This was a beautiful piece. I am mulling over this line: “It’s a lesson I’ll never wholly learn, how to live with the wanting, and the offering, and within the fire…”
I think it’s interesting to learn about your environment independently, as an adult. I always think of that as a generational knowledge, but, sadly it is often missed now. My children and I have found Peterson’s Guides very helpful for naming the creatures and creation surrounding us.
Thank you, Leah. I'll have to check out those guides. Zane was just talking in another comment about his grandfather teaching him the names of trees, which sounds like the generational knowledge you're talking about. :) I don't know almost any birds or trees by heart, but when I was nannying, I did my best to point stuff out to the kids when we'd go on walks: cicadas, or snakeskins, or spiderwebs. Just to practice noticing with them.
Yes, I love how she named the birds she knew-- that takes intentional slowing down to observe, to bother noticing. It's the same approach, or maybe frame of mind, that we find in the works of both Elizabeth Goudge and Rumor Godden...
Oh, great connection. I hadn't put those together, but I definitely think you see that "slowing down" in both novels. And Goudge's books are full of the beauty of the natural world: the swans in Dean's Watch and the garden at Damerosehay and the forest at Pilgrim's Inn in the Eliot Trilogy both come to mind. She gets that in part from Kenneth Graham, I think.
I so enjoyed your reflections. Pieces like this are an education in noticing. The self-awareness of your internal wrestling and your deliberate awareness of the natural world go hand in hand. I feel another poem coming on.😘
Thank you! That's a lovely phrase, "an education in noticing." I try to put those things together, noticing the world and noticing my inner state (what Thoreau calls "a meteorological journal of the mind"). Another poem! Exciting! I'd love to read it if one does end up springing forth.
Genuinely one of the best pieces of nature writing I have read in a while! And yes - it's incredible how much knowing something's name broadens your love and observation of it in the wild, which is true with people as well :) I also need to get some kind of birding journal or hat or SOMETHING where I can display your bird-as-heartbeat quote as well - definitely speaks to me as the birder's anthem!
Thank you!! I'm glad you enjoyed. :) I would love to see my quote on some sort of birding paraphernalia; that would bring me endless joy. Do you do a lot of birding? I'm very much an amateur of amateurs--just trying to pay more attention than I have been.
Also: your latest post was awesome. I love seeing how much detail you're putting into all your work, and the different background sketches and everything are so cool. I feel like I'm watching one of my favorite old-school animated films come together in real time!
ah thanks so much! I sometimes get too lost in the details - I feel like my visual style ends up being more like an I Spy book but I think that's fun! And yes, while I don't get out as often as I ought to, I bird a lot and it's usually a background activity to any vacation since birds are everywhere! I like the "collecting" aspect of the hobby (although you're not actually bringing back any birds) and I think it genuinely makes me more perceptive, just in general!
My grandfather named trees for me as a child when we would take walks in the woods. I am grateful for that experience, and wish I could have walked with him once I reached adulthood. I now, sadly, live in a place with very few trees. So maybe I will teach myself the names of birds or flowers instead.
How lovely that you had that gift from your grandfather. I think I'd know more tree names if someone could teach them to me-- I struggle with making the jump from a picture in a book/on the Internet to the trees themselves.
I read “One Thousand Gifts” and a little essay on abiding that she wrote. Her prose is full of beautiful imagery, and OTG encourages the reader to find reason to thank God in the every day and the mundane.
Well done! I'm glad to read that I'm not the only one who tries to catalogue trees and birds while walking, so as to desire less or else leave my desires to God. If I ever tried to describe that feeling, I'd wish it'd come out something like your descriptions here.
(And maybe it's only because we've discussed Dillard before, but the mind-world-sight-flame feeling you implied in this essay kept recalling her to me.)
Haha, Dillard is all over this essay. (As she is with so many of essays.) In fact, I was a little worried about publishing it, because I thought it might be a little too "flowery", in the sense that it's all fairly dense prose without a lot of the kind of plainer prose I usually try to work in around the really packed lines so it's more readable...I thought maybe it be too tangly, and then I read the opening chapter of Holy the Firm and was like "well at least I'm not *that* metaphysical."
