in the long night season

I'm sitting on my couch. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the blinds lowered over the window. Except that they hang crooked. I can never seem to get them even. Those two strings never hold with the right amount of tension. The side that's higher lifts inches above the window sill. Beyond it, a small, insistent glow from the white Christmas lights I left strung around my porch peers through the dark night and into my window. Drops from the first (late) winter rain sit on the window. They catch its light and sparkle. The condensation blurs the edges. Around it all: night.

This is life right now: dark mornings, dark evenings, couch-sitting, small details, mundane details, crooked details that I still can't seem to get right after all these years. Tension held un-balanced. January is all about starting small, slow, silent, a stark contrast to the bright, fast, full December we just paraded through. Hopefully, it's about noticing, about keeping candles lit and lights glowing even if they're small, about the grace that holds a never balanced life -- still whole, and worth living.

These are the first attempts at creative words I've written in over a month. Of the many things I may have learned about myself over this past year, one is that words are hard-won is transition. The un-balance is weeks and months when my head is wrapping itself around how to live. I haven't yet learned to dig words out until I'm on the other side. Something else I've learned, or am learning, is how darkness creeps in after those large, bright full days are over until night is longer than day. But night seasons are part of how the world moves and spins, how it turns over, part of the creation God called "good" (is what my pastor said yesterday, and I am trying to believe him).

Or maybe this is the way I am supposed to write it: after many long nights, day will always become longer than night, and something brighter than twinkling Christmas lights will announce itself through the cracks in my crooked blinds. I'm sitting here. I'm waiting.

[If you are reading, thanks for joining me here. I may or may not be adding more words in the coming weeks... stay tuned.]

photo: sunrise at griffith park

to be the child still

I sat near Sue on her couch. She had pulled the curtains to keep the room cool on that hot yellow morning in late October and laid out a platter of fruit and crackers on the ottoman in front of us. 

Across from the couch, on the shelf under the tv was a row of children’s books, and in the corner a posterboard decorated with stickers of friendly skulls and witch hats in green, orange and white – indicators of her nearly four-year-old granddaughter.

Sue lives with her daughter's family. Among Sue’s many roles is to take her granddaughter to preschool each morning and pick her up each day at noon. They made those Halloween posterboards together, and I’m guessing they also read those books and play with Sammy, the small brown dog who laid sleepily in the corner of the room while Sue and I talked.

I figured Sue was eager to talk about her granddaughter, and I wanted to know, so I asked. She’s just so creative, Sue said proudly. You should see what she does with legos. She told me how, every time there’s another birthday in the extended family, her granddaughter will bring out her legos and build a cake, complete with characters or figures on top, just like the Dory figurines that sat atop her cake when she turned three.

It wasn’t the details of the story that got me. Lego cakes are not that unusual. I have seen a lot of kids do a lot of things with legos. Instead, it was the way Sue told me, with such conviction that what her granddaughter created was unmatched and delight in how she sees this young one bringing forth what is inside her. In that moment, I became the child again, eager to demonstrate what I can do, eager for a subjective audience who sees me through eyes clouded with love. Maybe this is the way my Father talks about me, I thought, about the things I’m writing and about the ways I tried to love people in Kenya and the new ventures I’m embarking on.

I wanted to sit with this longer, to be the child still, but Sue kept talking, about her granddaughter and all manner of things. I put my childish desires aside but it came back to me later, when I was alone, and now, as I sit and write and build and take very seriously what might be clumsy lego birthday cakes but, to some, seem to change the world.

***

(photo: not Sue's granddaughter)

looking intently (or, trying)

I used to write in places where I was anonymous or alone. Coffee shops or my kitchen table. Now I write in a garden where guests and friends interrupt me, even when I wear my headphones. I write less this way, but most of the time I have more fun.

A man today told me God will bless me with a well-paying job after my time in Kenya. The other week, a guest told me God has a gentleman set aside for me. I wonder if these words are from the Spirit of God; I wonder about the spiritual lives of these bearers of blessings, if I can trust the blessings to bring their fruit. Either way, can't I trust that there is something good and full in the words they have spoken -- a wish for a full life?

