Bill and I experienced our first wildfire in November. We never dreamed it would be on our property.

Bill reserved a hotel room for April 7 in Fort Smith, Arkansas almost a year ago. Eight hours away. Because it was on the edge of The Path of Totality.

I wondered if that was a famous rock band.

No. It’s the last full solar eclipse in the United States until 2045.

I learned a new word. 

Perseverate. 
 
To repeat something insistently or redundantly. To get stuck, to ruminate, to loop back over and over. And over.
 
As in, “My 91-year-old mother perseverated.” 
 
My mom passed away a year ago. But I’m still haunted by echoes of her three looping ruminations.

Resilience is the willow tree of attributes. It flexes, stretches, and bends. The winds blow, failure hits, rejection hurts , loss and grief and disappointment happen. I can break, give up, or sway in the breeze and sink my roots deeper into God.

How will we emerge? That’s the question I’m asking myself and others in this “unprecedented” year. If I tune into the daily news or read the statistics, that question ripples through me with uncertainty and fear. If I lay the uncontrollable “we” down, and focus on me, I can answer. I want to emerge with some “more” in a year filled with “less.”

I met Leslie at the magical Laity Lodge at a conference in the summer of 2019. Little did either of us know what the next year would hold. The way she sees, the way she writes about what she sees, and the way she embraces her life and family reminds me of Annie Dillard’s quote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”  

The thing most about-to-marry girls want to hear is how to prevent the mistakes their parents and everyone else in the world have made.

We can be assured that God’s love indeed means that all will be well, but here and now this truth must be held in faith rather than full understanding. Julian of Norwich

As I walked and waited, prayed and pondered, I heard a quiet reassurance, “All shall be well.” And that one simple, but not ‘pat’ sentence, allowed me to breathe.

Beauty and brokenness are a package deal. If I live only in beauty, I live in denial. If I live only in brokenness, I live in despair. Beauty in the midst of brokenness is the cup of cold water, the hint of hope that there is more to come.

Because if we opened ourselves to joy, well, there could be . . . dancing. And then how would we ever get back to the real grind of work?

2. Life is bitter/sweet.