EMILY WEBB. [Having “gone back” to live a childhood birthday after her death] Mama, I’m here! I’m grown up! I love you all, everything! (Leans over table as if wanting to embrace it) (Mrs. Webb faces up, pares potatoes.) I can’t look at everything hard enough… It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.

— Thornton Wilder, Our Town, Act III

Our contingency is a gift. We are wonderfully, blessedly limited. How can we see better, wake up and approach our days better? I don’t have answers, but am happy to continue asking the questions.

I promised you all a poem last time I wrote. Here it is now. I dearly hope you enjoy it, and that you’re put in mind of ways you can soak up your own life, to learn more every day, as Emily (Webb) Gibbs says in Our Town, to “realize life while [you] live it—every, every minute.”

A Spell for Seeing in the Dark

I set my hands as if
my shuddering (unshuttering) would soak you up,
all of you into me. The spell
jerks past my lips to remind the world to still—
“I love you all, everything.”

Rake and rattle my bones, sweet earth, crush
lest my Babylon spill
another stammer of me;

fire me slow in the way of trees
and toddlers to know—
which is to say
to see
like the sleeping child does 
beneath my shaking hands.

To you, dear reader. What corner of your life needs a reminder to still? I’d love to hear of anything this might stir in you.

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Thanks so much for reading! You honor me with your time.

Imagine embracing the ephemeral as a discipline of not only conceding our mortality as a condition but receiving our mortality as a gift. It is winter’s loss that grants us fall’s fire.

— James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time

EMILY. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

— Thornton Wilder, Our Town, Act III

Limitations and Locatability

I don’t know if it’s just me, but so far 2025 has felt like taking a 30 mph turn at 60, like a slingshot I never asked for and didn’t see coming. I’ve found it very difficult to make time for writing recently (I can hear a friend jesting, “Your post may be late, but it’s not on time”), or to make space for much that is “meaningful” in general, whatever that means. It’s discouraging to feel so inhibited (emotionally; physically for the limits of the calendar and body and work which demands more than its due; spiritually for lack thereof). And it’s a beautiful thing, really, getting to attend floor hockey practices, taking my kids snowboarding or to Build Days at the Home Depot, to be present (I mean really, really there) in birthday celebrations, and to work hard at a job—even, especially, those less-than-thrilling days—to put food on the table. There are surely millions of little decisions peppered throughout it all that can influence what these rhythms look and feel and flow like, but in a big way, this is life. This is how things go. We must find a way to do it all well, and to accept our limitations.

By “do it all well,” I don’t mean we need to find ways to be more productive and then, countering all research on the subject, somehow happy about our godlike efficiency. No, what I really mean is to grab hold of those things amidst the whirlwind that have lasting human value: Becoming the best husband and father I can; being a true neighbor and friend; learning to be a kinder person when aggressive othering and chest-puffing and playground-bullying are the ways some are trying to make things happen in the world.

I played George Gibbs in Thorton Wilder’s Our Town my freshman year in college, and even then did not realize my life while I lived it. It is so hard; perhaps the hardest thing of all for us to do. Recently rereading the play I was struck by how much, how incredibly much it sounded like Ecclesiastes; struck as well by how incredibly much of the script I’d missed. (But remember: I was a freshman who had just received and been distracted by the glory of a leading role. But remember: There will always be something to distract. We really don’t understand, do we?) And yes, I did read a play for fun.

The first act is a perusal, companioned by the fourth-wall-oblivious Stage Manager, of a town to define the word “ordinary” by: the fictional Grover’s Corners, NH. Small, but not too small; a town drunk or two, but nothing terribly exciting in any sense of the word to speak of. Conversations on the weather dominate friendly relations. Doctors and newspapers and choir practice and baseball find their place in the mundane comings and goings of incredibly average people. But it’s in such places wonder blooms.

There’s a scene at the end of the first act which, though I was in it, did not strike me until my reread for the miracle it was. George and his sister Rebecca are up late looking at the moon when she, of a sudden, recounts a seemingly random and recent memory. Here it is in its small entirety.

REBECCA. I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: “Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm, Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.”

GEORGE. What’s funny about that?

REBECCA. But listen, it’s not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God,—that’s what it said on the envelope.

GEORGE. What do you know!

REBECCA. Yep, and the postman brought it just the same.

GEORGE. What do you know!

That’s it. That’s the whole interaction.

When I played George, the best I could make of this apparent tangent was cute entertainment of a young, sick girl on the part of the minister, and maybe a bit of relational context on the Gibbs. As a workaday father, this little scene slammed like a freight train into my own small entirety—my town, if you will. It hit home.

We never do meet Jane Crofut, but I can only assume she’s just as ordinary as the rest of the bunch, the part of the story of Grover’s Corners we do see. Maybe more so. Perhaps she’s even as ordinary as me; yet in the mind of God, just as locatable by him as by the postman. “Yes, I know where he is,” they might say together. “I send messages there often.”

What do you know.

Happiness

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”

“I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

— Luke 19:39-40

It is often the small, the odd, the overlooked voice which carries the most wisdom. In Our Town, this is proven true more than once by the flitty, hardly-present gossip Mrs. Louella Soames. We write her off easily enough during Act I, but it’s her words we’re left with at the end of Act II after—spoiler alert, and one of a few—George Gibbs marries Emily Webb. (Of course, there really was nothing special about the small, unassuming ceremony.) “Aren’t they a lovely couple?” Soames asks, though no one in particular seems to be listening. “Oh, I’ve never been to such a nice wedding, I’m sure they’ll be happy. I always say: Happiness—that’s the great thing. The important thing is to be happy.”

Is this naïve? Or is this a surprisingly, shockingly wise observation from a tertiary character? The Teacher tells us, after all, “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” And here’s the kicker: “I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live” (Eccl. 3:10-12). “Happiness—that’s the great thing.” We see in scripture and a visit to Grover’s Corners that this doesn’t come from pursuit of self-interest on any scale but from small and simple acts which tie people and communities together. These are the ingredients of a soil which can sustain life.

I’m put in mind of C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce in which people are always moving in either one or another direction: either becoming less and less able to stand the challenges and the beauties of the company of others, more and more physically isolated in their selfishness and ensuing anxieties (a self-imposed hell), or else more and more enjoined to those they meet along the way as they move toward others and community and heaven. Our Town, I think, is a glimpse of what we might see on the latter path.

People tend to make small decisions in Grover’s Corners. I don’t mean they make insignificant choices, but that the focal point of their paradigm is here, local, small in scope. Communal. Mr. Webb travels for some work but shows an affectionate knowledge of his town and a quiet love stoked, stirred, energized by his family. Another character has a chance to go away to college but stays to work his uncle’s farm. Some stories might paint these as missed opportunities and a wasting away in obscurity. Wilder shows us the opposite is true, that this is where we are, in fact, seen. Here is where the magic happens.

And when is our garden bed. Our “contingency is not a curse,” writes James K. A. Smith in his book How to Inhabit Time. Our limitations are gifts and a focusing of ourselves. They are the context we have to work with and the garden from which we can bring a feast, or not. These limits of mine, my veritably spiritual exhaustion, what can it all teach me? How can I take and stoke them to a happiness—not for myself only, but so others might warm themselves by it? Probably not by trying harder to control my situation, getting faster and louder and colder and squeezing it all to death. Not by putting Tyler first. More likely by finding ways to reconnect with people, love them more, and to remember where and when I am. To remember how deeply contingent and needy and here I am.

It’s worth some thought.

Paying Due Attention

I told you already there were spoilers. Here’s another fair warning, and your last.

Emily (Webb) Gibbs dies.

Our beloved Stage Manager, travelling back through the fourth wall as easily as we forget to notice life, affirms Emily’s desire to live a day over. This, despite warnings from the fellow Dead of Grover’s Corners she’s joined. “No!” says her mother-in-law. “At least choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”

Important enough.

The days I feel like lead. The days which end much as they began, leaving only a blur of memories between (“losses,” as Christian Wiman calls them in “The Drift of the World”). The days of board games and Legos and making dinner with my wife, of fighting the killing boredom of winter because it’s simply too cold to go outside. Summer days of “finger-pulls” on the swing set or playing catch or stuffing snakes in garden bags so they don’t nest in the siding; Fall walks; trying, failing, trying again to be a more patient daddy. Crying on the inside while she cries on the out. Weddings. Wrestling with God. Three-year-old, six-year-old, nine-year-old belly laughs that become hiccups. Goodnight hugs.

Important enough. Life is important enough.

EMILY. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER. No— Saints and poets, maybe. They do some.

