I Used to Think Places Didn’t Matter (+ Book Cover!!)

I used to think places didn’t matter
It was the people and the experiences
          and the big ideas

But now I know better
People are shaped by places
Experiences happen in places
Read a history book: ideas are watered in one place
         and wither in another

And in the end I love ideas
	because they 
	knock down walls and raise up houses and 
	spraypaint streets and sprinkle seeds and 
	rip out rot and salt steak and press oil and 
	fill theaters and spark electricity and clothe 
	children and sail seas and shoot rockets 
	and touch lips and shake hands and
All these things only exist
        in places

Poetry proves it: poetry is only as powerful
        as the place it paints for you
        as the place it opens before your eyes
        as the place it calls upon for metaphors
Poetry is the nesting of ideas
In an eyrie on a cliff, a burrow in the soil, an armchair in the attic—
Poetry is the placing of things
It gives to all of life
        a place

The bio on my personal instagram page reads in part “recovering gnostic” because it’s funny and nerdy and also totally true. I have often half-joked with friends that I wish I was a head on a stick or a brain in a jar, and while I know of course I don’t actually wish that—I love ice cream and hugs and swimming in the ocean too much for that—there’s a deep part of me that resents having a body. My body has let me down in many ways. I have more often felt it to be an embarrassment or a hindrance than an essential catalyst of joy or participant in peace. I have wished for the impossible: a cost-free, discomfort-less life that is still somehow full of meaning, purpose, and connection. Wrap me up like a bubble child and I might not get hurt but I might not get much else either.

There’s a gnarly scar on my knee from a scooter tumble when I was ten. As the summer heightens, it gets paler next to the rest of my tan and living skin. I remember bleeding all over a friend’s house, ruby smears on their white tile floors mixed with my tears as they bandaged me up. I also remember the feeling of wind on my bare arms and the exhilaration of taking a tight turn without tipping. I remember the rhythmic click of the rickety wheels over cobblestones reverberating through my whole body, the scratchy handlebars exfoliating my palms as I moved faster than I ever could on foot.

And I know, I know—this is our world. The wheat and the tares. I can’t get away from this theme. Beauty and terror. You cannot have one without the other, not here, not yet. You get a body in all the good and the bad. The portal to pain, the portal to all that makes life worth living. My best and my worst moments, all tangled up in my neurons and arteries and tendons.

So what does this have to do with places? Well, everything. Because our bodies live in places. Places push on our bodies. It’s hard to detangle the best and worst experiences in my body from the places where my body was when they happened. Places are material, and my slow-dying gnosticism is coming to terms with all things physical. The point is to get myself out of this Cartesian dualism anyway, not so much as to value the physical as much as the abstract or immaterial but to see that they are interrelated—not clones but also not combatants.

I love that I love ideas. Metaphors and abstraction and impressions and puzzles—wonderful, juicy things that are fundamental parts of my experience. Hallelujah! But look at my love of poetry and you’ll see that I can’t honestly devalue the material world because poetry’s strength is its ability to call on specific, tactile things to make connections that rewire how we see. (See that? Rewire? As in, electrical wires? Very physical.)

There’s this wonderful quote in N. D. Wilson’s The Chestnut King where the main character Henry’s mind/soul is being lured from his body (by a bad guy, of course):

His body was leaving, sagging away between the men. He felt a tug of discomfort. He felt suddenly naked, ashamed. He needed his body. He needed to wear it. He had to wear something.

In the beginning, God made us with bodies and placed us in a garden and said, it is very good. And much of humanity’s story, especially in this particular moment, is an effort to shrug off our skin and manipulate places to our liking and say no, I don’t want to wear anything.

But we need to. Our bodies and all the things that come with them—foods and beds and fashion and rationality—are our inheritance.

As I’ve come to lay down some of my resentment and instead appreciate that my experiences are essentially embodied and that I could not actually have any of my precious ideas or thoughts or intuitions without those experiences, I’ve come to love the places my body rests in too.

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In Other Words…

For one piece of news, Substack tells me I have reached my first 100 subscribers! 🎉 I know that’s small fry to some but gosh, that 100 people even took the time to enter an email into this little platform means a lot. Thank you for being here, truly.

And second, this poem is a repost from my old blog—and it’s also part of my upcoming collection!! I have been waiting (oh so not patiently) to publish the link to my book but alas, a USPS fiasco and various bugs with Amazon’s self-publishing platform keep delaying it. My goal is still to get it out in March so pray for technological favor and keep your eyes out. Until then, I thought it would be fun to do a …

Velocity: Zero | Cover Reveal!

Velocity: Zero is my first, self-published poetry collection. Many of the poems are old but hold a special place in my heart, and my hope is that it’s an encouragement to anyone whose life hasn’t taken the turns they expected or has ever found themselves in a place where they feel stuck—where their velocity is zero.

Before the cover reveal, here’s the blurb:

Velocity: Zero

A Poetic Journey

Velocity: Zero is a collection of poems but more than that, it’s a journey through what I only semi-jokingly call my “years of woe.” It’s the before, during, and after of the dividing line that chronic pain cut into my life. It’s a chronicle of my starry-eyed beliefs, my raw midnight questions, and my slow and wondering reconstruction of hope.

It’s for anyone who has held the embers of their dreams in their hands and wondered, what now? It’s for anyone who feels stuck and would do anything to move in any direction at all. It’s for anyone who longs to believe but has slammed up against the silence of God. It’s for anyone who wants to dance again.

And now, here you go—the cover!

I took that photo of myself standing on a frozen lake a couple years ago. I like the artsy abstraction of it (for all my talk of learning to love the concrete and material I’m still a sucker for abstraction) as well as the personal meaning. And it fits the vibe of this collection—cold and ice and frozenness and the life that is holding its breath underneath it all, waiting on the knife-edge of spring.

I’m so ready to share this with you guys—thank you for all your encouragement and excitement. It means the world. Little could the Aberdeen of those years know what would come from them, and you’re part of that story of redemption.

Goodreads (book reviews) 📚

Lots of new book reviews! I’m trying out a new thing where I’ll give super brief thoughts here, with a link to the full review should you care to explore further:

• The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement by Sharon McMahon | 3.5 stars

  • Interesting and compelling details, disappointing lack of organization and muddled tone

• Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Every Day Saints by Josh Nadeau | 5 stars

  • Prophetic for my generation, the book I have been waiting for

• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus | 3 stars

  • Fun subway read, good themes undermined by preachiness

Letterboxd (movie reviews)

Also lots of movie reviews today! I should keep posting so infrequently (haha…).

• When Harry Met Sally | 4 stars

• The Return of the King | 5 stars (rewatch with a live orchestra!!)

• I’m Still Here | 4.5 stars

• The Adam Project | 3 stars

• The Big Short | 4 stars

Wherever you fall on the gnosticism spectrum—a great lover of the physical world or a great skeptic or somewhere in the messy middle—thank you for being here.

to staying awake,

Aberdeen