Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Archives for August 2016

What was growing all along

It started with a garden. All we really wanted was fresh vegetables for the summer. The kind for which you can walk out to the backyard and pluck right off the plant and use for that night’s dinner. Garden-to-table.

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We got that–and a whole lot more.

We expected the tomatoes and the cucumbers and the squash. We were surprised by how quickly the winter squash we planted from seed took over the garden and matured. We have pumpkins in August. #gardenfail

We did not expect the community.

We planted a garden, but we didn’t do it alone. One neighbor offered extra tools. Another gave us a tomato plant that is producing the biggest tomatoes I’ve ever seen. A couple of kids who go to school with our kids came over to see what it was all about. They helped set up the fencing to keep the bunnies out. They watered. And we all waited.

To read the rest of this post, head over to Putting on the New, where I blog on the 12th of each month.

What to do in the depths: Review of How to Survive a Shipwreck by Jonathan Martin

I will admit: this is not the kind of book you want to have to read. Storms and shipwrecks, disasters of any kind are not the kinds of things I like to dwell on. Preparing for a disaster is not a priority for me. I prefer, instead, to pretend disaster won’t happen to me, even though it already has.

shipwreckI wish I had had this resource years ago.

In How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help is on the Way and Love is Already Here, Jonathan Martin uses his own experience with a crumbling life as the basis for a guide through the wreckage. It is more hopeful than it might sound.

But it’s also deep and a tiny bit painful. Martin does not provide easy solutions or sweet suggestions. It is a guide full of words like “death” as well “resurrection,” “letting go” and “holding on.” It is the baring of a soul who found out that he couldn’t keep his world from falling apart and he couldn’t put it together without help.

So many words moved me, but here is one passage that sets the tone for the entire book:

But it does not really matter how you got here or why; and it doesn’t really matter if it was God or the devil or yourself or some ancient chaos that spilled up from the bottom of the sea. What matters now is that you are drowning, and the world you loved before is not your world any longer. The questions of why and how are less pressing than the reality that is your lungs filling with water now. Philosophy and theology won’t help you much here, because what you believe existentially about storms or oceans or drowning won’t make you stop drowning. Religion won’t do you much good down here, because beliefs can’t keep you warm when you’re twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea. …

The shipwreck is upon you. And there is no going back to the life you had.

The waters that drown are the waters that save.” (p. 20-21)

I read this book while a series of minor storms hit, leading up to a more devastating one. Martin’s words offer comfort as well as encouragement to not be afraid of the fallout. Everything might fall apart, but that is not the end of everything. And, eventually, good can come from it.

The surprise on the other side of the shipwreck is that, while your capacity for pain proved to be far beyond your wildest reckoning, now you have a capacity to feel everything deeper. You are capable of a depth of empathy and compassion that would have been unthinkable before.” (p. 194)

Martin’s book is a must-read for anyone attempting to navigate one of life’s many storms, or for anyone who is helping someone else navigate one. Take it slow and let the words seep into your soul.