and can just enjoy the path I am on. Not a rethinking of who Melanie is but an embracing of who Melanie has always been.

I am an enneagram 71. I first found enneagram when I was a couple years back to work and trying to find my groove. I happened to come across a few podcasters talking about it and 2 of them were also 7s. Listening to them reflect quirky things about my personality in their own stories and realizing those things are part of who I am, not right or wrong, good or bad, just me, was so freeing. I might not react to things like you but that doesn’t make the way I react wrong. Example: I am a laugher. If you tell me about a major crisis you are having I might laugh and make a joke about it. Nothing personal, I think all my trauma is hilarious. And I don’t think laughing about it dismisses the real pain of a situation. I will still also be horrified for you and check in on you regularly.

A year or so before I started learning about enneagram I had a boss who told me she did not think I was taking my job seriously because of something I had laughed at that she felt needed more reverence. I felt so put down and called out and like there was something fundamentally wrong with me because that is how she presented it. Our personalities clashed in several ways and that wasn’t even the last straw of the job but it was certainly on the pile. Healing came a couple years later as I was listening to Bob Goff on a podcast talking about their beloved family retreat, and if you know anything about Bob we are talking beloved, beloved, he has said and written a lot about it. Then it burned to the ground when they were gone one summer. In the podcast talking about it he said, “And then it burned to the ground! ha ha ha”. And something in me healed. It was not funny, it was real and sad and I am sure there was deep grief there. I know because if it was me I would have said it exactly the same way, laughed and still held deep grief. And I knew in that moment I was OK. I might still need to read a room when it came to laughing at not funny things but I did not have to apologize that I reacted to life and hard things in that way. It was the beginning of me learning to embrace being me.

There are dozens of other Melanie quirks but I think the biggest part of what I want to accomplish in embracing being me is just embracing the journey I am on, the life I have, the boring daily and the fun adventures. Making mistakes, being awkward, trying new things, exploring a style not quite on trend, changing my mind, being impulsive, saying the wrong thing, not always accomplishing what I want to, half-assing projects, and still loving who I am. Loving when my daughter tells me that she told her boyfriend something I said and they both think it is weird2. Loving how I do things, how I think about things. Loving when I do nothing all day, forget an appointment, or a friend’s birthday, or that I already have 2 bottles of lime juice at home while grocery shopping. It’s fine! It’s good! I’m embracing it. Embracing being ME!

Since this feels more like a lifelong pursuit than a one off lesson I am not going to put a check mark next to Embrace being Me on my goal list just yet but I do think half way through the year I am on track.

How are your goals looking this year?

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What did I write about?

As I observe my second year of posts, a little snapshot into a small part of my life, I would say the themes have been recovery/health, imagination, asking the question “who is Melanie” and what is she doing next? My daughter moved out last August, we are moving her to another house in a couple weeks and somehow I suspect she will never live with us again. Admittedly we have taken up all the space in our small house since she moved out so I am sure she feels like there is nowhere to move home to. I hope she knows we would always accommodate her, but also, I think we all enjoy our independent lives so maybe stay the course with roommates…Navigating and enjoying empty nest is definitely a theme of my life.

Last fall I had an idea I wanted to have somewhat of a summary theme post at the end of every month. They are my favorites from other writers. I decided I would riff off my post about perspective. Considering perspective each month by looking back, looking ahead and looking at my feet. I did a couple of those posts and they were fine. But then I was inspired to spend this year Fostering my Imagination and reviewing each month’s theme has become what I end each month on instead. Many other posts have been related to that topic this year beyond those end of month posts and I am really enjoying both the end of month theme and sharing it here. Will I stay with it in 2027 or go back to perspective. That is a decision to far off to consider.

I also started this year with an idea to share several thoughts on our infertility journey. Not the in the trenches stories but the things that have stuck with me more than 20 years after we left that part of our story. I think these stories were ones I have told or thought about many times over the years and needed to finally write out. Have I shared all the stories or are there others? For now those stories feel complete.

And I have shared some plain old random stories and thoughts for no reason but they were on my mind. Stories of my childhood in the woods, and making a record, Stories about the books in my house, Minnesota winter, and more. And did I mention we went to Europe? Dublin and Paris?

The Business of Publishing a Substack

As I enter the 3rd year of writing here I wonder if it is time to take myself a little more seriously and jump some hoops to find more readers and make this a real thing or if I am enjoying the organic nature of my growth and this small little community of readers, most of whom apparently do not like to leave comments. (Hi, I don’t bite, feel free to join the conversation.) I currently have 83 subscribers, 2 of whom leave comments. (Thank you Sierra and Jen).

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Click that box and you too could get a call out in my 3 year summary post comments. :)

A few people have paid subscriptions and have earned my eternal gratitude and appreciation. It covers a couple lattes a month. Thank you.

I have wondered if I should do a push to bump myself over 100 subscribers. You know just to say, “hey, I have 100 subscribers.” Pretty sure if I was a little more consistent and posted in the Notes section of substack with regularity I could get there. I do get around 100+ views of my posts, sometimes less but most of the time just over 100 people read my posts. So clearly I get a few random people. You can follow without subscribing but I don’t see anywhere I can look at that number so maybe I have more than 100 people with followers and they run across my posts in their notes feed? For no real reason I have not been posting my substack newsletters on Facebook or Instagram. When I have I tend to get a bit more traffic but for reasons I cannot explain I have decided to keep this separate. Should I suck it up and post there or, again, just let this be a sweet little place that will come together as it does and not go chase down people to join me here? TBD what I do this year but I am in no rush to make a change.

(But in case you aren’t a subscriber and want to become one, here is the button to do so. I only need 17 people to reach 100.)

Next pressing question: Is it time to give this substack a real name rather than continuing with the default, “Melanie’s Substack”? I think so. Any ideas? I joke I can easily say something in 100 words (maybe 250) but please don’t ask me to say it in 2. I would never be able to write ad copy. In the early 2000’s when I was a mommy blogger (with an equally large readership of less than 100 people) my blog was called, “The Folly of My Youth and the Midlife Crisis”. I thought it was hilarious since my children are so far apart and a twist since both of them were so very much on purpose and not the result of folly or crisis. I thought referring to my kids as folly and crisis was funny. Maybe I should call this the folly of my youth has led to a midlife crisis. Or Folly and Crisis have left me in an empty nest. ha ha But actually, I would like to call it something maybe slightly more positive. I have wondered about imagination but am I committed to that as a long term theme? On the other hand, I have 86 subscribers, I could change the name every year and who would even notice or care? Honestly, I have been thinking lately that Imagination might stay as my theme, it is broad enough to cover basically everything. So there is a chance I might just call this substack, “Fostering Imagination.” Stay tuned to see what I commit to.

I think I am going to try reading my posts so you can listen to them if you prefer that over reading. I can be a voice in your head during your morning walk or while emptying the dishwasher. When I posted about curiosity a couple months ago I mentioned a podcast I had done a few years ago and as I listened back to a few episodes I remembered how much I enjoyed that process. Not sure I have podcast energy in me right now but I’m pretty sure I have read the post I just wrote energy. What do you think?

The other question I am asking as I go into year 3 is about consistency. When I started I really tried to publish something every week. I would force myself to come up with something to say each week, sometimes good, sometimes just filling the space, in order to keep my self imposed deadline. I wasn’t sure why I was here or what I was writing about and some weeks I just plucked a random thought out of thin air. I think in starting something new the discipline of that weekly deadline was important. However, I let that practice go at some point and you now can catch me weekly or every 2 or 3 weeks depending on how inspiration strikes. I am wondering if I need to re-institute that weekly deadline? I currently try to post at least 2 times a month including my month end summary. Honestly some months Fostering Imagination might be the only reason you are getting any posts this year at all.

What the Heck is the Theme of this Newsletter anyway?

Which leads me back to, what am I writing about? I had been thinking at the end of last year that Both/And was my main theme but while that still undergirds a lot of what I say, Imagination has come forward to be a stronger contender for the theme of this newsletter. I am toying with writing more about churches and the church selling I am doing in my professional life. Still thinking about how to format those thoughts. I go back and forth about how much I want to write about my faith. Writing about selling church buildings and how that work is becoming my ministry feels like a potential gateway without feeling like I need to get a theology degree, have strong opinions about anything or get to preaching. And finally, I will continue writing about the never ending question of what my life looks like in Empty nest. I have a piece I am noodling coming soon that might refine that question a bit for this next year, not sure yet. You will have to stay tuned to find out what happens next. And finally, finally I will always throw in random things that have no connection to any theme but I just feel like sharing. Any idea what the 2 word name for that combination of topics is? Mish Mash From Melanie?

Thank You!

Overall I am thankful for another year of writing, exploring questions, making observations, telling stories and discovering my voice. Thank you to everyone coming along with me on this journey, the 2 people who comment here and the many real life friends who comment in person. It does make a difference to know people are reading and enjoying the words I write. Looking forward to what we discover this next year.

Love,
Melanie

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PS: If you subscribe and get my newsletter in your email inbox you can always hit reply and send me a private comment rather than leaving a public comment. I do that with friends sometimes when I want too say a lot and don’t want strangers judging me.

Today I am thinking about journaling, the theme of my month as I foster my imagination this year. But not specifically about journaling. I am actually thinking about Christ Bailey who wrote the book, “The Productivity Project”. In it he spends a year practicing various productivity measures in an attempt to become the most productive man in America. As I recall during one interview that is how he was billed. So for instance he wondered how meditation affected productivity and meditated every single day for a month while keeping track of his progress. He tried various scheduling methods, concentration methods, etc. It was his entire hyper focused project for an entire year. And a good read if you want to explore those methods without turning it into a year long research project1.

And God bless him and his non ADHD2 brain from staying on task for an entire year. Every month that I have endeavored to explore a different part of imagination I have started out thinking about how I was going have a purposeful focus on the topic for an entire month. I will sit in silence each day, I will read a dozen books, I will take an art class and draw something each day, I will try a new thing every day, I will write a story every day, I will come up with a new question for each day…And every month I have certainly given thought and time to each one, but also I have lived my life and forgotten the plan probably 75% of that month. Does it still count? That is the question I am asking myself today. We are all fascinated by the guy who decides to live biblically every day for one year3 and writes a best seller to tell us about it, but do I really need to lock in and explore a topic every single day in order to notice the benefits and share what I am learning along the way?

