2017 In Retrospect

Here we are again in that strange limbo space between Christmas and New Year’s.  This is one of the strangest times of year, times in which we look backward and forward, but never seem to see what’s right in front of us.  These days are neither one thing nor the other.  Maybe we need that odd in-between stage to make us appreciate the moments when our feet are more firmly planted.  Looking back on this year, nothing immediately springs to mind that was all that spectacular.  It’s only when we look at the details, when we take a closer look, that life springs up in the cracks.

I started January in a state of anxiety—my boss was going to be out of town for much of the month, and for the first time I would be running things.  I remember I kept telling myself that I was ready, but I still didn’t feel that I fit in on a personal level.  Thankfully the days went quietly without disaster, though it would be some time before I really felt a part of the business.  In another part of my life, however, friendships and kindness opened up to me as I truly began to integrate with my church family.

February and March were peaceful.  I went to see a marvelous play written by my good friend Meredith Levy, “She Made Space,” a one-woman show about finding one’s place in the world and in culture.  If you have the chance to see it, I highly recommend it.  In what is becoming a tradition, I took my sister to the movies for her birthday.  She already has her selection picked out for next year. 

April was full of friendships—breakfast with girlfriends (and a baby!) one day, dinner the next.  We watched Doctor Who together when it reappeared, always a noble pursuit.  There was music this month, too, as I sang Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra.  It was an extraordinary opportunity, particularly the performance we gave at Liberty University in their new concert hall.  There is a moment in the fourth movement of the piece, when the orchestra reduces down to the deepest instruments—the upright bass in particular, a dear favorite of mine—playing the main theme as softly as possible, and it was exquisite.  Then, when the choir entered, and the bass voices rang out in triumph to the vaulted ceiling…I can try, but there are no words for how beautiful it was. 

At the end of April, our church broke ground on our new church building, and May saw the beginning of site prep at our property.  I was delighted that the property lies along my route to work, and all this year I have been watching the place that will be a home and a haven to me take shape.  (We have roof panels now!)  May was also a month of graduation for two dear friends, one from her undergrad program, the other from master’s.  I was and am so proud of them both.

I spent a portion of June housesitting for a family I often help in this way.  They have horses, so it’s harder to find someone who can take care of the place.  Would it be called farmsitting, then?  I always enjoy it; it’s like a vacation, in a way.  Then, at the end of the month, I took a long weekend and drove up to Washington, DC and Baltimore.  I took some time in DC to play the tourist and visit with my uncles in Alexandria, which was simply a delight.  After that it was onward to Baltimore, where I spent a few days celebrating the wedding of a friend.  Have you ever noticed that true friendships are the ones you can sink back into, like into a warm bath, and find that nothing has changed?  I am grateful for that.

July, my birthday month, was hot and wonderful.  I was celebrated first with roller coasters at King’s Dominion, then with Taming of the Shrew at the Blackfriars, the Shakespeare theatre in Staunton, VA.  The Blackfriars is one of my very favorite places, and the shows performed there by the American Shakespeare Center are marvelous.  Less marvelous was the moment when I bid farewell to a dear friend of mine, who set off for Boston for a year.  I have missed seeing her regularly as I used to.

Midway through July, a friend talked me into taking a trip out to Utah in August, so with far less planning than I normally put into trips, I flew out with her to Salt Lake City.  The Rocky Mountains are beautiful—I couldn’t take my eyes off them for the whole first day.  We went hiking up one of them to a gorgeous waterfall.  It’s strange how when you have exerted yourself for such a view, it seems more wonderful than it would have if you had driven up to it.  You have earned it, somehow.  We also went to a Shakespeare festival in Cedar City and saw the stark beauty of the red rock canyons on the way back.  Much of the rest of the trip was spent in hanging out with friends, which I think should take up more time on vacations then it usually does.  After all, what is the point of any vacation if you don’t get any rest?  My one regret was that I missed the performance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  The three of us shared a stomach bug during the week we were there, and that was my day to be sick.  Another time, maybe.