And I'm glad the feeling resonated. Thanks for reading and your comments as always, Kevin.
Thanks for reading! That quote seems to have touched a few people. :) I guess we all feel the same way about the beauty of birds. Honored to have been commonplaced!
nice to see you return to your wheelhouse. my favorite part of the story of a soul by st therese is when she, realizing the desires that burned in her heart were impossible to be fulfilled, to be a martyr, to be a doctor of the church, to be an evangelist, a missionary, etc, she didnt relinquish them, or even doubt, but instead trusted that He who placed those desires in her heart would bring them to fruition. Because He is almighty. And so He did.
I was excited to get a proper essay out! It'd been a bit. As fun as academic essays can be to write, this kind of stuff is really what I love. I need to read St Therese, I haven't read anything by her. I wish I had the boldness to place my desires in God's hands so wholeheartedly. My tendency is to try and talk myself out of things I can't practically pursue in the here and now--partially because I want to pursue His will and not mine, but also partially because it's hard to discern what His will is in relation to my desires. (An aside, but I've been reading St Teresa's Hidden Castle, and am loving it. If you've got other recommendations for mystic literature, I'd love to hear them!)
This piece, in theme, reminded me of one I have sitting in my drafts--about vocational angst, hearing from God, not hearing from God, and a failed trip to England. And I also quoted from Eliot--"Wait without hope." Maybe I will publish it once I come to terms with the fact that there's no resolution to tack onto it. That is one thing I admire about your writing--that you are willing to share your experiences with us while they are still raw and unresolved. Beautiful work!
I would love to read that essay. Sounds like we're walking through similar seasons right now. :)
I do try to put unresolved emotions on the page, because I know other people will relate. All writing is a kind of channel through which we're really telling other people's stories, as much as our own. But I definitely have things I haven't worked through that I can't write about or feel discomfort about trying to express! (Probably goes without saying, but I deliberately talked my way around what the unfulfilled wanting actually *is* in this piece. Which may be bad writing, but some things are a little too raw for Substack, as honest as I try to be.)
"All writing is a kind of channel through which we're really telling other people's stories, as much as our own." I love that. I need to remember that writing is a generous act--particularly when it costs to give it.
I don't think writing around whatever-it-may-be lowers the quality of the piece at all! Leaving some things unspoken gives layers. Desire is desire. Perhaps a bit of mystery gives your reader the space to "tell their own story" in this piece. :) But I think you found the particularity via the external descriptions that convey an interior world.
What a perfect essay. I like how it drifts between nature observations and bookish reverie.
Fire and Hemlock was an interesting fantasy novel. I think I need to re-read it at some point. I love the Now Here/ Nowhere and how perfectly emblematic it is for Lent. This has been a perfectly wretched Lent for me. I think I had about two days at the beginning of doing things well and then I gave up on almost all of my plans wholesale. March was a perfectly impossible month and it was all I could do to hold on while the tempests tossed me back and forth. I fell into reading Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books and neglected all the serious books I intended to take up.
I'm enchanted by your chipmunk and woodpecker. And "the quiet beat beneath the wrist of the world." is a perfect phrase.
The Dean's Watch was one of my favorite books of last year. I need to read more Goudge. She's so lovely. We are reading Green Dolphin Street now as a read aloud, my 17 year old daughter and I. I like what you say about her characters as people who should be unhappy, people with unfulfilled desire, who live in the now here as pilgrims and who are embedded in networks of grace. I'll be thinking of that as I continue to read.
Brede is one of my favorite novels of all time. It's such a perfectly Lenten book.
Learning the names of trees and birds is such a worthwhile pursuit. I've been puzzling over the identity of one giant growing in the backyard of a house on the far side of our block. Because it's behind the house I can't see the bark and because it's April there are no leaves. But it has a fascinating pattern of branches that is quite distinctive. I now have a theory that it's a sycamore because there's a tree in the center of town that I know is a sycamore that I think has the same kind of branches. I will see if I'm right as the leaves come out.
