There is rich, dark earth under
these streets. I know.
I saw it myself when the machines
dug up the asphalt, replacing the veins
of this city.
So we went out into the backyard
all seven of us
into our small patch of green
searching for that rich earth.
A gutted building looked down
smiled at us through broken
teeth, gashed
eyes, and we smiled back
toasted him with raised rakes
then
tore up the new grass
the barely-spring mud.
Shovels clanged against unforeseen
problems
rocks
old bricks
a line of beams that used
to border a walkway
someone worked hard to build
now covered.
Lucy
working on the soil where tomatoes
will soon grow
called out
Dad
What’s this?
In her pale palm, shining
in the sunlight,
hollowed out and jagged,
a crack pipe
filled with mud, it’s bulb
round and smooth
the stem mostly missing.
I told her what it was
because this is the world
this is where we live
and sometimes the easiest
answer to a hard question is simply
the answer.
Then I threw it in the trash
and kept digging
because sometimes it’s okay
to go back to pretending these things
don’t exist
at least for an afternoon
or until she’s a teenager.
We turned over old soil
cutting it open
lining it with furrows.
Cade planted tiny seeds one
after the other one
after the other one
after the other.
Sam and Abra
on hands and muddy knees
crept along the rows and
covered everything
and we prayed for death
because
unless a seed dies.
We took a deep breath
looked at the brown yard
the fresh dirt
the tell-tale rows.
Leo crawled on the patio,
brown smudges on his face.
He smiled
eating
rich earth.
We exhaled
gathered our things
went inside
and prayed for rain
or whatever it takes
to get us out
of this present death.
When I first saw the ad for this video on Facebook, I thought, Meh. It’s for a soap company. I’m sure it’s silly.
Yet the image was of a woman standing in front of two doors, one labeled “Beautiful” and the other labeled “Average.” The main reason I clicked on the video was because I had to know which door she chose.
But as I watched, I realized this commercial for Dove was getting at something very important, something that didn’t have anything to do with soap. The central premise revolves around a question we are confronted with every single day, and the way we answer it will determine a lot about our lives.
What do you think about yourself?
In this video, women were presented with a situation where they had to very publicly say what they thought about themselves and walk through the door they believed best defined them: either “Beautiful” or “Average.”
96% chose average.
Every day we’re asked similar questions, in different ways. Every day we have to decide if we are beautiful or average, intelligent or average, creative or average, handsome or average, funny or average, a talented writer or average. Beloved or average. Every day.
How do you answer?
Take three minutes and watch this video to see how these women answered the question.
Check out the look on the faces of those who finally label themselves as beautiful – I don’t know about you, but I see relief, joy, and a childlike giddiness.
And notice how many could only walk through the “Beautiful” door with the help of a friend…
When I first released my book, The Day the Angels Fell, I cringed whenever I visited the Amazon or Goodreads page, as if peeking my head out of the window and waiting for gunfire. I was scared. Had someone written a review that excoriated my book, my writing ability, my humanity? Had someone absolutely despised my storytelling? Had I screwed up the plot, the characterization?
Was I a terrible human being?
But as the first three months passed, and more copies sold, the good reviews began to pile up. Mostly four- and five-star reviews with a few three-stars thrown in for good measure. It was nice. It was comforting. I started to see the review section of these pages as a friendly place.
On March 23rd, 2015, everything changed.
Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that dramatic.
But that was when The Day the Angels Fell got its first one-star rating on Goodreads. I stared at the rating with some surprise, and a little shock, the way villains always look in the movies when they’ve been stabbed in the gut and they realize it was the fatal blow.
But I never thought I would die in this movie, their face seems to say. I thought I was the protagonist.
For a moment, just a moment, all those little voices started to amplify. You suck. Your writing sucks. You should really have been an economist. Or a taxidermist. Or something with regular pay, because, you know, your writing is terrible.
After you’ve created your art, whatever it is – a service, an idea, an interaction, a performance, a meeting – it’s done. What the audience does with it is out of your control.
If you focus your angst and emotion on the people who don’t get it, you’ve destroyed part of your soul and haven’t done a thing to improve your art. Your art, if you made it properly, wasn’t for them in the first place. Worse, the next time you make art, those nonbelievers will be the ones at the front of your mind.
– Seth Godin
My friend Jason shared that quote with me the other day, and it helped me to verbalize what I experienced after that one-star rating. Because moments after seeing it, I realized.
Who cares?
I gave that book everything I had at the moment, every ounce of writing skill, every precious idea and thought I had to offer. That was the best that I could do. And you know what?
A lot of people loved it. I get messages and texts and emails from folks who loved the book! Their kids loved it. I’ve had people ask me in depth questions about the book, questions about details so minor I didn’t have answers for them. People obviously cared, and I take immense pleasure and relief in that. The next book, the sequel to The Day the Angels Fell, will be for those people, and while I’m revising it, they will be the ones at the forefront of my mind.