In early September my sister came into town with my mother, and we three went dress shopping for her wedding this spring.  She found a beautiful dress in the first shop we went into, and they even managed to scrounge up a dress for me, as well.  Later in the month I made a (very) humble dinner for a friend’s birthday, and we started watching “Outlander” weekly, which is a brilliant show filled with drama and Scotsmen.

I celebrated Sukkot with friends in October, the festival of waving branches and building Jew forts.  I mean no disrespect, of course—it was a fascinating evening, and the music played there was some of the loveliest I’ve heard.  October was also the month that I selflessly offered to help a friend in her new business, becoming one of her massage clients.  I haven’t regretted it—she is gracious and very good at what she does, and it allows me to keep in touch with her.  At the end of the month the RSO took hold of me again, and I sang with the choir in a concert celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.  Lots of German in that program, and some truly beautiful music.  More music happened in November with the same choir’s performance of selections from Handel’s Messiah, a piece that is truly unique and wonderful.

December, as ever, was devoured by Christmas, although I did everything I could to avoid the music (it took three audiobooks to get me through the season).  Performing Christmas music, of course, is different from hearing it ad nauseum on the radio.  I enjoyed the RSO’s holiday performances very much.  At the yearly Pops performance in the Salem Civic Center, a monster of a concert, the Virginia Tech sousaphone players joined us for a delightful show called “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Hokie.”  Imagine a kickline of people playing instruments about the size of cars.  It was beautiful.  Just as wonderful, though not as well-advertised, was the first performance of my own little children’s choir on the second Sunday in Advent.  It was their idea to sing, not mine, and I was so proud of them for doing it and doing it well.  After that, there was nothing to do but find Christmas presents for my loved ones and celebrate the reason for the season.

Now here I am, gifted and grateful, my heart warm and my toes cold.  In this drafty little house, my home of more than two years now, I am content.  What will come in 2018, I do not know, but I refuse to be afraid of it.  Today was a good day, and I hope for many more to come.  I hope that for you, as well.  See you next year.

Spirited Silence

This is the time of year when everything stands on its head.  Christmas is the only holiday that takes over an entire month—December no longer has any identity separate from Christmas.  Everything that we do and see seems different in the light of Christmas.  Being a Christian, I should approve of this.  I don’t.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy Christmas.  I do—when it arrives.  But it seems to me it hasn’t gotten here yet, and I don’t quite like the consumer culture dragging it onto center stage before it’s time.  I do what I can to avoid it all until I’m ready to feel the so-called “Christmas spirit”: I get audiobooks for my car to protect me from the all-too-repetitive Christmas music, I try to spread out my Christmas shopping throughout the year, and I leave any decorating until a week or so before the holiday. 

To me, Christmas appears in the silent moments.  That warm and kindly feeling doesn’t come surrounded by colored lights and someone blaring “Winter Wonderland” from a speaker.  To me, Christmas is white lights on a tree in the distance.  It’s that muffled quality of sound coming through falling snow.  It’s the work I put into gifts on my own, imagining the smiles on my loved ones’ faces.

It’s strange that what is usually accomplished for me by music and song should require silence to happen now.  But then, this is Christmastime, and everything is different.  So don’t try to get me into the spirit—I need to get there myself.  Let Christmas come slowly, when the time is right.  Isn’t it worth the wait?

The Price of Justice, and the Gift of Grace

When it comes to books, I’m not all that adventurous.  I don’t like to waste my time on things I don’t think I’ll like, and so I usually stick to genres I’m familiar with—wizards and unicorns, as my father used to say.  But I do also try to educate myself to inform my writing, and sometimes my writing informs my reading.  For example, having been working on a blog from the viewpoint of an angel for over a year now, I’ve started to pick up anything that has to do with angels.  I’ve dug more deeply into the bible, kept pamphlets that Jehovah’s Witnesses push under my door, and found myself reading fluffy articles written by spiritual people on the internet.  And at the library the other day, when I saw a book called The Trial of Fallen Angels, I picked it up.