You may be my ideal reader, ha. Someone who gets all the bookish references and enjoys the nature scenes. :) Fire and Hemlock is actually my all-time favorite fantasy novel. I'd love to write about it more at some point, but I think there are other folks on Substack who have already done so. If you've not read DJW's essay on it, it's brilliant.
Brede is so good! I owe both that novel and Dean's Watch proper essays in their own right, but they ended up sliding in here. Philippa's personality is very similar to mine, in some ways, and I loved watching the community change and grow over the course of so many years. There's a line in the novel that I almost worked into this piece, but didn't quite, where one of the nuns (I can't remember who) says to either Cecily or Philippa: "Nothing less than the whole is good enough for God." I've kept that in mind lately.
I love that you're reading Goudge with your daughter. That's amazing. And I hope you're right about your sycamore! Identifying trees when they don't have leaves is hard. All of the trees in the woods by my parents' house are just starting to bud, and so it's tricky to spot them out. I love oak trees because they're so easy to spot: they just go every which way with their branches, crowd everybody else, and ignore all politeness.
Oh do you have a link the the DJW essay on Fire and Hemlock? I'd love to see it.
I think I might have written about Brede on my old blog. I should see if I can dig that up and republish it.
Today we read the sinking of the Green Dolphin and Captain O'Hara's death and redemption, which I had forgotten about and the scene had me in tears. I could hardly read, but I managed to keep it together.
I love your description of oaks. There aren't many oaks in my immediate area. We're mostly maples and pines. Our neighborhood also has locusts and catalpas, which are one of my personal favorites. But I grew up with live oaks in Texas and they're such sprawling every which way trees.
https://petson.livejournal.com/200935.html This is the only online version I can find. She talks about the Celtic legends behind it, the Odyssey, Cupid and Psyche, how the structure follows Eliot's Four Quartets, and some of the Trinitarian elements. It's amazing.
I've not read the Green Dolphin yet! I'll have to add it to the list.
Grace, joy, humor and humility shine through in this wonderful sketch of yours. I was nodding my head and saying "yes that's it" reading the chipmunk/acorn bit. You nailed it! I thank you for posting this.
Ooh, I've not read Scent of Water yet. I'll have to move it up on the list. My first Goudge was City of Bells, and so it has a special place in my heart...but my all time favorite is probably going to turn out to be The Bird and the Tree. I read it this past January, and just needed its story in the midst of a chaotic time of my own.
Yes, you must read The Scent of Water : ) Such a rich read and one that lingers. For my part, I have not yet read The Bird and the Tree. Somehow I began with The Heart of the Family, so I need to go back and read the first of that trilogy. I am so glad that novel met you during a time of need. Her books are such ministering agents, aren’t they!
I have a love/hate relationship with elms. Maybe it's odd in the southwest where I should count it a miracle that anything at all grows, but here the elm's branches have already turned into furry fists of coin-shaped seeds which it will scatter recklessly, as though it had vaults of those riches stored away for the years to come. Then I can look forward to elm saplings trying to shoot up through the porchboards or wiggling from under the skirt of our home, quite indecently.
It's nice to have shade when the summer heat comes anyway.
Thank you, and thanks for reading! There were Chinese elms in my neighborhood back in TN, and their leaves/seed pods would get everywhereeee; I couldn't go inside without tracking them in on my shoes. Remind me which state you're in?
This was a beautiful piece. I am mulling over this line: “It’s a lesson I’ll never wholly learn, how to live with the wanting, and the offering, and within the fire…”
I think it’s interesting to learn about your environment independently, as an adult. I always think of that as a generational knowledge, but, sadly it is often missed now. My children and I have found Peterson’s Guides very helpful for naming the creatures and creation surrounding us.
Thanks for sharing.
