A Contemplative Life

February 2, 2015February 2, 2015

If I Could Do Anything in the World Right Now, I Would…

Have you ever driven out of the city on an overcast January afternoon? Have you ever left the traffic and the brake lights and the three-day-old gray snow in your rear view mirror? Have you ever gotten out to the fields you grew up hiking through, the rolling hills and farms and long lanes, and marveled at how white everything was, how unmarked?

I know those roads better than any other roads in the entire world. I know where they go and where they come out. I know the woods and the farms that line them, the places to fish, the turns that will spin your car around if you’re not careful.

We drove out that way last week to see some friends, and the sun was setting somewhere behind the dim slate clouds and the low light shone off of fields of untouched snow. Corn stubble poked through, but that was all, just endless miles of white, and beyond the fields the hills, and beyond the hills, eternity.

My daughter Lucy said something that perfectly echoed how I felt at that moment.

“If I could do anything in the world right now, I’d run into the middle of that field.”

There was such longing in her voice. We had just pulled into our friends’ driveway.

“Go for it, Lu,” I told her as we parked the truck. “Do it.”

But as so often happens, the glory of desire met the unflinching light of practicality.

“I don’t know,” she hedged. “I mean, I don’t have the right boots on. These would soak through. And it’s so cold.”

“C’mon, Lucy,” Maile said. “If you want to do it, do it. We’ll get you home – you don’t have to wear your wet boots.”

“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly. We sat in the truck for a few more minutes but it became clear she wasn’t going to do it, no longer wanted to do it, so we walked into our friends’ house, and that was the end of that.

* * * * *

How often do we want to run out into the field? How often do we see something beautiful, or something we want, or a way of life we want to live, and the sacred nature of that desire takes our breath away?

It happened to us five years ago when the business I owned wasn’t doing so well and we decided to run into this beautiful way of living. For us it was entirely new, entirely unthought of before. I would make a living writing books for people. Maile would home school the kids. We would go where the wind took us. We would live simply and give away any extra we had.

Unlike Lucy and her field, we actually did it. We ran out into the middle of that glorious life, and it was incredible. It has been incredible.

But, right about now? It feels like our boots have gotten wet through. Our feet are freezing. We’re looking back at the truck, a half-mile away, and sometimes I wonder what were we thinking? How long did we think this could last?

It’s been a tough few weeks. A project we thought was in the bag slipped away. Out-of-the-ordinary expenses add to the weight of these moments. For the last two years we’ve had work lined up fairly far ahead, but suddenly we’re staring down the barrel of what looks like some lean months ahead.

We’ve reached that point where we ran into the field, into that glorious promise, and it was so worth it. But cold reality sets in, and we’re wondering what to do next.

* * * * *

This morning at church, Father David recounted something one of the kids said in children’s church.

“God must really be dedicated to the process.”

So true. Our God is not one of destinations, or God would pick us up and drop us down at the end of the race, the end of the hike, at the top of the mountain. But no, God is dedicated to process. So we hold our heads up, we cling to hope, and we embrace what this current process will bring to life in us.

We turn away from that truck parked back in the safe place, now so far behind us. We turn towards the next wide open, snowy field. And we run into it.

* * * * *

One year ago, Tim Kreider and I released a book that tells the story of a triple-homicide that took place right here in Lancaster County. It also tells the story of Tim’s journey after he discovered that his son had committed the murders. The book has been out for a year now, and today you can get it for your Kindle or Nook for $2.99.

Also, for reasons unknown to man, Amazon has the paperback version of my novel, The Day the Angels Fell, on sale for $9.91. You can get that HERE.

Finally, join me this Thursday night at 7pm at the Pequea Valley Library for a reading of The Day the Angels Fell.

January 26, 2015January 26, 2015

What I Learned From the Note My Daughter Left On Her Own Door

When you’re used to children always being up in your business, always talking or tugging on your clothes or leaving crumbs behind them as they live their lives, you get used to a certain level of constant noise. It becomes the soundtrack to your life. So when silence sets in, I go through a predictable sequence of thoughts:

Wow, it’s quiet. This is really nice.

Why is it so quiet? Where is everyone?

Who cares where they are or what they are doing. I’m going to sit here and enjoy it.

But remember the last time you sat there and enjoyed it? It didn’t end well.

Round and round it goes.

