by Christie Purifoy | Jun 6, 2011 | book of quotations, Books
I keep a book of quotations. It looks exactly like any other journal, but it’s for a different kind of journaling. Journaling with the words of other writers, if you will. Here I scribble down quotations from all kinds of books: poetry, theology, memoir, literary theory, fiction, you name it. I write down anything I want to remember.
Sometimes I use these quotations later, in my own writing or maybe just in conversation. But, it isn’t really about utility. It’s about beauty. Language can be so beautiful it stuns. However, I am generally reading so much, so quickly that I need a way to hold on to those beautiful bits that I just can’t bear to let wash down the stream of words, words, words.
I’ve always wanted to share more of my quotations. I usually do this by telling someone they must read such-and-such book, but some books are harder to sell than others. Like Coop by Michael Perry. It’s a memoir of parenting and small-scale farming in northern Wisconsin. Not a lot happens, but I could hardly put it down.
“We return to the house. The frozen air is bell-jar still. The sky is deep-black, the stars pressing down brilliantly all around, and I am reminded that we are not beneath the constellations, but among them.”
from Coop by Michael Perry
With only the smallest handful of words, Perry moves us to see the world and our lives from a radically different perspective. Our usual point of view is “beneath.” Beauty, mystery, light, mythic stories, unfathomable distances: those things are out there. We can only long for them or dream of them. We aren’t really a part of them.
It is an utterly different thing to be living “among” the constellations. Yes, we are small, yes the distances remain, but we are a part of the beauty, a part of the mystery. Best of all, we too are living stories with all the mythic contours of wisdom, love, loss and heroism.
“Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life” (from Philippians 2:15-16).
by Christie Purifoy | Jun 3, 2011 | Religion, Seasons
Do you know what a new moon looks like? Of course, I do, you’re probably thinking. Until two days ago, I would have thought exactly the same, but I wouldn’t really have been seeing a new moon in my head.
Because I have been in the middle of one book (or six) pretty much ever since I picked up my first kindergarten reader, many of the ideas floating around in my head are attached to letters but not pictures. For example, having read a towering stack of nineteenth-century British novels, I have the word rookery firmly planted in my head. However, I have no solid picture to go along with it. Instead, when I happen upon this word, maybe in Jane Eyre, I see the letters r-o-o-k-e-r-y with a vague image of big black birds sitting on rocks. Which is funny, really, because a rookery shares nothing with rocks but “r,” “o,” and “k.” Though, I had to look it up in wikipedia to be sure even of that.
So, new moon. Two days ago, I googled the phases of the moon. If you’re following a train of thought and sitting in front of a computer (or smartphone, I suppose) it’s amazing how far you can follow said train. My thought began with a complaint and a worry.
I have a two-year-old, and he is a terrible sleeper. Always has been. Which means that my husband and I haven’t slept well in more than two years (because those last few months of pregnancy are never great for sleep, either). Lately, this boy has taken to creeping into our bedroom several times each night and trying to sleep on the floor beside our bed. It’s a little sad and a little cute, but, mostly, it’s exhausting because the two-year-old can’t actually fall back to sleep on our floor, and we can’t fall back to sleep with the loud sucking sounds of his pacifier. Also, I’ve been worried that I’ll get up in the night, not realize he’s there, and step on him. Did I mention that our bedroom has been very, very dark lately? We have transom windows that let in a lot of moonlight, but recently there’s been no light at all and why has there been no light? . . . well, I started googling. The first page that popped up had a huge image of Wednesday night’s moon. A new moon.
This is what a new moon looks like: black, empty, nothing. Somewhere in my head I suppose I knew that. However, it’s the word new that throws me off. New suggests promise, possibility, beginnings. New things should be light, bright, and shimmery. Shouldn’t they? Yet a new moon looks like a black hole. The opposite of promising. The opposite of fresh. The opposite of, well, new.
Staring at that shadowy, black circle where a moon should be, I felt both surprised and encouraged. I’ve been waiting and watching and longing for new things. Months ago, I read these words and felt a promise for my own life: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43: 19). Some days, I did perceive it. Lately, not so much. I read David’s confession that God lifted him “out of the mud and mire” and “put a new song” in his mouth. I too want a “new song,” but I’ve seen so few signs of it. The landscape of my life looks a little dark. Mostly empty.
Seeing rightly what a new moon is, I recall what I do know: new things start out small. New things begin growing in darkness. In their earliest days, new things look a lot like nothing.
Today, I am choosing to believe that what looks like emptiness and nothingness to me is actually the most promising sign of something new. It is fertile ground for the new thing I choose to believe that God is doing.
I’m afraid I’m mixing metaphors here (from sky to earth), but the new moon reminds me of nothing more than a bed of fertile soil. It looks like absolutely nothing. It looks like darkness and emptiness. It isn’t.
“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him” (Psalm 126: 5,6).
by Christie Purifoy | Jun 1, 2011 | Florida, God's promises
I am blinking and shielding my eyes as I look toward another hot and humid Florida summer, and I am thinking about winter.
One of my favorite poets, Louise Gluck, invokes winter in “Snowdrops”: “You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you,” she writes.
I lived in Chicago for ten years, and winter has meaning for me. But I also know what despair is, so I think I would understand winter even if I had never felt the icy wind that blows off Lake Michigan.
Toward the end of a long winter, it is possible, even easy, to stop believing in spring. It is possible to doubt that you will ever again feel warm sunshine on your bare arm.
