The Waking
Editors Ruminate: What Sustains
Asking what sustains is what sustains us. These poems probe the limits of sustainability in all its ecological, musical, labor-intensive, and emotional forms. The hope for this issue, then, is that it might sustain you too.
Blessings
I know blessing and prayer and words and ritual and body and grace and anguish and contentment and supplication. I suspect they are not one thing, but as I travel through them I cannot find their edges...
Hope's Fragile Wings
It’s been over a year since the Parkland, Florida shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and over a year after the massacre in Las Vegas. It’s almost three years after Orlando, almost four years after Charleston, and six years, three months after Sandy Hook...We must seek light and joy again and we must do it with all our heart and soul because what is the alternative? Darkness.
Song of a Captive Bird: A Review
Forugh says: “Writing had cost me so much, but it was also the thing that saved me, that allowed me to live. I wasn’t the woman I wanted to be yet, but I was beginning to resemble her now.”
SEEN AND UNSEEN
Jennifer Cronin's visual art "Seen and Unseen" won first place in our 2019 Kalos Visual Art Prize and was selected by final juror Betty Spackman. It appears in Issue No. 50: What Sustains.
Love Languages
The ocean may try to kill me, but until it actually succeeds, it’s a give and take relationship—harmonious. It takes my false sense of comfort and security and gives me the gratitude of being alive. Writing may not be able to kill me, but I’m beginning to think it’s controlling me in other ways.
On the Search for What Matters
For the last six months I have been navigating this wall of hurt and pain and sadness and existential crisis. What matters? What really matters? Each thing that crops up in a day I weigh against all the other stresses. There is too much of it.
Riding the Waves of the Moment
At moments, I feel I’m like the rain, drowning in ceaseless sadness. Other times, I feel as if I’m a cardboard figure moving in a cardboard world. Sometimes, I feel like the indignant ocean wanting to lash out at Joe for leaving me.
Poem in Which Jesus Christ Sprains His Knee Fishing in Bethsaida
He twists it good, too. He wasn’t paying sharp attention to the angle of his foot / As he pulled the boat to shore. He pins his foot beneath the hull, moves his /Hips the wrong way, the knee slips. Down he goes...
Roof Clearing
Choreographed like a dance, pairs of officers asked each protester to leave, recorded their refusal, helped them stand, cuffed their hands behind their backs, and walked them to the waiting vans. Reverend Allison, third from the last to be arrested, chatted with those seated next to her, at times laughing as if they were waiting for an outdoor summer performance to begin.
“Love of the Thing Sung and Not of the Singing:” On Ambition
For everything I’ve accomplished in life, for every small victory, I find myself continually pushing myself to do better. That insatiable, ambitious ego within me—something so many writers have at their core—demands results, and quickly.
To Remake the World: A Review of Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else
In Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else...Mock explores gender equality, singleness, body image, and other cultural expectations that manifest inequity, courageously advocating for a world that embraces all people...Worthy...call[s] upon Christians to “remake the church from within..."
Hyssop and Cedarwood
My dress with the muddy hem is in the laundry and a garbage can full of empty bottles is still in the backyard. I’m happy I didn’t do a face plant and join what must be thousands of wedding mishaps on YouTube.
for the love of lowly things (for mary)
I knew Mary Oliver's work well enough to mourn her, to recall the way some poems snag you with their fishhook beauty and won’t let you go until you have reckoned with them. Perhaps most of all, the sacred imperative to give your whole self to a place and time—the endless and proper work of paying attention.
Creative Risks
It's scary to take creative risks, but I believe these risks help remind us to play and to stay vulnerable, nimble, and curious in our work.
I'll Leave the Light on for You
I have lived a long life in a world too few would recognize now. I reckon, by today’s standards, it was “old fashioned.” Simplistic? We managed to live with an ingrained sense of simplicity, of sufficiency. Our lives defied any particular sort of accumulation.
Waiting in Liminal Space
There have been times where liminal space became more like a burial shroud than a cocoon. I stayed in a relationship, friendship, or in bad habits, waiting in this space for as long as I could, never pushing forward, until I grew used to my surroundings in languish. Even in its awkwardness, there is a sacredness in liminal space.
Forgiveness Beyond Herself
Daily we pilgrimage to the saints' seemingly split facades: we interact—in families and communities, in cyberspace and private thoughts—and if we realize where we’re standing when approach their unhinged thresholds, we take off our shoes, bow, and offer puja.