This happened on Sunday afternoon. Eventually I came around to that point where I thought I should probably go check and see why everyone was so quiet. I walked all the way up to the third floor of the house, and I could hear Sam and Abra inside their room. Loud music reverberated through the door, and their little voices were singing away. Nothing to fear.

That’s when I saw the sign on Abra’s door (this is the translated version):

Closed
Only my friends can come in this room
If you do want to come inthen you will have to listen to me

* * * * *

I have a good friend named Seth. We’ve never met in person. It’s a strange world we live in now, that I can become good friends with someone in Arkansas whose face I’ve never seen in real life.

Anyway, I was expressing some of my self-doubt to Seth (in the form of a Voxer message), and I was explaining to him how these voices just kept coming back to torment me, even when the book was selling well, even when the reviews have been great, even when so many kids are enjoying it. He replied by giving me some thoughts about “the cave of the soul”:

The cave of the soul is the sacred space where you go to be alone with God and to listen and to hear and to experience his voice and his calling. The voices we find in the cave of the soul that are distractions, those voices are intruders. But so often we keep them captive. They crush us with doubt and anxiety and fear and pain. But instead of releasing them, we hold them captive.

I think that what God sometimes asks us to do is to allow the intruders the freedom to be let go. To say “I am enough, the spirit work in my life is enough” – no matter how small it might seem – “and the cave is my sacred space.” So, intruders, you are given permission to leave.

All of this to say, I think I need to take a page from my daughter’s book about who she lets into her room.

If you want to come in, Intruders, then you will have to listen to me.

What do your intruders say to you? What intruders do you have that you need to give permission to leave?

* * * * *

This Saturday night I’ll be doing a reading of The Day the Angels Fell at a friend and fellow writer’s house. Kelly Chripczuk is hosting the event in Boiling Springs, PA. For more details, check out the Facebook event page HERE or email me for details. Children are welcome to attend, but we do ask that you RSVP.

* * * * *

I’m giving away five signed, paperback copies of The Day the Angels Fell over at Goodreads this week. You can enter the giveaway HERE.

* * * * *

This is one of my favorite notes I recently received from a parent who is reading through The Day the Angels Fell with their children:

“Here is a picture of my daughter playing Tree of Life with her Playmobil, complete with water, stone, and (artificial) sunlight. Just read chapter 24 to the kids and they are loving it!”

If you’ve read the book, please consider heading over to Goodreads and/or Amazon and leaving a review (every review helps give the book more exposure and introduces it to potential readers).

January 19, 2015January 18, 2015

Voices Calling My Name in the Middle of the Night

“Even if I knew that nothing would emerge from this book [East of Eden], I would still write it.”

John Steinbeck

I was feeling particular moved after the processional hymn on Sunday morning. Leo was in the nursery, the other four had gone off to children’s chapel with Maile (she was teaching the older kids), and I was alone in the pew, invisible on the other side of a mountainous pile of winter coats. It was a gray, rainy morning, we had been running late to church, and a busy day awaited us: I think that initial moment of stillness and beauty just about knocked me over.

Visit then this soul of mine
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief

When Father David spoke prior to the prayer of confession and forgiveness, he prayed against the racism in all of us, the structures that promote poverty, and the ways that each of us contribute to the inequalities and injustices in the world. He prayed for our congregation, our city, and our nation.

It’s a sobering thought, when you consider just how far we have to go, when you think about how many idiots there are in the world who seem determined to bring about discord. And then I realize, as I pray the confession, that in small ways and large, I am occasionally one of those idiots.

Most merciful God…have mercy on us…

* * * * *

Many times (most times? all the time?) this discord starts inside of us.

Are you aware of how many voices are trying to tell you who to be and what to do? I think back through my life and the various voices trying to speak into me: the voices that told me to get into business; the voices that told me I should write; the voices that told me I wasn’t a good enough writer; the voices that told me homeschooling our children was a mistake; the voices that told me I was too skinny as a kid; the voices that told me reading was for girls; the voices that told me athletes couldn’t be interested in literature.

Then there are the voices today, the ones that tell me what I write isn’t good enough. The ones that tell me I’m failing my children in various ways. The ones that tell me I need to do more, be more, buy more. Have more. Make more money. More more more.

We are surrounded by voices telling us who to be and what to do and how to live.

So many voices.