If your answer is yes then you should probably just scroll to the next substack. This is not your place, I am not your people.

I am glad there are people who can hyper focus on a topic but I am not one of them. And for many years I tried to be, thought I should be, wanted to be the person who locked in and got things done, became the expert in a topic. In our culture that person is held up as the ideal, how we all should be. But the truth is I like to do things to a point and then I am off to the next thing. I actually do not have the patience or desire to be an expert in anything. There is no risk of me becoming a PhD. With so many different ideas to explore how would I ever be able to stay on topic long enough to become an expert in just one?4 I am a generalist, the person with “101 unrelated facts.” This is actually what my dad says about himself. Apparently it is genetic.

So this month I have been journaling, but not every day. I have been trying various types of journals, but not all of them. I have been thinking about it and will have thoughts at the end of the month (more if I start using my notes app better) but I am taking a breath to remind myself it is OK that I am not journaling every single day, that my life is not revolving around this project and that I am fostering my imagination this year exactly the way I need it for my lifestyle and my processing. This won’t be my last year of fostering imagination but the likelihood that I won’t become fascinated with something else next year is basically zero. The fact that I have even stayed focused on imagination for half a year is somewhat unprecedented and I think it is because I have given myself grace all year to not be perfect but to enjoy at my pace and with my focus the exploration.

What do you think? Are you the lock in and hyper focus on a topic sort of person, an expert on a few topics? Or a generalist like me who knows a little about a lot and can’t stop wondering about the next thing?

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We can do things by ourselves, but why?

Last week my husband was in North Carolina with our youth group. It was 6000 degrees every day with 200% humidity. Even the locals thought it was hot. John had a great time and all the kids thought he was amazing. He tells great stories and knows how to do a lot of stuff. Since the kids were tasked with fixing up a neglected summer camp that had fallen into disrepair since the hurricanes went through a few years ago his skills were very much in demand.

It was the longest we have been apart in our marriage a far as we can remember5. One week. Not long in the big picture but since neither of us travel for work there has just never been a reason to be apart for an extended period of time. We did survive but I was glad to have him home. One week of being an independent woman and taking out my own trash is an adventure, 2 weeks is completely unnecessary.

I did have a great time at the cabin by myself for a couple days. I rode the 4 wheeler (although I did call Riss to figure out how to start it…), went on a hike, fed myself and just generally enjoyed the alone time. Definitely will go again sometime. He does work every 3rd weekend…he wouldn’t even miss me.

Random Health Info:

I am meeting with a doctor soon to talk about getting my gallbladder out. Pros and cons but it is probably happening. At my one year after surgery appointment I mentioned to my doctor some symptoms I was still occasionally having that I thought might be related to my liver blood clot as they seemed to be in the same area. She ordered blood tests but also suggested it might be gallbladder and I should get an ultrasound. Initially I was going to skip the tests because I was feeling fine that day and when I feel fine I think I am going to feel fine forever and I am just over reacting to what was a minor issue. A week later I messaged while not feeling fine and asked her to order the tests. Turns out I have gallstones. But again, I was feeling fine the day I found out so I was going to tackle this problem naturally. And I have done all the natural things and I do enjoy the natural process. And also, my body has not cared at all and my symptoms continue to persist and seem to be getting worse.

Why am I telling you this?

Much of what I share is sort of me processing and sharing what I am processing. And in this case, as I have shared medical stuff, I have had a specific thought going around in my head the last month. I spent all of my 20’s suffering without an endometriosis diagnosis, I spent all of my 30’s and 40’s doing everything I could to manage it naturally. To a decent degree I was successful in that and to a degree I was constantly managing issues. But ultimately I was not healing my body just delaying the need for intervention. And what was apparent after my surgery is that I probably delayed too long. So as I begin this same road with my gallbladder I have been asking myself, how long is too long? What is the over-under on managing your gallbladder attacks before you have crossed the line and are miserable for no reason? It is a question I will explore with probably every medical issue I have the rest of my life and maybe finally the right question to be asking. I love natural medicine, I have seen it help in amazing ways. I think God created our bodies to heal themselves if we take care of them well. And I think God gave us modern medicine and doctors who can help us enjoy life in ways past generations never could. We do not need to suffer needlessly. So, I can get out my gallbladder and take digestive enzymes when needed. Feel good and move on with my life. The both/and approach to my health.

The end.

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I love being alone in quiet and in my head. The second thing I did this year to foster my imagination was sit in silence. It wasn’t a new practice for me but one that had gotten lost as the world got noisier and noisier over the past few years. That month of purposeful quiet helped reset my love of walks without headphones, drives without music, morning tea enjoying the view. But the truth is being quiet takes effort because even when I am quiet I am not quiet. My mind does not do silence, I have a lot of thoughts. A lot.3 4 I actually enjoy all my thoughts and the quiet to hang out in them most of the time5. And the thoughts most prevalent are the stories I am telling myself.

Mostly I am re-telling myself stories of things that had happened. I think through how I will share the story of that adventure with friends or strangers or with my substack audience. I tell stories WAY better in my head but also the stories in my head have A LOT of rabbit trails. It is hard for me to tell myself one story, I barely ever get to the end! One story leads to another story until I forgot what I was in fact trying to process in the first place.

Years ago I read a book called The Exact Place by Margie Haack. It is a memoire of her childhood in poor, rural, northern Minnesota and her complicated family story. It’s great. She has mastered writing in this rabbit trail style. She would be telling you a story about some adventure in a barn and then right before the punchline she would switch to another story which would lead to another story until you forgot she was even telling the barn story because now you are completely engrossed in the horse story and then suddenly you were back in the climax of the barn story again. It was wildly rambling in the most amazing way that never got you lost but kept you on your toes. Maybe other people would hate it but once I realized she was not going to leave me hanging with any of these stories I loved the wild, nonsensical ride all over the farm and back. She has 2 more memoirs that are on my to be read list. I was actually in a writers group with her a few years ago when she was working on them so I know they are full of fun stories as well.6

What is fun about this writing style is that it makes me feel like my wild, rabbit trail brain is normal. That all these stories mixed up in my brain can come together into a sort of sensical, non-sensical way that has a theme and tells a complete story. Which is why I wanted to spend time this month writing out some of the stories that came to me.

This month I have been thinking about story as it relates to imagination. Not just in the creative writing way fiction writers do but in the way I tell my own stories even if only to myself.7 I shared some stories a couple weeks ago that had been spinning in my head. I wondered if I got them out maybe they would stop spinning. Maybe I need to write out the stories, look at them and think about what they mean to me. I wonder if sometimes the stories I spin in my head are like musical earworms. My brain is trying to remember something so it just spins around and around until I go and listen to the song and my brain can complete the melody. Are stories like that? Is my brain trying to remember/imagine an experience and I need to sit with it, maybe write it out and fill in some details in order to move on to the next story?

Of course this leads my brain to remember that we tend to fill in gaps in stories with information whether right or wrong. My psychology major husband tells me that every time we remember a past experience we change it a little bit. At this point all my childhood memories are really memories of memories. Who knows what is true anymore? I have definitely disputed my sibling’s versions of events around shared experiences. Who is right? Who is wrong? Without a time machine who can say?8 But maybe it doesn’t matter if the story is accurate. Maybe what is important is the lesson you learned from it and the feelings you had around it. What if the truth of the story isn’t as important as the story itself. Maybe if my brother looks back at a moment in our childhood and remembers how he was heroic and I look back at the same story and cast myself as the hero, maybe what matters is how we chose to define ourselves in the story and exactly how it played out is sort of irrelevant. What if both our stories are true and we are both the hero?

I do also tell myself made up stories, not fiction/fantasy but more like wishful thinking stories. I love to imagine how I will handle various problems, meet new people, be the hero. I love being the hero in my stories. I didn’t write any of those out this month, it was more of a problem child month, but I wonder what would happen if instead of just leaving it floating in my imagination I let it out, wrote out that story of how I closed the big deal, explained the problem so everyone understood. What if I had written out the story of what I would do while up here alone this week? What adventures might I have gone on if I had taken the time to put some feet on the ideas floating around in my head, turned them into an actual story instead of letting them just sit in a jumbled up pile and then untangling them when I got here?

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the negative stories that spin through my head. I am the master at telling the negative stories. I am always either the hero or the victim in my negative stories. I am certainly never the villain. Sigh. Part of what was helpful this month was getting a negative story out of my head. How many times can I tell myself what a victim I am? It gets boring. And yet it spins and spins. It did turn out to be helpful to write it down. I had a lot of stories bouncing around and writing it out helped me to identify the one that was actually bugging me and why. Other parts of the story seemed more problematic but one spun in my head the most and writing it out helped me understand why and decide if it needed action or if it just needed to be understood and then let go. In this case it needed to be let go. Other times it needs action. How do we know the difference? No idea. I just make decisions and roll with them until I reach freedom or a brick wall. This one seems to be leading to freedom.

The other way I use stories is analogies. Jesus is famous for this, all his parables. Stories to teach lessons or explain concepts. The academic information is nice but Jesus understood not all our brains think that way. Some of our brains think in stories. This reminds me of a Star Trek Next Generation episode where there was a race that spoke in stories and metaphors and the Captain of the other race kidnapped Picard and trapped them both on a planet until Picard figured out how the language worked. A weird plot but the writers of the episode understood how people communicate through stories enough to imagine an entire race that only transfers information through stories.9

Years ago when my sister, sister-in-law and I were emailing each day our homemaking activities. It was before facebook and our emails were sort of our daily status updates. One day we decided to talk in stories by only sending messages in Haiku.

The dishes aren’t done.

Why won’t the kids take a nap?

I ordered pizza.

Stories are one of my favorite ways of understanding the world. If I can come up with a story, and analogy, a metaphor that connects an experience I start to understand it in a way I never could before. If you know me in person I have likely said at some point in our relationship, “It is like…” and then related the situation to some other experience. It is how I make sense of the world.

This has been a fun imagination practice for June. Thinking about story. Maybe one that seems more obvious when relating to imagination but do we actually use our imagination when engaging in our daily life stories? And how can that imagination help us understand our world better? I love those questions as I go about my days.

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Curiosity:

How did you foster your imagination this month?

