Thankful, Day 12: Permission

I am thankful to have learned it’s okay to sit with a poem I don’t understand, and to let it sit with me—to allow words and images and glints of insight to wash over me, and take hold where they will, and work somewhere deep below the surface. Even if I never find the words to tell you what it means.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 11: Rain

I am thankful for the days that the heavy skies break open and pour out everything that has been held back; for the colors of newly-washed, drenched things; for the sound on the roof and windows when I am inside, warm and dry.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 10: Small and Strange

The sky did all sorts of wonderful things this morning, and yes, I took lots of sunrise pictures. I love that you can look up and be amazed so often—that every day has its own kind of beauty.

But I also love that you can look down and find something much more humble but still magic. I’m grateful, actually, for the things that seem a little awkward at first but maybe only because you don’t know them well enough. Because I get awkward. And of course it’s slimy, but the fact that a slug has that much delicate detail—that much personality—is delightful. What if we all left a shimmering trail behind us wherever we went?

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 9: Burning Bush

I am thankful today for the surprise of a brilliant red shrub, still full of leaves and berries in a season that is increasingly brown and yellow and gray. It seems especially appropriate, considering only a short time before I happened across it I had been thinking about the color red, and about grace. How I’ve known for years that if grace was a thing I could physically put on each morning it would be something red and shining around my wrist—leading my hands, always in sight—something that held every possible shade of red warmth, glowing with the translucence of pomegranate seeds, or (now that I think of it) the berries on that fiery bush I just happened across. It is a color, a quality, I want to carry with me everywhere, reminding me to give and receive, reminding me that yes, it is a vibrant and glowing thing and it is with me always.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 8: Tenderness

Tenderness like in the morning after a frost, when the sun reveals the glaze over everything but hasn’t yet melted it away.

Or earlier in the morning, waking my children for school, when their breath is still full of sleep and everything about them is so impossibly soft.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 7: This:

Walking into a pool of warmth and light, you want to stay there and soak it up, don’t you? Cold floor, cold feet—and suddenly warmth.

I am thankful for the times the words of a friend or a book or some other beautiful source have warmed my bare feet. It makes me wish I could move through life from one pool of light to the next, like stones across a river.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 6: Elegance

Tuba Mirum, Mozart Requiem

It’s hard to say, exactly, all the factors that went into the Moment I had playing those two measures (0:52–0:58) last night.  I was already thoroughly steeped in Mozart, and that made a difference. But the way the voices fit together right there struck me as so perfectly elegant, elegant like the word limn or curved glass or a sliver of moon, that I felt a little giddy. I like being witness to those things.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 5: A Chance to Listen

I had the opportunity over the weekend to hear a number of writers speak about their craft, their lives, everything really, and everything touching everything else—their work and their lives glancing off and intersecting with and informing my own work and life.

One writer, in particular—listening to her spill out her words, poetic and brilliant and funny, was like being pulled through a flashing, shifting maze, effortlessly, into a single core thought. I don’t know how she did it, exactly. But all I had to do was follow.

What a gift it is, that chance to be quiet, and listen and listen.



Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 4: Diffusion

Some things are hard to look at directly. But when you get to see through something else—and there’s a time for that, even as you wait/hope/pray for the veil to be lifted—there’s grace in that diffusion, in the sideways, out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye, brushing-against-the-hem of what you are trying to see.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, Day 3: Dryer Bounty

Some details I’m good with, with others I totally stink. I rarely check pockets before doing laundry. Opening the dryer is sometimes a bit of an adventure. On the other hand, I love discovering the little treasures that were tucked away in children's pockets. I love that they gather little bits, too.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email