A bit of honesty: I’ve been wrestling with an emotion that feels quite new to me, or at least new in its intensity. Fear. “My town” is a beautiful place, my marvelous contingency itself contingent on so many others. And Jake Romm was right in his “Absence and Desire”: earthly love is—at least in part—the fear of loss. Or maybe more accurately, earthly love contains the fear of loss. But it is not lost on me that my fear itself can be its own worst enemy. Sometimes the tighter we squeeze things, the slipperier they get. Perhaps, as Smith says, we ought to “shepherd the wind” rather than chase it. My town won’t be my town if I cannot be the kind, fierce-loving, open-handed servant of that small entirety.

“They don’t—understand—do they?” asks Emily of a fellow Dead while George sobs convulsively at her feet—her gravestone. “No dear,” the response. “They don’t understand.”

I dearly want to after reading Wilder’s masterful work, but perhaps I miss the point. Perhaps it is enough to understand that we cannot understand as much as we’d like to or think we do. Maybe we let go a little more, put our own gain aside and quit strangling our gasping towns and words and world so we can notice it all for just a moment.

I wrote a poem after this brush with Our Town that I’d like to share with you soon, but for now, friends, let your contingency and lack of understanding be enough—your lot, and a starting point. On my end, I’ll be stoking this to happiness the best I can in the hopes it might warm another.

I wish you the same warmth, wherever and whenever you are.

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A short post this time, friends, for those moments we’re honest enough with ourselves to admit to wrestling with the angel: the times we step outside ourselves enough to see the angry sweat beading on our foreheads as we pin him, pin him, pin him again only to have him slip sideways from our grip.

Reflecting on R. S. Thomas’ “Amen,” (“And God said: How do you know? / And I went out into the fields / At morning and it was true.”), Carys Walsh submits that faithful acceptance is “a radical surrender of any attempt to ‘domesticate’ God…and of our own carefully constructed persona.” In a bit of an ironic turn, I wonder if subjecting oneself to the wrestling is its own kind of acceptance—a path into itself.

…Under the song

Of the larks, I heard the wheels turn
Rustily. But the scene held;
The cold landscape returned my stare;

There was no answer. Accept; accept.
And under the green capitals,
The molecules and the blood’s virus.

— Thomas, “Amen”

Tryst

Originally published in Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal vol 18, 2024.

I am always close, never more
than a midnight walk from the heel-
spun halo where he and I met
and meet, locked again
on river’s edge—will
against will, wave upon wave
upon wave.

In humble trist
the grass blades bend familiar bows—
         plowshares 
churning soil in small spaces,
charming life from dust again.

Again. 

It may be I’ll take him 
by surprise beneath a dark moon
or wrapped against winter’s chill. Until then, I re-
turn, twist, grasp a heel
of bread from the loaf-ward
         and beg
not a wound—that was never it—
but for the healing hand to touch me: 
show me where the pain comes from.

Postscript

• tryst: an appointment to meet at a certain place and time.

• trist: sorrow; sadness.

• loaf-ward: Old English hlaf-weard → Middle English hlaverd → Modern English lord

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Thanks so much for reading! You honor me with your time.

Wonderful people (yes, that’s you), so many more of you than I ever would have expected have graciously given me your time and honored me with your readership and thoughtful comments. When I could finally name why it was I wanted to write poetry and what the purpose of sharing a newsletter was, it ultimately came down to a desire for meaningful engagement with meaningful ideas. It’s always been about conversation. But conversation is more than sending off showers of digital spittle.

As I see it, I could continue sending you notes from behind this screen of blue light and anonymity, or I could make an attempt to put a little flesh to Awaking Dragons, namely mine. Though I may not have the privilege of shaking all your hands, I hope you’ll humor me sharing a little about myself—the face behind the newsletter—and I hope you’ll share something about yourself in turn, whether your “why” for writing, a habit you’re wanting to cultivate, or maybe just your favorite comfort food.

Though poetry and essay writing have become some of my favorite ways to process ideas (ok, they’re pretty much the only way this introvert processes ideas), helpful creative outlets, and even necessary spiritual disciplines, my current alter ego is that of a business analyst. Of course, that term means exactly a million things all dependent on context, so it really means nothing at all.

In practice I’m a technologist and growing software developer. I was not trained in this, but like many things in life (poetry, for example) I seem to have fallen into it and done enough good to be kept around.

I feel an existential tension in my bones many a day: It’s thrilling and even a bit poetic to take a blank page, fill it with precisely-chosen characters (scratch it, rework it, fine-tune it until it sings), and to have the end result be something that empowers and enriches someone else’s life, if only for a short time. I love that aspect of my job. But I have no desire to make our world spin any faster than it already is on its own. Productivity as an end unto itself is an empty one, if you ask me.

I like all kinds of music, but I often listen to EDM while I’m working to keep myself focused and the energy high. But I confess: Sometimes the energy-focus tension slips, and my desk space is transfigured, becomes a dance space 😎

In light of this confession, let me assure you I work from home most days. Wouldn’t want to make any coworkers jealous of the moves. You understand.

I’ll never claim to be a good dancer, but I’ll also never refuse a dance floor. There’s too much fun to be had, and I get enough sitting at work even with the occasional dance break (not to be confused with breakdance, which I think became dangerous when I breached 30).

I’m a husband to my beautiful wife of 10 years (as of this coming June). Beth is the reason I ultimately mustered the courage to start Awaking Dragons. She’s the comfort when I’m low, the shining smile and playfulness I so desperately need in my life, and a talented public speaker to boot. Check out some of the cool things she’s been up to. Also (and I say this with a loving grin on my face and her blessing in my back pocket), she’s not a great loser.

I’m sorry. What I mean to say is that she’s a terrible loser. I kid you not, I once went on a 30 (thirty) plus game losing streak to her. It didn’t matter what kind of card or board game we played—I could. Not. Win. When I finally did eke out a victory, there were no warm congratulations 🙂

I’ve won a couple games since, but not many.

We have three wonderful and rambunctious boys, all under the age of 9. They keep our hands wonderfully full with belly laughs, Legos, stories, the absolute best metaphors ever (did you all know that God is like a nutcracker?), and more zeal for American football than I’ve ever managed on my own. They are the reason this Minnesota-bound Oregon native is a) learning to ice skate, and b) actually having fun with it (though in the process I’ve discovered a few muscle groups I didn’t know I had).

Remember the name of those hard strawberry candies with the flavored goo on the inside, swaddled in a strawberry-looking wrapper? Yeah, me neither; but they’re my favorite, and they remind me of my great-grandparents (aka Nanny and Great-Grandpa) who I was privileged to know and live near as a kid.

Years ago, I discovered tea wasn’t half bad with sugar in it. Just a few months back, I learned a dressing of honey and cinnamon was how God intended for coffee to be enjoyed. Now you know, too. Keep it secret. Keep it safe.

One of the best gifts I ever received: I came home from work one difficult day to find Beth had dug up her old (very old) projector from her parents’ place, hooked it to her laptop, rearranged our small apartment living room where we rented at the time, and queued up The Fellowship of the Ring (extended edition, of course). Beth’s not a fan of Tolkien, but I’m a fan of hers.

I’ve always loved words, but it was Tolkien who helped me through them to see and love the world and the adventure of existence.

My Christian faith has taught me (continues to teach me) to love and cherish all kinds of life.

Malcolm Guite taught me to love poetry and reminded me of the raw power of language that Tolkien knew so well. I hope to be able to tell him so someday.

R. S. Thomas, Christian Wiman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are currently helping me to keep loving it all, which is also to say to keep wrestling, trying to understand, and allowing it all to be fully and completely beyond me, recognizing they are not things to be grasped and tucked in the pocket—not used. They are guides and walking sticks, not consumables.

In the spirit of conversation and living and wrestling and loving, I hope to publish a book of essays and poetry someday and am working toward that end. And now I’ve said it, spoken it out to the ether.

No—I’ve spoken it to you, friends, and shared my own hopes. What are some of yours?

And now a poem for all the little things that make us up—all our whens—and for taking the time to reflect on them in this wild and beautiful ride of a life we’re in.

In the Distance, I See

Originally published in The Habit Portfolio

Another miracle: me, weightless again. It only looks
like metal tossing us skyward—
the astute knows the spirit hefts all.

As we’re distanced from that to which we return
I remember. It is the fault
of the aeroplane to move so fast. No soul

was meant to. But its gift is the distancing,
if only for a flash offering a glimpse
of each and every one of our whens.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and some of your whens. You can comment below or message me directly. Let’s have a conversation.