Thank you, Leah. I'll have to check out those guides. Zane was just talking in another comment about his grandfather teaching him the names of trees, which sounds like the generational knowledge you're talking about. :) I don't know almost any birds or trees by heart, but when I was nannying, I did my best to point stuff out to the kids when we'd go on walks: cicadas, or snakeskins, or spiderwebs. Just to practice noticing with them.
Yes, I love how she named the birds she knew-- that takes intentional slowing down to observe, to bother noticing. It's the same approach, or maybe frame of mind, that we find in the works of both Elizabeth Goudge and Rumor Godden...
Oh, great connection. I hadn't put those together, but I definitely think you see that "slowing down" in both novels. And Goudge's books are full of the beauty of the natural world: the swans in Dean's Watch and the garden at Damerosehay and the forest at Pilgrim's Inn in the Eliot Trilogy both come to mind. She gets that in part from Kenneth Graham, I think.
I so enjoyed your reflections. Pieces like this are an education in noticing. The self-awareness of your internal wrestling and your deliberate awareness of the natural world go hand in hand. I feel another poem coming on.😘
Thank you! That's a lovely phrase, "an education in noticing." I try to put those things together, noticing the world and noticing my inner state (what Thoreau calls "a meteorological journal of the mind"). Another poem! Exciting! I'd love to read it if one does end up springing forth.
Genuinely one of the best pieces of nature writing I have read in a while! And yes - it's incredible how much knowing something's name broadens your love and observation of it in the wild, which is true with people as well :) I also need to get some kind of birding journal or hat or SOMETHING where I can display your bird-as-heartbeat quote as well - definitely speaks to me as the birder's anthem!
Thank you!! I'm glad you enjoyed. :) I would love to see my quote on some sort of birding paraphernalia; that would bring me endless joy. Do you do a lot of birding? I'm very much an amateur of amateurs--just trying to pay more attention than I have been.
Also: your latest post was awesome. I love seeing how much detail you're putting into all your work, and the different background sketches and everything are so cool. I feel like I'm watching one of my favorite old-school animated films come together in real time!
ah thanks so much! I sometimes get too lost in the details - I feel like my visual style ends up being more like an I Spy book but I think that's fun! And yes, while I don't get out as often as I ought to, I bird a lot and it's usually a background activity to any vacation since birds are everywhere! I like the "collecting" aspect of the hobby (although you're not actually bringing back any birds) and I think it genuinely makes me more perceptive, just in general!
My grandfather named trees for me as a child when we would take walks in the woods. I am grateful for that experience, and wish I could have walked with him once I reached adulthood. I now, sadly, live in a place with very few trees. So maybe I will teach myself the names of birds or flowers instead.
How lovely that you had that gift from your grandfather. I think I'd know more tree names if someone could teach them to me-- I struggle with making the jump from a picture in a book/on the Internet to the trees themselves.
Your writing is reminiscent of Ann Voskamp…but had me pondering and sharing and generally wanting to read more. Thanks for sharing this!
Thank you! I’m not familiar with Ann Voskamp: what’s she known for?
I read “One Thousand Gifts” and a little essay on abiding that she wrote. Her prose is full of beautiful imagery, and OTG encourages the reader to find reason to thank God in the every day and the mundane.
Stunning prose! I'm rereading Brede again and it's so powerful and convicts me in how much they give up to gain more of God.
Well done! I'm glad to read that I'm not the only one who tries to catalogue trees and birds while walking, so as to desire less or else leave my desires to God. If I ever tried to describe that feeling, I'd wish it'd come out something like your descriptions here.
(And maybe it's only because we've discussed Dillard before, but the mind-world-sight-flame feeling you implied in this essay kept recalling her to me.)
Haha, Dillard is all over this essay. (As she is with so many of essays.) In fact, I was a little worried about publishing it, because I thought it might be a little too "flowery", in the sense that it's all fairly dense prose without a lot of the kind of plainer prose I usually try to work in around the really packed lines so it's more readable...I thought maybe it be too tangly, and then I read the opening chapter of Holy the Firm and was like "well at least I'm not *that* metaphysical."
