words of a yeoman, a tenant farmer from tennessee

(speaking with Robert Coles)

...I talk to my land, you know. I ask it to be good; each year at the start I do. And each year at the end I say, thank you and amen...

...But I've always believed that when we leave our house and start in out there on the land, we're meeting God and doing all we can to show Him we can hear Him and we can believe in Him; and the proof is that He's there, helping us with the gift of His land, you see, and His sun you see, and His good, good rain, His precious rain that He sends us just when we need it and sometimes in between and to spare. It's up to us to go out and do our best by Him...

...There are times when I wish the good Lord would say to Himself that He should treat us all like we're in His Garden, and He should help the good people along, and take up the bad people, the weeds, and put them someplace else -- maybe up on one of the stars, way away. Then the weeds could have another chance there, to start over and not turn into weeds, you might say. I don't want people to be killed, as if they could only be weeds and nothing else!"

on being a metaphor to a child

Integrative Project Presentations 2011 - Abigail Vizcarra Perez from Mars Hill Graduate School on Vimeo.

from Annie Dillard

"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly will be lost to you."

from object lessons, by Eavan Boland

quoted in The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris

"Exile, like memory, may be a place of hope and delusion. But there are rules of light there and principles of darkness...The expatriate is in search of a country, the exile in search of a self."

To Beat the Child Was Bad Enough, Maya Angelou

A young body, light

As winter sunshine, a new

Seed's bursting promise,

Hung from a string of silence

Above its future.

(The chance of choice was never known.)

Hunger, new hands, strange voices,

its cry came natural, tearing.

Water boiled in innocence, gaily

In a cheap pot.

The child exchanged its

curiosity for terror. The skin

Withdrew, the flesh submitted.

Now, cries make shards

of broken air, beyond an unremembered

Hunger and the peace of strange hands.

A young body floats.

Silently.

some soul reading

from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, one long prose letter from a devout father to his son, near the end of his life, haven't wanted the book to end

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone . . .

No doubt that is true. Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

great expectations

Much of the disappointment I experience in my life has to do with my very vivid imagination...how easily I get carried away in the beauty of a story as I would write it, and how attached I get to what I have defined for each character or part. I have quite a knack for getting the details all wrong, thinking they are pointing in one direction (the direction of my hopes) while they may have little to do with what is really going on. It prevents me from sight, from really loving people for who they are, where they are, and what God is doing in their life. It prevents me from recognizing my own worth, as I can barely live up to the unrealistic roles I have assigned for myself. At times it leads me to blame organizations or institutions, entire groups of people for not living up to what I expected them to be. (Gordon-Conwell and Campus Crusade for Christ are two cases in point, both which served important purposes in their time. Ah heck why not also mention the entire Mormon church). In the end, when my eyes are finally opened, I look around and realize I have flown far far away, often from people who have loved me all along, who could never have lived up to or imagined what I needed them to be. Sometimes I think my biggest struggle with God is all just one big misunderstanding, and when all the colors as I have imagined inevitably start to smear, I come to find that He was there all along.

And the truth will set you free.