Everything Will Change

April 2024 || A month of making and a note of thanks.

Apr 30, 2024

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By the time you open this, it’ll have been days since I first started getting it down. Me at my dining room table scribbling in a notebook with fountain pen, and you, right there in your present, giving presence to these words.

In the space between, it’s important you know that every time I tell you I’m thankful for you, I mean it. And each moment of thanks for you — for being who you are, for being here, for opening, for reading, for commenting, for sharing — gets stitched together like a quilt I lay over me on days when I wonder if any of this matters.

And there are far less of those than there used to be, thanks to you.

The other day, I finally did bit of housekeeping around my website.

Once a full-fledged wedding and portrait photographer’s portfolio, for years it’s sat all but empty, my former work gone and only the words COMING SOON… broadcast over an old bookish photo I’d taken during my first round of revisions on The Other Side of Hope.

I remember how huge it felt to wipe that all clean, four years after first shuttering my business to write. And here I am, four years after building that bare landing page, freshening things up and redirecting people to the place that’s become a home for my words outside of books: this newsletter.

Four years and not much has changed, yet the whole foundation’s shifted.

We'll cut our bodies free from the tethers of this scene
Start a brand new colony
Where everything will change
We'll give ourselves new names, identities erased

Last night, I stood beside our daughter in an arena full of fellow elder millennials bouncing around to the beat of the Postal Service performing “Brand New Colony.” By the end of the song, Ben Gibbard had us singing our guts out, a cappella, to the lines “Everything will change… ooh ohh…,” and I can still feel the words thundering in my chest, this morning.

I’d waited more than half my life now, for this show. Give Up was released in the spring semester of my freshman year when I was just nineteen. Months away from the end of my second decade, then, and today, I’m in the final weeks of my fourth. It was like time travel, in the same city, the same girl but a woman, and beside me, our girl on the brink of teen-dom. My brain can’t make sense of it.

But goodness, what joy there is in sharing in discovery right alongside her. Because it seems, these days, that’s a lot of what we’re up to. Discovery and recovery, discovery and recovery.

We have so many opportunities in life to come round the mountain, don’t we? To return home, even if, home is a place you weren’t sure you knew until you learned to make it. When we come back, even if we’d like to think nothing’s changed, everything has.

Around the mountain, the road winds up and down, never right back to the place you were. Full circle is less a loop than a spiral, and I’m finally seeing it clear.

Learning to really see your hand, for the first time, will do that to you.

Living

Without my Field Notes from a Digital Fast from the last couple of Air Mail editions, I have no Making category, so here’s where I’m going to tell you ABOUT DRAWING, okay?

This month was full of soccer tournaments, braces-getting, oral surgery (for one said braces-wearer), a solar eclipse (not sure if you’d heard! ha!), and all the bits of normal life, but one uncommon thread, for me, was my daily drawing exercises.

Near the end of March,

angie warren

told me about a workbook she’d picked up to dig a little deeper into the art of drawing. Intrigued by the premise and promise of honing skills I wasn’t sure I’d ever have, I took the leap and told myself I’d get started with one lesson a day through April.

Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Workbook has been my daily creative companion this month, taking me on a journey of seeing with my eyes and working with pencil in a way I never thought possible for me. And it’s changed everything.

pencil drawings from exercises in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain — It feels like I've waited my whole life to learn to draw like this.

Writing

This month, my writing was given almost entirely to the work of poetry and I’m honestly not sad about it. As I mentioned previously, I committed to and finished the task of writing a poem a day for the month, and I hope to share some of these with you in the future!

Playing into lyricism can only contribute to my prose, and I’m trusting the seeds I’ve planted through poetry this month will lead to something beautiful in my fiction work. Unless they’re like my ill-fated summer squash from year one of gardening… but we don’t need to talk about that.

Reading

My standout reading moment from this month was wrapping up Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall which is unlike anything else I’ve read set during Henry VIII’s reign — or ever. I’m sure it will remain one of the best books I’ve read this year, let alone of all time. It’s not for the faint of heart as a work of literary historical fiction, but for me, as a writer, reader, and student of history — it’s been a draw-dropping endeavor.

Another highlight was Kate Albus’ middle grade historical fiction, A Place to Hang the Moon, which I read to the boys at bedtime. It was a moving and insightful story, both for them and for me, and I’m looking forward to starting her second book, Nothing Else But Miracles, soon.

I’ve been working through (and am almost finished with!)

Jonathan Haidt

’s The Anxious Generation, which you may have already seen floating around in reviews and commentary online. Haidt’s work, though not the first of its kind, is essential in the current tension and changing landscape of childhood from play-based to phone-based.

In that same vein, I was so encouraged by the article Can you Raise a Teen Today Without a Smartphone? by

Melanie Hempe

on her firsthand experience choosing a different path for her daughter. These conversations, I think, are important for us to be having, no matter the choices already made. We’ve felt the tension outside our home, in particular, this past year, but aren’t convinced the way we’re told it has to be is the only way.

Listening

This month, we took the kids to their first symphony to see Jean-Yves Thibaudet play Dawson, Price, and Gershwin’s America with the Nashville Symphony.1

Sitting Orchestra View with three kids between ages seven and twelve was a risk we thought worth taking. In the end, watching our kids lean forward in their seats during Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue played by one of my favorite pianists was an incredible joy.

And the music? Powerful and beyond moving. If you’ve an hour and a half to spare for a musical journey (or simply fourteen minutes for Dawson’s Hope in the Night — one of the most electrifying pieces of music I’ve ever heard played live) I made a playlist for us to revisit at home that I’m happy to share with you:

Enjoying

I don’t usually get too local, given my readers hail from 32 states and 15 countries (I could honestly cry just thinking about that — THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, again), but I’ve got to give a shout in this space to the newest location of the coffeeshop The Fainting Goat.

If you ever find yourself in Franklin, Tennessee, put it on your list. Their incredible work spaces, steady supply of caffeine, friendly staff, and breakfast burritos been the source of much creative fuel the last couple of months, and I’d be remiss in not sharing it with you!

Well folks, that’s it for today, this week, and this month, from me!

But what about you? What’s new in your world, this month? What song can’t you get out of your head? What’s the book you can’t stop thinking about? What creative practice have you been itching to get back to or try anew?

If you’ve got a sec, I’d love to hear from you!