I was supposed to teach English at a community center today, but instead I took the day off. Which actually led to deeper work than I probably would have done if I'd carried on with my schedule.

Kenyans ask me for things. They see a mzungu and assume I can help. It's not a magic wand they seek, but the advantage of privilege. Money isn't just money; to give is a sign of friendship. I am learning to respect that, and to understand the ways I really am able to help.

Kenyans are also extremely generous. Don't discount the treasure of a smile, a spoken blessing, friendship, English, welcome, tea.

At first, time here seemed long and slow. Just the other day, it turned fast and short. And a lot easier. Now I realize how the struggle of those early days demanded my attention, required intention. I don't want to float through these last few weeks and realize I still wanted to more. (I want to want more now, and go after it.)

I want to see need here the way it is to be seen, not through my own lens of what should be had. I want to see provision and help through the lens of those who will receive it.

what it was about

But when the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand. 

Mary did not always understand.  But one does not have to understand to be obedient. Instead of understanding -- that intellectual understanding, which we are so fond of -- there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which we are not yet able to understand. 

A young woman said to me, during the question-and-answer period after a lecture, "I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was eight or nine. I didn't understand it, but I knew what it was about." 

As long as we know what it's about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.

-Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

only rumbling over potholes

I sit in the taxi with Peter. I sit in the passenger's seat on the left side of the car, which still mixes me up. Peter has driven me before, and he has a kind smile, and a lazy eye, which makes him seem more friendly somehow. I try to carry on a conversation, but I run out of things to ask, and I know that in this culture, taxi drivers are not accustomed to being friendly with their customers (even if we are regulars). In the silence, I think about how I wish I had more words -- more things to say to people, more Swahili words to say it in a way that expresses a deeper commitment to their culture. I also think about how I want to write more, but the words are just not there yet. All I hear is rumbling like this van over the potholes in the road we are driving. And then I remember a writer's advice, how the lack (of details or information or whatever) is sometimes what you build the story around.  

***

We had an hour training on language acquisition. It's about culture learning and relationship building, too, not just memorizing a list of words and stringing them together to make sentences. You start by listening and pointing, not even saying a word. The idea is that listening in context, paying attention, finding language in its home and making that home more and more yours will be what shifts your thinking and fire new neurons until you produce new words. This means you will be quiet at first, and maybe for a long while. But when the words come, they may flow.

***

I am making lists of words I learn in their context, which stick more easily that the ones on my flashcards. Mtoto, child, who were invited up for prayer during church. Bwana asifiwe, praise the Lord, a refrain in worship songs. Hatari, danger, the name of the security company whose name is posted on all of the surrounding compounds. Lipa, pay, on my M Pesa account. I brainstorm ways to be around Swahili more just to hear it and put life to words and words to life. I am not ready to speak yet. When the staff speak to me to help me learn, I look back at them blankly, and then we laugh.

I'm hoping the language acquisition training was right, that the words will soon flow.

christmas day, a light has come

It  is late afternoon, the time when the winter light is a thin layer of yellow over the trees in the horizon. It has been a long day that started when little ones emerged from their rooms with big, eager smiles. Ready for gifts. Since then, there has been a scavenger hunt to find hidden gifts, pancakes and turkey bacon, a church service. Now, my nephew is sitting next to me on the couch, computer open, video playing. My niece is on the floor in the next room, making a roller coaster out of plastic pieces that snap together, move and light up. She is being helped by her dad and the younger neighbor boy. "It works!" they just exclaimed over the hum of a small motor.

We are together. It has not been a perfect day. Ones of us have been frustrated, disappointed, sick. But it has been a good day. Gifts, wrapped to hide their contents, were opened to the delight of being thought of and known and loved. The sun warmed everything it touched. Ice nearly melted - though not enough for the ducks to swim on the lake that I ran alongside. Instead, they waddled slowly on top of the thin layer between water and sky. This, too, a grace: walking on water.

To those who were in darkness, a light has come. Wonderful, mighty, everlasting, full of peace.