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Thanks so much for reading! You honor me with your time.

I’ve been trying to see Advent, the whole season, like a great lung, throwing my mind at the image when I can. I want to understand, to really know with the whole of myself, how it is we can breathe ourselves out during Christmastide and pause, refusing then to draw our own stale selves back in, waiting instead for a wind not our own to reinhabit us—to provide the sweeter inhale we could not. Maybe it’s a posture I can carry outside the season as well.

“The earth is charged with the grandeur of God,” Hopkins tells us, and, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” I see this nowhere better than in snowfall. For all its potential for slick roads, whiteouts, and the stray wad hitting you smack in the face (but we all know there is no such thing as a “stray” snowball), I find nothing more peaceful, calming, deep-down fresh than heavy snow out the window, down the street, sprinkled on the shoulders and the upturned face. As if the spectacle weren’t enough to beg wonder, the stuff itself demands our quietude. Sound waves get trapped in all the little caverns between the flakes as they pile, looking for a way out, finding none. Snow eats sound.

It is in this silent cascade I have always heard God loudest, always felt his calming presence nearest. Or maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe the peace of the snow, for me, allows a more complete exhale with the lung of Advent in anticipation, allows me, like R. S. Thomas, to hold my breath like a cap in the hand as I’m struck again by that dear freshness whispering from deep in this world I so often ignore; echoed whispers. But echoed from where? Can I trace its source?

In those unexpected moments of transfiguration surely there is an advent and Christ comes to us.

— Malcolm Guite, from Waiting on the Word

I do not think Guite is saying we’ll always feel Christ’s nearness in such moments as these. Whether it’s snowfall, a good cheese, or the spark in a friend’s eye just before they smile, we may not be gobsmacked by God himself poking through. Not every time. But why not? I think Guite is saying we can, if only we keep our eyes and hearts peeled to the possibility of seeing him in even these everyday transfigurations.

As I open myself to seeing Christ in new places (for we’re reminded—Hopkins again—he plays in ten thousand), where might I see his fingerprints? Where does the world shimmer with the oils of his hands? If he is the Prime Whisper from which all the echoes come, if he is the breath moving the tops of trees as much as the mouths of babes, then like a tired lung I want to learn to better hale me out, hale him in. Or, to take the words of Carys Walsh in Frequencies of God, become more “surrendered to the divine humming in the wires.” Let it be so.

Advent on a Quiet Stoop

Originally published in the Clayjar Review

I stooped, cut, twisted a wealth 
of snowflakes, heavy in their joy.
This is progress.
The blessings fought, but gave
and tore into the air, 
and spun a dance,
kissed my face, and tuck-tumbled down
to their rest on white earth.

The night sighed.
I let my weapon down.

And now
from this quiet stoop I can see
the aurora’s embrace
of my neighbor-home, can hear
the white welkin’s whispers,
can know the soft peace 
of new winter’s night.

Over to you, kind reader. Where have you been most surprised—gobsmacked, even—to encounter Christ? If you recognize Advent, what have been some of your favorite ways to do so, to exhale and make new space in yourself? I feel new to the practice (and hope I always will), and would love to learn from you even as we hold our breath together for the season’s fulfillment.

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Somewhere in the middle of his Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes our field of experience as a vale surrounded by low, cloudy hills, from which streams trickle by and hint at even further sources. This is Plato’s cave with an English twist. He also warns

Where the spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom (were it only from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even with himself. No wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others.

I think Coleridge is right. And wrong. In a strange way, it seems we comprehend each other more and more in our incomprehensibility: We buy into and willingly perpetuate the increasingly popular incomprehensibilities, the prevailing mindsets, the same rote language of the age. In other words, we’re tempted (or maybe tempered) always to settle for the vale without giving a second thought.

I recently sat in on a webinar on being change-adept in this technological era of ours. “Those who don’t adopt fall behind,” was the supposed golden nugget I was offered in more fluff. “Learners will always be prepared for what comes, while the learnéd will only ever be prepared for a reality that no longer exists.” A clever and catchy turn of phrase. But while I get the sentiment here (and there’s certainly some truth to it: we don’t want to stagnate) it ignores the fact that the field of our experience is only a sliver of reality. There’s a whole world out there—not to mention a history—of which we are only a part and player. If Coleridge’s vale is made to be everything, we lose sight in an instant of the tangible and the spiritual implications of our actions, and of the music ringing beyond the far hills. Adapting as fast as we can cannot be a good unto itself. The future (the one we’re fed, as opposed to the one we create) cannot be the only book to read.

Peter Berkman, in “Machine Apocolypse,” Plough Quarterly issue 40, reminds us “Narcissus didn’t fall in love with himself… He fell in love, fatally, with an image of his own creation.” My God, give me any other fate than this. Pausing for a flash to gather with family and friends this weekend, I want to slow and consider where my constructs, my created images, may be playing too large a part in my unspoken list of loves. Is it possible I’ve let them take me over?

Malcolm Guite, in his “Must I disrupt my life with discipline?” prays to no one in particular—or perhaps to someone very particular—

…let me stammer through these nights
Making a fertile garden of my squalor
Where we can scatter seeds in spring and raise
Above the rhythm of our appetites
The strange quietus I had thought was love.

The poem of mine that follows was written in the midst of being spread thin, eaten up by the rushings and the mad “progress” of the days, wanting something deeper and richer to characterize my life. Something less like the quick-sweet we numb our thought with; something better able to “raise / … / The strange quietus I had thought was love.” I’d rather live from there.

Honey is a Promise

Originally published in The Clayjar Review’s Toil issue

I could use a good
stir about now. The top
and surface of things is
watery sweet, and sweet enough,
and it would be so

easy to dip it up, over,
and into the cup. But press in—
look more, I say. Jam
your spoon down deep-like
to the raw heart of things
and spin it up. Take nothing
less. 
          There—this

is what you’ve wanted 
and been waiting for—the fully body and velvet
promise of how many stings and salves
and all that stuck
to deepen the tasting,
every sip of your steeping days.

What does this poem stir you? I hope it's an encouragement as you consider the posture you want to live from.

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Thanks for your grace as I took some much-needed time in the whirl of things to breathe.

I now come from those woods refreshed and ready for a walk in these—here in the word-wood with you—and I’d like to circle back a bit, even as we continue forward.

I don’t particularly pride myself on choosing the lesser-used of one of the most easily confused English verb pairings for this newsletter. But then again, I love the name, and it makes great fodder for some word-delving. Pride recovered. I’ve written previously about the name Awaking Dragons and why I chose it, but I think it’s high time for a deep dive.

Awake. Repeat.

Occasionally I’ll have someone mention their appreciation of my latest Awakening Dragons post. Some feel bad if I slip the corrected awaking into my thanks, but I assure them (and you) the fault is entirely mine. After all, I chose the name. I feel like I’m on a regular schedule now of googling these verbs to remind myself, yet again, that Awaking Dragons is not an embarrassment to grammar and the grammar-sensitive everywhere. I did it again just this morning (as of the writing), and so I’d like to put the question to rest, once and for all. Or at least until the next panic sets in. Miriam-Webster tells me the verbs awake and awaken were already being confused in Old English, which means I’m fighting against centuries of linguistic slog by taking this on. I promise this won’t take quite so long to read.

If it needs to be said, these linguistic cousins come to us from the same ancestor: Proto-Indo-European (PIE) weg-, meaning “to be strong or lively.” (Fun fact, this same root—no pun intended—shows up in vegetable, which was an adjective before it was a noun.) It should come as no surprise then that awake and awaken follow a similar path of development linguistically, with usage apparently being the greatest differentiator between the two. Of course, they both mean “to rouse from sleep,” and both can be either be applied to an object or not, but (and herein lies the bane of this newsletter) usage tends to favor awaken when it comes to applying the action to someone or something. Yet I hope for some redemption.

Despite similarities, I find one important difference between these words as their meanings, like streams, have slowly (if only slightly) separated over history’s span. While both maintain the sense of origination, and a springing to life or coming into an understanding, awake alone (Old English awacian) can carry the sense of being or staying attentive, even going so far as to bear connotations of keeping watch. You could have been awaked or awakened, but having been so, you are only ever awake.

Let’s put it this way, if awakening is to spring into being, then awaking is the being itself, an active consciousness intensified by that prefix a- and made present and continuous by the suffix -ing. This is not a one-time thing. The continual flow of the future into the present requires renewing attention: rhythms of reorientation and watch-keeping. You might even say wakefulness.

This is where my own venture into the tangle of these words has left me, but if you find something different let’s talk, and learn from each other. I’m no expert—just a curious observer.

