That kind of woman

"The best way to run faster... is to run faster." I bet I stated this at some point in every speed workout the last decade.  How annoying if you were at every one.

Sorry 'bout that.

Sure, there are plenty of techniques available to tweak running form and improve speed, but at some point, you must get out there with all your light feet and perfect strides and run wildly faster than you are comfortable running.

For those of you who dislike rigorous exercise or sweating, even, running fast is scary and requires much of you. Running really fast uses all the life-giving systems in your body and can mess with your mind and even your instincts.

You'll rarely be more nervous, nauseas and sore than before and after speed workouts. Chills and cramps, throwing up a little, feeling light-headed and overwhelmed are just par for the course.

Sounds fun, huh?  Makes you just want to skip on out the door in your Nikes?

I remind myself of these truths as I am eye-balling two new challenges at the moment.

1. "The best way to become a better writer...is to write".
2. "The best way to become a better wife...is to be a better wife".

You might have one to add to the list?

In regards to the first challenge, I now certainly have the time, the space and the quiet for writing.  Lots of space.  And time.  And quiet.

Yesterday my eldest, overly observant son looked at me and and noted brightly "I'm glad to see you did your hair today! It's been awhile and... lately... you've let your hair...um..." He wasn't wrong, and bravely soldiered on, "...but I know it's just because you don't have anyone to meet or anywhere to go".

Sigh. 

I have to borrow a paragraph from my dear friend, Christa Well's blog, that I couldn't write any better.

"...within a few days, I was sure the silence would swallow me up whole.  No friends.  No work.  No idea what do do with the songs I was accumulating.  No place to be.  No family around.  And a painful distance between even the two of us.  Every week was blank, looming at me like open jaws of a great  abyss..."

In the writing realm, I'm timidly lacing up my writing shoes, warming up ever-so-slowly around the outskirts of the track, stretching and taking nervous pee breaks.

To be a better writer, I need to write.

As for becoming a better wife, this takes all of me. The best way to be a better wife is to be a better wife.  I know what a better wife looks like. I know how she speaks gentleness and leans in when she listens. I want to be that woman. How hard can it be to have a warm smile when he returns home?
Apparently for me, impossible.

My wifely techniques are scrubbed and shiny. Family dinners on the farm are nutritional and visual beauty. I clean the splintery oak floors with lavender scented water (no one notices, but I truly don't mind). I grow pretty flowers and crunchy vegetables, tend chickens and birds.  I send the kids off after a hot breakfast and lots of kisses.

Better skills and techniques don't interest me in this moment.  I want to be a better wife in the deepest and most honest places, to run the race long and well, inside and out.

Psalms 119 cheers from the bleachers.

"The unfolding of your words gives light;
It brings understanding to the simple"

Oh, that my heart may be melted and changed through the unfolding of the words that bring life.


Understanding and light to the simple.  Tonight, how will I greet him at the door?

Hear and appear: Defending the weak.

"Titus." I whisper urgently.  "Go get your gun."

Could there be any more thrilling words in a ten-year-old's day?

I am still stunned that no matter where that boy is on the two hundred acre farm, he hears and appears, a breathless apparition, squinting up towards the silver sky at the hunting hawks circling low and slow above our chickens.

Four weeks ago, twenty seven day-old chicks arrived at our country post office at 6am.  Having hatched a day earlier in Iowa,  they were rudely examined to determine their sex, placed in a shoe box, and overnight shipped to our Maryland farm in less than twenty four hours.

There are not many things in the world cuter than day-old chicks, except the look on a sleepy six-year-old's face when she awakes to a shoebox of chicks cheep-cheeping on her pillow.

Five weeks later, the chicks are now free-ranging teenagers.  No longer timid, they strut their latest feathery fashions along sparkly chicken wire.  The adolescent girls gossip in giddy groups under the shady vines, all the while terrorizing the local insect gangs.  

Poor, poor bugs.

A few things we've learned about chickens:

1.  They eat stink bugs whole.
2.  This has greatly reduced the stink bug population on my pillow.
3.  Chickens deposit odious, copious amounts of stink bug poop everywhere.
4.  They attract ominous hungry hawks and very large black snakes.
5.  They bring out the most protective instincts in 10-year old boys.

So the protector of his flock takes aim and lets the hawks know who's boss.  The birds of prey are free to hunt all the farm field mice they can eat in our fields.  They may swoop down on jackrabbits in the meadow and groundhogs in the corn...but these chickens are mine.

While he hasn't hit one yet, this is going to be a true test of wits.  A young man protecting the weak, defending the vulnerable, and caring for those entrusted to him just like his earthly father and his heavenly one.

Game on.  Bring it.  Amen.

His eye is on the sparrow..and Ella

The rain continues to pelt the farm.

We slosh and slog and brave the muddy farm road to go buy another umbrella and I scratch the itch to complain.

Simultaneously, ironically, the fires continue to devour my thirsty Texas town. Fatigued firefighters and neighbors labor shoulder to shoulder; fighting for their parched, precious homes and land.

What they would all give for the clouds to well up, fat and black, and spill over the hills.

Ben Godkin Photography

My throat feels raw, and I am a thousand miles away, not even breathing the ashy air.

Outside my kitchen window, a sparrow clings to a whipping branch in a driving downpour.  How can such a small creature withstand nature's deluge?  I realize now that the sparrow is singing.  Singing!

johannesfehrle.wordpress.com

On Treehaven Lane, Ella and her family cling to the Tree of Life.  How can mere mortals withstand such unrelenting fury on body, mind and spirit?  It is too much fire and floodwaters for any saint.

