Tag: home

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hutchmoot 2019 | you’re not crazy, nor are you alone

I didn’t want to go to Hutchmoot.

When my wife told me that she’d bought me tickets because, wise as she is, she knew I wouldn’t do it on my own, I immediately thought: 

“Oh crap. Now I have to go.”

For those of you who may not know, Hutchmoot is the annual gathering of the community of (and surrounding) the Rabbit Room. It’s a weekend celebrating story, song, food, art, community, and Jesus. Sounds kind of wonderful, right? And I knew this before I went to it, because of how vocal the whole Rabbit Room Chinwag Facebook group was about it.

But even though I knew all this, I had a lot of reasons for why it wasn’t a good idea for me to go, ranging from the very real “Linnea will be three weeks out from her due date,” to the also very real social anxiety, to thinking that I didn’t belong with such an accomplished, artistic group of people. I am an introvert, and I hate crowds. I might have been just a little nervous that all of these enthusiastic people I’d met on a Facebook group were actually a super-secret cult that performed sacrifices of Hutchnewbs on an altar of Tolkien novels to Andrew Peterson.

Thankfully, my wife’s good sense (and years of training in snagging Door County campsites) paid off, and she convinced me to drive the eight hours to Nashville and attend.

That first night was crazy. I was tired from the drive and experiencing Hutchgaze, in which you stare creepily at a person trying to determine if they look like their profile picture before greeting them sheepishly by both first and last names. But I was in line for only a few moments before I got a big hug from Bailey Berry McGee and the greeting that would become the mantra of the weekend: “We’re so glad you’re here!”

I could go on and on about the highlights: John Cal’s songs and stories that made me look at the simple act of eating together in a whole new light, the craftsmanship in every creative work, the free-flowing Ethiopian Guji, the Poetry Pub championing each other and the oft-overlooked poetic value of cheese, the total welcome of every face, a list a mile long of things I can’t wait to read and listen to, and the session notes that I will continue to pore over.

(I wasn’t planning to gush. I was going to hold it together a little better. But as I think back over the weekend, gushing seems to be in order.)

Let me narrow it down a little, for all of our sakes…

When I first came in, I was cycling through anxiety, envy, and discouragement. I was coming out of a dry creative season. I had experienced some pretty deep disappointment recently and was muscling my way through it the best I could. In general, I was exhausted and wondering if this writing thing was even worth all of the effort.

What struck me most about Hutchmoot was that so many of my fellow attendees (at least the ones that God opened up conversations with this year) seemed to be in similar spots, or a little down the road in either direction from where I was. Many have dreams of doing more creative work and maybe even getting paid for it someday, and many are feeling like that might never happen. Many are in the thick of some grief, loss, or discouragement. Many are grappling with what to do next, or how to best steward the creative passion within them. We all are people who need a hug, a song, a snack, and the assurance that we aren’t striving alone or in vain. And we’re also all people who are willing to freely give those things to each other.

Maybe it’s an artistic personality thing, or maybe it’s just the nature of the landscape when it comes to creative work — but the sense of companionship and commiseration was truly a balm to my soul. It was remarkable just to sit across the table from someone I’d met yesterday and think: “you too?” It was something I didn’t realize I needed as much as I did, to know that I’m truly not crazy, nor alone.

And if you’re a creative who is struggling right now, you don’t need to go to Hutchmoot to know this. You’re not crazy. You’re not alone.

Of course, we all went back to our homes and communities bearing within us this knowledge, a kind of ember to keep us warm on the way. Hutchmoot, for all of its wonderful immediate welcome, is not a place to make a home. As Andrew Peterson said on the first night: it’s a wayside inn. It’s Rivendell, a homely place – but not the final Home, or even the earthly home I am called to inhabit. It’s a place where I caught a vision for homely-place-making in my own community, so that as I drove those eight long hours back to Middlebury, IN my mind was blazing with ideas.