Now, as I finish writing, the light has faded. But it will not leave.

Merry Christmas, friends.

***
(photo: morning light during a run, northern new jersey)

you almost forget to breathe

The day after my last day of work, I woke up too early and ran under a dull sky that hid the sun until I was done. I arrived back at my apartment by 8am, the sun shining now but not giving much warmth, with the entire day before me and few plans to fill it until the evening. I called my sister, cleaned my kitchen, showered.

Then, I picked up a book of short stories. I read slowly. I let my heart catch up.

The introduction spoke of stories as a form of art capable of putting a reader in touch with life's fleeting, inexorable rhythms. Good ones can move you somewhere beyond yourself. You almost forget to breathe. Even in these first few pages, I remembered why I love short stories (short forms of most writing, really) -- the intensity, the conciseness, the simple complexity -- and knew this would be a book full of characters and stories to disorient me from what life had been and turn me about. Ready, somehow, for the new one that's ahead.

This particular compilation, The Best American Short Stories of 2016, was edited by Junot Diaz, one of my favs. He curated a notably diverse group of authors to tell all kinds of stories. I liked nearly all of the stories, but I have to admit that the ones with female protagonists appealed to me the most. The women in these stories are vulnerable yet strong, recognizing that their fates are, in many ways, at the mercy of the men and societies around them, and yet not letting those seemingly predetermined stories be all that is said about them in the end. In one story, a young Bangladeshi woman with a history that is slowly revealed works in a garment factory and agrees to becoming one of three wives as a means of survival:

Jesmin sees marriage as a remedy. If you are a girl, you have many problems, but all of them can be fixed if you have a husband. In the factory, if Jamal puts you in ironing, which is the easiest job, or if he says, take a few extra minutes for lunch, you can finish after hours and get overtime, you can say, but my husband is waiting, and then you won't have to feel his breath like a spider on your shoulder later that night when the current goes out and you're still in the factory finishing up a sleeve. 

In another, a young Ojibwe girls is rescued by a white man (or, is is that she rescues herself?) from what is essentially slavery. She never speaks to the man, never tells him her name. He calls her Flower. To him, she is beautiful and sweet. But,

That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things--forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. 

And my favorite, I think, about a young woman dealing with the aftermath of a miscarriage of a baby about which she felt indifferent, who finds home in a strangers home, and the desire to mother in the grief of losing what she thought she never wanted:

All of my senses opened in recognition. The mixed scent of newsprint and butter, the muted ticking of the modern cuckoo clock on the wall, the enamel tea kettle gleaming atop the immense stove, the marmalade still sharp in my mouth: home. Here it was. Or something like it. Something homelike. Heimlich. How would the Germans say it? Gemutlich. Touchingly, where the soul or spirit belongs.

What happens to each of these women might seem like what you would expect, and yet each finds a kind of freedom: power over her body, her name, her vocation. It is only in the small entries into the women's narrations, the open window through which we hear whispers of what's really going on, that we understand this. Stories like this can ready you for a new season, ready you to look beyond what you think you know, ready you to know nothing at all.

to catch words one day

I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them
then blow gently,
watch them float
right out of my hands.

from Brown Girl Dreaming by Jaqueline Woodson

***
(photo: sunset at Griffith Park)

reading bad feminist

I know nothing about cars. When I take my car to the mechanic, they are speaking a foreign language. A mechanic asks what wrong with my car, and I stutter things like, "Well, there's a sound I try to drown out with my radio."... I don't want to be good at cars. Good feminists, I assume, are independent enough to address vehicular crises on their own; they are independent enough to care.

-Roxanne Gay, Bad Feminist

This is one confession in a list at the end of Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay. It made me laugh, the part about turning up the radio to cover up the sound. It also made me nod in agreement, the part about not caring, and yet wondering if I should (to be an independent woman, i.e. a good feminist).

