August in Pictures

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be found." - Carl Sagan

One Thousand Gifts (Wandering Thoughts on a Book)

"Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world." - Sarah Ban Breathnach

I've seen the gratitude lists people have made - mostly blogposts, not so frequently in day-to-day life. I've skimmed through them and thought they were nice, but I never considered creating one of my own. After all, I would end up halfheartedly writing the same things as everyone else: "A roof over my head. Family. Friends. Etc." The big things in life that I know I should be thankful for but always seem to take for granted. I don't freeze midday and just thrill through with thanksgiving over these things as I wonder, "Why me? Why do I get to experience this?"
And I think that's the first problem with my mindset towards gratitude lists. I look for the big things to write down that I should write down. In my prayers, I just gather everything up, every little crumb, in a nice packaged 'Thank you for everything', and that's the end.
But it's the little things that catch my eye throughout the day. It's the little things that cause me to freeze and thrill with unspoken thanksgiving. I am delighted by bugs and flowers and my garden and the sky and nature, but I still clump them all together into one big package when it's even the smaller things that make my heart sing. I don't necessarily always smile when I think about my garden. Sometimes I think about the gopher eating all my onions. Or the back breaking work of digging out potatoes or some other hard job.
But if I concentrate on the small things, then the small things reach out to me. It's not just my garden, it's the first pumpkin growing on its vine and the first watermelon. The honeybee who gets shot by a water droplet, and as I lift it off the wet ground, it shakes its wings off, and I feel the sprinkles hit my cheek. Or the silly stuff: my fuzzy blanket that never seems to be cold. The cup of hot chocolate I drank in the morning that somehow turned my grumps away. People who make me food.
It's these little things that make up the big things, and if I can't be thankful for them, how can I be thankful for anything and everything?
I never considered how keeping a list might change me, and I never considered it could be an act of worship and an essential part of a living faith. It's not the list. It's having a list to remind you to look around, to take note of things, to be present right where God is.
In One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp writes, "It's not the gifts that fulfill, but the holiness of the space. The God in it...This is supreme gift, time, God Himself framed in a moment...When I'm present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. In His embrace, time loses all sense of speed and stress and space and stands so still and holy. Here is the only place I can love Him"

And Ann goes on to write achingly real and poetical about her life and her struggles. Her fight for joy and thanksgiving and a full life. I reread sentence again and again and try to carve these words into my heart so I won't forget them, but the words are so many and so penetrating, and I am so forgetful.  I wish I could share all my highlighted lines from this book with you, but there are too many, and it's too late, and my words come out more and more rough and broken.

Read this book.

What do you think of gratitude lists? Have you kept one? Have you read One Thousand Gifts? What did you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

"The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving creates abundance; and the miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks - take the just one loaf, say it is enough, and give thanks - and He miraculously makes it more than enough."  

The Top 3 Influencers of My Writing

1.  Like many writers, I'm sure, my love of stories began with C.S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia. But I don't know if I fully realized the extent of power stories held until I watched The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in the theaters when I was 10. That movie came out at the perfect time in my life. I don't know if it would have enchanted me the same at any other age, but the enchantment of that first time watching it has lasted throughout the years, and still as I watch it, I might as well be 10 years-old.
How could a story hold so much power? It awed me, and I guess that's the same thing I want to do in my writing. To create awe and hope and courage and a yearning because those are the things I've felt from stories.  I guess it's revenge, in a way. I have this yearning that has been awakened by stories, and others must be captured and tortured by it, too.