What stories are you telling yourself right now? What sort of story teller are you?

Don’t be afraid to leave a comment and let me know what you think. Nobody here bites.

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June’s Imagination:

Creative Thing:

This month I found an Instagram account for doodling. Once you follow one more pop up in your feed. I spent a weekend creating repeating patterns. It is satisfying and I can see myself learning a few to fill a bulletin while I listen to a sermon or sitting in a CE class.

Reading Thing:

I am officially caught up on all the Louise Penny books and now await her next one coming in October. I went on the Libby library app to see if I could get on the list today but apparently you can’t reserve a book 4 months before it is released…lame. But wait, I could reserve it at my local library. I’m number 385 in line…I think I need a new mystery series to tide me over while I wait.

I am going to shift to a few spiritual formation books this month. Looking for some readable ones that I might want to spend an afternoon on the deck with and a few that I would want to take a chapter at a time in the mornings. All suggestions welcome.

Experiential Thing:

Our new experience this month was getting new carpet on our stairs. The main level and upper levels are all LVT flooring but I wanted to keep carpet on the stairs. I just don’t like wood stairs, don’t like how fake the LVT stair treads are and honestly I fall down the stairs a lot, always have, and hard stairs just sound like a good way to really hurt myself. Since I was only doing the stairs I wanted to do something fun and colorful on the stairs. But as we brought home samples I realized I wanted pattern but not color. We picked out a sample and then I over thought and regretted all my life choices for 2 weeks waiting to get it installed. But it is in and it is amazing and I basically want to set up shop on my stairs each day and bask in the soft, cushioned stairs with the fun pattern that makes me feel like a fun person. Although we did get new carpet for our condo before we sold it, we have never actually gotten new carpet just for ourselves, just to enjoy and bask in our own beautiful new carpet. I have helped clients pick out and get new carpet installed before they sold as well. But somehow getting new carpet for ourselves, thinking we deserve new carpet and are allowed to enjoy it while we live there, why don’t we do that? So, we did it. We got ourselves our own new carpet to enjoy for as many years as we can keep going up and down these stairs10.

My other new experience was a comedy show with Leanne Morgan. It was fun and funny. If you are a middle aged woman go find her on tour. It was on my son’s birthday. We are estranged and do not celebrate with him but it is also the day I became a mom so I try to do something to celebrate every year none-the-less. When my friend invited me to laugh with her on his birthday it was an easy yes. Most years we just eat a cupcake. This was better. Although I did have an Old Fashioned at a rooftop bar before the show. Also good.

Next Thing:

I realized as I was reading some notes from the beginning of the year that I have not fostered my imagination with journaling yet so that will be my July goal. Excited about that. I love to journal but am pretty haphazard about it. There are some practices I would like to renew and some I would like to try out. Stay tuned for that adventure.

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When I was 7 my parents built a house out in what was at the time a far flung, barely suburb of Minneapolis, more like moving out to the country. Today it is a thriving metropolis but back then my grandparents acted like they were taking a day trip to come visit (it was less than an hour away from their homes in St Paul). My parents bought the last lot on the dead end of an established neighborhood where they built our house. Our street ended at a farm. Behind us was a 100 foot drop to a train track. This year the very last farm in that city will be developed into yet more housing for this now popular, upscale suburb. The farm at my dead end was turned into an industrial park during my childhood. Somehow they leveled the farm down to the train tracks and created one more lot at the end of my street keeping our neighborhood separate from the business district1.

Between our lot and the lot at the dead end was one more, now land locked, lot owned by the railroad. (Think of that dead space in the corner of your kitchen cabinets, that is this lot.) This is where I spent most of my childhood summers. My parents kept most of the back of our lot wooded and we could have played in there but the neighboring lot had something special. A very large tree which had at one point stood right on the edge of that steep hill down to the train tracks had fallen over before we came along. Its roots stayed in the ground just enough to keep it alive and continue to leaf out every season. It was perfect for climbing on and around, making into forts and expanding our imaginations. It could be a house, a boat, an obstacle course. It was dangerous and safe. You could be king of the hill on top or the peon on the ground below. One summer some other kids in the neighborhood decided it was their tree and we were not included. So on the days they took over we stayed inside watching 80’s afternoon tv. While it isn’t a core memory for me, my mom will still to this day2 bring up with bitterness the summer the neighbor kids wouldn’t let us play there. I never wonder where I got my mama bear instincts from.

The train tracks were another source of imagination. We would climb up and down that hill just because it was there. We were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on an adventure walking the tracks with towering hills on either side of us. We weren’t in a suburban neighborhood we were alone in the middle of nowhere. One of our favorite things was to put pennies on the tracks and then wait for a train to come flatten them out. I remember one time realizing the train was coming3 as we were laying out our pennies and scrambling to get up the hill. We were hanging on half way up as it went by. How did we survive childhood? I suppose the same imagination that wanted to flatten pennies on the tracks could imagine what would happen if we didn’t get ourselves off that track quickly when the train was coming.

My brother and a friend spent an entire summer turning another tree a few feet down the hill from our backyard into a fort one year. They spent the whole summer cutting stairs in the side of the hill to reach it, then building a platform on a low branch, if memory serves there was a swing so you could swing out over the hill. (If my memory is incorrect then we will call this my active childhood imagination. There should have been one.) Years later, when my son was about 3 or 4, he found his way down to that tree on the old dirt stairs and then climbed the low branches. While he was conceptually only a few feet above the base of the tree and from the yard we were basically looking at him at eye level, none of us could reach him and the hill meant he was actually dangerously high above the landing point should he fall. Childhood adventures take on a different tone when you are the mom instead of the child.

One of the less fun things about our yard and the lot next door was the fact that it was full of poison ivy. This absolutely never deterred us from playing there despite the fact I was never able to figure out how to avoid it4. I can still remember the feel of the itchy blisters between my fingers and toes. Weirdly the dog loved to lick my poison ivy ridden toes and since it brought a measure of relieve I never stopped her. I even ended up staying home from school a couple times when it got too bad. I remember as a child hearing talk that the reason for the poison ivy was because there used to be fires on the hill caused by the trains. But I now live not far from the regional bike trail those tracks turned into and have not noticed poison ivy along this end of the tracks5. It got me wondering so I decided to do a little research and learned that while fires don’t bring poison ivy they do generously spread it. So I guess what might have been one little patch at some point had spread throughout our whole lot as well as both neighboring lots.

What it is about this story, about that tree laying down on the lot next door, about playing on the train tracks? Why did I continually risk poison ivy to go into the woods and why do I think so fondly about that portion of my childhood? How has it defined me?

I think one of the answers is freedom, independence, that is what it represents to me. That 80’s childhood where I could go into the woods and escape the world for a moment. A place I could be anyone, imagine any life scenario. It was an escape but not to run away from my life but to run to who I was becoming.

I still love to go into the woods. To hike, to experience the quiet, the mystery. It refreshes my soul in ways I can’t explain. When I am stressed I always want to run away to the woods. To just stand surrounded by trees for a little while and re-find my balance. I am not outdoorsy, I don’t love camping, I don’t pee in the woods, I don’t dream of roughing it. Ever. But I love the woods.

When my kids were growing up I tried to share this love with them. Our first house had woods on a hill that went up to train tracks. Basically what I grew up with in reverse. We moved away when my son was 8 but I was always trying to convince my 5 year old to go into the woods. I ended up signing him up for nature center pre school which gave him an organized taste of the woods and he fell in love with hiking through boy scouts.

A decade later I read “Last Child in the Woods” when my daughter was a pre-schooler who also did nature center pre school. Off we went to walk the nature center trails and then of course I would veer off course because that is where the real discovery’s are made, but not too far because I am a weird mix of rule follower and rule breaker. I want to break the rules but I don’t actually want to get in trouble. We got our cabin near the woods a few years later and she has been on lots of hikes in the woods with us where she complains the entire time and then tells us how much she loved it when we get home. And I think for her both are in fact true. She does have good things to say about 4-wheelering through the woods though.

One of my favorite nature center stories is from when my son was probably 5 or 6. I had my 3 nieces who were all around the same age. I was marching them down a trail through the woods which took us along a path that included a wooden boardwalk across a lake and marsh6. Just before we got to the end of that portion of the trail and back on land a fox jumps out of some marsh grass and stands on the trail looking at us. Behind us is slippery goose poop, to the sides are the lake. We have nowhere to run and so we all just stand there staring at the fox as he stands there staring at us. Finally, after what felt like forever but was probably a minute, he turns and runs off into the woods. We never saw him again. It was a highlight for me even as I am unsure the kids at their ages understood or even now remember it. Are the adventures we take our children on for them or us?

A few years later we moved to a house a few blocks from a creek where a fox lived. It became a regular occurrence to look out the back window and see him walking down our alley. While never the thrill of that moment on the trail, seeing the fox never got old. Animals are part of that wooded adventure, they live there surrounded by the trees and remind me for a moment of that place I spent my childhood becoming.

In a couple weeks I am going up to my cabin alone for the first time. John will be gone for a week and I have decided to take a couple days for my own adventure. I have a favorite path I take when I am up there. Can’t wait to go sit in the woods, imagine adventures and discover who I am becoming in this season.

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I wrote a bit about it last summer2 and I shared in January that I had not yet reached enough perspective to summarize the year in a friendly Christmas card. But getting to the end of this year long ordeal I am starting to find some clarity and peace about the experience.

I definitely can still spin myself up into a froth of anger over what happened and what I have endured. But it is exhausting to be mad at a doctor I no longer have contact with who was never going to admit she made a mistake anyway. And, somewhere along the line I realized that while I am still coming to terms with the lifestyle changes the colon resection has necessitated, my over all health has significantly improved. As if I really did need that hysterectomy, as if I desperately needed to remove that big fibroid3 and all that endometriosis, as if those things were in fact negatively affecting my quality of life and I really did need this surgery. When I step back on this side of recovery to look at the big picture I can see that my improved health has been significant. For a while I second guessed my decision to get the hysterectomy at all. A year later I am thankful I went in even if things took an unwelcome turn.

What have I noticed?