And that's probably a good way to sum up the book. There was some laughing, some nodding. In the middle there was some skimming because I got a little impatient with some of the essays. (And, I'd chalk that up to an editing choice. Some of these sections felt like a bunch of blog posts plopped there, instead of a more thoughtfully edited collection of essays - some previous writing that was expanded or combined or re-written.) In the middle of said essays, I also started to wonder if the author had anything positive to say. Where was the joy or the positivity? It was just critique of one bad movie after another (the section was on culture, gender and race). But then I felt caught - maybe it's because there's not much joy to be found, not much positive to say when it comes to how African Americans and other minorities are represented in film. Ok, keep reading...  

What I appreciated most in this book was the author's flavor of vulnerability. She wasn't confessional, but she did reveal a lot about what makes her human. That made her critique more credible. She's telling us that she's not a perfect feminist, that she's nuanced and complex and that she fails. So when she calls out others for ways they, too, have failed their art or their brothers and sisters, I can swallow it. We can be imperfect, yes. And, let's all try to be better. Yes.

***
(photo: coffee, reading, of course)

thoughts on writing as one being re-made

I heard a writer, speaking of the transition from being a writer who wrote for herself to one who was read by many people, say that she understood the experience of putting her thoughts and heart in words for people to read as being a living sacrifice. I know the passage of scripture where that phrase - living sacrifice - is mentioned. It is one that's been popularized by Christian culture, put on t-shirts and greeting cards and wall hangings. And yet when she said that, it was like I understood in a new way what the words mean. What she meant is that her writing is a way she gives her life back to God. It feels like sacrifice - letting go, surrender, maybe even being burned. A living sacrifice, though, isn't burned up to ashes but has a heart that still beats, limbs that move and eyes that continue to see. It is in the living, in the writing, in the figuring things out and then allowing my mind and heart to be re-made, that I sacrifice. That I live as one given over to another.

***

We don't need to make the gospel new; the gospel makes us new.

I heard this a few months ago and thought, yes. There are so many Christian books out there that try to give a new spin to the gospel. A catchy phrase and a trendy cover design, a format that reflects the kind of thing that people read now. I read a lot of these when I was in high school and working at a Christian bookstore, but at some point realized the authors weren't able to tell me anything new. I've come back to these kinds of books now, curious about what's being written and how my writing fits (or doesn't) and find that, once again, a lot of the same kinds of things are being said over and over again, and yet not much is really being said.

But then there are times when I hear a word and, even though it's a word I've heard many times before, it's like new, because it's making me new. How is it that the Word that was written so many centuries ago is like new each time I come to it? It must be something of the life of God in it, is all I can conclude, the same life that makes the day new, gives mercies that are new, renews me from the inside to re-make my heart, my sight, my love.

I wonder, then, how being made new then drives me to speak or write the gospel in a way that does, indeed, make it new for others. This is how it starts: a seed of a word that grows and makes a shady place for others to find rest for their souls, makes branches that birds can find a home in. The kind of work that lays foundations for many generations and brings peace to places that have been ruined.

***

So I opened my mouth, and he fed me the scroll. Fill your stomach with this, he said. And when I ate it, it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.  

- Ezekiel 3:2-3

***

(photo: flowers and concrete, griffith park, los angeles)

dreams from a bumpy van ride

So, here it is: I'm going to Kenya. Six months, ten time zones away, a few friends and many more to make. It was all a dream at first, one I conjured up on the long, bumpy van ride from maasai-land back to Nairobi. My skin red and bumpy from the strong, constant equatorial sun (even from behind the clouds, I felt it), bags under my eyes from six nights of sleeping (or not) in a tent while the night air scatters dust from on place to another. Exhausted but for the adrenaline, some might say. Spent but for the love, is what I knew.

Dreams are hard to pin down, the way they whisper in a jumbled tongue in your ear and leave you to decipher their meaning. Could this be for real? I wondered as I tried to hold onto the thought even as it slipped away. But then someone else said it, too: what if I could move here? Just for a few months? I said, me, too and I began to understand that something new was happening. Just maybe, I thought.

Bits of dreams make their way to the surface of life, cracked shells washed up on the shore to remind us of all that's living out in the depths beyond. Every time I told the dream to another, however tentatively I traced its outline, pieced together what little I knew, the response was always yes.

That feels right. 