And I'm glad the feeling resonated. Thanks for reading and your comments as always, Kevin.
This was such a beautiful reflection!
I couldn’t agree more with the following…and I put it in my commonplace book because it was such a perfect sentence…
Birds are the pulse of life, I decided; the quiet beat beneath the wrist of the world.
Thanks for reading! That quote seems to have touched a few people. :) I guess we all feel the same way about the beauty of birds. Honored to have been commonplaced!
nice to see you return to your wheelhouse. my favorite part of the story of a soul by st therese is when she, realizing the desires that burned in her heart were impossible to be fulfilled, to be a martyr, to be a doctor of the church, to be an evangelist, a missionary, etc, she didnt relinquish them, or even doubt, but instead trusted that He who placed those desires in her heart would bring them to fruition. Because He is almighty. And so He did.
I was excited to get a proper essay out! It'd been a bit. As fun as academic essays can be to write, this kind of stuff is really what I love. I need to read St Therese, I haven't read anything by her. I wish I had the boldness to place my desires in God's hands so wholeheartedly. My tendency is to try and talk myself out of things I can't practically pursue in the here and now--partially because I want to pursue His will and not mine, but also partially because it's hard to discern what His will is in relation to my desires. (An aside, but I've been reading St Teresa's Hidden Castle, and am loving it. If you've got other recommendations for mystic literature, I'd love to hear them!)
I recommend: The Ways of Mental Prayer by Vitalis Lahodey
The Three Ages of the Interior Life by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange.
Most of all, I recommend the practice of the Holy Rosary as a mental prayer (not a book!). Do\would you pray the rosary?
This piece, in theme, reminded me of one I have sitting in my drafts--about vocational angst, hearing from God, not hearing from God, and a failed trip to England. And I also quoted from Eliot--"Wait without hope." Maybe I will publish it once I come to terms with the fact that there's no resolution to tack onto it. That is one thing I admire about your writing--that you are willing to share your experiences with us while they are still raw and unresolved. Beautiful work!
I would love to read that essay. Sounds like we're walking through similar seasons right now. :)
I do try to put unresolved emotions on the page, because I know other people will relate. All writing is a kind of channel through which we're really telling other people's stories, as much as our own. But I definitely have things I haven't worked through that I can't write about or feel discomfort about trying to express! (Probably goes without saying, but I deliberately talked my way around what the unfulfilled wanting actually *is* in this piece. Which may be bad writing, but some things are a little too raw for Substack, as honest as I try to be.)
"All writing is a kind of channel through which we're really telling other people's stories, as much as our own." I love that. I need to remember that writing is a generous act--particularly when it costs to give it.
I don't think writing around whatever-it-may-be lowers the quality of the piece at all! Leaving some things unspoken gives layers. Desire is desire. Perhaps a bit of mystery gives your reader the space to "tell their own story" in this piece. :) But I think you found the particularity via the external descriptions that convey an interior world.
What a perfect essay. I like how it drifts between nature observations and bookish reverie.
Fire and Hemlock was an interesting fantasy novel. I think I need to re-read it at some point. I love the Now Here/ Nowhere and how perfectly emblematic it is for Lent. This has been a perfectly wretched Lent for me. I think I had about two days at the beginning of doing things well and then I gave up on almost all of my plans wholesale. March was a perfectly impossible month and it was all I could do to hold on while the tempests tossed me back and forth. I fell into reading Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books and neglected all the serious books I intended to take up.
I'm enchanted by your chipmunk and woodpecker. And "the quiet beat beneath the wrist of the world." is a perfect phrase.
The Dean's Watch was one of my favorite books of last year. I need to read more Goudge. She's so lovely. We are reading Green Dolphin Street now as a read aloud, my 17 year old daughter and I. I like what you say about her characters as people who should be unhappy, people with unfulfilled desire, who live in the now here as pilgrims and who are embedded in networks of grace. I'll be thinking of that as I continue to read.
Brede is one of my favorite novels of all time. It's such a perfectly Lenten book.
