In a grand effort to encourage creativity in continuum, instead of in spurts, I have been reading and looking and thinking and thinking some more. Rereading entries from Septembers in the past, in hopes that they will spur magical sight into September of the now. It's not working, nothing really is. It's not writer's block, I promise. It's something deeper, I think. Of the secreted sort.

I feel like I'm learning all these new and wonderful things that can't be shared, not even with me.

I'll let you know when the secret's out.

I've also disabled comments for the time being. It might last, it might not. But I figured I'd try. Contact me via my email, to the left, if you must. Or don't. Whichever.

I love this.

My email inbox is often filled with junk of a random kind. I’ve been targeted for various medications, love potions, wanted ads, and a strange assortment of FREE OFFERS ONLY FOR YOU LORE FERGUSON IF YOU ACT NOW AND SEND THIS MESSAGE TO TEN OF YOUR VERY BEST FRIENDS. Needless to say, I glance over my email messages checking for familiar names and that’s pretty much it.
Recently an email arrived in my inbox with an all too familiar name, and an accompanying link. I clicked and what I read disheartened me.

I first discovered her during my censored library days. After weeks of bringing home Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High at age ten, my mother put an end to this frivolous reading spell and before checking out required me to place my stack of the allotted ten books per card per visit in front of her for approval. Needless to say, my taste in literature was quickly sated with words of a better standard. Troubling a Star was my first delve into the works of Madeleine L’Engle and I feel that I can say with certainty two things: one, I knew that here was someone I could trust implicitly, and two, here was someone I could admire fully.

Over the past fifteen years I have collected every Madeleine L’Engle book I could find. When I visit a used bookstore, as I am somewhat known to do (On occasion. Sometimes. Mostly. Always.), I first head for the L section of juvenile fiction, then adult fiction, then non-fiction. She writes all three. The last is my favorite.

There is a small used bookstore in Quetzaltengo, Guatemala specializing in English books. It was my favorite haunt while I lived there and one day I found my favorite of Madeleine’s books, A Circle of Quiet, autographed, inscribed, for ten quetzals. I quickly nabbed. This past summer, though, my beloved roommate, most trustworthy of all of us, lost that copy en route to Chicago. She sat on my bed in tears and admitted this loss, quickly assuring me that she’d already been on Ebay and bought me another signed copy and that she was entirely sorry and deeply apologetic (you have to know Beca, she’s always deeply apologetic, but she was even more so this time). I laughed and of course said it was fine, and that the autograph didn’t matter to me that much anyway.

But when the new copy came, we were both pleasantly surprised by not only the autograph and inscription, but also the blue inked pages following—the owner of this book had obviously found a favorite as well. I’m surprised they parted with it.

In the past few years Madeleine’s output has dwindled and I anxiously wait for new titles to grace a shelf, but to no avail. I gathered her last few and savored them knowing that this woman was reaching that swift decent she had once written about in Summer of the Great-Grandmother: This is the summer of the great-grandmother, more her summer than any other summer. This is the summer after her ninetieth birthday, the summer of the swift decent.

The email in my inbox announced that swift decent with all the journalistic flair it could muster. This obituary writer, filing one more famous death away on their resume, couldn’t describe the weight of this literary mother. Couldn’t define the depth of her impact. Could only write and say facts, dates, children, names, places, books. There was nothing of this inspiration, nothing of this great imagination, nothing of the definition, or redefinition of Children’s Literature, capital L.

And I’m afraid I can’t do any better. I was only a reader, a devoted student, an active follower, but I didn’t know her either. All I know is that she’s gone now and what’s left is 60 books on a resume, a few book prizes, a four-part memoir, and generations of children and grown-ups who secret in their heart their own impression of this mistress of Literature.

She was beautiful, that’s all I know. And I’m thankful for her impression on me.

I’m not sure why, like the wardrobe or pools of water in Lewis’s Narnia, the archway at Hale Cemetery takes you into a whole different sort of world. But today, in the perfect blueness above and trees kissed by the sunlight into colorful frenzies, we crossed under that archway and entered a place of quiet. Now the cheeky answer to my query is that the quiet is due to the state of its occupants, but I won’t give that cheekiness the honor of my attention.