It was as if Hutchmoot held up a mirror in which I could see myself more clearly: a beloved, broken child of God who likes to create stuff. And then it gave me a swift kick in the ass and said, “Now that you remember who you are and Whose you are, go do what He tells you to do where you are. Here are some tools you can use, and some people who will walk alongside you.”

And thankfully, those people didn’t sacrifice me to Andrew Peterson.

Speaking of creative community…

I’ve been running a campaign on Indiegogo to create a new hardback poetry book with original art. With the help of dozens of friends and family, we’ve reached 85% of our funding, with only seven days to go! If that sounds interesting to you, we’d love your help to boost us over the top! Go here for more info, and thanks for considering!!

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peace (four poems)

rainplay

The pit-pat of rain
and little feet,
the splash of a puddle then
like liquid laughter, and
the storm is just another
plaything
to tiny toes.

artesian well

Perhaps
the hole will fill gradually,
as long-filtered rains seep down,
the weight of old winters
eroding the edges until it all runs over
into the earth.

Perhaps
it will flood in an instant,
like my heart at the sight of her, leaping
to suffuse my face with heat,
and rapid waves of hope
will be enough.

Perhaps
it will never fill.

To be empty and to know it
may be best,
for such cisterns
know true fullness when it flows.

stormcloud

Rearrange the clouds around this shadow of a hope,
that the sun will fall upon us
like the rain.

Drench our souls with truth that darker days will slip away,
like the shadow of a cloud
upon the plain.

The bitter will be swallowed as the fields lap up the storms.
We all will rise up with Him bearing fullness in our forms,
and the night will flee before us
and the peace ascend like dew
out of the pain.

still waters

Just past our door
is a little rising hill
with an oak tree and a maple
sprouting ten yards apart,
as though planted in different years
by different hands.
It inclines its chin to
the neighborly fence of the forest framing it,
against the still water of the sky.

And my daughter sees this hill
whenever she walks out our door to play.
Each passing is an imprint
of a deeper rest,
a widening assent of where she lives:
a place of hills and trees
and pond-like sky.
She has grown to love
this little hill across the way.
To her, it is the most beautiful place in all the world.

It’s only a hill.
But it is ours, and it is green,
and it is proof of home —
the simple strength of
diving roots meeting rising earth
just past our door.

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the longing of the wind in the willows

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame is perhaps my favorite book, or at least in my top ten. I rarely re-read books, but this one is an annual read for me, and only recently did I think to analyze why I love it so much.

Over the years since I discovered it, I’ve grown to love the characters, the settings, the language, and the respectful grace Grahame imbues into his story. But the thing that brings me back time and again to this book is not just the characters but the longings they experience — longings that resonate within me more profoundly on each read. The twin longings of journey and home draw me in and create the central joys and tensions of the book, but a third longing soon takes their place.

Mole is our entry-point, from the very moment he departs his home at the summons of the upper world. Through his eyes we encounter not just the wild excitement of new environs, but the great gift of camaraderie to be had with those who are rooted in the land — the poetic Water Rat, the curmudgeonly Badger, and yes, even the flagrantly conceited Toad — and ultimately the power of home and journey upon embodied creatures.

In “Dolce Domum,” Mole is completely mastered by the smell of his old home, a longing so potent in supposed opposition to his friendship with Rat that Mole breaks down and weeps. He has “lost what he could hardly be said to have found.”

Here the grace of Rat is revealed – that he would affirm Mole’s home in such a way that Mole himself is brought to realization and acceptance of the grace of going home. They tidy, they feast, they welcome others in, and then they rest. In the end, it is not the quality of the place that makes it meaningful, but the familiarity of it…

“[Mole] saw clearly how plain and simple–how narrow, even–it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”

Rat, however, is assailed by an opposing longing. From the start, Rat is the sensible (if sentimental) one. He is Mole’s fast friend and guide. It is the tactful Rat who introduces Mole to the river, to Toad and Badger, to the basic layout of all that he needs to know and understand of this new world — up to a certain point. When Mole asks about the Wide World, Rat immediately shuts it down.