Learning the names of trees and birds is such a worthwhile pursuit. I've been puzzling over the identity of one giant growing in the backyard of a house on the far side of our block. Because it's behind the house I can't see the bark and because it's April there are no leaves. But it has a fascinating pattern of branches that is quite distinctive. I now have a theory that it's a sycamore because there's a tree in the center of town that I know is a sycamore that I think has the same kind of branches. I will see if I'm right as the leaves come out.
You may be my ideal reader, ha. Someone who gets all the bookish references and enjoys the nature scenes. :) Fire and Hemlock is actually my all-time favorite fantasy novel. I'd love to write about it more at some point, but I think there are other folks on Substack who have already done so. If you've not read DJW's essay on it, it's brilliant.
Brede is so good! I owe both that novel and Dean's Watch proper essays in their own right, but they ended up sliding in here. Philippa's personality is very similar to mine, in some ways, and I loved watching the community change and grow over the course of so many years. There's a line in the novel that I almost worked into this piece, but didn't quite, where one of the nuns (I can't remember who) says to either Cecily or Philippa: "Nothing less than the whole is good enough for God." I've kept that in mind lately.
I love that you're reading Goudge with your daughter. That's amazing. And I hope you're right about your sycamore! Identifying trees when they don't have leaves is hard. All of the trees in the woods by my parents' house are just starting to bud, and so it's tricky to spot them out. I love oak trees because they're so easy to spot: they just go every which way with their branches, crowd everybody else, and ignore all politeness.
Oh do you have a link the the DJW essay on Fire and Hemlock? I'd love to see it.
I think I might have written about Brede on my old blog. I should see if I can dig that up and republish it.
Today we read the sinking of the Green Dolphin and Captain O'Hara's death and redemption, which I had forgotten about and the scene had me in tears. I could hardly read, but I managed to keep it together.
I love your description of oaks. There aren't many oaks in my immediate area. We're mostly maples and pines. Our neighborhood also has locusts and catalpas, which are one of my personal favorites. But I grew up with live oaks in Texas and they're such sprawling every which way trees.
https://petson.livejournal.com/200935.html This is the only online version I can find. She talks about the Celtic legends behind it, the Odyssey, Cupid and Psyche, how the structure follows Eliot's Four Quartets, and some of the Trinitarian elements. It's amazing.
I've not read the Green Dolphin yet! I'll have to add it to the list.
Grace, joy, humor and humility shine through in this wonderful sketch of yours. I was nodding my head and saying "yes that's it" reading the chipmunk/acorn bit. You nailed it! I thank you for posting this.
Thanks, Peter!
Lovely! Goudge and tree-identification are some of my favorite things as well : )
A kindred spirit! What's your favorite Goudge?
My favorite is The Scent of Water! Do you have a favorite?
Ooh, I've not read Scent of Water yet. I'll have to move it up on the list. My first Goudge was City of Bells, and so it has a special place in my heart...but my all time favorite is probably going to turn out to be The Bird and the Tree. I read it this past January, and just needed its story in the midst of a chaotic time of my own.
Yes, you must read The Scent of Water : ) Such a rich read and one that lingers. For my part, I have not yet read The Bird and the Tree. Somehow I began with The Heart of the Family, so I need to go back and read the first of that trilogy. I am so glad that novel met you during a time of need. Her books are such ministering agents, aren’t they!
Wonderfully said as always, Olivia.
I have a love/hate relationship with elms. Maybe it's odd in the southwest where I should count it a miracle that anything at all grows, but here the elm's branches have already turned into furry fists of coin-shaped seeds which it will scatter recklessly, as though it had vaults of those riches stored away for the years to come. Then I can look forward to elm saplings trying to shoot up through the porchboards or wiggling from under the skirt of our home, quite indecently.
It's nice to have shade when the summer heat comes anyway.
Thank you, and thanks for reading! There were Chinese elms in my neighborhood back in TN, and their leaves/seed pods would get everywhereeee; I couldn't go inside without tracking them in on my shoes. Remind me which state you're in?