Snowmelt to Roots

November of last year, with autumn awakening in me again the desire to write, I set myself the task of fifteen songs and fifty poems. Any poetry I had written up to that point I had written for myself, as a spiritual and creative practice. But I wanted to see if I could make something beautiful, or at least good, in the realm of poetry, to see if I could make a warm little house on a rainy, treeless hillside, out of poems.

Do Not Despair

I’m guessing that many of you may feel like I do a lot these days when you look at the news—both angry yet impotent to do much of anything significant about the world’s ills. It’s one of the problems of our age, that our sphere of knowledge dwarfs our sphere of impact. In these moments I often find myself “doomscrolling”, thumbing through one bad thing after another on the Internet until I’m in a bad mood.

Video: The Goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living

Leslie Bustard is one of those people who is just easy to love. 

That much became evident when the idea for this video project was suggested as a way to encourage Leslie during her ongoing battle with cancer. People rallied together to create the video you are about to see, and even in writing this introduction, it was hard to decide what to leave out from the tributes written for our dear friend. But here are a few thoughts from those involved:

Meditating on the Coming of Christ: A Trilogy of Advent Tanka Poems

Tanka is a cousin to the popular poetic form of the haiku. The word tanka translates to short song. Originating in medieval Japan, it is a free verse poem consisting of 31 syllables. Early Japanese writers composed these in one unbroken line; contemporary Japanese tankas are now written in three lines. English tankas are also 31 syllables but in five lines and a 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 syllable/line pattern. 

Hearing Scripture Anew, In a Chorus of Poetic Voices

Poetry helps us see things in a new light. Whether the subject of a poem is a thing, an experience, an emotion, or something else, the care with which the poet chooses her words helps us to see that subject in a completely different way. Poetry cannot be read fast; a poem challenges us to sit with its words, to pay attention, to contemplate what the poet has offered us in these words carefully woven together. Of course, none of these tasks come easily in our technological world, where speed and efficiency reign supreme. 

The Habit of Hope

On most weekend afternoons the year I turned seven, you could find me in my room pacing the purple shag rug while a library record spun on my old turntable. That summer, the last track on the b-side of a recording of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf was on heavy rotation. It’s the first time I remember hearing the story of Pandora’s Box, and I was enthralled.

She Slays in Mysterious Ways

The Faerie Queene is an epic poem written by Edmund Spenser in the late 1500s. This pioneering work of world-building inspired writers like William Wordsworth, John Milton, James Thomson, Alfred Tennyson, John Keats, George MacDonald, and L. Frank Baum, and it was a favorite of C.S. Lewis.

Piers Plowman and the Possibilities of Poetry

During this past summer season I had the joy of taking an aimless stroll through St Albans, in Hertfordshire, England. History was everywhere on display. From the remaining Roman walls of Verulamium to the riches of a tightly woven Christian past, it is a town that provides a fair field full of folklore, a storehouse of what has gone before.

Call It Good: Propaganda, Carolyn Arends, Andrew Peterson, & Pete Peterson

New to the Rabbit Room Podcast Network is Call It Good: Conversations on Creative Confidence. Hosted by Matt Conner (host of The Resistance), Call It Good is a limited series of conversations with authors, artists, and pastors about the invitation before us to join with the Spirit in the act of re-creating the world.

An Interview with Hannah Hubin

Have you listened to All the Wrecked Light yet? It’s a gorgeous, collaborative album of music, a lyrical exposition of Psalm 90, and a meditation on Holy Saturday, all in one. Wait until it’s dark outside, light a candle, put on some headphones, and press play. And then, when you’re ready to dig deeper, read this interview. As you’ll soon see, creator and lyricist Hannah Hubin is full of insight and eloquence, and her observations here will assist you in savoring All the Wrecked Light for all it’s worth.

Branching Out: Galahad and the Tree of Tales

Tolkien has rightly described the world of story, and especially the mysterious world of fairy tale, myth and legend, as being like a great branching tree: deeply rooted in the past, rooted in the very origins of language and the earliest mysteries of our creation as human beings, but branching out from the past into the present as each new generation absorbs the sap of the old tales and puts out branches, unfolds leaves—which are themselves new creations, new developments and yet rising out of the earliest stories, organically related to the whole, not so much inventing novelties as teasing out and opening up seeds of potentiality hidden in the earlier telling.

A Liturgy for Gardening

In anticipation of the full arrival of spring, here’s a liturgy from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1 for those of us who are contemplating what we should grow in our gardens this year. Download the liturgy at EveryMomentHoly.com/liturgies or in the Every Moment Holy app.