Heather Jane Writes

Category: All

No, I’m Not a Mother
What is it like to be a mother?
The game was that we would take a piece of string and loop someone’s wedding ring through it. Then, someone would hold it above the wrist of each of the girl cousins – not the boys – and wait to see how it would circle. It’s an old wives’ tale that is typically used on an expectant mother and perhaps one of my cousin’s being pregnant was what spurred it on. The ring swings back and forth – you get a boy. The ring circles – it’s a girl. We used the test to determine how many children we might have in the future. Mine circled once.
The idea of motherhood scared me from an early age. I grappled with the frightening thought of childbirth and whether I should skip the whole newborn stage and adopt an older child long before I was doing anything to produce a child. I was the youngest of two children, and my only limited experience with babysitting small children was not stellar. Before I was twenty, I had already convinced myself that I was not going to have children. I would not be a mother.
As years passed, I thought about that circling ring. There seemed to be a promise in it. Maybe, I could have one child. It would be a girl. She would be quiet like me and curious. I still could not imagine going through pregnancy, labor, or that stage when babies are so fragile and dependent. I always daydreamed about this potential daughter as a toddler.
In the fall of 2004, I had a dream about her. In it, I was sitting in a church pew. My husband, who didn’t exist yet, sat next to me holding our baby girl. I told my grandmother about the dream the next day. I was in my mid-twenties with no prospect of marriage and my first experience with sex still years to come. My grandmother, who had once wondered too if she would ever be able to be a mother, told me that some people weren’t meant to be mothers and that was okay. I’m not certain what spurred her to say that. There was still a chance that I could become a mother and no reason to expect that I would not beyond my own hesitation to have anything to do with the babies in our family. She died a few months later and that makes me wonder if she had received a dream or some piece of wisdom about me that she needed to deliver in that moment.
When I got married in 2009, I began to prepare myself for the question of whether I wanted children. The image of that daughter stayed with me and an expectation began to settle in my heart. I would have one child someday. Circumstances changed and the idea of children began to get pushed down the timeline. I watched the women in my life have their children or, worse, deal with the agonizing grief of not being able to have the children they desperately wanted to have. I chose to wait.
I separated from my first husband in 2014. Mixed in the pain of a failed marriage was the realization of time. I was 35 on my way to 36. Leaving him also meant coming to the terms that I would likely never give myself the chance to become a mother. The idea of that daughter would have to be let go. I shared that with him when I told him about my decision to leave him. The choices we had both made had made the string test void in my opinion. In my mind, I was choosing to be like my Great Aunt Aggie – single and childless but okay, nonetheless.
I heard a story recently about someone who found out that they could not have children. They had never wanted children so the news should have been a simple confirmation of decisions made. There is a grief in the transformation from “don’t want” to “can’t have” that is hard to explain. It is aching for something you did not want and wondering what you have missed out on.
There are many parts of me in the novel I began writing in 2020, but one of the biggest is Julia’s question of what it would be like to be a mother. When I married my second husband in 2019, I was still able to become a mother. We made the deliberate choice for many reasons to not have children. Though I had already made that decision in my heart for years, I still had to come to terms with it again. I was 41 when I wrote Holding the Stars. I’m 45 now as I write this, sitting in my living room at four in the morning thinking about the dream of a little girl and the path that my life has taken to come to the tenuous peace that it’s okay to not know what it is like to be a mother.
May 8, 2024
What pursues you?
Fear is the whisp of smoke. Fear is the scent of a fire beginning. Fear is the moment when the surface becomes hot enough to singe your hand. Fear is the dark smudge where a fire once had been.
“Would you like a glass of water before we begin?” I ask as Fear settles onto the dark blue velvet chair across from me. I reach forward to grasp the pitcher of cold ice water that is sweating on the glass table between us but stop when Fear raises her hand.
“No, thank you. It may cause me to choke,” Fear says. She arranges the folds of her black satin dress around her legs. Her skin is as pale as death. Beneath its surface, I can see the faint rivers of blue veins snaking their way to where I expect her heart to be, if she has one.
“Okay.” I move my hand to my glass and sit back with it, the nearness of Fear causing my pulse to race. I sip at the water, squashing the impulse to gulp it down. She is studying me as much as I am studying her.
“Let’s begin then,” I say, putting the glass down. “Do you remember when we met?”
She nods once. “In the hospital. You had just arrived.”
“Been born, you mean.”
“I thought you would recognize me.”
I gaze at her curiously. “How would I have, if we had just met?”
“I knew your mother. She and I spoke about you. I thought you might remember that.”
“I don’t. I didn’t, I guess.”
“You cried. Honestly, it hurt my feelings.”
“It was probably because of surprise and not you. The air was cold and there was suddenly so much to take in.”
She snaps, “Let’s not talk about Surprise.”
I had not thought about how Fear and Surprise might be mistaken for each other at times or the cause of one or the other to appear. I would have assumed that they would be good friends. Perhaps not.
“What would you like to talk about then?” I ask, reaching for the water again. I allow myself a gulp before admitting, “I had not planned on talking with you tonight. Otherwise, I would have prepared some questions or at least a topic.”
I lean forward to put the glass down and Fear leans forward at the same time.
“Why do you care about me?” Her gray eyes are searching the depths of my eyes, diving into them like a hot iron stick being quenched. I know I’m imagining it.
I slam my back against the chair.
Fear sighs and sits back too. “We’ve been walking together all these years and not once have you talked to me. You’ve mumbled about me, but not a peep of kindness to me.”
“You scare me,” I whisper.
She snorts. “That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?”
Out of the corner of my vision, I see Courage peeking into the doorway. She’s dressed as a Lion today, though her costume fur is quite ragged. It’s enough.
“You grab my hand,” I say, staring back at Fear. “You grab it and stop me. You make my heart pound. You twist my stomach and intestines until I am sick with the feeling of it. You’ve even stolen my breath.”
“I have never stolen anything from you.” She slides to the edge of her seat as if to bolt at the slightest hint that I might try to hurt her in the way she’s hurt me. “You’re so ungrateful. I’ve saved your life more than once.”
“Sure,” I admit. I can’t in good faith say she hasn’t kept me from harm, but there’s more to it. “But there’s also so many things that I lost because of you. You overdo it.”
“My job is to warn you. I can’t control what happens next. It’s your decision what you do with the information I give you.”
“You can’t put it all back on me. You cry wolf all the time. When am I supposed to know an actual wolf is standing behind the closed door?”
“Maybe if you knew me better, you would know that I’m not crying wolf. I’m telling you to pay attention.”
The light hanging above us has somehow become brighter. The gray color of her eyes has turned to a golden amber. She turns her face from me, disgusted.
I want to puke, to run, to scream. I look toward the doorway for Courage, but she has disappeared. I am alone with Fear. I’ve never been so scared in my life.
She lifts a thin hand to the cheek and wipes a tear away.
I realize that we are breathing together, the rise and fall of our chests falling in tandem. I feel the wetness of the tears on my cheeks, sliding down past the tip of my nose and dropping onto my lips. I taste the saltiness in them.
When my heart slows to a pace that does not choke my voice, I say, “I’m sorry.”
She flashes a sad smile. “There’s more to me than what you see. I am the whisp of smoke, not the fire. When you smell the candle burning next to your bed, do you worry about a forest fire? I am the moment when a surface becomes just hot enough to singe your hand. Do you blame the stove when you touch it rather than put a pan on it like you should? I am the dark smudge where a fire has been. Does the memory of a fire burn you now? If you would walk with me instead of run from me, I would not have to yell. If you would listen and pay attention to me rather than assume what I am telling you, your heart would not beat so fast. I don’t want to pursue you anymore. I never did.”
She stands to leave. I grab her hand as she turns, keeping her with me for a few seconds more.
“Walk with me?” I ask. “As a friend?”
I bite my lip, waiting for her reply.
She nods. Then, she slips her hand from mine and leaves.
She appears again a few days later. I am with Courage, her tail tucked in her hands but her voice loud and clear telling me to move forward. I smell the smoky scent of Fear and see her in the shadows behind me. I almost rush to her to let her fold me into her embrace. As scary as she is, Fear feels known and safe.
I smile at her. Then, I turn, open the door, and leave.
April 7, 2024
The Smell of Walnuts
The Smell of Walnuts