Faux-Toes Spitting Images (Without the Mess) (Kristin Roedner)

My hope in this raging storm is that He who cares for my sparrow cares infinitely more for Ella.

This creator and sustainer of all life came to save, not condemn.

His purpose is to heal ravaged bodies and raped lands in this life and the next.  

He does not seek to destroy, but to set wrongs right and make all things new.

He doesn't wish to make peace with death, he intends to destroy it.

Of this we can sing while we cling to this precious gift we call life.

We don't need flowers there, anyway.

"Oh dear.  She's really let herself go".  

We've all thought this, maybe even whispered it out loud, but none of us want to be that person, our physical demise the subject of so many post-reunion dinner conversations.

As you may know, I currently live in a house that has, for lack of a nicer description, "fallen into disrepair".  Over the past several years, untamed roots and vines have greedily devoured wood, brick and mortar.  Brambles and wild, woody weeds have been busy choking out the farm's gracious beauty, hogging all the light, all the soil, all the life.

With each consecutive sunrise on the farm, I grow more convinced that people and things don't just "fall" into disrepair.  Neglect is not passive.  It happens one excuse after another.

As a new caretaker to a longtime neglected farm house, and as a coach of people, the similarities in what is required for vibrant health and enduring beauty are astounding.

We have to weed.   

We have to get dirty and tired.  

We have to TEND.

We make room for beauty and life by ripping out the root of what is only going to devour us in the end.

Take for example this wretched weed.  Above ground, it was almost two stories tall when we arrived.  Below ground, I do believe it's roots reached all the way to China.

We hacked and whacked for hours that stretched into days and hardly made a dent.  Then, finally, hooked up a borrowed chain (from Larry, of course) to our ancient TRACTOR to pull out the root of all evil.  

Neglect is not passive.  

Neither is beauty.

The honest, salty and difficult endeavor of making room cares for the dying crepe myrtles, prepares a sunny home for the butterflies and blue jays, and a creates a fertile space for the baby fall vegetables to call home.

Excuses leave the stubborn, underground root alone.  It's too hard to rip out after all, it requires too much of us.

Excuses do not make room.

Excuses say "We don't really need flowers there, anyway."

Raise an eyebrow?

Yesterday, I spread a sheet on the wet grass, stretched out in the slanted sunshine and read poetry to the kids.

Can you believe this???  I shake my head even as I write it.  If one of you were to openly write you had done the same, I would raise my eyebrow, seriously wonder about you, and feel slightly sorry for your children.

But people, this was no ordinary week.

Experiencing an eerie east-coast earthquake on Tuesday and then hunkering down through a howling hurricane Saturday/Sunday lends itself to poetry.

Trust me. 

As does lighting several hundred candles, hauling water to flush toilets, and praying over every ancient, snapping and swaying tree surrounding the old farm house.

When the winds finally abated, there was a yearning to get outside, stare at the sky, snuggle close to the earth, and wonder at the awesomeness of it all.

It might take another natural wonder for us to head outside together with a book of good poems, but I really, really hope not.

Whether the Weather

Whether the weather be fine Or whether the weather be not, Whether the weather be cold Or whether the weather be hot, We'll weather the weather Whatever the weather, Whether we like it or not (Anonymous)

Considerably less shiny

I realized yesterday that my children and I had spent every single day and night of the whole summer together.

Eighty two days and nights.  Seemingly endless hours in each other's physical and emotional space.

Sadly, the better part of my emotional landscape this summer was wrought with fatigue, frustration and discouragement.  I am sure all the kids were duly delighted to be sharing that space with me.

I have always yearned to know each of my four kids deeply, to understand their individual hearts and dreams in order that I can love and guide them best.  But, this was the summer that I became known to my children.

I couldn't hide.  I couldn't go for a run.  I couldn't preach or teach or plan a party.  The four Hall offspring saw their mother in a new light, and it wasn't pretty.

They observed my heart at it's driest, witnessed my peevishness, felt my ugly ungratefulness and patted my back while I struggled not to cry.  I must have asked for forgiveness a hundred times and they were always quick to give it.  A choked "please forgive me" opening my human heart's dam to a river of grace from the ones I love the most.

Like the velveteen rabbit, I'm considerably less shiny and significantly more worn as a result of this summer.  My heart has been unnervingly exposed to my family for the sinful mess that it has always been, and unbelievably, I am known, and I am loved anyway.  

How amazing is Grace?


Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, who sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord doesn't count against him and in whose spirit is no deceit.  (Psalm 32:1-2). 

Free falling and fur

I'd been having scary Alice in Wonderland dreams of falling, falling, falling....

Josee Bisaillon

My bed (with me in it) was falling through the floor into the basement.

David had recently noticed, with no small amount of alarm and thinly veiled panic, the structural beam that supports the whole house was rotten, you could poke a pen in the wood, soft as sawdust.

This fun discovery helped explain the two-inch gap between the floor and our bedroom walls.  The house was slowly collapsing.

911 Larry.

He brought over a three TON jack and a heavy beam, and jacked the whole house back to almost plumb.  This was done with a great deal of panache and pride.  It's not every day you get to save a sleeping family from certain death.

Thank you Larry.  Now my dreams involve what I just found in the radiators.

Come visit soon!  Your radiator will be free of fur and you will not fall through the floor.

How's that for a marvelous marketing motto???