“That’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please.”

Of course, in “Wayfarers All,” Rat is seized by a nearly impenetrable desire to migrate out into the Wider World. The migratory tendencies of little creatures are not denigrated here, but there is a sense in which it would be against all natural reason for Rat specifically to answer that call, regardless of its peculiar persuasion and beauty. Here Mole extends grace to Rat, speaking of the beauty and delights of home, and leaves Rat, pen in hand, to turn his poetry to the hearth instead of the pathway.

These twin longings are for all of us. The longing to go, the longing to stay –  they war within us as only they can, within those who live in the tension between pilgrimage and home. We are set in a place designed to be our home, but marred by our willfulness. And we are journeying ever nearer to the distant shores of Heaven itself – that which our home, this earth, could have been.

In equal measure, we see the pull of home and journey in Badger and Toad. Mole’s first encounter with the Wild Wood emphasizes its fearsome nature, but even here, there is shelter to be had: Badger’s simple, rustic home. It is a haven for all those lost in the snow, a den very similar to its owner in its rough-about-the-edges practicality. Badger is philosophical about the origins of his home.

“People come—they stay for a while, they flourish, they build—and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I’ve been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.”

Badger is a practical creature, and his home is exactly what and where it should be. The allure of it comes not from its trimmings or tidiness, but from its enduring nature. A true home is loyal. It is a place we can come back to and know it will be the same.

 

For his part, Toad is the antithesis of enduring. Each new obsession of his involves motion, from taking his home on the road in a canary-colored cart to his disastrous motor vehicle escapades. We are carried along with him (like his long-suffering friends) on adventure after adventure, willing to put up with him because he makes life so darn interesting.

When in the depths of despair, however, it is the smell of home that lifts him from his stupor and breathes new life into a singular purpose: to return to Toad Hall.

The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over, and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.

Say what you will about Toad (and there is plenty to be said…) but his motivations begin and end with longing — the longing to adventure and the longing to return home after said adventures. Upon his sodden return to find Toad Hall invaded by ruffians, it is not solely Toad that takes it back but his company of loyal friends, all of whom are utterly convinced of the necessity of reclaiming his home.

Each character may reveal new aspects of these twin longings, but it is in the central chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” that we discover a third longing, one which generates and eclipses the others.

The call of this third longing can be found throughout the book, a through-line from the very first chapter: “with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them.” In “The Piper,” we discover the source of this whisper.

Rat and Mole are out searching for a lost otter cub when the call comes to them.

“Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.

“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

“Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.”

The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. “I hear nothing myself,” he said, “but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.”

The Rat never answered, if indeed he heard. Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp.”

Grahame unfolds for us here a sense of Someone beyond these animals who not only sustains and protects them, but creates unimaginable beauty to draw them to Himself. His parting gift to them is the grace of forgetfulness — that rather than remember the fullest longing they have yet received and pine away for heavenly reality, the fullness of it would pass from their minds and linger only in whispers in the reeds.

We too, encounter this longing. We who are in great need of a Savior have a Savior who comes to us and reveals Himself, and grants that we would ever be longing for full communion with Him, and ever experiencing it in only in part. We long to journey to Him, and we long to rest in Him, our final home, because in Him is perfection. Only in Him are we truly satisfied. For now, we only have glimpses that create in us a thirst for more.

So we sense Him in the company of saints, in the Word that nourishes us, in fresh and recurring displays of His creative glory, in our own creative passions, along the path and beside the hearth. We are Mole and Rat and Badger and Toad — forever sniffing out the source of longing, often errant in our passion or conceit, fiercely protective of those places which carry the burden of that longing. We are always drawn to Him. We are always seeking Him. And in this longing we find hope to face our days.

This is the gift of story, and the gift of The Wind in the Willows – to stir that longing up within us and to let it slip away again, leaving us breathless on the edge of wild adventure, sending us home into our familiar places, full of faith that someday, someday soon, He will return again and longing will be overshadowed by reality.