Every year when the sun climbs into the horizon and sets over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a gathering of poets and prophets, writers and artists gather. I have always wanted to go. My browser sits open to their website, and I skim over the details. It claims to be equal parts spiritual retreat, artist workshop, and festival. It is the conference I have most wanted to attend since I started this online journey of sharing my words and baring... Read more
It’s true. Sometimes I tire of the poets and I want plain words. Unhurried, slow words with lazy syllables. Maybe even stilted words that fall like heavy bricks and land with a singular purpose. But even then, I just fed you a simile, though filled with clay and dust. Words are busy little things, so much more than the feel in your mouth as you roll the letters down your tongue or march them through your teeth. They are meaning... Read more
I’ve written before that ~I write like a woman drowning. I write with a desperation to know and be known, to understand God, to see glory. I write to breathe again.~ I’ve been breathless lately. Mental illness is a riptide on otherwise calm shores. It is the pull of deep waters lulling you further and further from safe and sturdy ground, all at once weightless and buoyant, caressed by the lapping tides. It invites you to surrender, to be carried... Read more
On my 20th anniversary, last May, I do what I did the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. I try to keep breathing. I inherited my mother’s brown eyes, my father’s broad flat feet and from both of them, poor lungs. Asthma. I gather my lips around my inhaler, like a scuba diver on dry land, inhaling two puffs of albuterol while I hold in the medicine that makes my world expand again.... Read more
My word of the day app keeps opening to the word fenestrated. I look up the definition because while I consider myself well read, fenestrated is a jumble of foreign syllables to me. It says provided with a window or windows. I look out the windows. The dark still awaits the break of dawn and the moon everyone is posting on Instagram is nowhere to be seen. I don’t know why my view is lacking, but it is. There is nothing... Read more
The Fluency of Hope
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