50 Hours of Ruminate Happenings
Last April, as I was sitting in a beautiful chapel at Calvin College listening to Marie Howe and Pádraig Ó Tuama discuss the power of poetry, Marie Howe described an event she helped plan and host called The Poet Is In. Poets set up tables with typewriters in Grand Central Station and invited the public to come and have a poem written for them, "with them," as she said.
Sacred Spaces II
We are scarred and sometimes scared. But together, we bring fears into the light and imagine that God is the sea anyways, so if we fall, if we drift off, if the boat sinks or overturns or we find there was never a boat at all, it will be into holy water; we will fall into God.
The Afterlives of American Evangelicalism: A Review of Interior States By Meghan O’Gieblyn
"To be a former believer," she writes in her evocative first essay collection, Interior States, “is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime." Each of her fifteen essays, wide-ranging in their content, contains an element of that circling back around: to her Midwestern evangelical childhood or to her time at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where the threading began to unravel.
All the Things and a Prayer: Slowing Down a Moving Life
This prayer took me inward, took me backward, to who I used to be and who I realized I still carry in me today. This prayer took my attention off external details and put it on the space between details. This space, this prayer, may not heal my body or redeem time, but it will allow, if briefly, a chance to reacquaint myself with my self.
Every Moment Grace to Me
The medicine that saved my life was no longer saving me, and so the darkness came. The summer passed. Now I am in the in-between...I am in the not-knowing.
A Year of No Buying: A Fourth Quarter Report
In the face of a culture that is constantly telling us otherwise, A Year of No Buying allowed us to separate our joy from our things. We were left to find it elsewhere...We had more family outings and more lazy Saturdays, and in the bargain got laughter and creativity and relationship and rest.
God's Business
I’m proud of the work I’ve produced. I’m grateful to have had the books published. It’s soul writing. It feeds my spirit. Truth is, though, it does not always feed my family. That’s just the reality of it. And that, too, is the struggle.
5 Favorite Blog Posts to Revisit from 2018
For a review of the highlights, here are the top 5 most-viewed blog posts of 2018. I hope you enjoy these ruminations.
Lessons Learned: On Winning the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize
Stories have a way of percolating in people. They land, they ripple outward, they settle. Over time they become a part of us through their telling and retelling, a new limb through which we feel the world. Their lessons latch on to our senses and color anew everything we experience.
Faith and Femininity
When I watched my ponytail fall to the floor, I was surprised by the lurch in my stomach. The definite markings of my femininity would soon be swept into the forest, leaving uncertainty: How would I embody femininity now that I had chosen to withdraw from traditional feminine expectations?
The Grace of Waiting and Its End
There’s a magic that comes of waiting and watching—a magic only apparent when the waiting is over. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Queen of Waiting. I have no problem waiting out anything, even if it takes years. I have a patience born of soap operas.
Small Miracles & Happy Dances
With each order that comes through we seriously do a happy dance knowing that the good work of our contributors will be seen and held by more hearts and our little nonprofit is earning the funds that will help us start the new year strong. Our staff is deeply encouraged as we witness each intimate act of one human sharing something they love with another.
Stories and the Lives They Save
Stories do save lives—they always have, and they always will. We use stories to make sense of the world around us. We may sometimes turn to them for escape, and other times for answers to questions that plague us. Stories instruct. Stories uplift. Stories...validate the fact that we matter, that we are not alone.
Waiting with Simeon
There in the dust and bustle and eventual hush of familiar religious practice, the Old and New Testaments interwove suddenly, quite simply. Between God’s unlikely prophet, and the newborn—the oh, so unlikely One foretold.
Rebuilding My Life: Making Sense of Burnout and Depression
After 14 years of teaching, I finally decided that it was time for me to leave the profession. A few days after I handed in my resignation, I broke down. I didn't return to work again. Since then, I have been trying to function daily with a body and mind that is challenged by limitations, pain, and struggle.
The Story of Ordinary Time
Ordinary time is normal time, boring time, unpunctuated-by-excitement time. Consequently, time without narrative. It has no set Scripture. Instead, the Christian is supposed to somehow contemplate all aspects of the mystery of Christ.
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Finding a Vocabulary of the Heart
by Abigail Carroll
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