* * * * *

There’s a story of a boy named Samuel who had been dedicated to the service of the Lord. He slept somewhere in the temple, which is both a strange and comforting thought – sleeping in the church. I picture my 11-year-old son, grabbing a blanket, sleeping on the padded pews somewhere in the middle, somewhere he wouldn’t be afraid. In the middle of the night this boy Samuel heard someone calling his name. A voice. Just another voice.

“Samuel! Samuel!”

He thought the old priest Eli was calling for him, so he ran to see what he wanted.

“Here I am!” Samuel said. “For you called me.”

But Eli told him he hadn’t said anything. He should go lay down. So Samuel went back to sleep…only to hear his name called again. So he ran to Eli. Again, Eli told him to go back to sleep – he hadn’t called him. A third time it happened.

“Samuel! Samuel!”

So what does he do? He runs to Eli for a third time.

“Here I am, for you have called me.”

Powerful words, those: For you have called me.

* * * * *

At church on Sunday morning, Father David said something I had never thought of before – how often we think our calling is coming from a place it is not! How often we go running to the wrong source to find out who to be and what to do and how to live.

Here I am, we say to our spouses. Tell me who to be.

Here I am, we say to our friends. What do you think I should do?

Here I am, we say to our culture. Show me how to live.

We are lonely and frightened children, sleeping in unfamiliar places, and we run through the dark, looking for the person who called us. But our calling can never be defined by another person. It can certainly be encouraged. There are good voices around us, no doubt, voices of affirmation and kindness, voices that guide us.But a voice that can clearly articulate each of our individual callings?

* * * * *

Eli caught on to what was happening.

“Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”

* * * * *

Maybe this all sounds like blah blah blah but here’s why it’s so important to not let the voices around you dictate your calling. And it all comes back to the Steinbeck quote at the top of this post.

“Even if I knew that nothing would emerge from this book [East of Eden], I would still write it.”

That is the true test of your calling – you will do it even when you cannot see what could possibly come of it. You will write the book even when you have no publisher and no audience. You will start the nonprofit without funding. Maybe it means starting a business you’re unsure of, or doing something different with your children’s schooling, or embracing your singleness in a new way. Maybe it means spending more time playing music or recording a podcast or starting a blog. Maybe it means going to a new church or committing to your existing church in the midst of trials. Your true calling will probably look ludicrous to most people, but if it’s your calling, so you’ll do it anyway.

I feel that way about the fiction that I write – even if nothing emerges from it, I will do it. Why? I have no idea, other than it feels like something I was created to do. And when we shout I will do it anyway! No matter what comes of it! all the other voices grow suddenly silent.

* * * * *

Is there anything you feel that strongly about, that you would continue to do even if the results are not what others would consider worth it?

If you don’t know your calling, are you listening to the right voice? Or are you running to the wrong people, the wrong sources, and asking them to speak into your life?

Be careful to whom you say the words, “Here I am, for you have called me.”

[Thanks to Ally Vesterfelt for reminding me of that Steinbeck quote, and thanks to Jamin Goggin and Ed Cyzewski for contributing to these thoughts on calling, and thanks to Father David for a Sunday sermon that got me thinking.]

January 12, 2015January 11, 2015

What Happened When There Were No Gifts Under Our Tree This Christmas

All of us heading to NYC, including Maile, my ghost of Christmas present.

There are times in every adventure, every good idea, every new thing, when the old safe places suddenly seem vastly preferable. When you wonder what hallucinogenic drug you must have been smoking when you decided to do that thing you decided to do. It’s that moment when the Israelites looked back on their slavery in Egypt – their slavery! – and thought, we need to go back to that, because this freedom thing is way too hard and uncertain and did anyone consider where we’re going to get food out here in the wilderness?

You know. That moment.

It was around December 24^th at three or four in the afternoon when I felt that way, when I started having second thoughts about our decision to go on a trip to New York instead of buying the kids Christmas gifts. We had gone to the mall to pick up a few very small things to put in their stockings (toothbrushes, pajamas, socks, that sort of thing), and I saw all the other parents racing like mad from here to there, huge bags hanging down at their sides like the packs on burros making their way through the Amazon. And for just a moment, I wanted to go back to that old slavery. To things. To clutter. To piles of Christmas wrapping paper and that Christmas afternoon malaise.

Have we made a terrible mistake?

