The Ann's at My Table

"Stare at something beautiful. Stare for a long, long time."

This is the first Ann. The one who reminded me months ago to slow down.

She is practical. She gives me ways.




The first Ann's words resonate with the words of the second Ann. The one who reminded me just a few short days ago to be "happy in all these little things that God gives." The second Ann is leaning over cheese curls with her camera, when her husband walks in the door.

"I do feel foolish," she says. "I mean, it's curls of mozzarella and cheddar piled high in a pond of golden day."

These Ann's, both a part of my fast-paced online world. They visit my thoughts, accompany my moments. Slow down. Note the sunlight. Note the curls of time, the secret tucked-in places.

I decide to stare at something beautiful. How hard could it be?




My first thought is to cheat the experience, work from memory. I know what my great-grandmother's table cloth looks like.

Don't I?

My second thought is to set a timer. But what constitutes a "long time"?

Forget the details, I decide. Just jump in (mosey in?).




I feel the linen between my fingers. The weave is uneven, as I suppose all linen is. What is linen? I realize I don't know.

I don't know if my great-grandmother used a pattern for this table cloth, or if she dreamed it up herself. Oh goodness, are these grape leaves and grapes? I hadn't noticed. Ah, communion sewn into the cloth—a silent, spiritual poetry that sat under dishes and glasses, time and again.

And there is more I don't know. So much more. Is this the lesson of beauty? How much we don't know? Is this what moves us to awe? The ache to know?

I don't know how she chose the thread. It is strong yet silky. Did someone peddle it to her door? Did she walk to a shop on some German market street? Who made this thread that has lasted through time?

The stitches are small, so so small. How many hours did she work to make them? Did her fingers hurt as she moved the needle through nights and days, stitching a love gift for her daughter's wedding? Did she work by gaslight? Electric? Did she get bored, or did this work soothe her spirit?

I don't know. All I know is, thanks to my sweet Ann's, I have looked for a long time. And beauty has left me with questions.




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Thanks to...

Ann Kroeker, author of Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families

Ann Voskamp, author of One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

On, In, and Around Mondays: Edge of the New Year's Orchard

She wrote of challah dotted with raisins. In The Spirit of Food, Hathaway spoke of the moments making this heavenly braided bread for the Sabbath.

I thought about all the times I have tried to make bread—her idyllic description compared to my reality. There was no comparison.

This has been a year of admitting things like, "I can't make bread very well" and "I will probably never have a garden that results in actual vegetables." This year, I have left behind more than a few Wendell Berry/Laura Ingalls dreams.

So that, reading The Spirit of Food, I felt a sense of disconnection and slight sorrow. My realities are far from the visions of sweet homesteading and tomato vines overrun with fruit, of jams bubbling on the stove and land calling my name (as if I could do it justice with the turn of my unskilled shovel).

I came to the end of my assigned reading. Challah was baking, raisins plumping. And she, the successful baker, failed to keep her bees. Bees? It had been a new, hopeful endeavor that year, but the hives emptied, and the honey dreams disintegrated.

Wild bees came, in time, took up residence, redeemed the emptiness and her efforts. I think I was supposed to be comforted by this. But it was something else that caught my attention.

Little girl in the orchard, reaching.

Charlotte runs ahead, scampering through the bramble at the edge of the orchard to pick low-hanging fruit. When we catch up, Bea, her baby fingers grasping at everything, pulls at leaves, twigs, finally an apple.

This vision promised to turn my whole year around. Year past, and maybe year forward too.

I want to be the little girl who reaches for low-hanging fruit. I can make bread if I will let myself do it with a bread machine and a mix. I can grow rosemary and sage (but not thyme) in my garden, and gather tomatoes from the farmer's market. The whole orchard may never be mine, but an apple is waiting. Now I must simply reach. At the edge of the orchard. Reach.





Photos by L.L. Barkat.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

We're reading The Spirit of Food together at TheHighCalling.org. Join us?

Our Real Fake Life

Virtual life isn't real.

One panelist asserted this idea pretty strongly, during the "Can Digital and Physical Co-Exist?" session at IAM's Encounter conference.

Why of course it isn't real. It's virtual.

Maybe.

A few months back, Ann Voskamp wrote a moving post about her agoraphobia. I gifted her a poem in response.

Then Ann went on a trip and, in the real, hard moments of canceled flights and a left-behind passport, she remembered the poem that had been posted in this virtual place.

Today she posted about her experience, and my breath caught when I saw these words...

And I answer her hauntingly beautiful poem with my life.

