Issue 22: Up in the Air

Editor’s Note : Up in the Air

Welcome to Ruminate’s Issue 22: Up in the Air! This playful title was inspired by the work in these pages and their varied renderings of the in-between, limbo, and up-in-the-air moments in life. You know, those seconds or seasons spent on the threshold, when you’ve moved toward a door but have yet to pass through.

I like this idiom, “up in the air.” I picture things floating around, throwing my hands up—letting go. This sounds nice. But “up in the air” also means a kind of metaphorical pause, which can be uncomfortable or worrisome, even terrifying to those of us who like to have our feet on the ground, like to keep moving, like to have control . . . myself certainly included. And as many of our contributors point out, this pause or uncertainty can happen because of large life changes—pregnancy, an unexpected illness, a lost love, marriage, a new vocation, death—but it can also happen because of small things—the glimpse of a blue heron flying low at dusk, the weather, an airplane trip, or reading an Emily Dickinson poem. In “April Snow” Amanda Leigh Rogers describes the effect of simply watching snow fall, the “wet flakes rush[ing] to earth,” and she says “I lost my feel for gravity / and almost drifted up.”

And, of course, we were inspired by Micah Bloom’s winning art from our first ever Ruminate Visual Art Prize. Bloom’s work explores the charged moment before tragedy, when a life’s existence is up in the air, and it asks questions about when and how the divine intercedes. We were thrilled to have award-winning artist Sandra Bowden serve as the finalist judge for the Visual Art Prize, and she writes: “First Prize goes to Micah Bloom for the delightful and interesting paintings on interventions. There is something so contemporary and youthful about these works that makes them very intriguing.”

Like Bloom’s work, periods of ambiguity are intriguing (even if they’re uncomfortable) because they are ripe with possibility. They offer us the chance to grapple with the unknown, to encounter our finiteness. And when this happens, when it’s clear that things are no longer in our control, we come to the end of ourselves. And if we’re lucky, we are hushed—we must wait and see. Deja Earley’s short memoir “Virgin” shares her story of being a twenty- five-year-old Mormon and virgin who struggles with feeling like she has yet to start her real life. Her experience is ultimately one of waiting, of living in the in-between, of holding onto a covenant while she pilgrims an interim season of life.

Waiting, it would seem, also lends itself to new insights, new lessons. James Silas Rogers describes the untethered feeling of flying on an airplane and the realization he experiences: “. . . on this flight headed back from New York I grasp, in a way that I never did before, that . . . the past remains utterly irretrievable.” And in “April Snow” Amanda Leigh Rogers goes on to tell us that after she lost her feel for gravity, she then looked “downward to relearn myself.” I find myself wondering about this, wondering if we have to first lose our balance, become unsure, in order to receive these chances to relearn.

Let me be clear—I love control, and I hate losing it. But I am drawn to the beauty and relief of being hushed and made to wait, of being taught something anew. That’s the gift that the in-between offers. And, it is my hope that it’s what this issue offers to you, dear readers. Whether the blue heron flying low at dusk presents itself, or you discover it, when it happens, may we all remember the gift that accompanies the terror of being up in the air. And may we sometimes have the courage to let go.

Trying to loosen my grip,

Brianna Van Dyke

Editor-in-Chief

April Snow

I wanted apple blossoms
but today these wet flakes rush to earth.
Looking up into the sifting
I lost my feel for gravity
and almost drifted up.

When I looked downward to relearn myself
I saw how the whiteness clung
to the crocuses. It filled
their purple flutes with winter.

If you were here, your heart might hurt—
not because spring is baffled for a day,
or for the way the icy pieces burn the skin,
but that the flowers and the snow
bloom toward a silence
no one thought to pray for.

Amanda Leigh Rogers lives in Abington, Pennsylvania, with her husband and three sons and teaches writing and theater at Bryn Athyn College. She loves poetry not only as an art form, but also as a spiritual practice, one that invites writer and reader to move between states of quiet presence and energetic expression. Her creative goal is always to serve the poem and love the reader. Her work has appeared in various literary and general interest magazines.

