Category: beauty

on inspiration – letter no. 4

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It is popular these days to talk about creativity as if inspiration didn’t matter. I think this is an oversight. It’s simple to say that the important part of making things is to make them; to keep making and creating day after day without waiting for inspiration. There is nothing inherently wrong with this model, except that it’s an oversimplification. Sure, we shouldn’t be waiting for creativity to find us. We won’t write great American novels or paint masterpieces if we’re lying around, waiting for the brilliant idea to come. Creativity does have to be a habit. I’m just convinced there’s more to “inspiration” than that. 

I think inspiration is important, even if it’s not as vibrant and sudden as spontaneous combustion, or doesn’t go off like fireworks in our minds. But I think inspiration can also be cultivated. If you stop and explore what you’ve written or painted or composed or designed, I imagine you’ll discover that your best work happens at the intersection of a faithful creative habit and inspiration. And when you stop to explore where your inspiration comes from, I think you’d find a consistent source or sources for it as well. 

I used to just think I liked long walks, but now I’m realizing that I have my greatest capacity and inspiration for creativity when I can regularly get out for a walk by myself. Even if it’s not very long, it’s like a reset button. I come home a bit refreshed, a bit energized, and with my writing mind a little bit clearer. Maybe it’s the blank space of being unplugged for a while. Maybe it’s that plus the exercise, or maybe the chance to see beautiful things like light on the willow leaves at the park or a stained glass window in a neighborhood house or even a well-planned garden: something about walking without talking, pushing a stroller or glancing at my phone gives my brain a creative boost. 

It’s not as if I come home with new ideas every time I take a good walk. More often than not, it feels like I’m just stretching my legs. But my best ideas and my best writing all come when I regularly clear my mind, and I do that best when I’m walking. I can’t conjure inspiration, but I’ve learned I can make space for it to land. Maybe it’s a ten-minute walk before the sun gets too hot. Maybe it’s a long walk with a flashlight after dark, watching the growing crescent moon and listening to the crickets. Sometimes it’s just sitting outside on the patio without books or phone while my toddler naps – not walking but letting my mind wander all the same. Regardless, it’s clearing this sort of landing space that I know will eventually invite the good ideas.

Maybe your inspiration comes on Pinterest. Maybe it comes when you lie on the floor with your feet on the couch and stare at the ceiling. Maybe it’s a hot cup of coffee or a good playlist or yoga. But it matters that you know, that you find that thing that creates the most space for inspiration and do that thing repeatedly. It should be as much a habit as your actual work. Don’t let that space disappear under the pressure of life. It’s easy to think that time for self-care is selfish or unnecessary or that you’ll get back to your evening sweat session when there’s more time, but more often than we realize, that ongoing time of quiet is one of the most crucial players in our work and creativity. If you have to let it go for a while, don’t stay away too long. 

I did a study on rest throughout the Bible last year, because I think I was trying to figure out how I could rest in such a busy season of parenting. I mostly discovered that rest is pretty much a commandment in the Christian faith. It seemed a bit odd to me still, but I knew I was getting burnt out on a daily level trying to squeeze seven productive days into each week, so I began trying to find ways to rest. I’m still not very good at it, but I’ve found it’s not only giving me a better ability to function, it allows me to find greater creativity too. 

I’m not trying to make this into a sermon – I’m just becoming aware of a correlation between a tenant of my faith and the way it actually brings my creative goals closer to reality. I’m trying to say Look – down-time is so important it’s even in this major book of faith, the one I believe in. So create some restful space with your hard working habits, and watch inspiration step into that invitation. 

Find your rest: I dare you. Don’t wait for inspiration, go out and clear a place for it in your life, like weeding a garden even when you can’t see the seedlings yet. The flowers will grow, they just need time and a little space to breathe.

your story matters – letter no. 2

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It’s going to be worth it. It matters. These are the things you need to hear today.

Writing is worth it. Choosing a place you will write consistently and a way you will measure writing consistently and then doing the actual writing – consistently: this is all worth your while. It matters in ways you won’t understand at first. It matters when it feels dull, uninspired, worthless. It matters when it feels alive, golden, real. It matters all the times in between. And I’m using writing because it’s what I know but let’s pull in your own dream real quick: gardening, running, further education, travel, buying a house – it’s worth it. Stay with me.  Translate this whole post in your mind as you read. Put in your goal whenever I talk about writing. These words are meant to be true for you, too.

