Acceptable

Nov 17, 2022

So I’ve been writing poetry, much to my surprise, I think I’ve admitted. It started as encouragement to write a little bit every day, which daily bits somehow turned into poems. My sister and I started to send each other a new photo (she to me) or poem (me to her) every day. Then we began to challenge each other: I would write a poem in response to her photo, and she would take a photo representative of my poem.

Sometimes things go together wonderfully, like today’s sample. Sometimes the match is a bit of a stretch. But it’s been fun! Lately we’ve circled around the idea of collaborating on something.

The answer to that question is yes. A book, of course, and now what exactly to put into the book? The possibilities are a little boggling! The last number of photos and poems in Toward the Promise have been a couple such pairings, teasers perhaps? We’re not in a hurry, but every time we talk about it the only urge is to go forward.

So...stay tuned!

The poetry has been an interesting--compromise is too strong a word--alternative? substitute? for my longer essays. It’s nothing I expected, but it’s what I’ve got and it’s interesting and rewarding in its own way. A different way to work with words. An acceptable other.

Acceptable, like other changes I never saw coming, other aspects of this new and not always comfortable season I find myself engaged in. At times it’s so foreign I feel like I’ve stumbled into someone else’s life. Yet, here I am, being productive, making my little part of the world crank along a little more smoothly, doing OK.

I guess I’m figuring out how to let go of the size and shape of the world I wanted to fill, letting the internal furnishings shift, unclenching my hands from around what I can’t keep anyway. Looking for the great gifts in the new and more consciously letting God decide how to fill me with blessings as I step into what’s next.

Which seems like good advice for everyone, because my changes are no more wrenching and breathtaking than anyone else’s in their turn. The only thing constant is change for every last one of us. As the Red Queen told Alice, you have to run faster than that to stay in one place. And we’ve learned that’s not sustainable for so many reasons.

I guess this is...? Going with the flow in a less intentional way? Which sounds like a contradiction. Just stopped working to process it all as deeply and wrap my head around it? What’s processing and understanding about anyway--just another thin veil for control and not having to trust as utterly. Being stripped of all my ways to make myself safe.

Sinking into letting myself be stripped.

Because what’s most important is still always there. God Himself, a little less shadowed, uncompromising, tender and full of grace. Not the spaces, the relationships, the things, the circumstances. God Himself.

Which is all we really want in the end.

Toward the promise,

Lana