Mending a Tattered Faith: Devotions with Dickinson

by Susan VanZanten (Cascade Books, 2011)
Reviewed by Paul Delaney

Writing to family and friends, Emily Dickinson would often copy out by hand one of her poems, sometimes adapted just for that occasion. The poem enclosed with a letter (sometimes accompanied by a flower or a loaf of bread) was offered as a word of solace or delight. The poet who shunned publication as “the Auction / Of the Mind” nevertheless remained active in correspondence, circulating her poems as “a vital part of the commerce of friendship” as one biographer puts it. Over the past century Dickinson has been hailed one of the greatest poetic voices of all time, and her work is now the subject of countless critical studies and scholarly tomes. In Mending a Tattered Faith: Devotions with Dickinson, Susan VanZanten returns the poems to the realm of the personal. VanZanten is a formidable scholar in her three volumes—and many critical articles—on South African literature. But this slender volume seems more like a gift. I could imagine including it with a flower or a loaf of bread for a frayed friend who might be mended as much by words or meditation as by other forms of nourishment.

Out of Dickinson’s astounding output of some 1,800 poems, VanZanten chooses just twenty-nine that she invites her reader to ponder. Some are well-known, frequently anthologized choices and some, at least to me, are wholly new. In a twenty-page introduction to Dickinson’s cultural and religious context, VanZanten invites you to first read the Dickinson poem aloud, then read it silently, sit with the poem and think about it, and perhaps even write about the questions it raises and the way it speaks to you. In effect VanZanten encourages readers to take a lectio divina approach, allowing the poem to bud and blossom not just in the imagination but in the spirit, letting deep speak to deep. VanZanten certainly does not treat Dickinson’s poetry as holy writ, or even seek to minimize Dickinson’s vacillation between belief and doubt. But Dickinson pondered the biggest questions of faith, and VanZanten repeatedly shows how the poems offer occasions for readers to meditate on matters that touch eternity. After giving the full text of the poem, she includes an italicized question for mental or written reflection “if you wish to use it,” and then offers a page or two of her own illuminating commentary or meditation on the poem.

VanZanten’s approach is disarmingly casual, bracingly direct, yet shot through with discerning wisdom. Even her one-sentence prompts are incisive. When I first read “An altered look about the hills—,” I didn’t see that the poem was about spring or understand how Dickinson’s capitalized reference to “Nicodemus’ Mystery” pertained to the rest of the poem. VanZanten’s prompt gets right to the heart of the matter: “What is the relationship of the coming of spring and Nicodemus’ question in John 3, ‘How can a person be born again?’” The poem points to a number of signs of spring and says we would recognize many more. VanZanten regards the poet as courteously implying “that I know this as well as she does, but if I am honest, I must admit that I need her assistance.” Well, if I am honest, I must acknowledge my gratitude not just for VanZanten’s explanation of obscure references to “Tyrian purple” but for showing how the mystery of natural regeneration points the way toward the mystery of spiritual regeneration.

After reading VanZanten, I’ll never encounter a Dickinson line about an “altered look” without considering how an echo of “altar” resonates in Dickinson’s use of “alter.” VanZanten is so insightful that I’m inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt when occasionally an analogy seems a bit tenuous. According to VanZanten, the “axe shrill singing in the woods” must be a woodpecker because the roads are “untravelled.” That’s what she says—no human can be in a forest that has “untravelled roads.” Of course, that same line of reasoning would mean that Dickinson herself could not be present (except perhaps telepathically) to smell the “Fern odors on untravelled roads—.”