Not the one-star reviewer.
But that is what the one-star rating did for me. It ushered me one more small step along the road to not caring what other people think, to writing the story that needs to be written, and to enjoying my work. One-star ratings help me to build really important artistic callouses, the kind that make my work easier over time, the kind that allow me to put in the hard work without feeling the sting of rejection after every sub-par review. Worry, anxiety, and self-doubt are terrible co-creators.
What are you creating?
Who are you listening to?
(If you’d like to leave a rating or review of the book, you can do that at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads…or all three. Thank you!)
* * * * *
This coming Sunday evening Caleb Wilde and I will be at the Corner Coffee Shop to talk about the death-positive message behind The Day the Angels Fell, as well as how we talk about death with our own children. Kids are welcome! Check out the details HERE.
A picture of the courtyard of St. James from a few weeks ago, before Spring arrived.
“We are turning cemeteries into playgrounds.” Father David Peck
* * * * *
Well, here we are. Seven weeks later. I can hear late Sunday night traffic crawling by on James Street, on the other side of the drawn shades. The house is quiet, and I sit between two lamps that cast light and shadow around the room. Light and shadow. That’s all there ever is.
It’s been a long seven weeks. A long Lent. I came into it with a few things I planned on giving up, but it would seem that God had other things in mind. Go ahead, God said, give up your social media and your sweets, but I have bigger plans. It seems that’s the way of God, that just when you think you see the hill you’re supposed to climb, you get to the top and – hey, look at that – there’s a mountain range on the other side.
It’s that Yiddish proverb all over again: “Man plans, God laughs.”
After two very busy years of writing projects, business died off. For the last seven weeks I’ve been finishing up existing projects. Every potential job I had in the pipeline dried up, evaporated, disappeared. I’m not saying this to garner sympathy – it’s just part of the story. It’s been uncanny, how the lack of work has coincided with Lent. It seems there are many metaphorical deaths we can encounter. It seems that sometimes you can try to give up something for Lent, and then other times Lent can decide for you what you will give up.
I’ve been reminded that there aren’t many things harder than trusting in what we cannot see, yet that’s what I’ve been asked to do this Lenten season.
Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.
And I fought it. I did.
“Do we have to go down this road again? We’ve been here before. I’m not really in the mood for learning another lesson.”
But it seems the road will go where it will go, and you can sit down and pout along the side of it if you want. There’s a wide shoulder, and a lot of folks are just sitting there, passing the time, discouraged or angry or petulant. But the fact remains that you will have to walk the road at some point.
Might as well get up and walk it.
* * * * *
That voice said something besides Trust me. Strangely enough, it was also saying, Take this time to write the sequel. By sequel, I mean the sequel to my book The Day the Angels Fell. Just write it. That’s what I was sensing. So I did, all 80,000 words. And I’ll be looking for your help in narrowing down the title and a few other things in the coming weeks.
I was thinking of all these things when we went into church this morning – the dead spell in regards to work, the sequel I’ve been writing, the trust trust trust – and Father David said this phrase towards the end of the sermon, and let me tell you, it nearly knocked me over.
“We are turning cemeteries into playgrounds.”
If anyone ever asks me again what we mean by the Resurrection, that is what I will say.
Because I feel like that’s what God has done for me this Lenten season, took a dead time, a time full of anxiety and uncertainty, and told me to play. Write. Create. Turn what could be a monument to despair and hopelessness and, instead, have fun. So that’s what I did.
* * * * *
After church this morning, just as the sun was warming up and the sky was shifting into that late-morning spring blue, about thirty or forty children grabbed their Easter baskets and raced through the cemetery behind St. James, looking for Easter eggs. I suppose it was all rather improper, the way they skipped along over the grave sites, the way they climbed over the massive tombs. At one point my daughter sat on a large, above ground grave, looking through her eggs. Cracking those little plastic things open to see what treasures were inside.
But there was something immeasurably beautiful about it, watching those children laugh and dance and play among tangible reminders of death and mortality.
It is, in essence, why I am a Christian. I believe, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that every metaphorical cemetery can be turned into a playground. I believe that God can somehow take these dead places and before you know it, before you can turn around, there’s laughter, and there’s playfulness, and there’s friendship.
Cemeteries into playgrounds.
What’s your cemetery right now? What’s your playground?
* * * * *
I’ve got a few events coming up where I’d love to see your face:
– Friday night, April 10th, from 6pm to 8pm, I’ll be at Aaron’s Books in Lititz for their local author night. Please come by and say hello.
– Saturday, April 11th, I’ll be speaking about memoir-writing at the Lancaster Christian Writers’ one-day conference. More details HERE.