I’m speaking about a different sort of peace altogether. Perhaps it’s because my morning was surrounded with people and demands and serving and more people (All of which I love. I really, really do love.), but this afternoon’s peace was that much more noticed because of it, I’m sure.

Here in this local cemetery, surrounded by autumn and carpeted in pine-cones and maple leaves, the stuff of seasonal death—there’s a stillness too; a sort of nonchalant nod in the general direction of life and all its demands and needs. Fall comes and with it there is a letting go, a rest from all the warm-weather needs—sunlight, water, tender soil—trees release their summer beauty, grass hunches over in preparation for its coming blanket, we all hold up the snowy white flag of surrender to this certain end.

My pastor mentioned this morning that we don’t see U-Hauls being pulled by hearses in funeral processions. Good thought. Truth. Death means the end of it all. End of demands and needs and requirements and serving. It means turning down, shutting up, covering over, and sleeping at last. A sort of letting go that feels like the peace found in Hale Cemetery.

As we left she quoted I Corinthians 15 to me. And I was reminded that all this stillness and peace, the ending of life and all of its demands and joys and pains and thrills, are still cheap substitutes for the real triumph for which we’re waiting.

One of my favorite people and I sat on a favorite Potsdam ledge tonight and ended our evening with prayer. Knowing that death and life are in the power of the tongue, we tried to breath life into the body's strongest and deadliest and loveliest muscle. I won't wax eloquent too much about the tongue, it's a revolting appendage if you ask me, but tonight's post will be about the power of that speech mechanism.

On the way home I listened to unfamiliar music set to an old old song; when I was young I knew it as The Prayer of St. Patrick, I'm not sure what the young people are calling it these days:

God in my living
There in my breathing
God in my waking
God in my sleeping
God in my resting
There in my working
God in my thinking
God in my speaking.

Mmmm.

A friend made a pact with me this week: Tease Free Week for Lore. No teasing because she's so teasable, no teasing because it doesn't breed good conversation, but mostly no teasing because of this wisdom from Proverbs 26: Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death, so is the man who deceives his neighbor, and says, "Was I not just joking?"

I'm not going to lie, I pride myself on my ability to take it in and dish it out. I'm not sure whether I'm more often laughing at myself or others. I like to laugh and I like that I'm easily amused and, evidently, am the source for much amusement to others. But here are my recent thoughts--all culminating in tonight's post:

The tongue is flesh, quite possibly the most fleshly part of our persons, perhaps competing with only the heart--but it is still under the will of our character. If we're speaking out of the abundance of our hearts, and the old adage about there being a little bit of truth to every tease, then friends, I'm sorry to say, my heart has desperately wicked intentions.

The only answer is to get the Word so fully in my heart that there is no room for other things. I can't make my tongue get saved, it doesn't walk through the sanctification process like our emotions and character do, it's flesh and to flesh it will return. It never reaches the pinnacle and the point when it no longer needs a daily dose of Spirit. It's one of the things, my dear friends, that will continue the forging process until that longest sleep keeps it still.

One of my favorite portions of the Bible is chapter six of Isaiah--the visual image of the two angels whose sole occupation is to proclaim 'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God almighty. The whole earth is filled with HIS glory!' Something about that, folks, gets me super excited about Heaven, where the only words I'll ever say will be filled with worship and honor.

But for now, here, in this place, on that ledge and at this dining room table, tomorrow morning, drinking coffee while the house wakes up groggily, when I am teased and when I learn to keep my mouth shut, the test is to practice for eternity.

That's my pact with you.

A leaf fell from the maple tree in front of us. The raspberries are giving their last and homegrown lettuce is on sale at the farm stand. It's the time of the year when all the fresh presence that Spring brought has left and is leaving. It's the time of the year when we pull out the clothes we tire of so much more quickly than linens and light cottons. We say goodbye to mornings on the porch and hello to the kitchen woodstove. The couple across the street had their last words and we sat on the front step and watched her throw suitcases and shoes into the back of her father's car.