That night we went to St. James Episcopal for the Christmas Eve service and our four oldest kids participated in the Owen Meany-esque Christmas pageant complete with 12 shepherds, 8 prophets, many angels, and a star that was actually a very small person. I kept waiting for John to lower Owen from the rafters, his God-awful voice calling out, “Peace on Earth!” It was adorable. Our 5-year-old Sammy even had a line, which he managed to say in a firm voice, his eyes wide with something like terror when he saw the hundreds of people in the church. I think he was also second-guessing a few of his Christmas season decisions, but he managed to get his line out.

“I’m sorry, my inn is full.”

Then came communion, and it was beautiful and it took forever because there were so many guests and I couldn’t help but notice how happy our rector seemed, and I thought what an honor that must be, administering the sacraments on Christmas Eve to all of these strangers from the community who decided to celebrate with you and your parish. I took the wafer and drank from the cup and it was all there, out in the open, so plainly visible. It was one of those moments when the veil was thin.

Christmas Eve was beautiful.

* * * * *

We woke up Christmas morning and the kids raced downstairs to pull a few small things from their Christmas stockings and then Maile made cinnamon rolls and we packed up the truck. My sister and my mom and my dad pulled up outside, and we left. Destination: New York City.

We moved towards the city like pilgrims. We crossed over hills, through forests, past small towns with their factories and churches and stores, mostly quiet, mostly resting, until New York City suddenly rose up in the distance, a bright spot of hope. We cheered. We held our breath as we cruised through the Holland Tunnel. We cheered again as we came up in the midst of that bustling, that movement, that life.

I know it’s a cliché, but New York is one of those rare places on earth that, while you’re there, you really do believe that anything is possible. The wealth of nations is right there at my fingertips, and fame is just around the corner. We circled Times Square twice looking for parking for our hotel and eventually decided the valet would be worth the money. I parallel parked, nearly running over a few tourists and a man pushing a two-wheeled cart full of things I couldn’t identify. By now taxi drivers were beeping at us. Pedestrians glared. Maile and the kids jumped out and I unloaded the suitcases and the stroller. The sidewalk was shoulder to shoulder, brightly lit billboards stretched into the sky, and Maile was searching for all the blankets and pillows and we really needed to move. The traffic on the road was honking and barely moving, and the cacophony of the city rose around us, tangible, like smoke.

Then I realized Sam had not yet exited the truck, so I leaned inside.

“C’mon, Sammy, time to get out. Hurry up.”

But he just sat there, his seat belt still on, his puffy winter coat swelling up around him.

“What’s up, man?” I asked him. “Let’s go. Gotta go.”

He looked at me through solemn eyes and said something I’ll never forget.

“No way,” he said. “I’m not going out there.”

He caught me off guard. I looked over my shoulder, trying to see what he saw. Hordes of people flowing past. Exploding lights. Noise.

“C’mon, Sammy. Let’s go. You’ll be fine.”

But I know how he feels.

* * * * *

I feel like I’ve been asked so many times during the last five years to get out of the truck. Do something different. Go somewhere new. Give up those old dependencies. And it usually feels pretty safe and secure right where I’m at. These addictions of mine are pretty comfortable. I’d rather not get out. I’d rather bide my time. I’ll get out. Soon. Just not yet.

Then that voice.

It’s time to get out. It’s time to move on. Let’s do it together. You’ll be fine.

* * * * *

New York City was beautiful to us for those 24 hours, the shops warm, sidewalks long and straight. The kids used some money they had saved up to buy a few special purchases. I found a macaroon café close to FAO Schwartz and ate a weeks’ worth of exquisite sugar in four bites.

Then we got back in the truck and escaped the city, back through tunnels and over bridges, back through the woods, back to our small city that now felt like a wilderness compared to the immense largeness of New York. The gift of that trip far outweighed anything we could have boxed up, anything the kids could have unwrapped on Christmas morning. We all agreed it was a huge success, a new Christmas tradition.

You gotta get out of the truck.

* * * * *

I’ve decided that during this season of being very busy, I’ll be blogging here on Mondays for the foreseeable future. I hope you’ll join me.

If you’ve had a chance to read my book, The Day the Angels Fell, would you consider leaving a review over at Amazon? Every review helps raise the book’s profile. Click HERE to head over there and leave a review or purchase the book.

