Through Luscious Fields
to barren roads and trusting the path anyway
Issue #31/ Welcome to Good and Beautiful Things, thanks so much for joining me in this space. I love making stuff, sometimes with words, sometimes with my hands, and this weekly newsletter is a collage of both. So glad you’re here.
This summer if you’ve been tracking with me you’ll know that I’ve written a lot about the challenges of waiting for the return of someone you love and the bookend side of saying good-bye.
I opened a fresh draft for today, determined to offer an uplifting newsletter and leave those harder topics behind for a week.
Which means I shouldn’t tell you about the devastating moment on my bike ride this weekend. The moment when I arrived at the lush fields that had enveloped me like a protective hug all summer, only to find they’d been mowed flat to the ground. The towering green grass that had nestled the butterflies and wildflowers was now nothing more than brown mulch.
I pedaled onward, feeling vulnerable without the walls of thick foliage around me. The sudden removal of those fields felt like a mirror to the loss that was happening back at my house, where our twenty-year-old was taking down the posters from her wall and emptying her brown bookshelf until it was barren, preparing to move out for the very last time.
But since I’m going for an upbeat tone in this issue, I won’t tell you how the severed fields reminded me of other seasons of loss and change. Like losing my father through mental health issues and dementia. Or a ten-year friendship that didn’t survive the pandemic. Waves of loss washed over me and I felt annoyed at God for throwing a metaphor in my face again (like he did with the empty bird’s nest last week).
Even through my irritation I knew in my heart this metaphor-rich bike ride offered an invitation as well. An invitation to process the grief that had been building over the last several weeks.
I wrote last week about the temptation I so often face to silence my feelings.
“Because the truth is that I’m not great at hanging out between the sorrow and sweetness I know each of these moments will bring. In fact, my brain has been known to work extra hard to shut down the threat of incoming feelings.” (Me)
I continued down the shorn bike path as my heart met the invitation to grieve.
***
I can see that I’m making a mess of taking you on a lighter journey today, but this next part will hopefully make up for it.
On a previous bike ride a few days earlier, when the fields were still at their full glory, the Lord offered me a different image. As I pedaled that day, I played a short devotional podcast. The passage for the day was about the Israelites crossing the Jordan River, an event that takes place years after the crossing of the Red Sea.
I listened to the story of the Lord parting the waters and imagined the priests as they walked to the middle of the river carrying the Ark of the Covenant. They remained in the middle, bearing the symbol of God’s presence, as the multitudes crossed safely to the other side. When the reading was over, the host prompted me to think about the times God has been with me in my life.
Images rose up in my mind of God filling the room with his light even as the darkness of my Dad’s death threatened to overtake me. Or the promise he spoke into my heart near the beginning of my battle with chronic pain when I asked for healing and he answered, “I am healing you, it’s just that I’m healing your heart right now, not the pain in your body.” Memories emerged of danger in my earlier years when he made his presence known by providing a way out or by placing people beside to embody his love.
As the moments and images flooded my mind I pictured myself walking the path through the river like the Israelites, God’s presence always with me. In the waters that were being held back away from the path were all the moments that threatened to drown me but God had never allowed it to happen.
At this point I was riding through the tall, flowing fields and I imagined the bike path to be the path through the river and the grass to represent the walls of water held at bay by the Lord’s presence.
That’s the image that I’m carrying with me this month. Through the goodbyes, through the physical pain that still fights for my attention, through the questions that loom about what’s next in life, through the fears about growing older. It’s not the devastated fields that I’m carrying with me, it's the path carved by God’s presence. It’s the promise that although there will be moments in life where the pain takes my breath away and threatens me like a flood, I will not be swept away.
Continue the Journey
From the Archives
Here’s an earlier newsletter I wrote about the daughter who packed up and moved out this last weekend. At the beginning of this summer we were waiting for her to come back from a year in France which reminded me of the waiting we did long ago when she was in the NICU.
On Substack
Author Maggie Smith is the same age that I will be by the end of this month. I really appreciate this interview with her about getting older.
“When the gates appear closed, may we still go.
When the walls squeeze in, may we not forget to breathe.
When the floor disappears, may we not fail to know
He stays. Remains.”
From the Sketchbook Archives:
A recap of my art inspired by my summer bike rides
Blessings from the Guest Nest,
-Aimee
I would have been devastated to see those fields mowed down, too. Ugh.
And thank you for sharing from The Foundry. 🖤
Thank you so much for sharing. I relate a lot to this while going through my own seasons of loss. (Although, I will say, the pic of the severed field still looks beautiful. That blue sky! Maybe there is still some beauty to be found in seasons of loss and change.)