As I use it here, awaking is for that continued revivification, that drinking again (and again) from the well to be refreshed when the world beats us weary. Awaking Dragons is an experiment in divining meaning from the ordinary, questioning that which has become over-familiar in the course of our hectic lives, reorienting our loves toward the one toward whom all the signposts point. I find poetry a standup tool for the job, hence the poetic approach you find here. I’m also a bit of a word nut if you hadn’t gathered, and nothing strikes me as more over-familiar than our language and the way we justify our shallowness with it. If poetic explorations into language and meaning sound like your cup of tea, then I’m happy to pour. This is about learning to live humbly and well together. Awaking is to pursue fullness. Wholeness.

Wassailing

Wholeness. From cynics and skeptics to Christians and atheists and everyone in between, I dare to say wholeness is a hunger we share. Or should I say holiness? This might carry more religious baggage, but it hefts the same meaning.

It would be dangerous, I think, to call it a rule, but similar sounds in our language are often good clues that a relation might exist; and it certainly rings true in this case. Whole, health, holy, hale, and the Christmastide act of wassailing (which has nothing to do with sailing at all) come from a common PIE root for wholeness, wellness, soundness—the state of being untainted or uninjured. These are the pre-Christian meanings leading early translators of the Bible into English to adopt it for Latin sanctus (ultimately a ceremonial word), from which we get all kinds of blessings and consecrated things in Modern English.

If you’re interested, my “Triptych of a Cynic” hinges on the interplay between these Christian and pre-Christian meanings of wholeness & holiness. Thanks again to the Rabbit Room for publishing.

Rabbit Room Poetry

Triptych of a Cynic—Tyler Rogness

Triptych of a Cynic…

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2 years ago · 25 likes · 5 comments · The Rabbit Room

But there’s another adjacent word I’ve taken an interest in and that’s giving me some trouble: halo, that circular miracle of refraction around the sun or moon and thrown over the head of a saint in religious art. I was asked once where this word came from, and of course my mind went immediately to hal, that root of all those words relating to wholeness. It is a circle, after all; but strangely enough these words aren’t related.

Purportedly.

Multiple sources cite halo from the early Greek for a disk or something shaped like it (e.g. the sun, the moon, a shield, etc.), originally referring to the shape of or path around a threshing floor where oxen or slaves would thresh grain. But that’s where the thread stops, as far as I can find. “Probably” is used in numerous places to guess at where this word came from, but even those probablys go no further than the early Greek threshing floor, assuming the meaning for sanctity came later through its religious use.

I’m here to boldly offer another thought: Is it not possible the original sense of even the Greek word for a disk came from the early PIE root which also gives us holy, hale, and whole? We do share a language family, after all. Could the development not have happened the other way around, and heavenly bodies and threshing floors alike named by it because their shape resonated with the beating heard of the word? If this were true it wouldn’t matter whether halo’s first application to the thing backdropping a saint’s noggin was intentionally named for wholeness or simply its shape—the meaning would be there all along, waiting like stars in light-polluted skies to be seen again.

And then there were dragons…

So, what do halos have to do with Awaking Dragons? I’m glad you asked.

I’m certain your first thought when you saw the Awaking Dragons logo was, “That looks like a threshing floor.” Don’t try to convince me otherwise. Not much of a visual artist myself, Substack helped me through a few rounds of image generation before the right one showed up, completely unlooked for in a very real sense: I didn’t change much of my prompting, but suddenly I’d found it. Just to give you a sense of how different and truly unexpected this was, take a gander at a couple of the earliest images that nearly became the face of this here newsletter:

And of course, here’s where we are today:

I did not have halos and wholeness in mind when I began searching for a logo, but now I see how central it all is: The halo-esque backdrop acts as a boundary to the whirl at the center of which something dragon-like starts to take shape. What better visualization of poesy could there be than a becoming in the midst of a bounded chaos? And not just any becoming, but one of far grander and more terrifying and more beautiful significance than we always know what to do with. As we interrogate the pains and joys and wonders and mysteries of this world, should we expect to find anything less than that which is beyond ourselves?

I’ve gone on for some time now, so I’ll close for now with a nod both to the early West Saxons and to the rich legacy of that word holy.

Wes þu hāl, wes hāl, wassail, friends. Be whole.

Over to you, dear reader. What questions or thoughts does this stir in you? What is something you’ve seen, read, or experienced recently that jarred your attention loose from its slog, and awoke you again to wonder? If you’re needing such a “jarring loose,” check out the Clayjar Review’s newest issue on toil. I’m honored to have a piece featured there, which I hope you’ll enjoy; but I think you’ll find the whole work enriching.

There’s a horrible, beautiful tension to writing. The practice encourages the flow of ideas, and it’s oh, so satisfying to see connections synthesizing right before your eyes: what was internal made flesh. Fresh. The blank page can be daunting, but it can also be a friend—a sounding board filling up as the noise you throw at it turns slowly to music, and you start making sense of it all.

But there are times when no melody can be found. Put simply, we get tired, and to push and pry for a tune that won’t come feels like insanity. And in many ways it is. I’ve previously called this “fracking” a poem, forcing a thing which should be allowed space to become in its own time. Kind of like us.

So what to do when the heart needs a tune, but cannot hear one; a tuning, but all efforts to do so fail? I’m sure there are more answers here than one, but I’m learning (pronounced “struggling”) to accept the simplicity of silence and presence in moments like these. Despite what our culture would tell us, the fact is we don’t have to be productive all the time. We don’t always have to be at the top of our game. Crazy, I know. I’m preaching to myself here first and foremost, but I think some of the best work comes after rest and reorienting.

How are we to interrupt the mad flow of our lives and accept things—and our selves—as they are in the moment? Ironically, I once had a poem came out of this effort to breathe, and see again. I hope you enjoy it.

Presence

Originally published in The Habit Portfolio.

My chest is over-tight,
wound round and under
in pretzel knots
beneath the un-done day.
My posture wants a change:
fuller breaths are drawn
looking up. So breathe in
full. The air smells like
nothing. But maybe everything. Maybe

it’s the gray, dying daisies on the table,
the dust atop the noisy clock,
the lived-in-ness of the room 
its ticking fills
insisting upon my sense 
gentle waftings of home: a scent
so comfortable, familiar, friendly
I almost miss
the overwhelming love of it all.

But what about you, reader? What do you do when you’re in need of a retuning to where and when you are? I’d love to hear how you navigate these times of tension.

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*This poem was originally published in The Habit Portfolio, a showcase from the generous collaborations of The Habit membership. The online community exists to provide writerly resources and space for like-minded writers to give each other a little more courage, and friends, it’s all that and more.

The first installment of The Habit Portfolio’s newest issue, Road Trips and Other Journeys, went live this week. Check it out!

Driving home on an evening last summer I was put at considerable risk of crashing my car when I was distracted by a litany of little incandescents, tongues of fire hovering over yard after yard. I thought of my own, from which I’d so recently been plucking those wicks as nuisances. There would be no revelations under my watch.

On that drive I was reminded to look again for those things wanting fresh grace, and a reconsideration. Even as I write this, people come to mind whom I’ve written off, relegated as weeds in my life. It’s a harsh word, but an honest one. Perhaps I’m in need of fresh grace myself if I can think such thoughts.

Dandelions are notorious for domination, and are expert at reseeding. But far from the obnoxious-for-the-sake-of-it things I’d first considered them, the little yellow things can actually be a sign of poor soil quality. The blooms can root in places more tender things can’t, and their long taproot can aerate poor soil to allow more nutrients to flow in. If I look around and see nothing but weeds, perhaps it’s my soul—not my yard—that needs work.

I hope you and I, reader, can learn to reconsider our weeds together, and that before plucking them entirely we might learn to see something holy staring back at us.

We Call them Weeds

Originally published in the Amethyst Review.

This is whence yellow is named,
this the hue by which all gold measured:
fair maiden, standing tip-toe tall in the green—
earthed flicker of heaven’s flame.

And then, of a sudden burst soft and cloud-
pale in wisdom’s white: thus impaled 
by the last happy beams of the red west,
lit pure like a candle in its flashing death.

Love-seeds scatter on the wind; find
their given hold; take at a prayer’s pace.
And as the prairie ever tells, all
shall bloom which love has sown.

It was in ignorance I called them weeds;
though were my life but half as bright as these,
just think how sweet would be the legacy.