I know what you want: you want to have done the work. You want the work behind you. You want to see the fruit of your labor. Girl, I want to see the fruit of your labor too. I believe it’s going to be beautiful. And I truly believe it will come. But I know how it won’t come and I know one of the ways that it will. It won’t come by wishing on a star, by taking long inspirational walks in the woods, by sitting outside long enough. It won’t come by reading good books and calling them “field work”. It won’t come by attending a conference and calling yourself a writer with a fainthearted name-it-and-claim-it attitude. 

It will come by writing. It will come by writing the days you believe you’re a writer and the ones you believe you’re not. It will come by writing on the days when you felt wildly inspired and also writing on the days when you were sure you’d have to go back and delete every word, unthink every idea that led to those words. (Yeah. It’ll come those days too. Don’t discount them – remember all the days that I told you matter? Those are in there too.) 

I’m only partly here to reprimand you. And we do need it, a little. All of us begin to think that if we put in the work partly, that should be good enough. (It’s not.) Or we begin to think that we can’t put in the work. (That’s false.) No, you need to put in the work completely. You have to be all in and you have to be in it for the process, the work, the long haul. You can’t be in it for the applause that will not come on a predictable timetable or in an expected fashion. And you can put in the work completely. Honey, maybe you’re working full time and trying to workout and keep up a social life and all that you see is the ways in which you can’t. Then start with five minutes, girl. Start with five minutes and do it day in and day out. Read Atomic Habits and figure out how you can make that tiny, atom-sized habit a real one that sticks. You can write a book five minutes at a time. I believe in you. If I can write while raising a toddler, house-hunting and getting ready to birth a second child into our family, then you can write during your day job, your crazy social hours, your wacky gym schedule. 

There’s more to what I’m saying though. The second thing I’m saying isn’t so much you can or you have to but it matters that you do. It does matter. Your book is beautiful, babe. The world needs what you carry, as Janessa Wait says. She’s right. You’re carrying the stories you need to write even if you don’t recognize them yet. That’s ok, darling. Sometimes it takes a while. I’m still in the process of recognizing some of my own stories. Stick with it. What you find will be worth it. 

People will need to hear the words that only you can say. Please write them. Please write them hour by hour, or minute by minute. Please write them as slow or as fast as they come. But write them. Remember the fire that burns in your stories: think of it like a campfire. Sometimes campfires are little – they burn in the back corner of a yard and people stop by it to roast a marshmallow or warm their hands in between the exciting night games. And sometimes campfires are huge old bonfires. They roar and crackle so hard people need to stand back and turn slowly so they don’t get too hot on one side.

Friend, your fire matters no matter how huge and bright it burns. Your story matters. Tell it. The house you want to buy can be a home where you welcome people, where you welcome yourself finally. That degree can be a means of inspiration for others, a means of joy for you. That perfect latte pour can be your pride and joy and make somebody’s day, all at once. Any creative or artistic endeavor is a thing of weight and glory, darling. Never forget this. It matters. Your work matters.

that summer/winter life

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The first time I saw the sign pointing one direction towards private staff housing and another towards Eagle Lake Camp, I felt like a subtle barrier had been thrown up between that place and the rest of the property. It was before I knew anything about camp; at first I just assumed that it was somebody’s house, separate from camp operations. It seemed like the sort of outlet one should tiptoe past in order not to disturb the residents. After we joined the Navigators camp staff ourselves, I learned that that’s where we’d be housed during the summers, and I became grateful for the subtle separation. And now that I do indeed live here three months a year, turning left at the sign that points right down towards camp, that separation has slowly diminished.

The distinction on the sign is important though: it directs the camp staff and camper families in the right direction; away from the private housing of people who live here full time without working here. Towards the business center of camp. Towards the beach and the blob, the cabins and the check-in tables. Away from the two and three year olds who are just trying to nap on a Sunday afternoon, and their mamas who need a few hours of quiet.

There is a similar distinction between the life we live at camp and the live we live away from camp. I never expected quite this level of separation between my off-season community and rhythms, and the changes we make “up the mountain”. Yet they exist. Our first summer, I expected to visit friends in the city rather frequently; if I came down every week to get our mail and we came down on the weekends, surely we’d have plenty of time to join the bar-b-ques, the Bible studies, drink coffee on our back patios of a Saturday morning together? But by the end of the summer, I had only seen one friend with any regularity, and that was because she planned to move across the country at the end of the summer.

