Groundwork

Towles Kintz
Truth
Like so many of life’s other challenges — the marathon worth running, the job worth doing well, the piano sonata worth mastering — motherhood has taught me, as nothing else has, about process. The work of raising young children is no less essential or foundational than the tasks my younger, childless self wanted to rush through. I can’t neglect my children’s play time or resent their basic needs and still expect to have great relationships and conversations with them when they’re older, any more than I could have skipped writing the beginning of this essay and had the end come out the right way.

Tokens

Eric Peters
Place
I am a token here, an altar to mark the space where a dream was dreamed, a forest cleared, land reclaimed, a foundation laid, a hope hoped, a desire met. I sit upright on two front columns, regal, and alert, a king keeping watch over kingdom. My sides show their age, remorselessly and violently pierced by windblown shrapnel, by swirling apathy. Layers of cream-colored paint chip and peel revealing ever older storied layers. Sinewy mortar deteriorates in the space between bricks, and my lit soul wavers between the colorful future and the black-and-white past. Though riddled with exhaustion, I remain.

Take and Eat

Kari Baumann
Feast, Hospitality
I thought I knew the importance of sharing food. I have taken food to new moms and seen my mom’s counter overflowing with casseroles after my dad died. I have experienced the common grace of bread and wine. But it wasn’t until my husband put a plate in front of my exhausted body every night that I truly understood how much he loved me. He nourished me until I was ready to survive. The closest I can come to describing it is that it felt like being protected in a womb just like I had protected my son for all those months.

The Gradual Knitter

Anna Broadway
Crafty
It was a revelation: With my own hands and a little patience, I could make some of the very things I’d been planning to buy — and with just as fine or a finer result. Later on would come the challenge of translating what I saw in my mind’s eye into something that could keep my neck and hands warm. For now I reveled in the discovery of this power to create.
An Iconography of Birds

An Iconography of Birds

Denis Haack
Creation Care, Truth

That birds, with their riot of color and sound and an ability to fly, have come to be associated with the stories of our deeply human quest to explore such things only makes sense. They are our fellow creatures — dust to dust, ashes to ashes — yet manage to break free of the shackles of gravity and transcend the ground from which we are all made.

Possibility 101

Krista Barré
Artful Kids
I realized I wasn’t teaching these tiny people how to use their imaginations or how to be creative because they already were practically brimming over with innate curiosity. They were being who they were born to be — curious people. And if they were born like that, then surely I was, too. Over the years of working with children I learned to learn from them, and in the process, I have learned about myself.

In Dependence

Emily Bryan
Hospitality, Truth
It was not long after we landed that I became keenly aware of my own needs, which seemed myriad and great, physical and emotional and practical. As my pregnancy progressed, my body ached and grew weary very quickly, yet my responsibilities for my son and our household in this new place required a lot of physical activity. I was coming from a place where my sanity, and that of our son, was maintained by interacting with other families with small children on a daily basis, but in Iceland I knew no one.

Let Them Kiss the Dog: An Interview with Margie Haack

Katy Bowser
Bookish, Place, Truth
I did want to tell my story kindly. I love my family. It delights me that that is how it has come across. I see no benefit for myself or others if I tell a story filled with anger and bitterness. Frankly, I think if I am unable to extend mercy to the people in my story, and receive the gifts they have given, even ones that have caused suffering, then I should wait until I am able to process, to heal more deeply.
The Work of Love

The Work of Love

Andi Ashworth
Hospitality, Truth, Vocation

As my journals filled with the details of my life — raising children to adulthood, becoming a writer, years of hosting people and events, the development of Art House America, pursuing a seminary degree, and becoming a grandmother — the words on the page gave me eyes to see the significance of the smaller things that are always present.

Sure, there are high points, nameable moments of climax — but most of my daily life still takes place in the in-between.

My Grandmother’s Recipe

Dyana Herron
Feast, Truth
I wanted to do it alone. I lit the candles in the kitchen and turned on some music. Today, this would be the way I talked to God, and what I wanted to talk about was my grandmothers, and the way I wanted to talk about them was by doing something with my hands that their hands had done time and again.

The Order of Undoing

Kierstin Casella
Truth
In contrast, the pieces of my life didn't feel safe or ordered at all, but wedged inside a room too small to contain them. My emotions were beginning to seep uncontrolled from that room faster than I could shove them back in. Desperately, I wanted to dig myself free from this avalanche of events that had happened, all so abruptly and without my permission.

Learning Beauty

Shannon Huffman Polson
Creation Care
The Arctic coastal plains are flat, stretching from the mountains to the sea. The lines shimmer with beauty. The social view of beauty thinks something is missing in this flatness. In between is nothing. But in between is the space where imaginations live and souls dance. There’s so much more to see than flat. The flat distance offers the middle view. The middle view that’s missing is something that takes effort to see.

Roots & The Golden Mean

Alice Smith
Truth
The specifics of what transpires under the surface of the soil are largely unknown. When uprooted at the end of the growing season, my seven-foot-tall okra plants showed strong but at the most only twelve-inch roots. Perennials and other plants may truly look dead, yet the root lives and continues to prepare for the next season of fruitful beauty.

It is the same with our souls. We cannot see all that is being worked out below the surface. The strength of what lies beneath is able to sustain, support, and give life to great things.
Interview Series: MAKING — A Conversation with Bruce Herman

Interview Series: MAKING — A Conversation with Bruce Herman

Charlie Peacock
Truth, Visual Art, Vocation

I dream of the world as sacred space — as a living cathedral. Man-made cathedrals merely echo the natural world with its soaring sequoias, canyons, oceans, mountain peaks. This world was made by a Maker who loves and enters the creation to know it from the inside. This Maker is not aggressive or possessive as we humans understand Him, but is rather hidden, loving, generous to a fault.

Moonrise Kingdom Triptych

Sarah Braud
Stage & Screen
“Through beauty,” Fellows surmises, “we are led to a joy which belongs to another world.” Walking out of the theater after viewing Moonrise Kingdom, I carried with me the joy of a determined color story. Anderson’s choice of warm, desaturated colors intensified a feeling of nostalgia for childhood. Every shot is elaborately self-conscious recreating a childhood longing for fantasy worlds. The real genius of Wes Anderson, in my opinion, is his story of color.

A Window on Steuben Street

Laura Lynn Brown
Hospitality, Place, Truth
I took a photo after all, of the one thing of hers that I have asked for: her pencil cup, made of rolled magazine pages, pencils included. It came out blurry. Once I pulled the car up the drive and loaded my bags, she was ready for the customary parting hug on the front stoop. But I had one more task, to be completed indoors, so we returned to the kitchen.

Finding a Workaday Tune

Barbara Lane
Music, Truth, Vocation
I train my eyes to rest on these beautiful things during work days, reminiscent of the time I discovered an open E chord on my guitar and played it for a solid half hour in as many ways I could, with my ear resting on the body of the instrument to soak up the resonance. There’s a stability I’m finding here that is good and right, that reminds me of the growing stability of my hands mastering those first basic chord shapes and transitions.
Interview Series: MAKING — A Conversation with Kim Thomas

Interview Series: MAKING — A Conversation with Kim Thomas

Charlie Peacock
Bookish, Truth, Visual Art, Vocation

I absolutely think that the history of frequent moves, adjusting, new people — all that affects my making today. It takes a lot of courage to be a maker of any kind. It requires many decisions, commitments, and lonely times in your head. The nomadic life built up my courage for new things and change, sort of immunized me to sameness, and made me invite the adventure of mystery and unknown.

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