As a literary scholar, VanZanten has examined Dickinson’s handwritten versions of poems on microfilm and microfiche and can vouch that Dickinson wrote an “e” rather than an “a” in a word that might be “spacious” or “specious.” She explains what it means to “con” a subject or to be “unshriven,” words that might have been familiar to a Shakespearean audience but are less so today. And she has a keen ear for biblical allusion. When Dickinson puts single words such as “consider” or “sparrow” in quotation marks, VanZanten unerringly points us to the scriptural passage the poet invokes. She shows how frequently Dickinson goes back to David in the Psalms, or to the Lord’s Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount, and other words of Jesus. But VanZanten also cites Dickinson’s allusions to Paul and Silas in Philippi and other scriptural passages from Genesis to The Revelation of St. John the Divine. More surprising to me is her ability to quote the precise Isaac Watts hymn that Dickinson appropriates in “Where bells no more affright the morn—.” She even has a wealth of biographical details which she deploys concisely and precisely. If Dickinson conceives of heaven as a place where “Not Father’s bells—nor Factories— / Could scare us any more!” VanZanten can tell us when steam whistles at straw-hat factories in Amherst would roust workers—and other sleepers— out of bed each morning.

But VanZanten wears her learning lightly. Her meditations are replete with details that are far more personal than scholarly. We learn that she’s a night owl who likes to get up after ten, that she’s self-conscious about freckles, that as a child in the early 60’s she was fascinated by Queen for a Day on daytime television, that she grew up on an azalea nursery where she had first-hand experience of the destructive power of frost.

But what comes through even more forcefully is VanZanten’s acknowledgment that she identifies with the questions Dickinson asks, even when they spring from anguish, from anger, from affliction. She journeys with Dickinson, asking the hard questions where the answers are not assured. She even—and this, to my mind, reveals the most telling humility— writes about poems she confesses she does not understand. After bringing Matthew and Psalms to bear on “I think just how my shape will rise—,” after explaining the theological point that in Jesus’ account of the sparrow “God does not stop the bird from falling on the ground; rather God is with the bird as it falls,” after wistfully telling us she doesn’t just want assurance of God’s knowledge but wants God to intervene to prevent her from falling, VanZanten confesses: “I can’t ultimately figure out this poem and read it in such a way as to make consistent sense.”

When did you last hear a scholar offer such a frank admission of not being able to figure something out? “But,” VanZanten continues, “I do know that some of its painful questions echo questions I have felt. I understand the anguish and the anger.” VanZanten’s brutal honesty about the limits of her insight inspires my confidence in all that she reports that she can see. If she says the “axe shrill singing in the woods” “has to be a bird!” well, maybe it is.

But Mending a Tattered Faith is not ultimately about figuring out poems. The poems just provide an occasion for figuring out our lives, our anguish, our anger, our response to the questions that will endure as long as “This World is not conclusion.” VanZanten’s unvarnished acknowledgment of anguish and anger makes her book a safe place to go beyond platitudes and examine painful places in ourselves. She has the wisdom to acknowledge that such mystery “puzzles scholars.” But when she finds “testimony of faith” in some poems, I believe her.

VanZanten is even willing to dispute with a poem, to take Dickinson to task on occasion. She finds the voice in “To lose One’s faith” to be “too rigid, too simplistic” and she’s not afraid to say so. The point, over and over again, is not just to figure out poems but to ponder the hard questions.

So who is this book for? Well, it’s for anyone who finds in words a means of approaching the Word. It’s for anyone who cares about Dickinson’s poetry—or who has been intimidated or baffled by Dickinson—and wants to journey with her. It’s a book for anyone wrestling with doubts or enduring tough times. It’s a book for people of faith and a book for people of doubt. Reading this book I thought multiple times about a former student who reluctantly confessed to her community of faith her sense of isolation, her fear of death, her doubts regarding the divine. Mending a Tattered Faith offers a voice I think that former student might be able to hear. So I commend the book not just as one you will want to have for yourself, but as one you might wish to give to someone you know. Send it with a flower or a loaf of bread.

—

At Westmont College, Paul Delaney teaches American literature, contemporary drama, Irish literature and Shakespeare. He takes Westmont students to plays throughout southern California and (every other year or so) the British Isles. He is the author of Tom Stoppard: the Moral Vision of the Major Plays (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press). Tom Stoppard in Conversation, which he edited, was the first of several volumes of interviews with playwrights published by the University of Michigan Press, a series to which he has also contributed Brian Friel in Conversation.

