Even after a year of writing The Bright & Morning Star, I’m still delighted and humbled that you keep saying “yes” to what I’m trying to share.
Thank you.
Before I go further, I wanted to pass along a tender thing I read this week and invite you to join me in sending a little help if you can to those in need.
As this article indicates, here in Utah many families with children are anxious about the upcoming winter and finding a warm place to stay.
https://www.ksl.com/article/50765127/homeless-families-face-limited-options-going-into-winter
The Road Home is an organization that provides housing and other vital support to those experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, and other basic needs. Their donation page makes it easy to give a gift that will go directly to helping our brothers and sisters. If you can help, join me in sharing a little hope.
https://theroadhome.org/donate/
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Fall is my favorite.
For as long as I can remember, there’s been something about moving from summer to autumn that stirs me. The soft light, the changing leaves, the approach of winter—all these and more put me in a reflective state.
A word that describes some of what I’m feeling is “evanescence.” No, not the band. :-)
Here’s one definition:
“Evanescence comes from the Latin evanescere meaning "disappear, vanish." Something that possesses qualities of evanescence, has a quality of disappearing or vanishing. The evanescence of a shooting star makes it hard to catch — it's there one moment and gone the next.”
I think this feeling is a spiritual one, a “heavenly homesickness” we feel sometimes when we see or hear something beautiful or when we are in a moment of transition of some kind.
In Susan Cain’s lovely book Bittersweet, she writes of this duality, this entwining of light and darkness that hums the muted hymn of this season.
“The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.”
For a long while now, I’ve been collecting little bits and pieces of evocative things that have this feeling of evanescence about them. I hope you’ll indulge me as I share a few with you.
For me, they draw out feelings of love and longing for a Place and a Face I can’t remember.
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I was first introduced to Robert Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay from this scene in The Outsiders. Have you seen it?
“Stay gold, Pony Boy.”
By Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
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Fall is the season of endings. Even the name—“Fall”—hints at the prevailing mood. It is also a season of loss, increasing darkness, and the passing from summer’s balm into cold wind and stark, bare branches.
Several years ago, singer/songwriter Fiona Apple shared the following with her fans when announcing the reason she was postponing an upcoming tour to South America because her dog Janet was soon going to die. It is poignant and beautiful and touched by something beyond words.
It’s 6pm on Friday, and I’m writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I’m writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.
Here’s the thing.
I have a dog, Janet, and she’s been ill for about 2 years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then — an adult, officially — and she was my kid.
She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face.
She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.
She’s almost 14 and I’ve never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She’s a pacifist.
Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We’ve lived in numerous houses, and joined a few makeshift families, but it’s always really been just the two of us.
She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.
She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me, all the time we recorded the last album.
The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she’s used to me being gone for a few weeks, every 6 or 7 years.
She has Addison’s Disease, which makes it more dangerous for her to travel, since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.
Despite all this, she’s effortlessly joyful & playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She is my best friend, and my mother, and my daughter, my benefactor, and she’s the one who taught me what love is.
I can’t come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.
She doesn’t even want to go for walks anymore.
I know that she’s not sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present than people.
But I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part of everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.
I just can’t leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I’m afraid she’ll die and I won’t have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.
Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes just to decide what socks to wear to bed.
But this decision is instant.
These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.
I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable & comforted & safe & important.
Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life that keeps us feeling terrified & alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time. I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in the last moments.
I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.
Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I’ve ever known.
When she dies.
So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and I am revelling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I’m asking for your blessing.
I’ll be seeing you.
Love,
Fiona
So lovely, yes?
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This picture of one of our granddaughters during a recent visit to North Carolina, taken by the brilliant and lovely Ginger Livingston (yes, we’re very much related.) All the feels, ya’ll.
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I have a favorite book. Probably no one except those who know me very well would ever guess what it is.
It’s a book called Rascal by Sterling North. It’s based on his experience growing up in Wisconsin at the beginning of the 20th century. Rascal is the name of Sterling’s pet raccoon. I don’t remember when I first read it, but I’ve easily read it a dozen times or more. If I can I try and read it once a year—always in autumn.
The writing is so good—both plain and poetic. Although published as a children’s book, it is a story that anyone would love. Sterling lives with his father (his mother has passed away before the story begins) and is largely left to fend for himself–an arrangement that he delights in. I won’t share more in case you decide to read it (which you absolutely should do…I promise you’ll thank me for the share.)
Why certain books click for us (or don’t) is sometimes mysterious. At the core of Rascal there is a story of a real place with real people that seems to be gone forever. Maybe that is why it moves me so.
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Indulge me for one more?
It’s a brief piano solo (under two minutes) from The Lumineers titled Patience, best listened to while driving along a rain-dark, leaf-lined country road. Just let it soak in and take you somewhere in the fading gold light of a November evening.
Thank you for letting me share. Beautiful things, even sad ones, help me feel closer to the Savior. I hope some of these little trinkets have helped you feel closer to Him too.
Congratulations on a year! You're doing a great service and bringing more peace to the world. I also loved The Outsiders. Sad story, but worth watching. I could never watch it without gushing tears at the end of it.