– Sunday, April 12th, at 6:30pm at The Corner Coffee Shop I’ll be hosting a very special event with my friend, Caleb Wilde. We’re going to be talking about the death-positive message behind The Day the Angels Fell. Caleb is the writer behind the extremely popular blog, Confessions of a Funeral Director. He’s wise, and funny, and kind, and way more interesting than me, so come on out. Children are welcome.
– Monday, April 13th, at 5:00pm, I’ll be in Radiant, Virginia, reading from The Day the Angels Fell at God’s Whisper Farm, hosted by Andi Cumbo. If you’re in the northern/central VA area, you won’t want to miss it. Details HERE.
I was home alone with our 6-month-old, Leo. It was a dark January night, cold and wet, the kind of night that calls for a hot drink and a good book. But Leo wasn’t having any of that, so I paced the house with him, singing made-up songs and bouncing to intermittent rhythms.
A knock at the door. I hadn’t been expecting anyone, so I peeked through the blinds. It was my dad, bundled up in a coat and scarf. Steam clouded from his mouth as he waved to Leo thorugh the glass.
“What are you doing?” I asked him, but at first he didn’t answer, just snatched Leo from me and headed into the living room. He put Leo on the floor and played with him for a little, then answered my question.
“I was walking back from the hospital,” he said with a sad kind of disgust in his voice. “The cancer’s spread. She’s on morphine now, and hospice will be with her in the next day or two.”
A friend we used to go to church with was coming to the end of her life. She was in her early 40s, a wife, and a mother of two. My dad and I didn’t say anything else, just stared at little Leo as he laughed and made his first halting efforts at crawling.
Abruptly my dad stood up, gave me a hug, and walked back out onto the cold streets.
To read the rest of this, my last post for Deeper Story, click HERE.
You know those weeks? Those weeks when work still isn’t showing up and that bookshelf just doesn’t seem to paint itself and you find out the transmission is out on your truck so there goes $3000 you don’t have? You know those kind of weeks?
Yeah, we had one of those last week.
I’ve felt it for the last month, that descending into a certain period of time you’ve experienced before and don’t necessarily look forward to experiencing again. Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s that sense of a gradual lowering, the way they used to lower miners down, down, down into the darkness with nothing but a headlamp and a hammer. I sensed it coming a few months ago, but I couldn’t describe it and I tried to avoid thinking about it. No one likes the quiet and the shadows that fill these valleys of life.
But there’s something I say every time I give a book talk for The Day the Angels Fell, and I guess it’s time to see if I believe it or not: There is no resurrection or redemption without some kind of death. Something is passing away in me now, something that needs to die all the way. I can’t put my finger on it yet, so I take a deep breath, and down we go.
* * * * *
I couldn’t help but apologize to the couple at the end of our two-hour conversation.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “I know this is tough ground for you to cover, and I’m sorry I have to drag you through it every week.”
Their daughter committed suicide 20 years ago, left behind 22 journals, and they hired me to write their story. I’ve written about it before. But last week, it was a tougher session than usual. Brutal memories and questions and uncertainty.
“I’m really sorry,” I said again.
“No, it’s okay,” the mother said.
“You know,” the father said. “There’s an element of this process that brings her back to life for us.”
Silence on the other line. I could tell they were descending through their own valley, their own mineshaft.
“Are you okay?” she asked him. I could barely hear their voices through the phone line. It felt like I was eavesdropping on a private moment.
“Yeah,” he said quietly, clearing his throat. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
* * * * *
One of the central premises of The Day the Angels Fell is that Death is a gift. And it’s so hard for me to accept. Rationally, I get it. But in my heart? It’s hard.
So when I gave a book talk and read the first chapter at Pequea Valley Library last week, and when a large portion of those in the audience were part of a family who had just lost someone last summer, I found myself apologizing for that premise.
“I know it’s hard to understand,” I said. “And I don’t want to be insensitive about this idea that death is a gift.”
They listened quietly, those family members of my friend who had died: his brother and sister-in-law, his mother and father, his nephew and niece, his friends. Afterwards they came up and hugged me and we talked about books and they were so encouraging, everyone clamoring for a sequel and asking about details in the book, which is of course the best way to make your writer friends very happy.
But at the very end, when chairs are being put away and tables are being repositioned, the mom came up to me and gave me an extra hug.
“You don’t have to apologize about that,” she said with emotion in her voice. “You don’t have to apologize about death being a gift.”
* * * * *
All of that to say, we are surrounded by courageous people. Have you taken the time to notice them? I find that these days, when the darkness is most palpable, I cling to the courage of others, those that go before me, fighting battles, climbing mountains. I watch in awe the paths they are able to navigate, and it gives me fresh determination to take the next step of my own.
The darkness never seems quite so dark when you’re being lowered down into it with someone else, someone who can be courageous when you start to feel the fear rising.
Thank you for being courageous for me.
* * * * *
If you want to read the first chapter of The Day the Angels Fell, you can check that out over at Caleb Wilde’s blog (you’ll also find a link there to purchase the ebook for $3.99).