The Good and Bad:

Off HRT

I had to go off the HRT because of the blood thinners I took after the clot. I was concerned about what would happen to my mental health which was the main reason I was on them. The brain fog, random anxiety and occasional depression was far worse than my hot flashes. So I was prepared to ask for Zoloft or some other anti depression drug and was carefully monitoring my moods. I had initially pushed for the HRT instead of one of those options reasoning that if hormones were throwing off my mental health that was the most logical way to treat it. Turns out it was the endometriosis throwing off my hormones even more than menopause. It seems getting all the endometrial adhesions, each of which was producing additional hormones, out of me has caused my hormones to balance themselves right out and I continue to feel great a year later. Additionally, I significantly changed my diet over the summer to heal my liver and I think that detox helped too. (I am a big believer in food as medicine.) I continue to monitor my mental health but so far so good. The occasional hot flash has returned but they are pretty mild and I am happy to endure them when my mind is feeling strong.

Lost 30 Pounds

I lost a lot of weight. At first this was just pissing me off because it was the result of the pain I was in. Everything made me nauseous so I wasn’t eating and dropped 10 pounds in a couple weeks. When I did eat I couldn’t poop so then I was taking laxatives. So that is the secret to losing weight, starve yourself and then take laxatives. (eye roll) Obviously I would gain it back once I was better because there was nothing sustainable about this weight loss. So why bother enjoying it? By the time I returned to health I was down close to 20 pounds and decided it was enjoyable enough I should figure out how to keep it off. I lost 10 more as I slowly started feeling better and have been holding here for the last 6+ months. While I love how I look the truth is what has been more motivating has been how great I feel, how much easier it is to move my body. While looking good is rewarding, it has never motivated me like feeling good. I didn’t even realize how much my bigger body, and I wasn’t even that big, was slowing me down, getting in my way, etc. Small things when the weight comes on slowly but huge when you suddenly get those movements back.

Keeping the weight off has has required some changes, I didn’t go back to eating the way I was pre surgery but I also did not stay on the diet I was on last summer while healing my liver. I live somewhere in between while also doing Intermittent Fasting4. I have returned to an occasional alcoholic drink but limited and honestly it is something I am trying to decide where I will land. Last summer even communion wine would trigger a liver reaction, now I am not quite that sensitive but more than one drink or more than one night in a row seem to be too much for me. Which is making me wonder why I drink at all lately. Things I am thinking about.

Neighborhood walks

We only got up to our cabin a couple times and only went on the 4 wheeler once (twice?) last summer. Even when we were up there we did things that involved sitting not hiking, exploring or generally moving. On the other hand, by late summer, when we were most able to go up, my recovery involved short walks a couple times a day. I got to explore beyond the one block area of town we generally hang out in. It was fun to observe how the streets a couple blocks away felt different than our little corner of town. I wonder if the talk around town was about the weird lady slow shuffling down the sidewalks holding her stomach. My walks could be summarized, “get me out of this house”, “get me off this couch” but also “do not let me go too far from it because I will need to sit back down soon”. The walks also helped me get stronger so I could be away from a chair longer and longer. Through the process I have really come to love neighborhood walks. It was amazing to experience my body getting stronger every day with such simple movements. And it was a thrill when I finally decided to do a 2 mile out and back walk instead in small circles around my home so I could get home quickly. I have been asking myself this year if we undervalue the simple daily movements and put too much value on the hard gym work out. I love a good work out and probably won’t abandon them completely but I feel less compelled in this particular season to do a lot more than my daily walk knowing how big a difference it is making.

Along with strengthening my whole body the walk was good for my mind and my colon. John says that in the ER they tell people if you want your bowels to move you have to move. After a summer of more effort that one would like trying to move my bowels, I can testify that getting in daily walks really helps.

The New Normal

I started Pelvic Floor PT last fall, have had all the tests you don’t even want to know exist regarding a bodies ability to expel waste, and it has been determined there is nothing wrong with me and this new normal is just my new normal. Daily laxatives and daily movement seems to be the best balance. Instead of being obsessed with getting enough protein like most menopausal women I am obsessed with my fiber intake. I spent most of this year fighting that prescription. I did not have to take laxatives before this surgery, could walk or not walk and everything still came out easily and regularly. I was told my recovery was normal, going well, and the doctor had no additional need to follow up with me. However, I did not feel normal, did not think things were going well and wanted to know how to find the sweet spot on the amount of laxative, and when exactly I was going to be able to stop taking it all together. Because outside of that I did not see how we could call me recovered. If I was going to return to normal I expected that normal to be defined by my experience before the surgery.

I am going to be honest here, there are holes in the medical system. What I was experiencing in recovery was their definition of normal and acceptable. The fact that it was not my normal and I was not finding it acceptable did not seem to compute with anyone. The colo-rectal and gastroentologists did not seem to understand my frustrations or my questions. They just ordered tests and procedures and told me they were all normal and couldn’t understand why I was getting angrier. Ultimately I was able to find a doctor who at least answered some of my questions and was the first one to actually say, “you might have to take a laxative the rest of your life”. Honestly, I just wanted someone to say that. To admit that I was not going to have a full recovery and was going to be managing things the rest of my life. Tell me what is true and I can live with it. Act like I am the problem because I am not having the experience you are telling me I am having and I will not hold back on my opinion of your patient care. (just sayin’)

More Content in my Life

I wrote a little about this a couple weeks ago but I am more at peace after a summer on the couch. Nothing feels like an emergency anymore. I just do what is next and let things happen in time. I suppose last summer was a reality check about life and gave me a new perspective on who I am and what is important. I suspect this is another both/and moment. Talking to friends it seems like this is something we are all noodling. How hard we need to strive, what is important? We’ve lived long enough to know things work out and this too shall pass. I just got a crash course in resting and time to reset my life in the midst of that season.

The Interesting:

What day is it?

One of the more interesting aspects of recovery has been my minds inability to fast forward past the lost months. I can visually see summer is arriving, I look at my calendar and write the correct date on documents, but when I am projecting out I think fall is 6 months from now. Basically I have lost a whole season and this past year my mind has not been able to reset. I am hopeful that starting the year over again and having this whole summer will catch my body and mind back up in time.

What did we do last summer?

One of the funny things I did this winter was say things like, “Why didn’t we go to the farmer’s market last summer? I was going to do that regularly”. Generally John would just look at me for a few minutes while my brain reviewed my life and remembered.

Titanium staples

The entire year I have been very aware of the spot my colon was resected. Can feel it when I move. I worried it meant something was wrong until a few months ago when I saw a new doctor who finally told me this is a common observations among patients who have this procedure. Once I knew it was OK I realized it sort of makes sense. While titanium staples aren’t heavy I do have a series of them all around my colon and logically my body is aware of them and my mind is constantly noting the new experience. I’m assuming my brain will eventually get used to them. Its not a pain, just an awareness. Particularly noticeable when I walk up and down stairs lifting my left leg and pushing that part of my colon around. Fun and fascinating now that I know what it is.

The Reflections:

It is always easiest to be angry at other people and avoid looking at your own responsibility when things go wrong. And while I don’t feel like I should have known how to perform my own hysterectomy and explain to my doctor how to do it, I have had to admit that I spent the majority of my adult life knowing I was experiencing a lot of endometrial issues and choosing to manage them myself and avoid doctors. I knew I probably needed a hysterectomy for years but was stubbornly refusing to get one because I wanted to go into natural menopause5. (Why?) As a result I suffered far longer than I should have and when I did go in my issues were severe. And, because I didn’t have a doctor who had been following my history or look for one that had endo experience, we were all caught off guard by how bad things were. I’m learning to give myself a little grace that I was doing the best I could in the life we lived and not expect 35, 40, 45 year old Melanie to handle things with the knowledge and opportunities of 55 year old Melanie. (And give a tiny amount of grace to my doctor as well.)

We did not have good health insurance when I was younger and it would have cost so much money we did not have to find a good doctor and get the tests and treatments I needed. It was easier to just manage it myself. I can buy a years worth of Advil for the cost of a couple doctor appointments. God knew and in the right moment he pushed me forward. I generally wouldn’t chose the hard experiences that have been part of my life but never have I regretted the lessons I learned or wanted to give up what I gained as a result of the struggles. Not sure I am quite ready to say I am so glad I had this experience but I am learning to appreciate how I have grown as a result and allow for a little gratitude.

A year after a trauma we often say the body remembers. Certainly there are season in my life where I find small things more stressful or feel anxiety that seems out of proportion for the experiences. Every year fall is a sensitive season at our house. As the years have gone by it has gotten easier but that also means a trigger can catch us off guard. So we are all patient and full of grace for one another in the fall.

As I have marched toward this anniversary I have been carefully watching my moods and feelings waiting to fall apart. And while have felt all the feelings leading to this anniversary. I don’t feel trauma. I’ve been thinking this week about how we hold traumatic experiences. I have had hard things happen that have been held in my body for years, Losses I was not prepared for. Events that shook me to the core and I didn’t have the ability to property process. Those are the things that hit us in the fall. And so going into this anniversary I was expecting something similar. But my body just is not telling me that. I am reflective of the anniversary but don’t feel overwhelmed by it. I don’t want to shut down. I am not feeling any fear. And it has me thinking about the difference between a traumatic event that is hard and needs processing and a traumatic event that is so hard your body can’t process it and the event gets stuck in you. Last summer was traumatic but I am realizing I am not holding trauma over it. This anniversary is not something I dreaded but something I am glad to get past. To be on the other side of a whole year feeling stronger and basking in my improved health. I’m sure there will be some up and down days this summer as I do continue processing the experience but it feels more like healing than trauma.

This summer I am looking forward to long, bumpy rides on the 4-wheeler (we are heading to the cabin this weekend), many trips to the farmer’s market (hit the first one last weekend), long hikes in the woods, and continuing those daily neighborhood walks both at home and at the cabin. Along with a full summer with work, friends, family, and a few projects around the house.

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I did write about changing the way I phrase things, saying, “I wonder…” more than making bold statements I am not sure I fully believe and certainly haven’t fully explored. I have corrected my language a few times while talking to friends and family and it is interesting how it changes the conversation. Most of what I have been curious about this month has been more personal than I want to share in this space but it has been a useful time of exploration.