Contributor’s Notes

Karina Borowicz’s forthcoming book, the Bees are waiting, was selected by Franz Wright for the 2011 Marick Press Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in Agni, Poetry Northwest, and the Southern Review.

Micah Bloom lives in Minot, North Dakota, and has shown work nationally and internationally. More of his work can be viewed at www.micahbloom.com. This morning he read Galatians 6, drank Lotus tea, and dodged ice patches on his bicycle commute.

David Bogus was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a BFA from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He is currently assistant professor at Texas A&M International University. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibit at Casper County Community College and group shows include “The Chromatic Edge” at NCECA Seattle and “Materials: Hard & Soft” at the Greater Denton Arts Council in Denton, Texas. He writes: “My ceramic process has recently shifted to a focus on slip cast objects—creating identical multiples of objects often taken from real life found objects to create a trompe l’oeil effect. The contents of my work are derived from memories that continue to reveal themselves by offering revelations about life through seemingly coincidental events.”

Rob Cook is a social dropout trapped in New York City’s East Village. He edits and publishes Skidrow Penthouse and works hard to fight back the dirt and cockroaches secreted by his tenement apartment. His latest book is Last Window in the Punk Hotel and recent work has appeared in the Bitter Oleander, Fence, Mudfish, Versal, Pear Noir! and Bomb (online).

At Westmont College, Paul Delaney teaches American literature, contemporary drama, Irish literature and Shakespeare. He takes Westmont students to plays throughout southern California and (every other year or so) the British Isles. He is the author of Tom Stoppard: the Moral Vision of the Major Plays (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press). Tom Stoppard in Conversation, which he edited, was the first of several volumes of interviews with playwrights published by the University of Michigan Press, a series to which he has also contributed Brian Friel in Conversation.

When not writing poetry, James Dickson keeps himself busy by teaching English and creative writing at Germantown High School, just outside of Jackson, Mississippi. He lives with his wife, Greer, and their son, James. In June, he completed his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. The South is a wonderful place to write—things move a touch slower here (he’ll refrain from making the obvious joke about his students being slow, too), and it gives writers a chance to take note. Some of his poems appear in Stirrings, English Journal, Burnt Bridge, and Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly. However, it should be noted that his list of rejections is much more impressive.

Deja Earley’s poems and essays have previously appeared in journals like Measure, Arts and Letters, Borderlands, and Diagram, and several of her poems were recently included in Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets. She married the man she writes about in “Virgin” after all, and they moved to the Boston area, where they live with three bickering cats. They are slightly less complicatedly in love. She works as a development editor at Bedford/St Martin’s Press.

Bryce Emley graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2011 with a BA in creative writing. He’s an editorial assistant of the Florida Review, Managing Editor of 12:51, and a substitute teacher/ marketing executive by day. More of his work can be found in Pleiades, Slipstream, on EmpriseReview.com, and elsewhere.

Dave Harrity is a traveling teacher who conducts workshops for churches, seminaries, and other religious institutions about using poetry as a devotional practice for spiritual formation and growth. His poem “To Mark the Place” is a tribute to a close friend who recently retired as the chaplain of Asbury Seminary in Kentucky. Living in Louisville with his wife and kids, he enjoys working with his hands—gardening, doing home improvement projects, and, when time permits, making artwork from scraps of metal, wood, and other ‘junk’ found in his garage.

Sally Rosen Kindred’s first poetry book is No Eden (Mayapple Press, 2011), and her poems have appeared recently in Diode. She is currently obsessively reading the poems of Jack Gilbert, Paula Bohince, and Lisa Russ Spaar. After reading Peter Pan to her sons this spring, she’s writing poems about Wendy Darling.