Then August came, the tenth and final week of camp rolled around on a Sunday morning and rolled past on a Friday. Campers left, and then counselors, and then program coaches, and then we did. And I realized suddenly that the old wooden sign directing the summer staff in one direction and the families in another had never really kept us apart. The girls I’d discipled over the summer took pieces of my heart back to school all across the country and even straight up into Canada. Some of my friendships would be renewed the next summer and some would not and I realized as we moved back into the range of backyard cookouts and enthusiastic greetings at Sunday School drop-offs that I missed the summer piece of my life as much as I’d missed the winter piece through camp season.

I didn’t know how to reconcile these fragments at first. How could I maintain lasting friendships with people if I was going to be gone all summer? And how could I create real bonds at camp if I was only going to say goodbye – maybe forever – after ten weeks? And yet just like the private driveway up to staff housing that loops back around to form a circle with the road, there are unexpected connections through the pieces of my year that begin to thread them together.

Camp is an undeniable part of our lives and unless my husband wanted to change jobs, there’s no way simply wouldn’t move to camp for a quarter of every year. Yet our friends “down the mountain” have taken an interest in our camp life; they offer to come up for Chapel on Sundays and ask how they can pray for us through the summer. They ask about Grant’s role and my role and they flex their tight schedules to meet me for coffee when I do, finally, come down to collect our mail.

At camp, right when I wonder if I can keep my heart open for another season of loving hard and saying goodbye, I am met by people who have answered this same question with a warm and thorough yes. People I never expected to meet take time to learn my name and greet my toddler with high-fives. Counselors I thought I barely knew are giving me hugs, winning over love I didn’t know I had left to give. I find myself looking up strange combinations of names and numbers that make up Instagram usernames so that I can follow this one to Alaska and that one to Wisconsin through their long winters until I maybe see them in the spring.

Camp will always be seven miles from home as the crow flies and remain an hour’s drive on a good day. There will never be a complete reconciliation between these two halves of life. But the way I treat the distance matters. It makes a difference that I remain open to the love these separate communities have to give – to me and to each other. Perhaps they will always seem farther apart than they truly are, but it will always be up to me to see past the dividing ridges, to recognize how close and even intersecting these two sides of the same mountain are.

beauty will save the world

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I have always loved this quote, even before I knew where it was from, but I have not always believed it. Even when I heard it perfectly illustrated at a conference about the arts – about the necessity of beauty – even then I didn’t believe it. There was a seed of Midwestern Baptist doubt that nothing, not even the beauty I crave like living water, could be so instrumental in saving the world. But yesterday I found a new layer of understanding.

I wish I could say it was a new understanding altogether but my spirit has rarely learned like that, in leaps and bounds. I grow slowly and deeply and my roots have to push deeper into a thing, a truth or a season or a reality, before I can see it slowly growing in my own life. The thing about beauty is it’s been growing on my heart for the past year and a half and only now can I shape into words how this belief is changing me.

But I don’t have to just believe that beauty will save the world anymore. I’ve heard stories so blatant they spell it out nice and slow for even those as stupid as me. The story I heard this spring was the story of a woman in a choral group that sang old latin hymns. She loved them for their beauty even though she didn’t believe the truth of them. And yet gradually, that beauty became so rooted in her heart that she began to wonder if these words about Christ and saving and hope could actually be true. There were other influences in the gradual renewal of her beliefs, but it began with the hymns of a dead language whose words were very much alive.

Yesterday it came home to me in my own way: I had tucked my toddler in for bed and stepped outside for a walk. We live in the woods, at camp, with other families: there were people who’d hear him if he cried, and I only wanted to walk the quarter-mile loop of the driveway a few times. There were birds singing. A sunset glow was gathering on the opposite hill. Wildflowers were blooming – some I know, like shooting stars and blue flags and golden smoke and alpine bluebells. Even more that I want to learn were pushing their blossoms up in places I didn’t expect, catching me off-guard with perfect tiny white blossoms and surprising fragrances. Last year’s rose hips marked the places where this year’s roses will bloom.

I walked in that wide loop for a long time, just savoring the freshness of the air and the presence of the flowers and the singing of the wind on the tops of the hills. It’s moments like that which give me the ability to go back to being a mama with more gentleness. Walking and solitude and beauty give me the chance to be restored. They save the way I talk to my toddler, or my husband or my friends. They change the way I write, process, imagine. They save the way I see the world, the way I understand beauty and its small saving graces. Yes, beauty will save the world, one wildflower, one tired mama at a time.

There’s hope in this knowledge; when I can’t find or get to beauty, I can know it still exists. It still changes things. It still saves in it’s own small God-made ways. And when I can, it saves me, sends me back to God again in ways that don’t quite happen in a church. Yes, beauty will save the world, sometimes whether we realize it or not.