Other thoughts on curiosity:

A few years ago I did a little podcast for our church I called, “Mentoring the Daily” it was designed to be a conversation starter for the mentor groups I had set up. We were thinking about mentoring for daily life rather than focused on mentoring big topics. They weren’t designed around sharing the gospel or establishing any theological foundation but about encouraging each other in our daily life and faith. What can I learn from younger women, what can they learn from me as we simply live life? One month I reached out to a woman at our church who was a question asker. Whenever we got together she asked me lots of thoughtful questions. I wanted to explore that idea with her. I listened back on it today and wish I had started my month with this podcast because it was a great conversation to get me thinking about asking questions of both myself and others.

I think this is totally worth listening to but before you listen just know this sounds exactly like the sort of podcast that would be recorded at a friend’s dining room table with one mic and zero editing. I am not a professional.

The thing that sparked my desire to even think about curiosity along with imagination was a quote in the Beth Moore bible study I did this winter, “Sometimes the attribute most asleep in our bible study is curiosity, and…it needs waking up.” A couple chapters later she says, “We will not trust who we cannot question.” It has me thinking about how to be more curious about reading the bible.

After 55 years of Sunday school, bible study, sermons, camps, retreats, small groups, conferences, books, podcasts, songs…do I still come to the bible curious about what I am reading or do I assume I know it all and just skim for the highpoints of what I already know. Do I read asking myself if what I have been taught is true or if there are further explorations or deeper understandings still to unearth? Do I ask questions, not of doubt, although those have value too, but to know more, to dive deeper, to grow and encounter God in a richer way,? Or am I content to just know the Sunday school stories and summaries from my childhood and make them fit into every experience I have going forward? Am I letting God get bigger or keeping him small?

The truth is I’ve asked lots of questions of my childhood lessons, what I took away and what I was either taught or interpreted what I was taught (they are not the same thing) throughout my life. I went from Baptist to Anglican. You don’t do that without being curious and asking questions. But I have noticed seasons where it does feel like there is nothing left to learn unless I want to dive into a theology degree. Those, I wonder, might be the seasons where I am asking fewer questions. Where my curiosity is stagnant.

I have been picking up my bible this month more than I had been lately to see what is new and what new questions I can ask. It has felt fresher to come to it with an attitude of curiosity and I have had an excitement that had been missing lately. A friend is listening to bible in a year this year and she was telling me that a minor story from David’s life about a woman named Abigail struck her different in this season as she observed something she had never thought about before. Sometimes a new way of studying the bible, like listening rather than reading, can trigger new observations and questions. For a few years I read The Message bible in my daily reading time. Passages so familiar I only skimmed in the NIV were unfamiliar in The Message and I often didn’t realize until afterward it connected to verses I knew. It caused me to see it fresh again. It’s a fun version to read.

If you really love questions Emily P Freeman is who you want to start following1. She asks great questions and has an end of month newsletter that always has questions to help you reflect on the end of the month. Sometimes I answer them for myself, sometimes I just enjoy her answers. Here were her questions at the end of April:

1. What’s something you’ve made that you’re proud of?

2. What is a moment that made you laugh in April?

3. When did you get to do what you love?

Random:

My goal of fostering imagination is to not spend one month on each of these focuses and then move on but to build on each one. So I am still finding time for silence2, still reading3, still looking for new experiences4, still trying my hand at artistic activities5 and will continue to be purposeful about curiosity throughout the year.

This month I read:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Seemed like I should finish off the series. I did skim both of them, skipping parts I found boring or just wanting to rush to parts I enjoyed most. Sometimes you are just in a season of needing a comfort read that is in easy reach and after watching the good-but-not-quite-the-same movies while flipping channels I decided I’d rather just read the books than watch the movies.

I am also almost done with a book written by a friend from church called, '“Resilient Heart”. She and her husband served as missionaries in India for 20 year before they were kicked out of the country. Back home processing the experience she reflects on the resilience needed during those years and all the ways she grew up from a newly wed 20 something still trying to navigate adulthood to a mom and ministry leader. I am enjoying learning about her experiences navigating a different culture while also relating to the universal insecurities around building relationships as adults no matter where you live.

I am creative:

Every season I update my desktop with a new wallpaper that reflects things I enjoy about the season, quotes, sometimes work related things, etc. As I was working on a summer version this month I realized it is one of the ways I express my creativity and something I look forward to updating regularly. Like all of my creative endeavors I don’t over think it but I do spend some time balancing it out and finding pictures that bring me joy. Always fun to create. This is my May art. Enjoy.

As I finish writing this the end of May I am not sure yet how I am going to foster my imagination in June. It will be a surprise to all of us. Stay tuned!

What have you been curious about lately? How are you fostering your imagination this summer? And ideas for me?

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I’ve been thinking about the slow progress of change lately. I have always loved setting goals and getting after a new habit so I can be more productive, more organized, get more done, be a better person, etc. But as I spent this year recovering from surgery, experiencing that slow but steady progress with no option but to keep going forward whether it was making a difference or not, my way of thinking about managing and improving my life is changing.

After surgery-gone-wrong1 my life was about healing and getting back to normal not about trying to be more productive, not about having the perfect routine, not about managing my social media usage, not about writing, not about finding new clients, not about hitting a work out goal, not about hitting any goal. I was just surviving and believing the moment would not last forever.

In the aftermath of that space, I find I am less in a rush to set and meet big goals2 and trying to rush into being something different. I am more satisfied with the slow progress of change. There were things I liked about the relaxed pace of that season. I watched my body recover one day at a time, slowly. I took steps, ate different, used caster oil packs, carefully moved my body on slow, short walks each day, I took the medication and supplements. I did all the things I could but I could not make my body heal faster than it was going to, could not tell it which days I wanted it to feel good based upon my schedule, could not control the pace at all. Nothing I did created instant results. Mostly I just showed up each day and hoped for the best. Some days, many days, it felt like nothing was improving.

There wasn’t a moment where I was better. It didn’t happen over night. One day I am not OK and the next I healed. In fact, even though I am back in my life there are some parts of me I am not sure are fully healed yet. I just slowly added to my life as I felt better until one day I realized I had been full energy and pain free for weeks and maybe I was better and could fully return to my life.

It was hard to be in between. I wanted to view myself as either completely functional and therefore fully productive, or on the couch all the time barely surviving. If I can get up and do one thing why can’t I do all the things? Last summer taught me to embrace that space in between. Where I might be able to get up and do one or two things but was not in fact at full capacity. I am allowed to be in that space while recovering. I could show a couple houses but then I need to come home and rest. I could focus on a topic for an hour or so but then I start getting fuzzy. I could attend an event and not think about my pain but then not be able to leave the couch the next day. It is all real and it is part of the process of recovery. And it was all OK.

What if it is part of the process of growing as a person, building new habits, and becoming who God wants us to be? What if that is not a linear path, good/bad, right/wrong, success/failure, on-track/off-track. What if there is more of a back and forth inside progress. What if it is both/and? Good and bad, right and wrong, success and failure, on and off track? What if that is the real path God has set before us as we move forward and become?

A friend told me that addiction recovery groups are starting to move away from counting days sober because it is so common to relapse at some point, even years later, and telling someone they are back at day 1 and all the work they had been doing no longer counted was not telling the true story of recovery. Are we allowed to make mistakes, have bad days and still move forward? Is perfection the only measurement or are we living a life of grace that allows all the good days to count even if bad days are mixed in?

As I head toward the one year anniversary of the surgery I find myself abandoning that search for perfect productivity. The real forward progress of life happens when I mix my productive days with my lazy days3. When instead of trying to do it all every day I focus on doing a little each day. Maybe real life is a little like recovery. Some days you feel great, some days you feel terrible. In between you do what you can and give yourself grace for what you can’t. The goal is not daily perfection but small movements that over time make a big difference.

What small movements are making a difference in your life these days?

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This month as I foster my imagination through curiosity I have been struck by how often I say, “I think…” when what I really mean is, “I wonder…” I tend to announce the things I am thinking about like fully formed ideas rather than just things I am processing out loud. Like putting words in a thought bubble that I can then look at, move around and see if they work or not. And what I am wondering is, does using the language, “I think” end up accidentally creating a need to make that statement work rather than give me permission to continue thinking about it and wondering if there are other ways of looking at something? Am I accidentally cutting off my curiosity?

I “think” about a lot of ideas for how my family could function better. Such as, “I think you should apply for this or that job”. What if instead I said, “I wonder if this job would be a good one to apply for?” Because honestly, I do not know what job is right for my currently job hunting daughter1. I wonder if I used the more curious “I wonder” when making suggestions if it might create the kind of dialogue I am actually seeking to have with her rather than a defensiveness because she doesn’t want to collect water from storm sewers this summer.

I wonder if changing my language to more curious phrases will allow me to begin to understand different people, different cultures, different experiences with a more open perspective. What if my goal was to ask questions and learn rather than figure out the final answer and conclude the conversation.

I also wonder if there are other ways my language blocks curiosity. Are there other phrases I could adjust to open myself up to more curious thinking?

How about adding “What if…” to ideas rather making statements. “What if we did that thing” rather than “No, we can’t do that thing”. “What if the government did have pictures of aliens” rather than “That’s stupid there are no such things as aliens”

What if I said, “I don’t know. let’s find out” rather than trying to create an answer from my limited knowledge base and creating a foundation based on misinformation that crumbles when challenged.

I don’t know, let’s find out.

What phrases do you use that help you stay curious rather than close minded?

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Mother’s Day

It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow and I am seriously considering wearing a tiara to church tomorrow. I won’t but it would be fun. Maybe I will for lunch. :) I actually wore one at my birthday lunch with friends and everyone kept smiling at me. I forgot for a while I was wearing it and just thought it was a friendly restaurant. ha ha. We should all wear tiara’s more often.

That said, I have mixed feelings about mother’s day. I love being a mom, I love my mom, I think mom’s in general are awesome. Woo, let’s celebrate us! And also, forced celebrations of people can be exhausting. OK everyone say something nice about mom today!

But also since everyone can’t be a mom acknowledge the sadness of people who aren’t being celebrated as moms and want to be. And also, all the moms whose kids don’t like them and all the kids whose moms don’t like them. They have to be seen on this day where we celebrate mothers too. And if your mom has died and you are sad about that we don’t want to trigger your sadness by being too happy we have a living mom to celebrate. We don’t want anyone too feel bad on this day we celebrate mom’s.

