This Transitional Season 🖋 Alongside Letter #5

Hello friends! Hope September has treated you well so far. Popping in with some thoughts on this transitional season, two fall conferences you should know about, and an update on my ongoing weird relationship with social media.

I keep thinking that it’s gong to feel more autumny outside than it actually is. Today I went for an unexpectedly vigorous and sweaty walk in the woods with my dog. The morning was gray, and the weather app said it was only 72 degrees, so I threw on my lightest hoodie and convinced Malika to go for a little ride with me out to Paskamansett Woods.

Summer is the time for avoiding the woods because it’s a little too muggy and buggy to be fun. But the pumpkin decorations have been pulled from storage, replacing our summery blues and flowers with oranges and browns, and all the sad acoustic folky records have been moved to the end of the shelf for easy access. I imagine for a minute walking among the pines with my cozy hoodie, breathing in the cool air.

Well, not quite. There was cool air, sure. The scent of pine and moss. Brilliant fungi in bright orange and purple, and splashes of sunlight inviting me to pause and long look. 

There were also an alarming number of mosquitoes, so many that every person I passed on the trail commented with the same tone you use to make small talk about crazy weather. If you stop, you get eaten. I jogged for a bit, and I don’t like jogging.
 

(scenes from today's walk. I did not get cool mushroom pics because mosquitoes.)

I’m not sure what to call this transitional season. A few years ago, I realized letting go of summer is harder than it used to be. I love the apples and the sweaters and the crunchy leaves and the cool breezes. I get excited for Halloween and bonfires and pumpkin drinks (yes, yes I know). But there’s just the tiniest bit of me that’s sorry to let go of summer's warmth, that dreads the coming winter with every earlier sunset. When some friends say they kind of hate fall for this, I think I understand. The last few months of the year are glorious and sad.

This year though. This year, I’m ready.

If I’m honest, this has been a weird, hard summer. I’ve been wanting to send out a letter for a while, but my thoughts have been sticky and sluggish, hard to organize into words. I won’t belabor the reasons, but here’s the short list: summer began with processing the stuff with my past job (which I wrote vaguely about in May), continued with record-breaking heat waves, and ended with the sudden and shocking loss of a beloved member of the Rabbit Room community. All of this, plus the uncertainty of a fresh COVID surge, plus Afghanistan, plus continuing polarization, plus, plus, plus.

Numerous losses, big and small, near and far. And it all adds up in an equation of compounded grief. “Disenfranchised grief,” as one bereavement expert calls it, “this feeling of loss that no one seems to understand and that you don't feel entitled to.”

That’ll mess with your heart, your head, your creativity for sure.

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A couple weeks ago, I was talking to my spiritual director about the heaviness of this season. As we always do, we began in silence. As we waited, some lines from a psalm I hadn’t thought about in a while gently surfaced. “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.” I’ve learned to take these odd rabbit trails as an invitation for further pondering, so I’ve kept Psalm 131 close to me for the past couple weeks.

Okay, childlike faith. Childlike trust. We get it. It’s a staple of Christian teaching. It’s also a super accessible metaphor for teaching children, and it’s an ideal adults can long for. But for me, and I suspect many others, it’s one more thing to try to do. How does one work to be like a child? How does one calm and quiet their own soul?

As I’ve camped out with this psalm, here’s what resonates. "Like a weaned child." It’s oddly specific, don’t you think? Still too little to be independent, but a baby growing up. Not so much clinging to their mother for survival, but instead being, resting, content.

I think of how often talking to someone about spiritual life becomes a conversation about their relationship to church. They’re serving, leading, volunteering, or they might be frustrated and taking a break. They might be finding joy and solace in community, or they might be wounded and questioning the whole thing. I know this has been my story too… how many times do my conversations drift to the things I’m doing, the things I wish I was doing, and the things I’m too tired to do?

I look back on my summer, the one shot through with joy and beauty and grief, and I feel bad about the things I didn’t accomplish, the times I didn’t go to the beach, the ways I fell short of my writing goals.

But what if, as the season melts into cooler days, the only invitation is calm, quiet presence? The spacious center where we are receiving and received, the deep, healing well from which creativity can flow again?
 

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MISCELLANY

+ I first properly noticed Psalm 131 through Frederick Buechner’s little passage “Depression,” originally published in his book Whistling in the Dark. I’ve found his meditation helpful off and on throughout the years. You can read it here. 

+ Also, it’s always worth saying that if you have the blahs, a sense of not-rightness and complicated grief, please find someone to talk to — a therapist, a spiritual director, a close friend or wise family member. I meet monthly with my own spiritual director, and I honestly believe it has helped me keep going this summer. TWLOHA's Find Help tool, Psychology Today's Find a Therapist directory, and SDI's spiritual companion directory are broad but decent starting places. (If you'd like a little extra guidance, please email me!)

+ My hope for this fall is to prioritize creative writing time (lol we’ll see about that) but in the meantime, at least I’ve had She Reads Truth keeping me busy. Been writing a bunch of devotionals for their upcoming studies, and the first one will be up this Thursday after their Hosea reading plan starts. Follow along here.

+ Once again, Hutchmoot is online this year. Though I dearly miss in-person moots and can’t wait to be in Franklin with my people again someday, I’m still so so excited that anyone and everyone can join the party online. Hutchmoot Homebound starts October 8th, and you can get tickets anytime for just $20! Join us. Because you must.

+ If you’re in the New England area and want a tiny taste of Hutchmoot, good news! Chris and I will be joining the Creative Christianity Conference in Concord, NH, Saturday November 6th! There will be workshops in music, visual art, theater, writing, and poetry, with a keynote address and concert by Andrew Peterson. (See? Told you it’s a tiny Hutchmoot.) Learn more and get tickets here!
 

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JEN VS THE SOCIAL MEDIAS UPDATE

As a follow up to my last letter re: unplugging from social media… well, I’m back to Instagram. I did set screen time limits on my phone, so I basically have to search for the app, enter a password, and give myself literal permission for more time. (I thought the barrier would help me use it less, but I’m not sure it has, ha.) Facebook? I dip into a couple of groups, maybe look at the top 5 posts in my feed (inevitably from people I want to hear from), and dip out. Twitter? I can handle maybe 5 minutes a week.

I’ve been chatting a bit with Sofia, a Hutchmoot friend and Alongside Letter reader, about our social media dilemma as artists. I floated the thought about how to engage better, and she posed two *great* questions we can all ask about redemptive engagement with these platforms:

“Regarding engaging redemptively, I feel like there are two tracks to consider: How do I engage in a way that is redemptively kind to my own soul? and How do I engage in a way that is outwardly redemptive--that "adds to the beauty, tells a greater story" (to borrow from Sara Groves)?”

How are you engaging redemptively in online spaces? (Or at least hoping to this fall) I love getting responses from y’all, so always feel free to hit reply. I might be slow at responding, but I promise I’ll read it and write back when I can. 💛

Thanks, as always, for reading Alongside Letters. Until next time!
~Jen