I’d like to think I’m not alone in feeling the pressure of our productivity-mad culture on my creative endeavors. Poetry—and I think I can speak for creative work more generally here—is notably grounded in the practice of slowing down to notice what’s going on inside and outside the self. Yet societal noise would have no end to the output, no rest for the wicked (nor the attentive). For anyone tracking with me, whether you’re a writer, painter, clay-shaper, or simply just someone trying to stay human amidst the whirlwind, you know how this pressure can suck the life straight out of even good things.

Ironically, it was out of a similar reflection that my poem “Night Sky from 912” was born. Though it is an irony, it’s been a helpful touchstone to go back to when I’m feeling that pressure to produce instead of a true and pure desire to see. More to come on that later.

Nine-twelve is a prime and beautiful campsite on Sawbill Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, one of my favorite places on earth. The site is perched on a rocky outcropping commanding a wide southwestern view of the Lake and nearby islands, and on clear nights, a stunning view of more stars than God showed Abraham. The place demands reverence, and in return gifts a wonderful sense of smallness. There are more poems waiting to be mined in the BWCA than all the natural resources industrial giants could ever frack or plunder from the place. Here’s another I found there. Yet if I’m not careful, I could (and do) easily fall prey to that draw to production, fracking half-hearted poems from the experience instead of allowing them to come to me, or not. And with which mindset will I approach life? It was in a decided attempt to shift toward the latter that this poem was written.

Night Sky from 912

Originally published in the Amethyst Review.

Open like the evening, heart, in wordless wonder:
     mark the whirling earth who bears
          still waters; how still
     the stars recall their dance—not
          a misstep, no mistakes—
     but every one in perfect place
          as painted
     on their velvet bed.

I rest my head below the bear, and hers—
      a stranger here— 
and ember down with our chariot star.
Let there be night, my restless soul. 
     Break open like the even.

“Wordless wonder.” Sometimes, that should be enough. More often than not, it is. Here’s to more and more (and more) pausing amidst the chaos—the never-ending demands to produce—to really see what’s going on inside and around us. Here’s to feeling wonderfully small, and to taking more opportunities to “break open like the even” and mark our place in this wide, grand story we find ourselves a part of.

Growing up in a Baptist church, it didn’t take me long to form an opinion on transubstantiation—the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist—and on adherence (not to mention adherents) to the idea. It’s amazing how little of a push we need to form judgments of others; amazing how long those can last. This is no comment on the church or tradition I grew up in, but an observation of my own tendencies as a human being.

I don’t write this to convince you (or myself) any which way on this particular dogma. I write instead to recognize the insatiable hunger for presence we bear as flesh-and-blood stamps of a relational God. A text message only goes so far to tell us about a person’s tone (hint: it’s not far). A written letter only gives the idea of the company of another—a beautiful and possibly deep one, but still only the idea. Even rich media like conference calling can deliver no more than the illusion of nearness. What we want is presence, a communion or companionship (literally “with-breading,” from Latin com- “with,” and pane “bread”), a guide through our joys and sorrows and losses and all the little things that make us smile. As Christian Wiman says, “The revelation we want—or at any rate the revelation we need—is not ultimate, but intimate.”1 The ultimate does not change us until it becomes intimate, until we encounter it in the “fullness of time” which is a moment.

I think that’s why ’s poem “Say It’s More than Symbol” strikes such a chord in me. Not because I believe in transubstantiation and want her and others to believe in it too, but markedly because, like her, I don’t. Yet I have that gnawing, human longing for presence. If the Baptist-child-me was convinced there could be no such miracle at play, I sit here now not caring so much whether the child adopted a particular belief of a particular part of the Church, but more that the child was open to seeing Christ in the bread and the wine and not behind it only. I sit here caring that the Baptist-child-me, who is still a part of me, would be more open to seeing Christ in everything.

Say It’s More than Symbol

A Practicing Protestant Yearns for the Sacraments*

by Lee S. Kohman

Holy Communion—
          blessed boon
                    for the breaking

                              and broken,
                    for the hungering
          for every tongue longing
to touch and

 

          taste

 

to feel
          even for a fleeting moment
                    the physicality of unseen union—

 

          the imperceptible

 

                    plated, then placed
          under fleshy
palate roofs.

 

Christ clothed in crust of skin,
     meet me

 

          in my mouth.

 

Slake me by divine wine;
                    nourish the ache

                    gnawing to know
beyond symbol or creed:

Your body present.
                    Your life poured into me.

Lee has a deep and amicable friendship with spacing. All kidding aside, she has a knack for using the empty space of a (web)page to help guide a reading, and a sinking into the language at play. If you skimmed her poem just now, I’d encourage you to go back over it again, but slower, allowing those white spaces to lead you to the particular words and breaths—the sights and vistas—the piece has to offer. Pray the poem.

In the first few lines we’re invited into the familiarity of Holy Communion (and no doubt all of us are picturing some different iteration of this: paper-flavored crackers and Welch’s; wine and fresh bread; a plate passed around with the elements; everybody drinking out of the same medieval flagon as though germs were never a thing). Lee brings us together and settles us gently into these images by comfortably recycling sounds in “blessed boon / for the breaking.” Immediately the mind recalls the practice of “breaking bread” with another—or again, with-breading—the sharing of that which sustains. But even so early on Lee turns a meaning on us, and it is not only the bread but we ourselves who are broken. We not only break and share the bread, but having been broken ourselves, receive.

I once mistakenly took Communion at a Lutheran church I was visiting only later to learn how scandalous this was. In my defense, no one stopped me, and the pastor still served the sacrament. In a similarly gracious act, Lee offers us line after unexpected line of prayers and new perspective, the “physicality of unseen union” itself coming to us on the Communion plate, whence we tuck “Christ clothed in crust of skin” himself “under [our] fleshy / palate roofs.” There’s a wonderful play between the exalted and the earthy—between the divine and the mundane—in this poem. A perfect picture of what we practice when we take Communion: dust participating in a divine hope. An incarnationality.

I’ve spent a severely unhealthy amount of my life wanting and working to be unequivocally right. I’m still recovering. As George MacDonald’s Lilith knows, it’s difficult to relax a clenched fist, but I’m learning to let go a little more every day. And a little more. Not to toss my beliefs to the wind willy-nilly, mind you, but to hold them openly and humbly so they and I can grow branches and roots (which is difficult in the stuffy space between palm and fingers) and so they look less and less like violence to others, more like invitations. Thanks for your patience with me even as I do so here.

As Lee’s excellent work here shows, poetry is a new lens: a willingness to consider something from a new angle. Sometimes this leads to seismic shifts in the heart; other times to a refreshment of established beliefs, a kind of stirring the soil to allow new air and light in. And if we’re open to that, we may just find Christ where we least expected him, or chose not to see him before.

I don’t believe in transubstantiation, but I hope those that do will forgive me that. Here is our common ground: Like you, I’m hungry to know, “even for a fleeting moment / the physicality of unseen union,” I have a deep “gnawing to know / beyond symbol or creed / [Christ’s] body present. / [His] life poured into me.”

I believe we can commune over that much and more, together “nourish[ing] the ache” and leaning across whatever table we might share to whisper to one another, “Say it’s more than symbol.”

is one of the many talented poets featured in the recently released Habitations, Vol. II, a collection of the generous work of The Habitation Poetry Collective. I commend the book to you.

Now over to you, dear reader. What does this poem stir in you? What lines stand out and stick with you?

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Chasing a Curiosity

Before being voted “most likely to join the military” at my pacifist, Mennonite high school (read into that what you will), I had the opportunity to visit the truly peaceful grounds of a Benedictine monastery. I wish I could tell you about the deep, spiritual experience it was to be there, how the stillness of the place struck a chord in me that’s resonated since. In actuality, great student that I was, I remember only two things about our time: the communion-flavored grape juice we had at lunch and the following conversation.

A few of the monks had graciously lent their time, showing us around and teaching us about the monastic life. “Ora et labora,” we were told, was the sum of it all: prayer and work, balanced. They went on to describe their practices for deepening the faith and interceding for their surrounding community, but I was already stuck, left in the dust with a curiosity. I raised my hand.

“The roots are the same,” I pointed out.

“What?” said the good friar.

“The word ‘ora’ meaning ‘prayer’ is the suffix of ‘labora’ meaning ‘work,’” I said. “Why is that?”

Silence. Then a stutter. “It’s just—” he began. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just ‘ora et labora’: prayer and work.”

I didn’t buy it. Still don’t as a matter of fact. I’ll go so far as to say I wouldn’t believe the holy man even if these Latin sound-a-likes were only so by sheer chance.

What I mean is this: I don’t agree with the statement, “it doesn’t mean anything.” Words have depth to them, entire worlds holed up in their cores, and I’d rather break the shell to see what’s inside than take them for granted.