January 5, 2015June 26, 2016

What If It Takes 1,000 Days? (or, A Path Worth Walking)

Seems you turn around and there’s a new month, a new season, staring at you, like opening your eyes in the middle of the night to find one of your (now terrifying) children standing quietly beside the bed, waiting for you to wake up. Cade used to do that when he was three or four years old. Just about sent me through the ceiling.

These years will do that to you, the way they just keep showing up.

* * * * *

I remember writing 10,000 words for the sequel to The Day the Angels Fell. Characters and scenes and settings. Then, soon after that, I finally discovered the whole point of the book, the questions that I had about life and death that the story will explore, and I realized all 10,000 words were wrong. They won’t be in the book.

Let’s assume I can write 250 first draft words per hour. This means I put in forty hours of work that were deleted. Thirty pages, gone. But this doesn’t alarm me anymore, not the way it used to when I first started writing, because I’ve learned that to get to the final story there are many, many deleted words that must be written first.

There is no path worth walking that starts at the finish. There will be steps that take us backwards. We will stumble, take a winding path when a straight one is available.

We all have so many miles left to walk.

* * * * *

“Once you find (the problem with the work), and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.”

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

* * * * *

There are things we will do in this life that will seem impossible. We will start books we do not think we have the strength to write. We will start businesses that require every ounce of us just to begin. We will love people who will not love us back or, even worse, will deliberately hurt us, seek to destroy us. There will be deleted days, months that seem useless, years that pass under a shadow of rejection and pain and disorder.

I hope that if you have resolved to do anything, it is to try and be brave again, which is not the same thing as being fearless. The only people I know who say they are fearless also happen to be very good liars. They walk around with their heads held high, claiming not to know fear, but when they turn around you can see their fear clinging to their backs like an imp.

I hope you’ve also resolved to persevere, to be willing to wait. Sometimes it takes 1,000 days, and sometimes it takes 10 years, and I suspect that sometimes we will get to the end of our lives, still waiting, and realize the waiting was what was required, not that thing we were waiting for. Whatever you dream of doing, it’s worth walking the long road. It’s worth the winding and the seemingly wasted steps. When you get there, the path will make sense.

Today, take the next step. Be brave. Be willing to wait.

December 30, 2014

On Waking Up, a New Year, and Why She Can’t Read My Novel Yet

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope…who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art…

Ursula K. Le Guin

Seven months after my book released, I am coming to terms with my status as an ordinary author. My writing life is simple, and good. There is a book on my shelf with my name on it. There are the lovely reminders from readers that my book meant something to them. And I am learning to receive this as a gift: I’m not as big a deal as I always hoped I’d be.

– Micha Boyett

I stood in the lobby of our hotel in New York City at noon on the day after Christmas, packed in a line of thirty mostly unhappy people. I still had my coat on, and I was warm, getting warmer. The bar stools were all taken, the sofas were full, and piles of luggage lounged on carts waited to be delivered to new rooms. Me and my tribe? We were just trying to check out. We had been in the city for 24 hours, had our fun, and were ready to return to small-city life.

The wait was long. I pulled out my phone and continued reading one of the best books I’d read in a long time, All the Light We Cannot See. It was the climax, the peak of the story, and in that moment I was no longer in a city of 8.4 million people. I was no longer waiting in a lobby surrounded by baggage, holding my phone. I was in France, in 1944, surrounded by the detritus of war. Smoke rose from the rubble and restless refugees wandered through a broken land. A young, blind, French girl asked a young, starving, German soldier a question.

She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”

He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

I looked up at the television screens showing images of Times Square. I watched the bellmen and the receptionists and the bartenders scurry from here to there. I watched the people around me, complaining or reuniting or checking their phones, consumed by stimuli, seemingly oblivious to the startling, beautiful world around them.

Am I awake? Am I living my life?

* * * * *

I find myself feeling a little untethered at the end of another year. And what a year. We moved from forty acres of woods to a small sliver of city. My sister got married on a beach in Florida. My wife had a baby, number five, Leo Henri, our gentle giant. Soon after he was born, I was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, my colon blocked, my world shaking. A kind young father, a guy I knew from high school, passed away, leaving a wife and three children behind on this side of that dark passage. My parents sold their place, the basement of which has housed my family and I for two small chunks of very transformational time. I published a novel.

These years, they come and go, and some of them seem to pass like one breath leading seamless to the next. Other years are long sighs, or rattling coughs. Or gasps. Or the breath that comes through a smile. I’m still not sure exactly what kind of breath this year was, but it refuses to pass unnoticed, unrecognized.