It makes me wonder what we mean by "real." For me, this is oh so very real. Thank you Ann, for your life, and the real way you touch me and countless others.


Light Gallery photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Drift Me

Night comes and I realize I'm bound up. I can feel it ...as if cords are laced from one part of my insides to another, and little tension-elves are pulling them tight, tight, tighter. My breathing is shallow. I keep sighing, as if to catch elusive breath. The day has done me in, or maybe the week... okay, the month.

It has been long, too long— sitting inside, letting life wrap and tug. I remember these words, written during my year of daily outdoor solitude and I'm filled with the urgency to be freed...

There were days when I would go outside only to think, “There is not a single new thing I will find here.” In these moments, it felt utterly true, and I felt I was wasting my time in my excuse-for-a-woods. Then, in the next moment, the trees above me would shudder in the breeze, and something would blow past. Seeds, maybe, releasing themselves to the wind, raining over me.

Then I would start to relax, to breathe. It occured to me that I breathed differently when I was outside, and that with each breath I lost some care of the day. I became a lady’s corset, unstrung by the wind, unlaced by black-capped chickadees.

Why have I gotten away from this? The commitment over, I guess, life rushed back in, but my heart still needs rain, seeds, wind, sky. The Ann's are reminding me to come back to lazy moments, to let God drift me.


Sunset Over the River photo by Sara. Used with permission.

RELATED:
Ann K's book Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families
Ann K's post Catch a Falling Star
Ann V's Slow Down, A Primer
High Calling Blogs Power of the Slowing
elk's Four Windows
Mom2Six's Still
S. Etole's Take Time
LL's Stumble into Loveliness and Morning with the Moon
Kelly's A Broken Still
nAncY's into
Maureen's Reading GoodNightMoon
Bonnie's The Beauty of Whitespace
Esther's Ditch the Leash
Joelle's This
Ann K's From the Rush to a Hush
Jennifer's Hush...
Bonnie's The Call of Love Whispers
DSMama's The Best Part
Kirsten's Cemetery Walking
Monica's Slow to See the Spinning
Jessica's Sit Down!

HOW ABOUT YOU?
Do you have a story to share, about the need to slow down, or your experiences with "slowing"? Drop your link in the comment box and I'll link to you here (links back are appreciated, though not required; that way, others can see what we're up to and share too). Let's celebrate and drift together...

_______

Poetry prompt: Make a "word pool" of at least five slow words. Yeah, I guess molasses counts. But verbs are good too. Create a poem using a minimum of one of your slow words, but feel free to use the whole pool. Post your poem by Thursday, October 22, for links and possible feature at High Calling Blogs. Drop your post link here in the comment box so I don't miss it. Thanks!

This Blog is a Book

"Blogging is for angst-filled teens."

That's what I said just a few months before launching Seedlings in Stone.

I was talking to Simon & Schuster's Director of Marketing and Promotion. I think we were both eating curried lentils when I showed my terrible naivete, but she forgave me— not for the lentils, but for the misled comment about blogging. Then she firmly contradicted me, "You need to blog."

She was right. Blogging has shaped my professional life in ways I never anticipated. And I'm not alone. Off-hand I can think of several wonderful friends who've found unexpected opportunities through blogging.

For instance, I just read a chapter in Makoto Fujimura's book Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture; it's called "Planting Seedlings in Stone: Art in New York City." The first time I read that chapter, it was a humble blog post. I loved the ideas so much that (obviously) I used part of the title to name my blog. At the time Mako wrote that post, did he have any idea it would one day be in a book, along with many of his other posts?

I think too of Gordon Atkinson, who started out as an anonymous blogger called Real Live Preacher. His posts, gathered and bound, now grace my home in the form of a lyrical, amusing, straight-on book called... um... what else... Real Live Preacher. Gordon now shares his life with us through his awesome writing, over at HighCallingBlogs.

Then there's Billy Coffey, who started tentatively, wondering... what would this blogging thing really lead to? Today, Billy writes a parenting column for us at HighCallingBlogs and he found an agent (or maybe she found him).

Ann Kroeker, the Parenting Content Editor at HighCallingBlogs approached other bloggers and included their work in her new book Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families. Why, just today, as part of my talk "Jesus the Gucci Guy", I read Ann Voskamp's contribution to the book. You could have heard a pin drop.

If you're here today, you probably know what blogging can do. But maybe you've got a writer friend who hasn't quite figured it out yet and is still typing largely off-line. Grab a dish of lentils (curried or plain) and break the news, "You need to blog."



Refractions with Me in Long Island, photos by L.L. Barkat.