I'm not ready for winter this year. I rarely am, and perhaps it's the two year absence from this tundra that makes me less ready for the coming hibernation; all I know is that this favorite season is too quickly over and settling in for tea and wool sounds dreadful. I like green and outside and breezes. I like fresh and I like new. I even like a little old. But I hate dead.

But, which is more, I hate the deadness of unmet expectations and delayed hope. I am, I'm told, too often a direct reflection of my immediate circumstances instead of representation of the Christ I long to emulate. I memorized the first few verses of Romans 5 as a weapon against this great dread of mine. I like how The Message puts it:

There's more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary--we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit.

So this is what I think about today, as I shelve art supplies for the coming school year, as I eat celebratory autumn pumpkin muffins, as I don a sweater and hunt for a space heater to use at work, I think that all these reminders of the end of Summer, the end of newness, create a gap that can only be filled by Spring.

And, in the meantime, we don't feel shortchanged because we know that it's coming.

Expectations are debilitating. Not yours for me, but mine for me, I mean. I know that without a vision people perish, but does that always mean the vision has to be the peoples' own? This is what I am mulling over recently--others' expectations for me and my lack of wherewithal in meeting them.

I have been drinking tea and staring blankly at this computer screen for a half an hour. The reason: debilitating expectations. Without doubt she will ask me in the morning, as she most always does, if I've written. Without doubt, I will almost always say no. No. I haven't written, and here is my excuse: I have no time, I have nothing to say, I don't know how to say it, I don't know where to start.

But the real reason is that expectations threaten me. They make me feel like there is some unseen potential, hidden from only me, visible to everyone but me. I felt that choking sensation the moment I was handed my diploma, frightening responsibility. I felt that suffocation when a friend asked me to share at the recent youth retreat. There is this great weight that accompanies maturity and I never feel ready to accept that coupling.

A verse from Proverbs that is often quoted to me speaks of a man's gift making room for him, and I've written about it before; it always convicts me to be more responsible with the things given to me--to invest in them expecting a ready harvest.

I should know, though, that reaping takes more than a forgotten seed planted sometime in the spring. There's daily tending to be done and my hands have grown soft with fear and timidity.

I need to write again.

Pedestrian was the word of the day a few months ago. Ordinary. Commonplace. Or sometimes Dull. I feel like my life of recent has been nothing if not pedestrian. Normal, though in disorganization. Common, though so in-between. Ordinary, glaringly so. Even embarrassingly so. Filled with all of these great ideas and plans and hopes and visions, seeds I planted deep in my heart-soil--things I purposed I would see bear fruit with immediacy and power. Seeds which were planted too close to one another, choking out each other's need for space and soil of their own.

Before I moved back to New York a friend from Tennessee gave me a small book by a shared favorite author. It's been one of the few consistent things in my life in the past month--I carry it almost everywhere, soaking up the words that speak so directly to my psyche and my current place. She writes this:

"It is a scriptural principle that the divine energy acts upon the stuff of this world. Jesus had the servants fill the stone jars that happened to be standing there when he made wine from water at the marriage in Cana. He used a boy's lunch, instead of starting from nothing, to feed five-thousand people. His own spittle and the dirt at His feet were the remedies for a blind man's eyes. Common things taken into the divine hands accomplished eternal purposes."

Elisabeth Elliot God's Guidance

And I remembered the sermon that propelled my move back home into action. He spoke about loaves and fishes and making a very big something out of a very small almost nothing. And I decided that Potsdam, New York was a very small pond for this very hopeful big fish, but that I would take commonness and pedestrian and see what dirt and spittle could do to these blind eyes.

I'm not promising sight and I'm not pretending twenty-twenty--I know my blind spots and suffering from a severe case of the doldrums is one of them--but here's what I learn more every day: He takes something pedestrian and makes it accomplish eternal purposes, not just miracles, not just power and zing and pizazz. He says to pray His kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven--and what is Heaven if not completeness in every way?