Where you, cancer, copy furiously,
I fumblingly create.
You can not uncreate me.

I learned of this poetry chapbook when I heard Jonathan Rogers interview Katy Bowser Hutson in the first episode of his new podcast The Habit: Conversations With Writers About Writing. Her words resonated with some of my own experiences with trauma and so I went looking for her book, Now I Lay Me Down To Fight. I wanted to see for myself what she had made from the place of vulnerability that is cancer in her body. She writes in the intro: “There is a magic, a medicine to putting words to terrible things. I wrote through all of it: to face fear, to say it out loud, to pray, to fling it all away from me.”

Out of terrible things, she has made art. A gorgeous handhold for the journey.

Walking is a way to find possibility in your life when there doesn’t seem to be any left.

I am a big fan of Austin Kleon’s work and Keep Going is full of quotable lines, but this is one of my favorites right now.

Not just a one time read, this book is packed with gems for making art. For living.

I intend to get you what you need. I don’t know how I will manage this, but in the fullness of time it shall be accomplished.
– said the cob to his son who had no voice

Inspired by the Trumpeter Swans I see on my walks each day, I got a copy of The Trumpet of the Swan to read with my boys. (I think I may have never read this book before.) Author E.B. White reads the audible version and we enjoyed his storytelling. Now I keep watch for a handsome swan to touch down in the Lagoon with a trumpet, a slate, and a moneybag around his neck.

For what am I most grateful? For what am I least grateful? …..The examen makes us aware of moments that at first we might easily pass by as insignificant, moments that ultimately can give direction for our lives.

As I understand it, the Daily Examen is a meditation practice associated with Ignatian Spirituality. Ever curious about forms, applications, and realities of prayer, I bought Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life on recommendation from…I have no idea where.

With all the bread being baked at our house lately, I was inspired to finally read this little book and am glad I did. It’s a quick read and offers helpful inputs for practicing mindful living to bring greater awareness of God at work within the context and experiences of our lives.

Marriage is the act of choosing love again and again and again. It is the falling out of it and the diving back in. The constant evolution of two people who have chosen to weave separate, complementary lives. It didn’t have to be the brain injury – although brain injury may be the most extreme, expedited form of change two partners experience. It could have been cancer or depression, an affair or regrettable neglect. But this question I have arrived at is the question I was always destined to arrive at: In this difficult moment, with so much uncertain, will I chose this marriage again?

Our stories are different and our parts are different, but the question is the same. As my therapist often says during the hard, hard moments of my life: All that being true. How are you going to live?

How do you get through, when things are too much? Ask me and I’ll tell you to walk. “Just walk,” I’ll say. “Walk. Walk and walk and walk and walk and walk.”

I was super curious when I heard about the structure of this YA book >> 100 chapters, 100 words in each chapter. I liked it and felt like it worked. Hard topics that were perhaps held together a little too breezily for reality – 100 words, 100 pages after all – but reality was present nonetheless. And the grief and the walking are things I know to be true.

If certain things hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here now, in this place with this perspective.

I read an opinion piece in the newspaper and went looking for more from the author. Homestead Girl is her story. Rather, a collection of her stories. A book of essays – poetic and thoughtful. And a good addition to my Alaska bookshelf.

This questioning of the meaning of being, and dying, and being, is behind the telling of stories around tribal fires at night; behind the drawing of animals on the walls of caves; the singing of melodies of love in spring, and of the death of green in autumn. It is part of the deepest longing of the human psyche, a recurrent ache in the hearts of all of God’s creatures. 

I think it’s been a couple decades since I last read L’Engle’s book Walking on Water:Reflections on Faith and Art. Perhaps it’s the way my brain works now – or maybe it is the nature of a book of “reflections,” but I found it hard reading to stay on her trail, while at the same time I copied out a lot of helpful insights and am always glad to read L’Engle.