I had a sense. 

I always knew you would love this.

Seers, not into the future but into my heart, into the way that perhaps was always laid out before me.

I think now of the bumpy van ride, the many hours I've spent in that van, the way it makes my butt hurt, the way I am often needing more air, the way it fills with dust when we leave the windows open while driving through dirt, the way it breaks down then, with a jiggle it comes back to life (or so it always seems to me). The way I reach out the window with my phone for a photo, but I'm never able to capture what I see. It's just too expansive. By now, I know the way a way forward is often like this -- bumpy, imperfect, too big to comprehend.

***
(photo: trying to capture what i see from the van, kenya 2014)

yes, and

.... Love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart.

from Thirst by Mary Oliver

This is a line from one of my favorite poems. The first time I read it, I sat on the floor between shelves of books in Borders, probably looking through a stack of magazines I piled in my arms and lugged with me. The title of the book, which is the title of this poem, stuck out to me from the binding of the thin paperback where it sat on cart of books to be shelved. I picked it up, thumbed through, read a few short poems, and cried when I read this one, stuck in at the very end of the collection. And, when I first read it, and for years after, this line seemed to me to describe a battle. An either/or. You choose the earth or "you" (God) and the author, trying to choose God, gives away a lot of things (we read in the next lines of the poem). 

The poem appealed to something in me, but I struggled with this line because, I realized, I really like the earth. Not just like the geese and ponds that Mary Oliver usually writes about (though sometimtes I like those, too). But I'm talking the way I feel after a run, sweaty and satisfied. Feeding my people with brunch or a really good salad. Tears that are happy or cathartic. Rhythm and dancing. Holding a book in my hand. Finding a piece of clothing or jewelry that I love or that are flattering on me. I like being carnal - of the body, of the earth. But am I supposed to not like these things? What does it feel like to like God more? To let him dominate the conversation? Win the battle?

But the word she uses isn't "battle," but "conversation."

My friend is a comedian and has taken improv classes. She's hosted groups of creatives at her apartment, and as a warm up activity, she leads us in "Yes, And." Two of us sit across from each other, are given a premise, and make a story by affirming what the other says and building on it. "Yes, and." 

The last time I read the poem, that word "conversation" stuck out to me and I realized that  it was this kind of conversation that these loves may want to have in my heart.

Yes, and. The things we love about being in a body, being on an earth, holding and smelling and feeling and being with - all this in conversation, affirming and building on the things we love about being God's, of the spirit, able to sense and intuit mystery and be filled with grace and see how one plus one can equal some crazy number we didn't think possible. 

***

(photo: lights in trees, pasadena nights)

on limitations and creativity

Years ago, when I was beginning to understand creativity as something deeper and more resounding than a playful pastime, a wise person in my life told me that creativity was more about limitations than total freedom. I’d never thought about it that way before, but I realized he was right. I thought of the collages and cards I loved to make from magazine cut-outs throughout high school and saw this dynamic at play. Limited space, images that could only be chosen, and which could be altered only by choosing where to cut and how to place within the frame.

I see the power of the limitation dynamic in non-fiction writing, too. I’ve heard authors talk about what to do when memory fails, or when the details of family or community history that will add depth to your story aren’t available. Not knowing becomes the story, one writer suggests.

I’m thinking about this in part because of the post I wrote yesterday. It was about me, but it was also largely about other people who may or may not want details, identifying or otherwise, on my blog (small readership though I may have). I didn’t want to say too much about my coworker and her relationship. I didn’t want to mention much about my family history of disease. And I didn’t want to mention my visit with my aunt this summer, and how I saw remnants of disease and treatment in her body, and how she told me important information about my other aunt, who passed away years ago.