Words matter.

In Owen Barfield’s History in English Words, the Inkling chronicles the tendency toward “internalization” in Western language and thought. It’s fascinating to see, in words alone, shifts in consciousness over time toward the individual and away from community; away from integration and into the arms of reductionism; praising comprehension, foregoing apprehension.

All this is to say again that words matter. They shape the way we think. Remember. Live. And it doesn’t take a long look around to see the ways that “internalization” has shaped our perception of the meaning of our comings and goings.

I don’t mean to level any blame at the good monks we visited that day. I simply had to look elsewhere to find the answers I sought. And while ora et labora may not have any special significance for my life today (I never did join the Benedictines, Mennonites, or military), what does is whether I go about slinging worlds of meaning left and right without a second thought. Someone might just get hurt; or maybe worse, kept from seeing what’s shining beneath the surface of things: distracted by the rote of our busy lives and language.

“Utter words,” says philosopher Martin Buber, “as though heaven were opened in them and…as though you had entered the word.”1 If there are worlds in our words, their each and every utterance is an unfolding meaning we step into, co-creating it as we do.

If we are to realize — in the fullest sense of the word — that “all matter is radiant of spiritual meaning,”2 we’ll often need new language for the task, which is to say new and renewing perspective. This is a driving reason I’ve come to appreciate poetry more in the last handful of years (thanks for the kickstart, Malcolm Guite) and find even dead languages fascinating. There’s nothing wrong (and a lot of good) in having my assumptions challenged and the ground under my feet shaken a bit from time to time. The more the better, I say.

Come to think of it, these Latinates — courtesy of our kind, Benedictine hosts — may have plenty of significance for my life today after all.

Breaking the Shell

Interestingly enough, I haven’t found any indication these words are truly connected. Following an etymology of labora back to Proto-Indo-European ultimately accounts only for the “lab” in the word: something taken or gained.3 This might just leave room for a potential combination of roots — perhaps with one such as, oh, I don’t know…ora: of the mouth.4

Please note: there may not be a relation here. I’m not trained for this arena by any stretch of the imagination. I’m an amateur through and through. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Ora refers to the mouth (or in the case of our Benedictine slogan, what comes from it),5 and lab-ora refers to what is taken for the mouth, or the means to take for the mouth: exempli gratia, to labor.6 Food for thought.

For those bearing with this etymology, then, one could interpret the roots of ora et labora as “what the mouth produces, and what it consumes.” And that has plenty to bear on my life, especially considering Barfield and Buber. While “prayer and work” can be watered down to dry practice (been there), I think there’s something deeper going on here with these words.

First, what is taken for the mouth; consumed. What narratives do I give credence to? Are they centered on my own navel-gazing realities, meanings, desires, and perspective? Or are they stories of mystery and connection with others, the world, and the Reality that surrounds me and of which I am only a part and player?

And then there’s ora: what is produced. Are my language and living subtle and deep, rich and dangerous, pregnant and healing to those in my life? And what about to myself, who must step into the meanings that come from my mouth? Will I be known as trite, precise, and busy, my words as reduced and empty? Meaningless? Shallow?

I land on different sides of these questions every day, but I hope and strive to know the worlds I create with my words leave a little room for wondering and the wondrous, for re-humanization and community and being known, and for more grace in my language and living, which is to say in my ora et labora. Perhaps this is the heart of its Benedictine sister-phrase, laborare est orare: work become prayer. Our rote become poetry. Life become living.

Here’s to more of it for all of us.

Last month I confessed my previously tenuous relationship with free verse poetry. This was still in full swing when, a few years ago, I joined the then newly-created Habitation poetry group — a branch off the great tree of The Habit membership — first joined and found myself among the likes of such wordsmiths as Joy E. S. Manning. I was immediately hesitant. What had I gotten myself into?

Something wonderful, it turns out. Not only have these people made me a better writer, but in doing so they’ve made me a better person: celebrating my successes, meeting my vulnerability with tenderness, and coming alongside me in my creating. My best poems have their fingerprints on them, and I’ve learned so much from their work.

It was Owen Barfield who gave me the new framework for understanding the spiritual component within poetry and prose alike — poesy — which works itself into our preconceived ideas, planting beautiful things in their place. It was in Joy Manning’s poetry I first experienced it.

Even though it was in free verse.

At Night on I-95

by Joy E. S. Manning

Used by permission of the author.

Night falls on these eight lanes
where traffic congregates at all hours.
Stripes, color-sorted by their course and aim,
glow red and white streams that wander
up and down the incline.

Bowled like a gleaming cherry, I stare
as white-light pairs spill down the heights,
making progress that contrasts
with my red-light northward pack,
now at a stand-still.
Flashes like crimson fireflies flicker
here and there to signal new ground
gained, and we inchworm forward
for a yard, then halt again.

Above, the charcoal sky splotches haze
that black treetops tease with their
sway to the tune of the evening breeze
while the lights ribbon and sparkle in
a December display. I sigh.
The edge and aggravation escape
my throat and slip out the open sunroof
window to disperse and blow away
in the chill, brushed to oblivion
by the trees' play.

I trace the stagnant red-light line
and watch it disappear on the dark horizon
with my desired destination
and all my design…
I raise my head to the darkness, a smokey
cloud curtain slides past,
the vast blue-black sky appears
and a crescent moon is revealed.
She beams constant her reflected light
and winks at my uplifted face.

Full disclosure: my first time through this poem was a haughty one, and had me asking all the familiar questions. Isn’t this just obscure prose? Are we just dressing up a traffic jam? But such quick judgments are where my ignorance shines most (in)glorious. That was my first read. It was on the second I began to see that in tackling the spiritual exhaustion of being stuck in traffic, Joy offers us the opportunity to be transformed along with this drudgery, if only we’ll set our preconceived notions aside and accept it.

From the first we have the all-to-familiar sight of an endless sea of tail and headlights into which our designs and hopes disappear. And doesn’t this at times speak to the flow of our lives in general? “Stuck in traffic” — everyone trying to get ahead, but with no real progress being made — feels like an apt description of many a day.

But even here at the outset of the poem there is already a transformation at work. The flow (or lack of it) is a stream, which could at once be the never-ending and grueling line that it is or a peaceful rivulet. And with the language of water in play, opportunities for new sight arrive on the scene as well. The white line of progress in the opposite direction both mocks and has the potential to “spill down the heights” like some raging baptism. But how will we interpret this scene, or our own “traffic jams”? It is difficult to accept a renewal of sight when we are at a stand still and facing frustrated plans.

But then again, maybe that’s when we most need it.

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However challenging, and however frustrating the “inchworming” down the highway (or through life) the poet cannot help but see fireflies in the taillights, dancing over the river. And so our hearts — still very much aware of the drudge of traffic and all it signifies — are slowly lifted skyward with the poet’s gaze where the clouds part to reveal a “vast blue-black sky.” What had felt like a claustrophobic, out-to-get-us-world is unveiled as the deep, wide wonder it is. There is a kindness Joy employs here, and instead of an “I told you so” embedded in the revelation, it only sweeps our “edge and aggravation…to oblivion” and offers us a gentle wink: a reminder, and a kind of knowing, friendly assurance that beyond our own narrow designs is a greater one.

What stands out to you from Joy’s poem? How do you see it transforming your own experiences of traffic, both real and otherwise? Do you have a favorite line?

I hope you see your “edge and aggravation[s]…brushed to oblivion / by the trees’ play,” and that you’re encouraged in the midst of your own frustrated designs to “raise [your] head to the darkness” and “the vast blue-black sky” for a wink. Sometimes, it takes a second read — a pause, a willingness to see something or someone from a new angle — for us to see the magic at play in the world. And it is at play.

Even in a traffic jam.

I never really liked tea. Never, that is, until the fateful day it dawned on me I could drink my tea with sugar in it. (It’s not as obvious as it might seem.) My world was revolutionized, turned upside down. I felt like I was really seeing things for the first time, and I haven’t looked back. Odd as it may sound, my experience with poetry has been much the same.

Go with me on this one.

Back in school I can remember feeling at once there was something good and worth savoring within the verse, and also that it would always be just out of my reach no matter how hard I tried. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for it. Like a good and sweeping story, I wanted to get poetry—wanted to be able to appreciate the weight of the words, to taste their depths and let them sink into me. Or maybe I wanted to sink into them. In any case I didn’t want to feel like a dunce for not smelling what everyone else was stepping in. Steeping in. But there always seemed to be something in the way. Now, I can’t be sure, but I think it was the free verse.

