Wet Seaweed

and other pleasant ruminations

On internal wobbly-ness

June is here and halfway gone. April and May tangled themselves up and rolled by before I even knew what was happening. If any season were a tumbleweed it would be those two months. And now we're approaching summer while shaking off the dust from a string of busy weeks. June has come with her fireflies and gloriously unkempt trees spilling over every roadway and fence and silly way we try to contain nature.

I turned 36. I wouldn’t rate it as one of my favorite birthdays due to the fact that the morning before my birthday I had (what we think was) a full blown panic attack that left me bedridden for days. We think it’s related to complications of living with PMDD. We don’t know. I had a doctor’s appointment last week. They don’t have any definitive answers. The soonest any specialist can see me is August. 

I’ve been busy (aren’t we all busy?). I guided hundreds of people through The Silmarillion over on my Tolkien substack. It took 8 weeks and then some. I’m so proud of that work. I’m so tired from that work. I wonder what work I need to be working on next. My brain doesn’t want to not work. 

We put one of our children in an organized sports little league for the first time. Watching them overcome nerves and failure and learn to keep going has been incredible. We’ve all learned a lot as a family while supporting them in this new adventure. And, at the same time, I’ll be glad when 5 nights of our week aren’t being spent at the ball field. I’m ready to have slow weekends again. 

I took an accidental break from showing up here for many reasons–both personal and global—but I’m back now. Here I am showing up because I want to write despite an internal wobbly-ness that has plagued me for years now. Every time I think I’ve hit rock bottom on the foundations of my belief system, it cracks and I fall deeper into another layer than needs to be dismantled, untangled, un-built. 

On leaving something in the world that is wholly mine. 

I am grieved by the widespread acceptance of generative AI (namely chatGPT). I get why people use it. Writing is hard. In fact, as someone who has been writing publicly for over a decade, writing it is still one of the hardest things for me to do creatively or professionally. It takes work. It doesn’t come easy. It takes hours of keeping my butt in the chair and getting up to walk the dog and then getting back in the chair and wrestling the words like an unruly plant until my work resembles something that will bear fruit. 

Am I angry at the general lack of hesitation people have to use generative AI to “write” for them? Or, am I angry at a world that’s so hellbent on capitalism that it’s left people financially scraping by to keep up with the demands of the current economy? It’s a weird mix of both. 

In an act of gentle retaliation I’ve been journaling more. But not just regular journaling. Picture journaling.¹ I spent $40 whole dollars on a new notebook.² I ordered prints of my phone pictures. I found a giant box of washi tape on sale. I bought my new favorite pen³. And now I sit at my desk and create and write things I’ll never publish on the internet and tape picture-memories next to my words. My own words that I wrote myself from my own brain. 

I just want to put something that is wholly mine out into the world. Nothing that was prompted from a machine that lies to me.⁴ Nothing that churns out ideas ripped from someone else’s hard work. Nothing that is cobbled together like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster to lumber down the halls of the internet while everyone pretends it's not a grotesque approximation of creativity. 

The world is scary enough without utilizing a machine to barf out sad replicas of the arts we use to process and navigate it. 

What did “be the hands and feet of Jesus” mean to you?

The headlines are heavy. My brain feels swollen and bruised from the constant battering ram of information being shoved towards it. I come across posts on the internet saying, “Christians, you’re allowed to check out. You’re allowed to stop reading the news. This world is not our home. Tend to your family and let that be enough.”

And all I can think about is: what if Esther had said the same thing to Mordecai when he pleaded for her help as she stood safely behind the king's gate? What about Jesus telling us to pray that God makes things on earth as they are in heaven? What about the least of these? The orphans? The sojourner? The prisoners?

I thought we were supposed to pay attention so we could be the hands and feet of Jesus in a hurting world. I guess it doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. I thought we were here for such a time as this.

On showing up and getting rained out

I took my dog, Billie, for a walk in a local park this week. Due to my ongoing health issues, she and I haven’t been able to leave the house as much as we’re used to doing. But we had an open afternoon when I finally felt up for it. I unloaded her in the parking lot and we started a brisk walk together like we always do. The sky overhead looked a bit broody but I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t even mind when tiny droplets started pinging on my arms and neck. With the heat we’ve been having, it was kind of refreshing—that was until we got to the furthest point away from our vehicle at the back of the park. 

The heavens opened up and gushed rain down in thick swaths. There was absolutely no point in trying to outrun the storm to stay dry, so Billie and I just continued walking instead. And you know what I did? I laughed. It was absurd. Me and my giant cow of a dog sloshing through a rainstorm with nary a fellow soul in the park (unless you count the rabbit who had sense enough to shelter under the thick underbrush). My hair stuck to my forehead like wet seaweed. I could barely see through my glasses. Billie wouldn’t stop trying to shake the rain off. The sun came out and turned every droplet into a pearlescent orb. I showed up and got rained out. If that's not life imitating art(ist) I don’t know what is.  

But I’m still here, wobbly-ness and all, trying to do the good I can with the tools I have available to me; trying to believe the redemptive arc God is weaving isn’t broken yet.

This is where my thoughts have been lately and trying to get them into words that are actually readable has taken a long time⁵. Here they are nonetheless.

Here I am nonetheless.

1. My definitive guide to picture journaling. I can’t tell you how cathartic this little creative practice is.

2. I searched for weeks to find the perfect notebook and ended up buying what I always do: a blank page moleskin. There’s a reason they’re so popular.

3. This pen is phenomenal. Trust me.

4. AI lies to you. It’s literally built into how the systems function.

5. Could AI replicate the agony and joy and frustratingly rewarding process of taking my inner thoughts and taming them into something legible? I think not!