2.  From the age of 4 until 15 (okay, if we're being honest, we haven't stopped), my brother and I would spend our days creating stories and enacting them. It was through this that I realized I could be a storyteller. It wasn't some magic thing only certain people could do. Storytelling was everywhere and could be done by anyone and in any format. With my brother, I learned more about stories than I could have by reading any book. I learned about creating story worlds, different characters, compelling plots (if I wasn't on top of my game, my brother would get bored quickly, and then all the characters would be suddenly dead), conflicts in stories (our arguments would spill in and out of our stories). Even now, seeds that were planted then come up. Beloved characters have morphed into some totally different role in stories. C. S. Lewis might have influenced my writing a lot. He might have showed me the power of stories, but acting out stories from sun up to sun down with my brother? Those moments showed me how entertaining stories were. How enjoyable it was to create them. And all those memories come with my brother and best friend; so he's up there by C.S. Lewis as an influencer of my writing.

3. It was 2010, no, early 2009. I had a blog called 'Where the Sun Shines' back then with a handful of followers. One of them was a girl named Liz. She was a couple years older than me and an Indie writer (I think she's published two books by now). Out of all the blogs I followed at the time, hers was my favorite. She shared clips of her writing and photos and life in general. But I guess it was the way she answered and even had conversations in her blog's comment section (which is still my highlight of blogging. I never did like how it was more of a one-sided social media outlet) that made her my favorite blogger.
I did write enough then to consider writing as one of the things I enjoyed doing, but I didn't really pursue it whole-heartedly. Through posts on her blog and conversations, she inspired me to actually finish one of my stories. Not only that, she offered to read some of what I'd written, even though I had nothing to give her in return. She read page after page of my different stories and sent back long e-mails.
Let's face it. My writing stunk. Sure, it wasn't as terrible as my early stuff, but it certainly didn't shine. She could have ripped it apart easily. She could have gotten stuck on the grammar or my spelling or how much I told instead of showed, but she didn't. She overlooked my smudges and saw my heart and my potential as a story teller. Sometimes I wonder why she even bothered as I look back at all I've learned and realize everything I didn't know then.
Some writers have sad stories about how different people who've read their writing first ripped it apart. Those writers are so courageous to keep going in spite of everything. I don't know if I'd ever have gotten this far if not for the seeds of hope she planted in my heart.
Over the years her blog disappeared. She just disappeared. I found her on Facebook once, but somewhere along the way, our paths went in totally different directions, but still I imagine hers will be one of the names in the acknowledgements if I should ever publish a book. Those e-mails she sent are still in the dark, dusty basement of my inbox. I sometimes pull them back out and reread them, and I'm once more encouraged. They are more a reflection of her character than my writing, and they remind me of the power of words and being in a place of influence. And they remind me that sometimes compassion trumps truth. Sometimes you need to be reminded how much you're getting right rather than everything you've still got wrong.



Who has influenced your writing the most?

A Half-Bloomed Flower

You paused,
And I paused, too,
To take some pictures
Of the mountains
Just coming into view.
You didn't say a word,
And I didn't think I needed to.
You were quite aware 
That my gaze was still on you
-Your flushing cheeks gave you away,
And your flying motions,
And your eyes hesitating to meet mine;
They told me more
Than you would ever dare to,
And so I let you be,
Hoping eventually you'd find your words.
I didn't want to steal a half-bloomed flower,
A half-bloomed kiss,
A masterpiece in progress,
A half-given gift.
So I waited,
And I watched you take the world in
Through a purer set of eyes,
And I caught a glimpse,
Of a beautiful world that's yours.
I knew why I couldn't leave
Or lose patience in the waiting -
It was you, and only you,
Who'd make my heart be satisfied,
But you are a wanderer,
A butterfly up on a breeze,
And it may take forever
To be enraptured by something as normal as me.
So let's take the world by storm,
Climb another mountain,
And see the better views,
Or hike to some place special.
With you, I don't mind the unexpected
So long as your eyes 
Begin to linger more on mine
And less on grander sights,
And you finally find your words. 

&

Written from a thirsty and tired land eagerly awaiting Fall and its rain. Burning throat and eyes. Aching head. Bleeding sun and moon. Blurry landscape clouded by some dying place not my own. Falling ash. I think my head is brittle.