Do we feel this bad on Father’s Day? I just don’t think I have observed this same level of holding every single person’s feelings about a holiday on Father’s day as I tend to experience on Mother’s day.

I wonder2 though if maybe that is the truest form of celebrating mom’s? We do tend to hold our kids feelings throughout out life. We see them, we worry about them, we encourage them, we guide them, we celebrate them, we hold all of them inside us. And maybe a day where we are celebrated would not be a true tribute to us if we didn’t also see the feelings of everyone around us struggling with this day in one way or another and hold a little space for that too.

So tomorrow I will enjoy being celebrated by my daughter who is coming over to spend the day with me. I will hold space for the continued sadness of not hearing from my other child and then will go over to my mom’s and teach her how to use the Creami my sister and I bought her for mother’s day in hopes she and my dad can enjoy a slightly healthier version of their nightly ice cream treat.

How are you celebrating or holding space for a mom in your life?

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But what about the hierarchy of creativity? Maybe I am a little creative but I am not creative like other people therefore my creativity doesn’t count. I dress utilitarian and they dress flamboyantly therefore they use their creativity to dress and I do not. Why? Why do we have I told myself these stories for so many years?

Well, it stops today! Today I will put on display my mediocre art and my incredible creativity all at the same time! (be nice to me)

This month I wanted to foster my imagination with art. I specifically had this idea that I would like to junk journal but broadly thought I might try other things. I also decided to pair this adventure with immersing myself in beauty once a week so John and I hit a couple museums and a conservatory on his days off.

One thing I did find surprising and not at all surprising is that while sitting down to do art can be fun my mind and body were very resistant to getting off the couch. I could imagine going and pulling out the junk journal stuff every night or practicing some lettering (another skill I imagine mastering), but my body was perfectly content to sit on the couch and just think about fostering my imagination in a new way without the risk of actually doing anything. As a result I did not do as much as I had imagined, as much as a certainly could have done. But this is a building practice of fostering creativity so I will keep trying new things and practicing different forms of art. And try to convince myself that practice is as relaxing as scrolling my phone2.

One of the things I did not do this month but is on my art plan is lettering. I have a practice book called “The Art of Lettering” and in it she says, “Practice, practice, practice is the best way to learn lettering, and the most rewarding.” True of so many things in life. But how often do I feel that if I am not good at it right away it isn’t worth doing? What if the practice is the best part? I will be taking that thought into May.

What I did do:

Junk Journaling

The first thing I did was watch some videos on different people junk journaling. I had collected some stuff from our trip to Europe for the purpose of putting them in a junk journal. There are a lot of different ways to do it and styles. Some more overwhelming than helpful. I watched one where the woman literally grabbed stickers off her groceries and cut up the packaging of food she bought on a grocery haul and creatively placed in onto a page in her journal. Literal junk journaling. While I found her “don’t over think it” approach the most helpful, I did not think I will start collecting literal junk to put in a journal.

To finally get started I ended up going over to a friend’s house who is an artist and asked her if we could parallel play doing art. I decided I needed a friend there with me. But while my actual goal is to parallel play art with John, after watching the junk journal videos with me he had more opinions than I wanted about how I should lay out my journal. I needed to start without him. I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do, had some ideas but nothing clear, so all his ideas were too much. I needed to figure out what I was doing myself. Then he could have an opinion. I’ve done a few pages now and while I would love them to be more colorful and “better” whatever that means, I am ready to let him see me work without feeling overwhelmed by his ideas.

I did have a fun idea to roll up the receipts we saved and lay them out like the Eifel Tower. It took a while to figure out what the right shape was, even when I was looking at a picture, but once I got there I am pretty happy with the result.

The only other art thing I did this month was attend a workshop at a women’s retreat on art. I will be honest, my take away was that I needed a much more remedial class as I wasn’t completely sure what she was asking us to do most of the time. But I went with the intention of just letting myself be bad at it, putting on the page whatever I wanted and not apologizing for it. She was going around complimenting people at one point and I could tell wasn’t sure what to say when she got to me so I said, “I’m just having fun” and she said, “That’s great!” ha ha.

The other practice we did this month was to go on a weekly date to a museum, conservatory or some other place that inspires creativity. The first week we went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It is a favorite, really great variety of art and it is mostly free. There is always one paid exhibit which is probably great but we wouldn’t know because we never pay for it. The free stuff already takes half a day.

The second week we went to the St Paul Conservatory. Huge indoor greenhouses basically with walking paths and benches. On a cold day it is a gift.

Week 3 we went to the Walker Art Museum and the neighboring Sculpture Garden.

The sculpture garden is free all the time. We met our daughter there to walk around, enjoy the art which includes the architecture of the Basilica across the street. Then she left, we grabbed dinner and went into the Walker which is free after 5pm on Thursdays (the day we were there). It is a modern art museum with less traditional but still fun and interesting displays.

The final week was back to MIA for Art in Bloom. Floral artists create arrangements that are inspired by various art pieces in the museum. Fun to see the different ways they are seen and interpreted.

Reading In April:

I came across a book title this month that I immediately went to my library web site and reserved. “Shitty Craft Club”. It was available right away and is exactly the art vibe I am going for in this season of my life. I actually tell people I hate crafts. Mostly I hate them because I don’t know what to do with them when I am done with them. Like the junk journal of your grocery haul scraps, you are just prolonging the moment when it all goes in the trash. But what this book helps me understand is that crafting isn’t really about the finished product, it is about the process. She uses her crafts to celebrate her life. My favorite craft chapter is on pom poms. She proposes 3 ways to make them. One is to buy a pom pom maker, one is to use a fork and the 3rd option is to just plop a bunch of ribbons and string and whatever you have already knotted up in a box down and tie a string around it. Voila, the shitty pom pom club. I have found my people.

The only other book I read was The Order of the Phoenix, the 5th Harry Potter book. I needed a comfort read and picked that one. I skimmed the parts with Umbridge because she makes me mad. I’ve read it a few times, I know what happens. I was on my phone too much this month but during a car ride to a women’s retreat I listened to all the books my friends were reading and felt inspired to put the stupid thing down and get back to reading. Also, I have started noticing I sleep better when I read instead of scroll my phone at night. Why hasn’t anyone else noticed this? Oh right, everyone has noticed this.

Substack:

Here is a really great essay about leaning into our weirdo artist era. This is like the Shitty Craft Club only for art. Or maybe they are the same thing.

Everything is Liminal

What if we lean into our weirdo artist era?

There’s a difference between intentional focus and avoidance. I want to inject that thought into my veins because other than skimming the headlines, I’ve been shutting out the news lately, but a nagging little voice keeps whispering in my ear that it’s self absorbent to ignore what’s happening here at home and in the world, specifically the war in Iran. I tell my inner voice to shut it because I need to fiercely protect my creative space, the one that I’m finally coming into after years of being muddled in angst…

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5 months ago · 147 likes · 78 comments · Jenna Park

New Things in April:

For new things John and I tried a new coffee shop, it was amazing. We are still laughing about the high barista trying to take our order:

Me: I’d like a hot chai with almond milk

Him: we don’t have almond milk we have oat milk and almond milk. Long pause while I looked at him, I mean oat milk and coconut milk.

Me: OK I’ll do oat milk.

Him: Great, what drink do you want?”

Me: Hot Chai.

Him: with regular milk.

Me: No Oat milk.

Him: OK so iced chai with oat milk.

Me: No hot chai…

Repeat a version of this with John’s order and then he made John an iced drink instead of hot. John drank both. Seemed like we earned it.

I also experienced a new retreat center in Wisconsin. Beautiful space on a lake. The room I stayed in was nicer than many hotel rooms I have stayed in on vacations over the years. Definitely the deluxe women’s retreat experience.

Fostering my Imagination in May:

This month I am going to attempt to foster my imagination through curiosity. On the one hand I am a generally curious person but on the other hand I tend to like having the answers and focus more on what I know than on what I don’t know. Learning to ask questions and wonder about things is certainly a skill. Will see what I come up with in May. It is 4 days in as I finally get this summary written and the answer thus far is nothing. But the month is still young and spring is springing up the eternal hope of possibilities to explore and questions to ask.

Did you do any art this month? What sort of weirdo artist era are you in?

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We made a purposeful plan not to book tours ahead of time. Which, because we were going during the off season, we knew was a safe bet for most things. And, because we didn’t have any specific must do expectations we decided that if it meant we couldn’t do something we were OK with it.

When we were in Ireland we ended up not being able to do the Guinness tour which we have heard from many people is fabulous. However, they had a little bar at the back to try different samples and that sounded like enough. We ended up sitting next to an American college student studying abroad in Greece who had come to Ireland for St Patrick’s day with friends1 and like us did not get tickets ahead of time. We started talking and had a great time together while his friends were on the tour. Something that started out as a disappointment for all of us became a highlight.

A couple days later we were in Paris walking up to the Musee L’Orangerie before lunch ready to start a day of tourist activities with the thing I most wanted to do. The L’Orangerie houses Monet’s Water Lilies and I REALLY wanted to see them. I don’t think I realized how much it was the focus of what I wanted to do in Paris until we were standing outside the museum on Sunday being told that tickets were sold out until Wednesday (we were going home Tuesday). My heart was sinking as I was telling myself it was OK and not meant to be and God would bring us something surprising that was just what we should do that day instead. Deep breath.

The L’orangerie is a small museum which can be seen in 2 hours or less so we had planned to also go to the Musee D’Orsey as well which is how my mind was reframing our next step. “It’s fine, still get to see great art, still in Paris.” They are very near each other and so I was just standing silently processing before we walked across the bridge to our next destination when the guide who crushed my dreams says, “If you go to the D’orsey you can buy a combo ticket for both museums and get in today.” Ummm….Lead with that next time!!!

So we headed to the D’Orsey for our first museum of the day enjoying it thoroughly as we saw works of art we never imagined seeing in person. One was titled “Water Lilies” by Monet and John was like, oh, here it is. I just smiled and said, no that is not the one. Monet actually did 250-300 paintings of water lilies at the end of his life so if you want to see one closer to home MoMA in New York and The Art Institute of Chicago both have something as well. But they are not the one.2

Once I realized John had not looked it up and did not know what I was taking him to I became even more excited to experience the surprise of the scale with him.