Grace Around Grace

Grace and the barn: it brought us the story of a particular table that sits on the porch of our sweet Canadian friend Ann.

But such stories are only beginnings. Our lives, and perhaps the tables in our lives, have stories behind stories behind stories. It was my profound artist friend Erin who remembered this, who said in the comment box, Ooooo, I bet the history behind that table is a gooooood story.

So I wrote to Ann, asking for the story behind the story. And this is what she said...

A story behind that table? At first, I thought no... no stories that I know. Discarded from a sister-in-law, we dragged it off to the barn, where it quietly sat for the past decade.

And then, yes, it came — a story scrap (for isn't everything storied?)

I wanted a gathering place for the porch... nothing grand or ornate. (Read: nothing glass, shiny, curvy). Just simple, a bit worn, quiet. (Do seating arrangements reflect our personalities?) Like a hawk, I scoped out thrift stores, garage sales. To no avail. Couldn't find a plain, wooden, worn table. (Does this somehow speak of the oddity of this personality? ~warm smile~)

And then I thought of the barn table: Yes. Exactly right. (Yes, I'm a farm girl— where else to find the perfect table?)

The only glitch was that kind Dutch Farmer whose wedding band I wear. He said he needed the barn table to remain in the barn. It was a fine repository for various miscellany. The perfect size. The perfect shape. The perfect age. I agreed.

For the porch.

Negotiations continued for a few weeks. As days warmed, and the porch called for leisurely sitting and talking and eating, I pressed. But neither could I find a similar replacement table for the barn.

And then one inviting summer day, there was the table, sitting out on the porch, waiting.

Confused, I asked 'But don't you need it still? And I haven't found one to swap you yet...'

He smiled kindly, the way he does. 'I'll make do. Table's yours.'

Grace.

You wrote it so well, L.L: Grace and the barn. That's where Grace entered into our messy world.

And redeems us.

Nearly every day this summer, into the fall here, we've eaten out on the porch at least one meal a day around that barn-redeemed table. Saying grace around grace.

It was the perfect place to read Stone Crossings, L.L.

But then again, isn't anywhere?

For all is grace.

(I look forward to more grace places Stone Crossings has wandered too! Thank you for this place, L.L.)

All's grace,
Ann

I thank Ann for this story behind the initial story. And when I asked permission to lift it out of the comment box at my original post and raise it to the surface, this is what I said, hoping she would agree...

If you say yes, I think I will match it with a picture of an old wooden table that sits on my side porch. How many of us have old wooden tables in our lives? Oh, and wouldn't it be fun (I think it would), to invite people to do their own posts of such tables. And their own sweet, and struggling, and hopeful and mournful, and joyful posts about such tables.

So there it is. Do you have an old wooden table in your life? A storied table, as Ann puts it? Or maybe an old wooden chair? I would love to see the pictures of such tables or chairs, hear the stories. And if you tell me that you've posted such, why of course I shall link to you.* It could be our own way of saying grace around grace.


*Your patience appreciated as to the speed of my linking... I'll be in Paris for some days coming up, mostly internet free. But I shall get to it. I promise.


Old Wooden Table Photo, by L.L. Barkat. Woven Nest, by Sara and Sonia.

NEW LINKS TO THIS POST:
Warrior Princess' Grace, Tables and an Artist's Easel
Hildegard's Resting on Grace 1
Hildegard's Resting on Grace 2

Of Grace and the Barn

Ann, my dear Ann of Holy Experience, who slowly made her way into my heart, has graciously agreed to let me post her picture of Stone Crossings, as part of my Links for Art offering.

I first saw the picture when she gave the world this eloquent review of Stone Crossings. Still, I knew nothing about the secrets behind it, the humble beginnings of the table and what Ann's mind and hands had purposed and wrought. So, thank you, Ann, not only for the picture but also for this beautiful story. Told in the kind of beautiful words you're always speaking...

It's an old wooden table, one that's been out in the barn for years, neglected. I dragged it into the sunlight this summer, painted its top face a happy, gentle scone color, sat it out upon the front porch, a place of honor. Bestowed her with a wreath of worn chairs, ancient and memoried. So the little ensemble greets visitors right at the front door, inviting them to sit a spell, share. And I smile when I think of Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places laying there. It seems appropriate, right. An abandonded, beat-up barn table redeemed, set in an esteemed place.

Grace found in a hidden place.

Isn't that just SO Ann? Grace that searches the darkness of a barn, works to bring love to light.


Stone Crossings at Wooden Table photo, by Ann Voskamp. Used with permission.