Peter Mitchell Lawniczak writes: “The hardest thing for me to do is talk about myself. So many other subjects are so much more enriching that I hate to waste words discussing what I consider to be a constant. I live blessed by abundant family and friends. I have body, mind, and possess an unlimited energy for the process of creating art. I have to finish school. The roots of my intrigue are transparent in anything I write, whatever the subject, one will see that everything is motivated by love and the expression of this is limitless. This is my first publication.”

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell currently resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and is learning all about Cajun cooking and warm winters. Originally from Pennsylvania, Sarah is studying in the Deep South for her MFA in poetry at Louisiana State University. She and her husband are enjoying married life, despite the occasional spat over who does the dishes. As of now, no babies are on the way, despite Sarah’s mother assuming that all good news will turn out to be baby news. Her work may be found in Muse & Stone and ConnotationPress.com: an Online Artifact.

Jason Myers grew up in the Cumberland Valley of Maryland. His proximity to Washington, D.C., cultivated an early appreciation for both culture and politics. He once stood in line for four hours in thirty-degree weather to see a special exhibit of Vermeer at the National Gallery. He also endured similar conditions to witness James Brown lying in state at the Apollo. He studied with Mary Oliver at Bennington College, Philip Levine at New York University, and is currently a Master of Divinity student at Emory. He lives in Atlanta, where he walks to worship at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Amanda Leigh Rogers lives in Abington, Pennsylvania, with her husband and three sons and teaches writing and theater at Bryn Athyn College. She loves poetry not only as an art form, but also as a spiritual practice, one that invites writer and reader to move between states of quiet presence and energetic expression. Her creative goal is always to serve the poem and love the reader. Her work has appeared in various literary and general interest magazines.

James Silas Rogers is a lifelong resident of Minnesota—for fifty- nine cold years now—where he is director of the University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies. He edits the multidisciplinary journal New Hibernia Review, an academic quarterly that also publishes essays, memoirs, and new poems. He’s published his creative nonfiction in various periodicals, including South Dakota Review, New Letters, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and is wrapping up a mixed-genre book on cemeteries and sacred space; the working title is Notes From Places Near the Dead. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, among them Nimrod and Poetry East, and in the chapbook Sundogs (Parallel Press, 2006).

Claudia M. Stanek grew up in Depew, New York, a town once centered in the manufacture of railroad parts. She received an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, Euphony, Red Wheelbarrow, and the Briar Cliff Review, among others. Her poem “Housewife” was selected by composer Judith Lang Zaimont as the inspiration for a commissioned libretto for the Eastman School of Music’s 2009 Women in Music Festival. She was awarded a 2010 writer’s residency in Bialystok, Poland, which allowed her to explore a new sense of place in the context of how Poland has evolved since her ancestors emigrated to the United States. She lives and writes in East Rochester, New York, where she and her rescued pets enjoy viewing newly planted birches.

Nancy Teague lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband of forty-two years. She has two sons and four grandchildren. Nancy has been shown her work in juried art fairs across the country and recently won ‘Best of Show’ in the October 2010 Bold Brush online competition and ‘Award of Merit’ in the National Oil and Acrylic Painter’s Society “Best of America 2010.” Her paintings hang in private and corporate collections across the United States. Nancy writes: “It is amazing how the power of light on objects can cause the everyday, flawed, or time-worn to reflect new life or significance. Someone once said, ‘Stand still and look until you really see.’ I hope the viewers will do just that with my work, discovering and enjoying—and then carry this ‘looking’ into their days. Often we are in a hurry or even denial, not realizing the difference light can make in the details of everyday or flawed life.”

Tracy Youngblom has been writing poetry for longer than she has been gardening, but both those things drive and define her. Her first chapbook of poems, Driving to Heaven, was published in 2010 by Parallel Press, and recent poems have appeared in Aethlon, Turtle Quarterly, The Cortland Review, and Emprise Review. Work is forthcoming in New York Quarterly and Weave Magazine. Besides teaching English at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, she runs, blogs, cooks, and enjoys her husband and three sons (when they come home to visit).