This kind of doubt seems ridiculous. Haven’t I witnessed the earth turning year after year for decades? Don’t I know that spring always returns?
I know this, that spring always comes, and I know something else: it is better after waiting. Waiting out a long winter, whether literal or metaphorical, is incredibly, sometimes unbelievably, difficult. Even when I hold tight to my belief in spring’s return, I can tip over into despair, like a teeter-totter shifting between faith and fear.
Having walked through a decade of winters, winters that were often seasons of my soul as much as seasons on the calendar, I know that the sunshine and warm air feel better, richer, more precious after waiting. Even now, knowing what I know, I can still waste too much effort wishing away the waiting, trying to speed up time.
Today, looking toward several months of heat and humidity (though the near-constant coastal breezes do offer some relief), I want to wish it away, as if I could push some sort of cosmic fast-forward button. It’s the weather, yes, (I may have grown up in Texas, but I have never been a hot-weather person), but it’s also a whole season of waiting.
Here, in Florida, we are in-between. Our careers and the long miles between us and family suggest that we will not stay here long, but we don’t know where we’ll go next or when that might happen. We are waiting, yet trying to find within the temporary some sense of at-home-ness. At times, I despair. I begin to believe that I’ll always be frozen in this place, with this weather.
“Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!”
– Isaiah 30:18
by Christie Purifoy | May 30, 2011 | Uncategorized
by Christie Purifoy | May 26, 2011 | Books
The first time I held a Nancy Drew book in my hands, I was in our tiny school library. I knelt down low and pulled a yellow-bound book from the bottom shelf. The Secret of the Old Clock. I was only seven years old, and I suppose I hadn’t even been reading books on my own for very long. The idea of genre was only starting to take fuzzy shape in my head.
The word mystery meant nothing to me, but I had some sense that stories could be scary or not scary, and I knew that I wanted scary. This same year, I would startle the librarian by insisting on checking out Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I loved it.
Looking at that atmospheric cover art, Nancy in a dark landscape, a clock lying at her feet and a puzzled, sleuth-y look on her face, I thought I’d found something which fell in the scary category, and I quickly moved to share it with my best friend.
As I tipped the book in her direction, Michelle’s eyes and mouth rounded into identical Os. Neither of us had read a word, but we were both pretty much hooked.
The next year, in third grade, I tried to write a novel. I had been given a small, blank book for my eighth birthday. It occurs to me now that blank books were probably not that easy to come by back in the 80s. I take the shelves of moleskines and Jonathan Adler-designed journals at my local big-box bookstore for granted, but my first blank book had, on its cover, a photograph of a kitten dressed in a lace cap and seated at a desk with a feather pen. A sort of grandma/kitten/author hybrid that disturbs me again, remembering it.
I took that kitten book and decided I would write a story for Michelle. I probably wrote half of a chapter before I started rereading what I had written. Even at eight, I recognized that my words didn’t sound like me. They sounded like Carolyn Keene. I suppose this was something of an achievement for a third-grader, but it didn’t feel like one. I stopped writing and never did give Michelle the book. Though I remember how in fourth grade she became somewhat obsessed with making a photographic calendar of her cat, so she may have appreciated the cover art, at least.
My favorite Nancy Drew book was always The Mystery at Lilac Inn. Or maybe it was The Secret of Lilac Inn? I’m sure I could google it to be sure, but my confusion is telling. One Nancy Drew book can largely stand in for any other, and I don’t remember a single thing about the story. I remember the cover art. I think it was always the cover art that drew me. Nancy crouching behind those lilac bushes. What was it about those lilac bushes? I was a little girl growing up in Texas. I’d never even laid eyes on a lilac. Never smelled that heady perfume.
When my daughter was four she spent a lot of time perched high in a lilac tree. I’m not sure if lilacs are technically trees or shrubs, or maybe there’s no botanical difference? But, this lilac was old, and it was tree-like, and she attended a Waldorf preschool where tree climbing was practically an official subject in itself (I love this about Waldorf schooling. Any philosophy of education that takes tree climbing and painting more seriously than testing has a lot going for it, in my humble, non-expert opinion.)
Our photo albums are full of pictures of Lily, face buried in pinkish-purple blossoms, breathing deeply. I never passed a lilac without asking her to smell, to pose. She always agreed. More than that, she’d dive right in, nearly hyperventilating, oblivious to the buzzing bees. Watching her, pushing my own nose in beside hers, I would sometimes think about Nancy Drew and her lilacs.
It only took that first book, The Secret of the Old Clock, for me to discover that Nancy Drew’s stories weren’t really scary. Reading mysteries, we sometimes know fear. But, by the end, when all the pieces have fitted themselves together, we discover that there was never cause to be afraid. In other words, we might experience fear along the way, but when the last piece is placed in the narrative puzzle fear evaporates.
A girl who once stared at a book cover, as if she might smell perfume seeping through the cardboard, has watched her own daughter float in lilac, swim in lilac, breathe deeply those soft, delicate petals. Between girlhood and motherhood, I was often afraid. But, why? Was there ever, really, any cause for fear?
On most days, the story I am living feels exactly like a mystery. I wonder how and whether the pieces will ever fit together. The unknown tomorrows can be scary. And so, I remind myself that life is, essentially, mystery and not horror. One day the full story will emerge. The image formed by the jigsaw pieces will be clear. And it will be good.