I was a bit disappointed not to find a Miltonian novel about Lucifer and his followers receiving judgment, but my disappointment did not last long.  Written by James Kimmel, Jr., this book is a story about a woman seeking justice, and finding something else entirely.  At the beginning of the story, Brek Cuttler, a young lawyer and mother, finds herself on the platform of a train station.  She is naked, covere din blook, and though she tries for several chapters to deny it, she is dead.  But her quest is not to find out what has happened.  Rather, she has been charged with the task of representing the dead in the trials that will decide their eternal fate.  Divine justice is not what she expected, and what Brek will have to do is the hardest thing she has ever done, for her very first client is the man who killed her.

Kimmel’s portrayal of life after death is original and imaginative, relying not on any one tradition but instead presenting a new image of beauty and strangeness, of the impossible made possible.  Despite this imagery, it was a bit hard for me to get into the book—I usually don’t have a lot of patience for suspense or withheld information, and there was a fair bit of it.  But Kimmel does an excellent job drawing in his reader, so before you know it you are in the thick of the story.  Each new character introduced in this supernatural courtroom drama has something to add to the story, until you realize that all of them are drawn together into an intricate and complex history, full of family and tragedy and the importance of justice.

It is justice that is the driving force of the book.  Brek herself has always sought justice, from the time of her childhood.  It frustrates her, therefore, that justice in the afterlife seems hurried, careless, blind to aspects of the truth.  She resolves to bring true justice to this place, but instead she learns a deeper truth that cut me to the heart.  Kimmel’s own words are best to describe it:

Terror and murder are the way of justice, not the way of love.  Every war waged, and every harm inflicted, has been for the sake of justice. … He who seeks justice is harmed, not healed, because to obtain justice one must do that which is unjust. … Not to seek justice is to love those who harm us and become victors.  Love is not passive or submissive.  It is the determined application of opposite force to hatred and fear, demanding the highest effort and skill.” (Kimmel 353)

To me, this was one of those passages that make you put down the book and close your eyes to absorb what you’ve just read.  It had never occurred to me before to see justice and love as opposites.  But it’s true that “justice” is the harsh cry that precedes some of the worst things mankind can inflict on one another.  We demand blood, hardship, and cruelty in the name of justice.  Justice calls for punishment, and it leaves no room for love.

In church on Sunday the pastor was talking about debts and how they must be repaid.  He said that when wrong is done, someone has to bear the cost of it.  Even if the debt is forgiven, that doesn’t erase the wrong, and forgiveness means that the one who was harmed bears the cost.  Forgiveness is not justice; it is grace, a gift that we do not deserve.  It is love, pure and simple.

This was one of those books that put into words something I’ve always felt.  This was one of those passages that made me realize something I’ve always known.  I highly recommend this book, whether you are someone who loves easily or someone who has cried out for justice in your life.  It shows you that there are two sides to every story and many sides to every person, and sometimes justice demands that both opponents must suffer.  But in the end, of the book and of our own lives, it is love that must carry the day.

Quiet Nonsense

Today I choose not to fill the silence with music.  Somehow the quiet makes the breeze cooler, the sunlight brighter.  I don’t know why my senses choose to cooperate in this way, but I wish they would always do so.

Today I find peace bound in leather, soft and fragrant over the boards that protect the pages that hold the thoughts I had not so very long ago.  Those thoughts bring to life new ones, and isn’t it strange that I can find satisfaction and accomplishment simply by having new thoughts?

Today the river is calling me, but whenever I answer that call, I am filled with ideas and words that call me right back here, so that I can catch them before they fly away.  

Today I wonder about inspiration, about the way stories progress, about the difference--and the similarity--between story and meaning.  I wonder what meaning is.  I wonder how I can find it, and if I can someday create it.  Sometimes I wonder if I already have.

Today I do not question where I should be, or who I should be, or how I am failing, or how I am succeeding.  I just am, and there is something wonderful in that.