These details may have made my story more interesting, more compelling. But in writing non-fiction, I want to be mindful of how I give away my life (or rather, how I protect and preserve my life) in my writing. Another writer talks about aspects of this dilemma of disclosure in terms of voice and criticism, which are other issues to consider. In another way, choosing to withhold certain details can be seen as limitations that force more creativity. How can I say this in a different way? What other details or scenes can I share? What is enough but not too much?

let's just see what comes

I don't know why November is the month for mustaches and writing, but that's what it is. And pumpkin and turkey, as my nieces and nephews are now calling Thanksgiving. I am not growing a mustache and I can't think ahead far enough to know what my plans will be on Thanksgiving. I am taking one day at a time these days. And now, committing to write one day at a time. I've always regretted not doing nablopomo (that's national blog posting month, for those of you not in the know). It feels important this month because I've been losing track of a lot of things, including some of my friends, my email inbox, my sanity and my writing.

I actually hadn't been planning on doing this until just now, so I haven't really thought about what I'm writing in this post, or if I should stick to a theme this month. Let's just see what comes.

Here is what's going on right now: There is music playing from my speakers and pumpkin muffins cooling on a white wire rack in the kitchen. The light outside my window is going faint while a small bright flame flickers in the candle on the table at my side. Just the other day, I dug the thick purple blanket my mom knit out of the basket next to my couch, and now it is on the couch next to me. I hope it will be a staple for the weeks ahead. Soon, women will knock at my door and I'll hear the teapot announce the water is ready for tea and we'll all sit with each other expectantly, the way that women who have shared tears and laughter and confusion and all manner of stories do.

I love these evenings of inviting my women (my small group) into my apartment. Part of it is that I love hosting (the candles, the teapots, the muffins), but it's also that I love what the spiritual transactions bring to a place, and vice versa. I've been thinking about the new name I was given in Kenya this summer - they called me "peacemaker." I have to admit, I was disappointed by it at first. The Maasai version is beautiful, but the meaning was underwhelming to me. And is that really me, anyway? Did they get it right? But I have been remembering how many times friends have told me what a calming presence I am, and I have been realizing what strength there is in nurturing peace. A household of peace welcomes, restores, blesses and sends, and if that's what I can do for people, I would be incredibly honored. The Bible speaks over and over of peace as what God intends for his people, and so it must be a good thing, not just the absence of bad but an incredibly powerful presence of something good. To be called to make peace, and to restore places of peace to peoples' lives and cities, even to memories or hopes or desires - that is quite a call.

So tonight, I am embracing it. Tonight, these women and I -- we will sit with one another as the light outside fades, and hope for more light in our hearts, the warmth of the tea we sip perhaps reminding us of the living water we seek - the way it fills every emptiness in us. The way it brings a deep peace to every battered place in us.

literary, lately: not about me edition

Writing quick and dirty this week has meant writing a lot of random thoughts about me. Ugh, I know. You're probably even more tired of it than I am. So I give you some other things to read, listen to, think about that are not about me. (Well, mostly not about me... This whole exercise leads me to some existential thinking about whether that can even be possible since obviously these are coming to you through the filter of me... but I'll spare you from that.)

Food tells stories and holds memories -- about our past, our wars, our ways healing. On stories and recipes from northern Sri Lanka.

This blog is helping me think less about me. Loved the update this week on the stories of #15girls and the short post on the new secretary-general of the U.N. (a stark contrast to a certain presidential candidate). And, using narrative to change attitudes toward FGM.

Someone else's favorites. I love these kinds of posts!

This podcast* is exactly what I need to hear, every week. And the host hits the heart by talking about her life (someone to learn from!).

Love this quote. ... it just begins to live that day.

***
*I know, it's really white privileged Christian content but... still, I think Christy Nockels, through her music and speaking, has such a deep and unique grasp on the Word that I really admire.

(photo: looking up)

literary, lately: travel edition

I have a love/hate relationship with professional conferences. Love: travel to new places, eating out on someone else's dime, staying in hotels (I love a clean bathroom, especially when I'm not the one cleaning it). Hate: spending all day in over-chilled rooms with no windows, uninspiring keynote speakers, networking (i.e. an introvert's hell).

I'm thinking about this because it's happening next week, I'm going to a new city, getting up in front of a lot of people to talk about writing (simultaneously my most exhilarating dream and worst nightmare), and hopefully getting lots of reading done on the flights there and back -- among other things. Here are a few links that are getting me excited about traveling, writing, reading and everything in between.

Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people. A writing manifesto, in the form of ten tips. Maybe I'll scrap my presentation and just read this to the audience?

Airports are mini-civilizations, governed by their own rules and rituals. On bookstores in airports. My airport rules: a magazine from those ubiquitous bookstores, peanut m&m's and stretchy pants.

The National Book Award long list selections are being announced this week. I haven't even heard of most of the nonfiction books just announced. Looks like I have some reading to do. Maybe worth an airport book purchase?  Follow along if you're interested...

I go in phases with writing music. Right now, it's this song and every other one from the album. He's, like, the male T.S. I'll probably also be listening to this on my flights. (Don't judge.)

Can't wait to find myself here. (Quick stop over to see my sister!)

***
(photo: NYC skyline, before flight to Kenya)

an unread library

There's magic in being surrounded by books... Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

- Austin Kleon, Steal Like at Artist

***
(photo: my library and messy bookstacks... only partially read)

friends, here are some books i read

Friends and books: two of my favorite things. I like to read with friends, about friends, talk about reading with friends. Today, as I play catch up on blogging books I've read, I see a theme and I'm going with it. These books reminded me of how good writing will sound to you like a friend's voice, how friendship will inspire our reading choices, how good friends will give good books, and how one of the most enduring stories we will tell is how we found our friends.

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

Well-known memoir by a widely-loved writer. I read it on the way to the writing conference I went to back in April because I knew he'd be speaking, and because I found it for five dollars at a used bookstore a few weeks before. The book was good. Here is my favorite quote: All my life I had recognized almost at a glance those who were meant to be my friends, and they have recognized me. Yes.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

About a week after my birthday, I came home to a mystery Amazon package on my doorstep. It looked like books. I got excited. In it was this book and another - both books I'd been wanting to read. They were sent by my sister. The woman gets me, even if she doesn't often understand me (which is probably the case a lot of the time because I can be crazy and text her a string of emojis that I expect her to interpret). That might be my new definition for friendship.

The book sat on my coffee table for two months until I decided I'd pack it for my trip to the east coast and Kenya. I started reading it in a Starbucks with my nephew. He wanted us to close our books and play cards, but I kept telling him to read another chapter so I could keep reading, too. It was good. Then I read it on the plane flying over the Atlantic, and in the van weaving in Nairobi traffic and struggling over the rocky, dusty roads that led to Maasai Mara. I read it while America was arguing with each other about why police were still killing black men and in between long looks out the window traveling around Kenya, trying to understand the country by what I could see.

I don't have the book with me (it is already lent out to a friend). If I did, I might give you a quote. Instead I will say that I loved her writing about Nigeria, and wondered what I could learn about writing about Kenya. I also loved her insights about Africans in America and how they relate to African Americans and to America in general, about what they love and what they find strange, about the ways that language and accent and hair and clothing and weight and food and love and the way air feels on skin all make moving to a different country so disorienting, and coming home, even after so many years, like encountering an old friend.

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

One thing I love about books of compiled stories or essays is that, if they are well-edited, reading them can feel like sitting around a table with some really smart friends. That's how this book felt. The writers invite us readers around their table to learn from them, to start a dialogue, to acknowledge our shared humanity. Each essay highlights the specific voice and experience of the writer, which makes the books feel like a collective, a community - a gathered group that, together, is something more than just the sum of its parts. My favorite themes were writing to remember and the emphasis on the physical experience of being black in America (and, really, our world).

I can't choose just one quote to share with you. Not one thought or sentiment would sum up what the book made me feel or think about. But I am still thinking about it, which is good, and I hope I will be for a while to come. Mostly, I hope what I read will stay with me and help me be a better friend to some very dear people in my life, and to people I have yet to meet.

***
(photo: books! though not the ones i read)

learning their names

I make it a priority to learn about names on this trip. I ask names and look hard at faces to commit them to memory. I listen to names and try to understand how people here understand their names by how they use them, by how they respond when called. But whenever I start to ask questions, I feel as if my words come out in a backwards language. Maybe it is because the people here always return questions with a shy smile, which makes me thing they’re amused by me. They likely are, but I know they are also shy, and probably unaccustomed to my direct inquisitiveness.