I get the sense I’m not really with the times when I say this, but unstructured poetry hasn’t always been my cup of tea. Call me an old soul if you will, but know you’re not the first to say so.

“Isn’t free verse just obscure prose?” I’d have previously asked. “How can we call something poetry if it doesn’t follow a poetic structure?”

Taking for granted words have their own inherent rhythm, there are admittedly times I still struggle through modern verse, looking for an overarching structure that just isn’t there, looking for some kind of guide to lead me through the thoughts and images. I’ve appreciated the challenge of writing within bounds of an established poetic structure, and admire the ability of others who do this well. The constraints themselves can lend their own meaning and power to a work, and encourage intentional word choice and diction. To be fair though, structured verse has also been known to tease the trite from the pen, encouraging a rhyme instead of the right words to convey an image or thought. When I began to see this in my own writing, I found I needed a new framework for understanding poetry—needed to expand my heart and allow language to rule over my expectations.

So as one does in such conundrums, I consulted the Inklings. Owen Barfield’s sharp little punch of a book Poetic Diction brilliantly broke poetry free from my verse trappings, and as a result broke prose from non-verse. In essence, Barfield suggests poetry is the use of language (by way of metaphor, archaism, and strangeness among other tactics) to help reader and writer alike see the subject matter afresh, and to resurrect a fuller meaning from the increasing over-precision of our modern language. In other words, poetry is language imaginatively employed to redress an imbalance between reason and intuition, the former of which runs rampant and amok in our technologically-attuned Western psyche. As Barfield puts it, “It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres.”1

To “catch for a moment the music of the turning spheres,” to convey it to another, to let it resonate in your own heart—that is poetry, whatever it looks like on the page.

Poetry, which I had previously consigned to structured verse, can be either poetic or prosaic. Non-verse literature, so often called prose, can be either prosaic or poetic. My world was turned upside down. The difference here is not structural but spiritual, affecting a change in consciousness and encouraging fresh perspective. This spiritual component, which Mr. Barfield calls poesy, sounds akin to J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of the purpose of fantasy literature: to help us “clean our windows” and to rescue the world around us from “the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.”2 Poesy, it would seem, knows no genre.

The school-age me didn’t dislike poetry for its own sake, but because I could not (or would not) at the time see the spiritual and imaginative component in it. For me, this took a slowing down and an attentiveness I was not used to practicing. It may be a bit obnoxious to our busy selves, but like enjoying a good cup of tea, we’re meant to slow down and taste—no, taste—poetry and allow it to waft images and meaning and thought to us like a sweet herbal steam. And while an avid reader may feel a resistance to even metered verse (“I’m just not interested in ‘poetry’”), it may well be they have always fostered a love for the poetic—for poesy—without realizing it. I know I did.

Like sugar bringing out the flavor in my favorite steep, poesy in both poetry and prose can open our eyes and hearts to see that “all matter is radiant of spiritual meaning.”3

This reframing has helped me enjoy reading and writing poetry more (and more broadly) and to be willing to set my expectations aside, pay attention, and let the words reveal their own weight to me. And like appreciating a good tea, I find that’s what a lot of reading and writing comes to: slowing down, paying attention, savoring. And sharing.

Of course, this all falls apart if you prefer your tea without sugar, but we won’t get into that.

And what about you, dear reader? Do you prefer your tea with or without sugar? Maybe coffee’s your jam?

What has made it difficult for you to engage with poetry? What non-poetry works do you find particularly poetic or perspective-shattering?

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Goings

As a dad, one of my all-time favorite things in the world is the old “fee fi fo fum” routine, which sends the heebie-jeebies up my kids’ spines and sets them squealing and scurrying across the room. Coming in close second are the funny or unexpected things my kids say.

My four-year-old, wont to describe things in such words as gem-ish and who isn’t convinced there’s a difference between penguins and pangolins, recently whipped out the word cornucopia. A couple weeks ago, in asking for some tea in the “Caribou cup” (let’s hear it from my Caribou Coffee fans) he politely requested with a searching stutter the “caboose mug.” Even more common than these endearing foibles (and just as fun) is his excited use of go’ed to tell a tale of some exciting happening he attended. Usually I don’t correct his sweet mispronunciations because it just feels wrong to spoil such wonderful naivety. In the last case, it’s not just a feeling. Went, after all, isn’t the past tense of go.

Sure, went has thoroughly taken root in this particular place — donned this grammatical role — but it’s an invasive species so to speak, having slithered and, well, went its way over from its native wend. Digging a little deeper, the Scots gaed comes up as the closest modern thing we have to the “indigenous” past tense of go.1 My son, relying on all the linguistic instincts he’s been able to scavenge in four years, and in the face of all the times he’s actually heard the rest of the family say went, was able to more or less appropriately inflect the word go to tell us something cool about his day.

I, for one, think that’s pretty neat.

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Comings

Something new from Awaking Dragons

In mid-most of the word-wood is a path
That leads back to the springs of truth in speech.

— Malcom Guite, from “De Magistro”2

I think I’ve always been a bit of a word nut, to some extent. I don’t pretend to have some kind of mind-shattering vocabulary (that facade would soon fail), but I like taking the mile plunge with the inch I have and pulling on dangling threads like a child with a sweater. I’ve always liked stumbling on a new word and have learned to love their unraveling as well.

As a poet, finding the right word to convey a meaning can pull a flailing piece off its face, make a decent piece good, and might even bring a good piece into the realm of the “not too shabby.” At the very least (and more importantly) it can set things back on track, back to saying something the heart can hear. The right word can soothe an ache, plant seeds in the heart, heal.

As a person, this can be the difference between fostering connection or misunderstanding, clinging to reality or apprehending Reality, praising knowledge or courting wisdom. You might think I exaggerate, but consider the serpent’s words to Eve, and the twisted meanings that have since shaped our world.

We create worlds with our words, too.

There’s a mystery at play when we speak, a process inside us that, over in a flash, doesn’t tend to strike us for the wonder it is. An experience, a feeling, a meaning translated by the imagination into sound or symbol, this somehow intelligible to another who attempts (and that’s key) to un-translate back into the realm of ideas and meaning: that is a word. And there are webs and webs and oceans more of these words that have crashed over one another, usurped and killed and carried and loved one another over the centuries to make up what we’d now like to think is our static language and superior, modern ideas. I wish I’d have come across the term “chronological snobbery” sooner than I did.3

I’d have previously told you words have one meaning, and only one. What are dictionaries for, after all? And laws? Textbooks? I think I was wrong. I may have been right to a certain degree, but I’ve come to think I was still off the mark.

I’m not an expert in this field, not a linguist. I have no credentials to share with you. But I have questions, curiosities, and the gumption to pursue them. I believe that when questions are asked, answers turn up, if slowly.

By heading Into the Word Wood, a child and focused branch (though still very much a part) of Awaking Dragons, I hope to spend some time intermittently meandering, wending along the “path / That leads back to the springs of truth in speech,” exploring words and their depths with what tools I have and connections I can make.

I hope you’ll come along with me. Let’s see where this path goes.

What are some of your favorite words, and why? How about your least favorite?

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I fell in love with the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in 2021, and most of my too-few trips since have been to just one lake. But what a lake! If my research is correct, Saganaga is the largest and deepest in the Boundary Waters, and the only one that has not had its depths fully mapped. On first rowing out from Sea Gull River into the great wet expanse, Clark Island in the distance I was stunned, all of sudden aware of my own smallness — my unworthiness to be right smack in the heart of such grand and wasteful beauty. Who was I to come before the maker of all this?

The question haunted me through my first visit there as I read in my tent bits of Sir John Davies’ “Nosce Teipsum” (lovingly unpacked in Malcolm Guite’s Faith, Hope, and Poetry, which I’d stowed), a sprawling poem in which Davies discusses the nature of the soul. If we are to know truth, he claims, we first need to know and face ourselves: to both come to grips with our fallenness and see the “heavenly treasure in so weak a chest” we bear. But — and this is the kicker — a divine light is required to see either of these rightly.

The following stanza I found particularly moving:

Oh Light which mak’st the light, which makes the day!
Which set’st the eye without, and mind within;
Lighten my spirit with one clear heavenly ray,
Which now to view itself doth first begin.

— Sir John Davies, “Nosce Teipsum,” lines 201-4

But I read this after Saganaga had swallowed the sun, and night was thick. This stanza of Davies’ and the indescribable stillness of the resting lake were the impetus to the prayer that eventually became “On Unfamiliar Shores.”