As I stood in line in that hotel in New York City and read that passage from that heart-breaking, beautiful novel, I considered 2014 and I thought to myself, “Wake up and live your life.” Because if I’m honest I have to say that I slept through much of it, numbing myself with Netflix binges and an ever more encompassing cell phone addiction. I recognize in myself an inability to stop consuming the very things that are breaking me down.

I think we all feel that message at different times in our lives, to varying degrees: Wake Up. Live your life. I felt it strongly in 2001 when Maile and I moved to England and then again in 2009 when it was time to leave Virginia and come home. It came in 2011 when Maile and I started talking about traveling across the country. I felt it this summer when I realized, no, when I knew, that I needed to publish The Day the Angels Fell.

We all feel this message from time to time, this calling from comfort into discomfort, from predictable to not, when this hand reaches down and offers to draw us out of the rut we’re spinning in. For each of us, that call seeks to bring us closer to the center of ourselves, but it almost always arrives in the form of a question beginning with the words, “Are you willing…?”

For me? This year? I can sum it up for you in two questions that came to me through the mist of two powerful things I recently read, one shared by my friend Emily Freeman, and the other written by my friend Micha Boyett.

“Are you willing to see through our…obsessive technologies to other ways of being?”

“Are you willing to believe you are not as big a deal as you always hoped you’d be?”

* * * * *

I am beginning to remember the freedom that comes when I answer that call to Wake Up, no matter how nonsensical or counter-intuitive the ensuing steps may seem at the time. I’m beating around the bush, I know. The long and the short of it is this: the answers to these questions, in 2015, wait for me on the other side of something difficult, namely spending much less time on social media, less time blogging, less time building a platform for myself. It’s time, once again, to step back. Breathe.

I’ve come to enjoy Facebook and Twitter and the kind responses you offer to my blog posts. I’ve made real friends online, people I will stay in touch with through other means. But I also realize that my addiction to the short spurts of approval that come through Likes or Retweets nearly kept me from the long, concentrated time I required to write a novel that I’m very glad I wrote. I don’t want to watch the next five years pass and suddenly realize I have little more to show for it than a few hundred forgotten blog posts, a few thousand Facebook fans, or 1500 pithy Facebook updates.

I know you might ask, “Why are the two mutually exclusive? Why can’t you write and do social media?” I’m not sure. I can’t explain it. But for me, that’s just how it is. I have not been able to dive deeply into writing the novels I want to write…except during the year I took a break from blogging. Also, I must emphasize that this is not a value judgment on social media and it’s impact on society. Or on you. It’s a value judgment of myself, a realistic assessment of my capabilities, of how much I can handle, of what’s important to me, right now, and what it will take for me to Wake Up.

* * * * *

When I released The Day the Angels Fell just over a week ago, I was mostly nervous about one thing, and that one thing came up in a comment left by a reader of this blog. She wrote:

Looking forward to reading this once my head is clear. Finding ‘death as a gift’ a difficult concept at the moment.

How can death be a gift? How can the thing that separates us from those we love be a gift? How can other, less literal deaths (the loss of jobs, the giving up of things, the turning away from things we want) be considered something worth having? The last thing I’m trying to do with this book is diminish the pain we feel when we experience some kind of death.

I had a long talk with Caleb Wilde about this last week, and I’m still not sure exactly how it plays out, this idea of death being a gift. Yet I know this: stepping back from social media and blogging feels like a kind of death to me. But it also feels like an amazing gift. That, I think, is where the tension lies: the loss we feel when we encounter death does not always coalesce with the knowledge that death can be a passageway to somewhere or something better.

So what lies on the other side of this passage?

I will focus on the projects I’m being paid to write. I will begin writing a sequel to The Day the Angels Fell. Maile and I will take a trip to New Orleans, because that seems to be where the sequel will take place, and I want to look around, feel the place, walk the streets. In April and May we’ll tour the country, talk about the book and meet new friends and hear what you have to say about death being a gift, or not. Once the trip dates and locations are set in stone, I’ll post them here and send out an email to those subscribed to the list.

If you’re currently asleep, I hope you’ll consider what it might take for you to Wake Up.

If you’re currently experiencing some kind of death, I hope you’ll hold out hope for something better on the other side.