To Make a Hero

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of fantasy books.  My dad used to say that I would never read anything that didn’t have wizards or unicorns in it.  While that’s not strictly accurate—I loved books with dragons and prophecies too—fantasy has been far and away my favorite genre for my entire life.  And being a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about fantasy tropes and common plot elements.  On my mind today is the typical fantasy hero or heroine, specifically their history or their backstory.  I’ve noticed that often there has to be some form of drama with the protagonist’s family.  Either they are an orphan, or raised by unkind people who are not their parents (or in the case of Harry Potter, both).  Maybe they have lost one parent and the other is incapable of taking care of them, as with Artemis Fowl and Katniss Everdeen.  Maybe their real parents are not who they thought—take Richard Cypher or Prince Cor of Archenland or the wildmage Daine or Lirael of the Clayr (this is a pretty popular form).  Or maybe they never knew who their parents were, or even thought that they had parents, as with Maximum Ride or Septimus Heap.  Maybe their parents or guardians had secrets that are only discovered after their death, as with Jacob Portman or the Baudelaire children.  Whatever the case, it’s nearly a requirement in a fantasy story for the main character to have some shadows in their past.

Archetypes only become archetypes because they work, so what is it that makes this parental mystery so fascinating?  Maybe it’s because we all, in real life, have a fascination with our family history.  Nearly everyone I’ve ever talked to about this has some story about how their parents met, how they came together, what made their relationship unique and interesting.  It’s not just our parents, either.  We look for interesting stories in the past because we feel that those stories reflect well on us.  If we come from somewhere special, that makes us special, too, right?

Of course, there are stories that avoid this.  Only one of the five young heroes of The Dark is Rising series has a mystical background, and Candy Quackenbush could not possibly get more ordinary.  They become special of their own volition, through their responses to the problems that are thrust upon them.  In the end, all of those other heroes I have mentioned do the same.  Often, their magical or mysterious or interesting beginnings are not help but hindrance to them, making them afraid or guarded, or giving them enemies and setting obstacles in their paths.

What I am trying to say is it’s all well and good to be a “chosen one”, to have something mystical or tragic about you from an early age, some destiny that is just waiting to snatch you into an adventure.  But a hero—read, a good, well-rounded, and capable human being—can be raised in an ordinary, loving home, too.  It is not our beginnings that define us, but what we make of what we have been given.  In the end, we must all make our own greatness.  (Dumbledore said something like that at some point, didn’t he?)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write a story in which someone extraordinary is fascinated by the lives of ordinary people.  Because, in the end, it’s the ordinary things which are the most wonderful.


In order of mention, the books referenced above are: Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis, Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce, Lirael by Garth Nix, Maximum Ride by James Patterson, Magyk by Angie Sage, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, and Abarat by Clive Barker.  All are personal favorites of mine, and I highly recommend them.

Once Upon a Happily Ever After

I’ve always been a sucker for a happy ending.  In fact I cannot remember one story that I have loved that didn’t have some kind of a happy ending.  Of course there are marvelous books whose endings could never be called happy, but they don’t live on my shelves.  The books that I own, that I read over and over again, all have some kind of happy at the end—the beginning of healing, a small consolation prize for the main character, or even just a line that indicates that the character will still be able to move on—“Tomorrow’s another day” and all that.

I don’t think I’m the only one.  We all love a good “happily ever after.”  So much, I think, that we’ve begun to look for them in our own lives.  We’re all trying to get somewhere, to crest the hill from which point we can look out at the sunrise and smile, and the screen can fade neatly to black.  Maybe that destination is a lifestyle you want (be it white picket fence and 2.5 kids, or the day you can retire and get an RV to travel the country).  Maybe it’s that new job that you’ve had our eyes on for years.  Maybe it’s when your book will be published or when you’ll finally meet The One.  Maybe it’s just the end of the year and a fresh start on a new one.  Whatever it may be, we’re all trying to get there, but when we do, often we find that there’s just another hill to climb after that.

But the thing is, a story never encompasses an entire life.  What book have you ever read that began on the day a person was born and ended the day they died, leaving absolutely nothing out in between?  What book contains all the falling over and bathroom breaks and sick days and staring at the ceiling that we do?  Not to mention all the time we’re asleep (and not dreaming: just drooling into the pillow).  If there were such a book, I guarantee no one would read it all the way through.  It would come across as disjointed, distracting, and just dull.

No, every story has a point, or a moral, or a theme, and whatever is in the story is leading it to that destination.  The happy ending doesn’t just happen; it was constructed by a biased author who picks and chooses what details will help get there.  Trust me, I’ve been there—I spend weeks at a time trying to figure out which sentences and scenes lead to the ending I want.