Last Note

Ruminate Contributors on Up in the Air…

Learning is in the times between before and after. Once we realize what we have learned, we find ourselves looking for the next oasis just over new dunes that lie in front of us.
&#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 Claudia M. Stanek Poetry Contributor

Every day since I started paying attention to my life—started intentionally contemplating, writing—I have been offered a small scrap of silence each day. Often it comes when I’m intentionally seeking it, but sometimes it sneaks up on me. I’ll be going about my business in all the usual noisy places—work, home (especially after my kids have gotten out of bed!), driving, wherever—and a noiselessness emerges out of the barrage or monotonous background: a few seconds of complete stillness. These polished quiets are a haven for me—a tiny seclusion from all the flickering busyness. The trick is allowing myself to experience them—I’ve been so focused on my tasks for the day that I’ve worked through the moment or I’ve been so startled by them that I push them away. For me, these flashes of peace are a foil to what’s always happening, a reassurance against what’s constantly moving around or in me—they are a reminder that there is always a retreat just before me and just after me. When I slow down long enough to feel the reality of quiet–that it is everywhere—a wonderful peace comes and I realize that I am not living in noise but between the happenings of silence.
&#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 Dave Harrity Poetry Contributor

Limbo: caught between. Trapped, if momentarily. Raising children was one long experience of limbo for me—will you-won’t- you, please come here-please don’t go there, speak to me-don’t speak to me like that. The joyful sight of emergence and the painful closing up. My children are grown—mostly—and I still find myself caught between agonizing and celebrating their unfolding lives. Will there be a time they have “made it,” when I can enter one place or the other, worry or assurance? I doubt it. After all, I said it myself once, in a poem: Joy is half dream, longing half grief.
&#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 Tracy Youngblom Poetry Contributor

We sat next to each other on the plane, sipping plastic cups of water, talking softly. Occasionally he would say, “My dad died,” very quietly, as if I hadn’t heard the news, as if he hadn’t really heard it, and I would say, “I’m so sorry.” But mostly we talked about anything but that, and we hadn’t yet met his mother alone at the airport, and she hadn’t yet told us how it happened, and we hadn’t yet looked at urns in the basement of a funeral home. It was just the two of us, and I knew what to do then, knew how to listen, knew not to open a book or put on my headphones, knew that we hadn’t yet landed, it wasn’t yet real, he wasn’t yet gone.
&#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 Deja Earley Nonfiction Contributor

In between is where all the action is: muscle is built after, not during, the workout. Compare the joy of a meal with the after- dinner afterglow. Doesn’t conception—the real hard work, after all—happen after sex? Lulls in action aren’t really lulls at all: the volume’s just lower. Eliot says that the shadow falls between the motion and the act, but there’s a lot of light in that tiny space, as well.
&#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 James Dickson Poetry Contributor

Up in the air, limbo, in between times? What powerful and necessary places of transition. Of course I’ve learned that truth the hard way—responding with tearful or crying-out questions: Are You sure this is where I am to be? Does it have to take so long? This is such a lonely place—Are You sure this has purpose? I was sure this was the direction You said to go, but now it seems so hard—did I miss Your will, did I hear right? Are You here? But now those kinds of questions are not so quick to surface or rule my heart. I think it’s because I can now identify with the Psalmists who said, “I once was young but now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread.” He means it when He says—“I am the God of all flesh, is anything too difficult for Me?” (Jer. 32:27), “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways” (Is. 55:8). May I add, they are so much better and wiser! No matter how long those in between times are, He is there and He is working to show us His goodness and faithfulness. Learning to rest and being teachable in transitions means nothing but good. What powerful places they can be.
&#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 Nancy Teague Visual Art Contributor

A threshold can look like a wall, because we don’t yet know how to see the new life we are about to enter. Winter is a time of waiting, and the trees must let go of green and wait naked for a long time before the blossoms appear. In a way, we are always in between. Each breath, each step is a little leap into mystery.
&#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 &#160 Amanda Leigh Rogers Poetry Contributor