This is it:

Monet’s famous Water Lilies Cycle or Nympheas cycle is comprised of 8 large panels. They are set in 2 oval rooms designed by Monet to create an immersive experience. You walk into the room in silence the way Monet requested the works be viewed. There is literally someone who stands and shushes people if too much talking starts. It takes your breath away.

Although I sort of knew what I was going to see I did not know there would be 2 rooms. Double the amazing. It was a fun surprise to go around a corner into a second immersive room. We spent a fair amount of time in there, wandered the rest of the small museum and then decided to go back a second time before we left. The first time is for pictures and taking it all in. The second time is for processing.

When we booked this trip the first week of January, I had no idea Monet’s Water Lilies were more than just one painting. I honestly had never given any thought at all to them. If asked I would have told you it was the painting of a bridge over a pond which my sister had a poster of in her college apartment. I too would have assumed I was looking for a simple painting similar to the one John saw.

But in January as I was struggling to know how to focus on my work which seemed a trivial distraction to the greater story going on in the world and in my neighborhood, I read about Monet who painted his great masterpiece during World War One while people were fighting nearby and he could literally hear and feel artillery shells going off at his home. He felt the torn emotions of the moment as friends and family, as well as himself, were in danger, as his country was at war, while he painted his garden. Was there any point? What value was this in the midst of so many other needs and sorrow?

In 1914 he wrote in a letter, “Yesterday I resumed work. It’s the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times. All the same, I feel ashamed to think about my little researches into form and colour while so many people are suffering and dying for us.”

Yes, I felt that a lot in January.

When I discovered his pieces were hanging in Paris I knew I wanted to see them3.

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As I wandered the room taking in the scale, the colors, the patterns and textures, I thought about that inner turmoil that he worked through. While I spent several days staring at my phone or the walls in January, he found a way to keep working rather than curl up in a ball or run away to find something more “important” or “significant” to do. I wondered if there were spots that represented days he was sort of phoning it in4. Where he just showed up and plopped some water lilies on the canvas because it was the next thing on his plan rather than because he had any vision for it. I wondered if there were days that started out a chore but he got caught up in the inspiration of the colors and shapes he was creating and found himself full of energy for the task. I wondered if there were days he left the studio early. I wondered if underneath the layers of paint there were half hearted attempts that got covered up the next day. I didn’t see one continuous line of inspiration and perfection, I saw years of ups and downs, questions and doubts, fear, anxiety. But also hope, perseverance, inspiration, getting lost in the details, being inspired by the beauty, the forms, the colors and the joy of creating something that represents the life cycle of water lilies in his garden and peace in France.5

As I think about my life and my work I want to be reminded on the days that feel mundane, or pointless, when the world feels like it is crumbling around me, that those days are part of the cycle of my life, my garden, my story. Along with the days of joy and energy and passion for my life, my work, my family and friends.

When we were there I bought a poster of one of the panels for my home office. We bought some trim pieces, painted them gold, and John nailed this frame to the wall around the poster. A little reminder as I go about my days that whether it is a day of confidence or doubt, enthusiasm or sorrow, confidence or fear, all of it is going into creating my master piece, this life that God has given me.

PS:

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When researching, I use that term loosely for what I did here, I came across a couple substack articles that cover Water Lilies and give a little more history than I was interested in relaying. Check them out:

The first one talks about visiting those smaller paintings he did at another museum I didn’t even know about in Paris but now wish I had also visited. (guess I’ll have to go back). The impact was similar for her.

Peace Is Power--Janessa Gans Wilder

When the World Went Dark, Monet Tended the Garden

A few days ago, I took my parents to an artistic gem in Paris, the Musee Marmottan Monet, that houses the world’s largest collection of Monet’s paintings…

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8 months ago · 25 likes · 12 comments · Janessa Gans Wilder

This one gives a little more history of Monet in general and this season of his life in particular. A quick and interesting read if you are like me and like history but don’t have time to get lost in the weeds.

Moments of Wonder

Thirty years looking at a water garden: the Water Lilies paintings by Monet

Monet's Water Lilies, the achievement of a lifetime…

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a year ago · 8 likes · Moments of Wonder

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I’ve been thinking about that lately. That first moment when I differentiated between what I loved and what my kids loved and realized I can have my own interests. Shortly after that trip child number 2 became enamored with animals and is now pursuing making a career of it. I have spent many more hours at zoos and aquariums since then fostering her love and passion for the work. But now she is also grown up. And I don’t have to go to the zoo or aquarium because she wants to. Her passion is sparked, now she is off to her own pursuit. Instead I can go on a hike, or to an art museum. I can skip the science stuff on a trip. I can stand at a history display and read all the words instead3.

I’m not gonna lie, this season of realizing I get to be an independent minded woman who doesn’t have to manage kids anymore and can instead manage my own life has been more challenging than I anticipated. Turns out my independent mind isn’t quite sure what it should be thinking. Could someone tell me what to do next? Where to put my energy? I have a lot of great advice, is there anyone out there that wants to hear it? Where do I go from here? What is my next role? I suppose I could learn new things, develop new passions, pursue a next path. Sigh, that sounds exhausting. Maybe I could just lay on the couch until I die? Wave if you need me.

This past few weeks I have been processing the end of this full time parenting career I have spent nearly 32 years on. Where I advised, directed, and fostered passions. Where my interests were maybe not completely absent but were not always the priority. As a result, as I practice stepping back from involvement in my daughters day to day life, I am asking myself what my interests are, what do I do now? And combined with that, the full existential crisis of what is my purpose in life now? Who is Melanie????

This question seems to be the crisis of my age and stage of life. All my friends are asking it. New seasons of parenting where we are needed less, career changes, whole lifestyle changes. I have a friend with a huge garden her kids helped with who keeps asking, “do I even like gardening?” You wake up one day and wonder, where do I fit now? Do I fit now? Where do I go from here?

My absolute favorite line from Phineas and Ferb comes from an episode where they decide to do nothing all day. The shows premise is that every day during summer vacation Phineas and Ferb build some outrageous contraption and the older sister is always trying to get them in trouble, catch them in the act, get the mom to turn the right direction and notice whatever they are doing. Every day they do something different and every day she tries unsuccessfully to catch them. Then one day they decide they are going to do nothing, just sit and enjoy the weather. But the sister thinks it is a trick and is still trying to catch them all day. Finally she has to admit they are doing nothing wrong that day and finds herself unsure what to do if she isn’t trying to catch them. In a panic she asks herself, “Who is Candace?”

This pretty much summarizes my life. But instead of trying to catch my brothers in the act I am trying to solve my daughter’s life. Oh, I have the whole day to myself, I should do some meal planning for my daughter. Oh wait, no. Instead I will research grad school programs for her. Oh wait, that’s wrong too. Hold on, I know, I will go pick up coffee from her favorite coffee shop and drop one off at her house on the way home…Sigh. If I am not taking care of my daughter then, “who is Melanie?”

This is the both/and of my life right now. I am very excited to be an independent adult who can make my own decisions and have my own interests. But also, what exactly are those? Do I still remember how to be independent and develop my own interests?

Today I started wondering, Am I over thinking this? I mean not that I normally over think but it is possibility I should probably explore4…

What if we find our purpose along the path not while sitting in our comfy chair contemplating the options. What if what I am called to do right now is show up for the things in front of me? What if the answer comes as we go along not in an instance.5

As a mom I look at Candace and know exactly how to help her. If candace doesn’t know what to do outside of trying to catch her brothers the answer is obviously to start trying new things, pursue different activities. Not wait until clarity strikes on what the next thing should be but go out and adventure. Give herself grace when she find herself trying to catch her brothers again some days and celebrate the days she enjoys doing something just for her. Over time she will discover who she is and it will be a mix of what she was and who she has become and it will be beautiful.

Who are you becoming in this season of life? Something all new or something that is a little bit of the old and a little bit of the new?

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April, Praise God.

This is finally happening in Minnesota…

Considering putting away my heavy jacket…

Our first new experience was Dublin. We arrived and grabbed lunch after dropping off our luggage. It was about 3pm and we asked our waiter what a couple of badly jet lagged people who wanted to stay awake a few more hours could do and he said, “Honestly, go take a nap, we come alive at night”. You didn’t have to ask us twice, we went and took a 2 hour nap refreshed for the evening. Now we aren’t really night life people so most nights we were still back in our room by 10pm. But we took to heart the spirit of the pub crawl and had a progressive meal almost every night, A drink and app in one pub, a drink and split a meal in another, maybe one more drink and app somewhere else. When you spend 3 or 4 hours doing that you go home sober, full and excited by the food, conversations and adventures you had.

One of our highlights was the book of Kells and the Long Room library at Trinity College. We loved it. I heard mixed reviews beforehand but as we were touring it I realized, you have to know yourself when considering what you will love. Old architecture, library, old new testament manuscript gorgeously illustrated, history. We love every one of those things. There was no scenario in which we were not going to love that exhibit. I understand that is not for everyone and fair enough, but that is us in every way.

The best part of traveling are the unexpected experiences you don’t plan. And in both Dublin and Paris God gave us something unexpected at a church. In Dublin we walked over to Christ church one evening just before dark knowing the tours were closed but just wanting to see the building. There is a statue in the courtyard called, “Homeless Jesus” which was high on John’s to do list for the trip. But when I wandered near the building the door was open. Turns out they had just started evening prayers at this Anglican church. Yes please, I grabbed a bulletin and marched in. Even if you aren’t Anglican, the choir alone is worth the experience. We had come from a whiskey museum and followed that service up with a couple pubs. I joked it was the most Irish thing we could do. ha ha.

In Dublin the tours we did were more interactive and we ended up chatting with people. One of them was a woman solo traveling from North Carolina. We chatted about travels and she said something I knew I would keep, “everywhere you go is just someone’s hometown.” I was fascinated both by how it makes the whole world feel a little more accessible, but also how it makes my hometown a destination to explore. The whole world, down the street and a thousand miles away, is full of new experiences.

Dublin ended up being the perfect place to start the trip, to shake off jet lag and to get into a vacation mindset of wandering, exploring and experiencing. It felt like a gentle hug. Friendly people, english language, we knew what the menus said. It all felt natural but with a fresh edge that made it fun and exciting. Every day we said, “We are in Dublin!”