So when the ending happens depends on what kind of story you’re telling.  If you’re telling a fairy tale, the ending might be a wedding.  If a tragedy, it might well end with your darkest moment, regardless of whether you ever get out of that darkness.  If it’s a story about a journey, then you might have the ending standing beneath the waterfall roaring down from the rocks, or it might be when you’ve caught the stomach bug and miss out on a concert you were looking forward to, or it might end with you sinking back into your easy chair at home.  (All of those things can and have happened on the same vacation.)  

The point to this story (because this is a story, of a sort, and there is a point, to which I’ve carefully led you) is not to worry about whether or not you’ve reached your happy ending.  There are many, many stories in every lifetime, and so at any given moment you are simultaneously living your happily ever after and waiting for the story to begin.  And take it from a writer who hates nothing so much as the middle of a story: both of those positions are good places to be.

More Grand than Heaven

Obligatory statement of embarrassment as to how long it’s been since I posted to this blog.  Great, moving on.

I adore Les Misérables.  As a musical especially, it is a beautiful story, and I nearly always ugly cry at the finale.  Sometimes I forget, however, how very good the book is, as well.  There are reasons for this, of course: it is a massive book, larger even than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or Outlander, some of the more modern fridge-sized literature.  It took me weeks to finish, where I normally can knock out a book in five or six days, and that was including several long passages on the battle of Waterloo or how ships are built that I flipped past.  But it is a classic for a reason.  

“This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the infinite.”

For those of you who have not read it, nor seen the various plays, musicals, and movies based on it, the story (much abridged) is this: a young man, Jean Valjean, steals a loaf of bread in post-revolutionary era France and is imprisoned.  Thanks to harsh criminal law and his several attempts to escape, he serves nineteen miserable years in prison.  This makes him a hardened, cruel person, but he experiences a life-changing event when, upon his release, he is offered incredible kindness by a priest.  Valjean turns his life around, eventually adopting the daughter of an unmarried woman who dies before she can escape poverty.  But throughout his life and Cosette’s growing up, he is hunted by a policeman named Javert, who refuses to believe that a thief could ever redeem himself.

As is often the case, what is important in the story is not what happens but why it happens and how.  Valjean is like a saint, but there is realism in his desperate struggles with his conscience—one of the most beautiful and relatable passages is the night and day that Valjean spends trying to save a man who has been accused in his name.  Throughout all that time, though he is moving to do the right thing, he consistently makes excuses, tries to find a way that he can escape the confession that he knows he has to make.  His anguish makes him very human, and yet he makes countless sacrifices and proves himself a true hero.  Likewise Javert, Valjean’s enemy and foil, shows a darker realism found in humanity.  He is relentless in the face of justice, even cruel, and yet believes himself to be in the right.  When he is finally forced to see that he was wrong about Valjean, he cannot comprehend or accept that truth, and it destroys him.  (I would have mentioned there would be spoilers, but—well, the book has been in print since 1862, so…)

The quote above was speaking of God, and there are chapters and chapters of Christian ideology in this book.  What I found most interesting, however, was not the way the book talks about God, but the way it talks about humanity.  

“There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven.  There is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the inmost recesses of the soul.”  

The story is really about the nature of humanity, that which we all have in common.  Its enormous and varied cast portrays a sampling of human nature.  We see pure, true love in Marius and Cosette, but also love denied and twisted in Fantine and Eponine.  There is selfless parental love in Valjean for Cosette, and opposing it is Madame Thénardier, who allows her sons to grow up on the streets.  Valjean and his benefactor, M. Myriel, show true selflessness, and then there is sly, grasping Thénardier, who always has another plan for his own gain.  Enjolras embodies patriotism and love of his nation, and he dies senselessly for it, while Marius ends up in the fight almost by accident and survives it.  Young and old, rich and poor, good and wicked—all appear in the pages of this text to show a piece of “this infinity which every man bears within him.”

I could write a dozen posts inspired by this book—on war, love, faith, conscience—and I might.  But what makes this book so real and so relevant, even now, is what it has to say about who we are.  Life may be miserable sometimes, but you can always find happiness and hope if you reach for the better parts of yourself.  This, after all, is all part of “the somber march of the human race.”