Maasai are given both English names and traditional names? I ask, even as I realize that it might be more appropriate to call them Christian names, like James and Jemima and Jonathan. Both of those terms carry tricky connotations and I don't know if one is better than the other. Yes, I learn, they have both. The Christian names are easier for me to learn and remember, but I want to learn the Maasai names, too, or at least allow my ear to become accustomed to them. Where do these names come from and what is their meaning? are questions I still have and will eventually learn at least partial answers to. 

During our introduction session, in which my plan is to get to know the students and, yes, learn their names, I decide to have them write their Christian names on one side of a piece of construction paper, their Maasai names on the other. Settled in the classroom, nearly fifty tall, lean students with dusty feet and ankles cram three to a desk with the colored paper before them, a bright contrast to the mostly monochromatic world they live in during the school week: wood beams, brown floors, dark skin, faded and dusty blue uniforms. (A day later, Saturday, I would see them again in their Western clothing – all yellow and red and blue.) When I give them the instructions, they start to write their names small in one corner of the paper, and I realize I should have made an example for them. Bigger, I tell them. Take up the whole page with your name.

Then I tell them that we’re going to line up outside the classroom in alphabetical order by our Christian names. The teachers lend order to the activity, sending out the As and Bs while I indicate where they should stand and shift the line up when we need more room. Then I see it: the line of students holding up their papers with names written across. It hits me that I have spent a few months thinking about these kids and wondering about their names. Call them out, I tell them. I want to hear you say your name loud, I say, because even though I know this is a people who speaks softly, I have been waiting to hear these names.

Ann. Dickson. Elizabeth. Esther. Isaac. Jacklyn. James. Lillian. Titus. I'm still trying to remember them all...

***

First draft from a longer essay about names and being named.

(photos: learning their names; because I couldn't pick just one) 

called by my name

Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name…Isaiah 43:1

We walked out of the airport in Nairobi, pushing our carts piled with bags and treasuring the feel of cool, fresh air on our skin after hours in an airplane. Our Kenyan friends stood by the curb to greet us with warm, eager hugs. Mercy was among those waiting for us. She is sixty years old and wears her decades advocating for young girls across Kenya in a deep, dark scar on the right side of her jaw and in eyes that bear both kindness and an unknowable depth. My friend who leads this trip calls Mercy “mom,” and the more I know Mercy, the more I understand how true this name is. She is one who labors, bears, nurtures, releases.

Mercy’s voice is a melody, so that even her most piercing questions carry within them the comfort of a light blanket. After our hugs, she asked about our travel, about the drone and video equipment one of our members carried in his bags, about our day-long drive to the rural area the next day, where we would spend a week of our time and do the bulk of our programming. I don’t remember now what I said to her about the activities I’d been planning for the youth, but I must have conveyed some of my anxiety about how my new ideas would take shape over the next few days. “You are Betsy!” she responded. “It will be wonderful.” And then she moved on to the next person, wanting to hear more about our plans.

I hadn’t moved on. I stood still and let her words sink in. it was as if, in calling out my name as reason enough for our programming to succeed, Mercy summoned something yet to be realized - but which she saw a glimpse of. What was so moving to me is that she doesn't know me that well. Empirically, she had no way of knowing whether I really had what it takes. She also had no way of knowing how much I had struggled leading up to this trip. How much I self-doubt I had wrestled against. How deeply I’d felt that I didn’t have what it would take to pull off the things God was putting on my heart. There was too much I wasn’t familiar with, and too many ways in which I’ve known myself to fail or give in to fear in the past.

It was as if, in saying my name, Mercy knew it to hold what is most true. She called me Betsy as one who is able to do good things, who is able to grow, one who is filled by the Spirit. One who is known and becoming known by her and by this country of people I love.

***

(the words are coming slowly and a bit rough. more to come, i hope... photo: girls with whom i learned more about the meaning of being one who is called by name, Endonyolasho Primary School, 2016)