While I never would have anticipated sharing this poem at Christmastime, it seems fitting a prayer to be illumined and renewed by Christ’s light should come when we remember the time in our history God took on flesh and broke into our world, striking right down into our mess to lift us out. I love the way Anne Ridler puts it: “Christmas declares the glory of the flesh.”1 I think she and Davies would have made good friends.

I share this with a hearty Merry Christmas to you and yours.

On Unfamiliar Shores

After the style of Sir John Davies.

Oh Peace which makes the peace which holds the night 
     In gentle arms of deep, warm dark, you tend
The water, pines, the wing in dreams of flight;
     But I, sad pilgrim, fear I may offend.

Oh Peace which weaves a blanket over brightness,
     In ignorance I've tripped into your ken.
Great Still, forgive! and limn me in your likeness.
     Come, sound these depths, and pray, remake me then.

What mystery of mysteries below,
     As great, uncharted depths of inland sea — 
What hidden glories would their treasure show
     Were I to turn my eyes my soul to see?

I plunge beneath the surface of my deep — 
     But plumb nor fathom for the shadow find.
And how am I within my soul to keep
     Where ever all my faults beswell the mind?

Oh Peace which makes the peace which makes the night —
     Light which makes the light which makes the day —
Come, rend these shadows with one ray of sight,
     And deep within this darkness make a way.

What stood out to you from this poem? How do you find quiet enough during this time of year to remember and re-anticipate the “Light which makes the light which makes the day”? I would love to hear from you.

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To bear new life or learn to live is an exacting joy.

— Anne Ridler from “Christmas and the Common Birth”

Friends, I promised you a poem. Here it is.

Despite the title, “Summertide Rhythms” has a lot to do with winter. “Life becomes” in summer: joy springs, birds sing, and boughs wake, but they only do so from what was once “the formless dust” and wintry crust; and from the ashes of trials. In my own challenges I tend to look for a quick ticket out, neglecting the fact seasons of wintering can themselves produce growth, and are even necessary for it. A walk on the brink of physical summer and personal winter reminded me of this truth, and so I share this poem on the brink of physical winter to encourage personal summering; or at very least the expectation of it, which can be its own kind of healing.

I’ll spend a brief moment on the poetic structure here. The golden shovel is a form which interacts with another work, often a phrase or a line from another poem which can be read down the right-hand side of the new poem. Do so here and you’ll find Anne Ridler’s quote above adding its own connotations to “Summertide Rhythms.” Learning to live is certainly “an exacting joy.” “The whole self must waken,” she goes on to say: it demands something from us, requires we put skin in the game to anticipate and work toward “summertide rhythms” even if winter is our current lot. As we head into another beautiful Christmastide, be reminded of the “summer glowing in winter’s breast” and waiting, waiting for the ground to thaw. There is life in you, even now.

Summertide Rhythms

Originally published in The Habit Portfolio.

I took the long, the thoughtful way to
the corner, and the park there. Hearts bear
those things too heavy for hands; but new
rhythms wait: they are found things, and to be sought. Life
becomes, blooming from the formless dust or
greening, grinning from woken boughs to learn
again — for so we must — to
know afresh: the summer glows in winter’s breast. A live
and living thing, throbbing with expectancy is
she. — On the long way to the park I see an
answer-expectant, breath-holding, love-exacting,
springing-from-the-ashes joy.

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Hello everyone!

I have a poem to share with you, but it’ll have to wait. First, a little housekeeping.

I’ll start by taking a moment to thank you for reading Awaking Dragons. To say it means a lot would be a gross understatement.

You may notice things look a little different around here, and I’m here to assure you panic is not necessary. I’ve changed the platform Awaking Dragons lives on in the hopes it will be both easier for me to manage and easer for you to interact with. Here are some highlights for you:

• You can now read newsletters directly as email.

• If you prefer reading online, you can still do so at awakingdragons.com.

• Going online will allow you to easily like, comment on, and share posts you enjoyed.

• As this site now lives on Substack, you can get the Substack app to engage with Awaking Dragons and the great writing of others on the platform. (May I recommend Ekstasis Magazine’s thought-provoking newsletter?)

  

  Get more from Tyler Rogness in the Substack app

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All in all, you can interact with Awaking Dragons as you always have, or you can tinker with some of the bells and whistles Substack offers. But don’t let me bore you with details. Happy reading!

P.S. Oh, and that poem I promised? Keep your eyes peeled (and emails from Substack out of your spam folder). Until then, you can…

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Revisit the Archive

Hello, reader. It’s been a while, and for reasons I’ll address.

This poem began as a few short lines subverting the state of mind I was in at the time of writing. I was tired of courting dreams only to find no space for realizing them. I was tired of running into walls, tired of mental somersaults. Tired of being tired. Writing these words didn’t solve the problems I found myself against, but it did reframe them. I’ll highlight just a few.

It’s truly obnoxious how easy it is to focus on the negative — to live in a scarcity mindset and see only the roadblocks to accomplishing everything on my all-too-long list of to-do’s. It’s far easier to live like this than see the abundance around. New sight is needed here. If I look within and see the scars of the years, they may very well bring old pains and hurts to mind. But if they do, they must also “remind of healing,” for the blood no longer flows. If my heart aches with the passing of time or a particular loss in my life, that keening reveals a love — a precious thing — that wants tending just as much as any surfacing sadness.

The young and adventurous soul in me would like to glorify and encourage itself with images of knighthood in this chaotic world, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to associate with the “weak [in need of] lifting up”; or at least to hold one image in each hand, and balance the two. Far from the stout picture of knighthood, I can still use my own “thrownness” — my experiences, my strengths, and yes, my weaknesses too — to lift others up. But I am also in need of being lifted myself and helped along by others who are strong where I lack.

Plug and play your own experiences as you read these lines.

The title itself here has been through a few changes, but I landed on “Breadcrumbs” because like Hansel and Grettel’s trail, these lines help me to better see where I’ve been. And that gives me a confidence in continuing forward.

I’ve avoided posting this piece here because I haven’t felt like it’s my best work. I’m deciding in the posting that that really doesn’t matter much. It represents a part of my story, and I think that’s enough.

I hope you enjoy, and that even just a piece of this might be a reminder — a breadcrumb — you can carry along on your way.

Breadcrumbs

Originally published in the Agape Review.

Drink deep my soul: remember this
	For nourishing your shoots —
That winter, not the springtime, is
	For deepening the roots;

That scars remind of healing,
	And keening carries love;
And knighthood is for kneeling,
	The weak for lifting up.

The gold is proved by fire,
	And hope through darkest night.
From waiting comes desire;
	From out the shadows, light.

The phoenix rises from the ash
	To break her banking crust,
And ours is an infinite path:
	Eternity from dust.

Pick up your staff, take up your mat
	And bend your will to walk;
And may flowers bloom in footsteps that
	You tread within the dark.

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The following is a benediction I wrote for the 2022 “With a Grateful Heart” event at my church. Gratitude being the central theme, I wanted to share it with you all as well considering the approaching Thanksgiving holiday. I hope it enriches the way you see yourself and your endeavors, and those others around you in the coming days and months.

A Benediction of Gratitude for Creation and Creativity

We are created in the image of a Creator, and His imagination echoes through ours. Every act of creativity performed in this knowledge can also be an act of gratitude. We approach the formless clay, the canvas, the empty page, and our hearts whisper a prayer that we can make something beautiful. Something meaningful. Something resonant. In hope and gratitude we work and wait.

It is amazing to hear even secular artists talk about the independent life their work has, describing it often as something separate from their original intentions. We believe and trust this independent life is the spirit of God hovering over the waters of our endeavors, partnering with us to shape our work.

All the same, the creative process can be a painful one when our results are not what we had hoped for, or when they are not appreciated by others for the value we see in them. Yet we persevere in gratitude, thankful for the image in which we have been created and for our unique expression of it. We hone our craft, taking our gifts and working them in such a way as to be a gift in return — an act of worship in itself — to the divine Giver.

More than that, we persevere through the chaos and the pain and the loss and the suffering in this world in gratitude, thankful for the wonders around us that stir our hearts to longing for the coming kingdom: the kingdom we can begin to recognize even now. We approach the formless clay, the canvas, the empty page in faith — and in gratitude. We create so that we might bring the light of more beauty into the darkness in our world.

Let us continue on in our endeavors in thankfulness to our Creator for making us in his image, and for the beauty He’s crammed into this world to shake the soil of our hearts loose, making them ripe for planting the seeds of his kingdom.

I am truly grateful you’ve chosen to stop by here, if only briefly, and my hope as always is you would leave encouraged. Happy Thanksgiving.

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