Paris, while equally as amazing, was a trip to the big city. More to see, more to do and more to think about. What does that say? Where are we going? Don’t drop your guard. In both places we asked the question, How is there one incredible building after another, block after block? Does it never end?

We arrived in Paris mid afternoon, once again found food, sandwiches at a deli near our hotel, and then decided to wander. We had a destination in mind to see the Eiffel tower light up at night from a rooftop. But it wasn’t night yet so we kept wandering. And next thing we knew we were standing in front of the Louvre. We knew we weren’t going to try to go in so we just got pictures in front of the glass pyramid. Then we turned around and discovered while we were taking pictures they moved the Eiffel tower into our view. How had we missed it while walking over there??? (the answer is that the sun was setting in that exact position and so we never looked that direction.) We sat enjoying the view from there for a while and then went to find dinner never returning to our original destination. We were a 25 minute walk from our hotel and prior to our trip I said I didn’t want to walk more than 10 minutes but everything was beautiful, and I brought my gloves1, so we just kept walking and taking everything in. We averaged 10-15 miles a day of walking on this trip. While we did take the train at least once or twice in both cities we did not use it nearly as much as we had originally expected.

The second day we were full on tourists checking boxes. But the main event was to see Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musee de L’Orange2. It was spectacular. When we arrived they initially said tickets were sold out until Wednesday, when we would be home. As I am standing there processing this disappointment he says, “but if you buy a ticket to the D’Orsey you can buy a combo ticket that includes L’Orange and come today. Um hi, lead with that next time! We had been planning to do both anyway so it worked out perfectly. I may write more about that in the future, Water Lilies was everything I hoped it would be.

Our last day we wandered the Montmartre district we were staying and then headed to Notre Dame for the last major attraction we wanted to lay our eyes on. It was spectacular and we loved it but afterward we started wandering looking for a place to have our last dinner in Paris. As we were standing considering our options we heard church bells and looked up to see we were standing at the back of a church. Down the little alley I went and the door was open. An older woman walked in and I followed her. It is a church, they are open3. She went over to confession leaving John and I as the only ones to wander this gorgeous church that was sort of a mini version of Notre Dame. Mini being relative when comparing to Notre Dame. A couple young women, mid 20’s came in shortly after us and we were all wandering and enjoying the beauty of the space. And then, I am guessing inspired by the beauty of the space and being the only ones there, one of the young women started singing Ave Maria absolutely beautifully. It was a gift, that unexpected experience when traveling you can’t plan but come across when you hold your schedule loose.

Paris was a city we never imagined going to that both challenged us and excited us. An experience we never new we needed or wanted but so thankful we now have. Every day we said, “We are in Paris!”

The gift of the fact that this trip came together quickly and was not something I had been dreaming and planning for years is that I didn’t go in with a lot of expectations of all we had to do, how I wanted to experience it, what it had to mean, all I wanted to take away. We had done enough research to have an idea of what to do, where to go and find a few highlights but I joked every part of the trip was informed stumbling around. We were there for the experience and whatever came was exactly what it was supposed to be and whatever did not happen was not what we needed this trip.

Was my imagination fostered by this new experience? In obvious ways yes, I am imaging many additional trips. But also how we think about ourselves, how we view the world, what we value, who we are and who we are becoming all made appearances in our experiences, in our conversations, on the streets and sidewalks, the churches, museums, restaurants, monuments and more. And as we come home to our life that is full of both peace and chaos, joy and sorrow, clarity and questions, full of ease and challenges, our ability to navigate all of that, to process, to ask questions, to find answers, to become, has new material, new things to consider and new energy for each day.

I came home from this trip energized. Sad to have to return to our every day life after the glamor of a vacation, but energized to see my own daily life as exciting, purposeful and having a value that can sometimes get lost in the day to day. Maybe it was hearing everywhere is someone’s hometown early on the trip. I ended up viewing Dublin and Paris through that lens, as places people work, and dream. Raise families, figure out who they are, build careers, find friends, worship, play, and be present. When it was over I was excited to return to my hometown where I do the same.

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Drinking with our daughter:

The other new experience we had this month was drinking with our daughter4. She officially turned 21 and we took her out to put that new ID to use. It is weirdly relieving to have a 21 year old. And we cannot wait to take her to our favorite vineyards and cider brewery this summer. Is that weird? My Christian upbringing says yes but my mom who wants to share life with her daughter says no. I am going with the second one since I am not sure the first one knows what it is talking about.

What if we could live like we did in Europe?

While we were gone, getting in so many steps and enjoying walking and being present, I wondered about walking more in my own hometown. I live close to grocery stores, restaurants, the post office, coffee, book store, etc. Yet I often drive the one mile or less, even in good weather, rather than take the time to walk. We live 1 mile from our church and never walk there. Why?

I’m not the only one who asks these questions. I came across a substack article by a couple that spent a month in Europe walking more and living a different life. They returned determined to maintain that lifestyle here. Spoiler, they didn’t find it possible. Read about it here:

Strahm Stories de Saudade

We tried living like Europeans in the U.S.

There wasn’t much to complain about on paper. My wife Ashley and I, married for nearly a decade, owned a small but charming single-family home on a picturesque tree-lined street in Durham, North Carolina, a revitalized former tobacco town with a culinary scene that punched above its weight. We had a fenced-in backya…

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a year ago · 3057 likes · 335 comments · Cody Strahm

CS Lewis’s thoughts on Imagination:

Recently I read this substack written by a young woman who grew up at our church. I still remember the first time I met her, she was 6 and they had just moved back from a couple years in England. She had an adorable English accent and when she told me her name I thought she said Evie which is the name of my niece. I got excited to meet another little girl with that name. She was too sweet to correct me, her name is Ellie. She has grown up to be a wonderful artist and thoughtful writer. I loved what she said about imagination in this piece:

March Reading:

Nothing…

I didn’t read as much as I hoped this month. Lots of substack articles, Magnolia magazine, French words on duolingo that helped me have vague ideas of what the signs in Paris said, continuing with the amazing Beth Moore Bible study I am slowing working through. But I didn’t get lost in a story this month. Planning to rectify that in April.

Fostering Imagination in April…

My focus in April is going to be more artsy creative imagination. The kind most people think about I am determined to see what junk journaling is, I am toying with taking a class to learn some artsy activity. I am hopeful more spring behavior will happen in Minnesota and I can creatively notice the robin singing on a branch, the tulips peaking out of the ground and the buds forming on the trees. Not totally sure things start blooming in April but the robins have been singing on my morning walks and it does give me a glimpse of hope.

To start the month off John and I spent an hour at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It isn’t busy on a Wednesday afternoon and we were able to take our time and look at what we wanted. It’s too big for an hour but we hit a few things. One of the gifts of our hometown is that many of our beautiful art museums are free. So we have been there many times and will return many more times. Hoping to hit a few this month as I foster my imagination.

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Our trip to Dublin and Paris was full of imagination and the ideas around it. In Dublin, at Trinity College, we came across this display:

Hello. Can you imagine?! A department that thought creatively about how to work together and solve problems? I was immediately drawn in. This was literally our first day in Dublin, still jet lagged, completely excited and inspired by what this trip will hold when this gem meets us basically at the front door.

“Radical imagination is the ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be.”

This is sort of the whole idea behind what excites me about fostering imagination. Seeing beyond this life I have, this life I am living and imagining something more, different. More refined understandings of what I already believe, maybe completely new ideas I have never been introduced to. And then using that imagined idea to grow, pursue positive change in my life and my world.

“We are living inside of imaginations that other people told us were true…”

Someone imagined this world for us, what can we imagine for the next generation? Or even just for our own next season of life? What can we imagine next?

Years ago when John and I were not at all newlyweds but were still finding our groove as a family and as partners, we were out on a date where I was laying out my goals for the next year and for our family. Imagining new experiences, stronger careers, connected family time, etc. After listening for a while, and in particular hearing some of the actions I was interested in John taking, he says basically, our life has been going along a pretty good trajectory so far so I don’t know why we need to go through all of this…I looked at him for a moment and then and said, “This life we have didn’t just happen, I planned it!” Somehow along the way I had made our forward progress seem organic as if it just happened and was a big surprise to everyone. A compliment I suppose but we have laughed about that a lot over the years.

Without imagination I wouldn’t have know what to plan, where to direct us, why we needed to do anything but trip along or over whatever was in front of us. And I assure you we never would have just tripped over the life we are living today. We are living inside the imaginations of our past selves1.

The Paris part of our trip was a dream for sure but not one I ever dared imagine. I took French for 4 years in jr high and high school where I learned next to nothing,2 a few basic phrases and a little bit about France. So I did have knowledge of Paris and what a trip there would offer. I could imagine it as a concept, but I had never combined it with our life and said that is something attainable, worth imagining for our future and pursuing.3 I hoped maybe we would go to Europe someday and when we decided to go to Dublin that felt exactly like us, english speaking, we knew a few people who had been there and said it was beautiful. And affordable. But when my travel advisor friend, Cindy4, who had just come back from Paris, told me it was attainable in our budget to spend a couple days there I could not stop imagining it.

This is the importance of inspiring other’s imagination. Cindy’s experience both in traveling to Paris, knowing how to book a trip and find hotels, and then answer all my questions and concerns, was key in allowing me to not just imagine a trip to Paris but then actually take it! Prior to that I thought it would be fabulous but was wildly expensive, the language barrier would make it impossible to navigate, and how on earth would I even know how to find and book a hotel there? Do they even have a Holiday Inn Express in Paris5? I needed a friend to come along and feed my imagination, fill in gaps in my ideas, correct my misconceptions and tell me what I thought was impossible could indeed be possible.

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After our fabulous first trip abroad I am now dreaming of our next trip. A tour of schools for our daughter to attend Grad School6. I fell in love with the Trinity College campus, met a grad student from Pennsylvania who was attending, drilled her with many questions, and am now inspired to foster my daughter’s imagination of studying abroad. So far she is definitely in on us taking her to Europe to look at colleges next year after she graduates, an idea we got from a couple we met who had toured schools last year with their son who is now awaiting answers to his applications. Whether it is the take her to Europe or the look at colleges part she is excited about who can say7 but either way I am confident it will expand her imagination for what is possible in her future.

What if you imagined something different in your life? What new thing would you do? How have you inspired others to grow their imagination?

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