This was not the moment when I smelled the walnuts. That would come a short time later when the chef placed the squid dish in front of us. The herb in this cocktail was the reason I lifted the plate of squid close to my nose and found my grandmother’s date nut bread. Without it, I would have only had a lovely dinner.
You either liked it or you didn’t. The dark bread with its sticky texture. We would cut thick slices of it and spread margarine into its cracks. The tase of it sweet in our mouths.
We only got date nut bread once, maybe twice a year. It was one of the two things that I remember my grandmother making for Christmas. The other one was mashed “turnips,” which was really a rutabaga, a word my grandmother refused to admit existed.
In the past eighteen years, Christmas has changed. There is no date nut bread to spread margarine on. There is no pot of mashed turnips on the stove for the family to trick someone new into thinking it is sweet potatoes. There is no extended family crammed into my mother’s home. There were only five of us around the same kitchen table where my grandmother, grandfather, uncles, aunts, cousins, and my family sat not that long ago.
Spurred on by nostalgia, I bought a loaf of date nut bread from the grocery store a few weeks ago. I heated up a slice and bit into it, knowing that it was not dark enough to be the same as my grandmother’s bread. It was not sticky, and I could not forgive it for that.
But maybe that unfortunate loaf of bread is why I noticed the comforting smell of warm walnuts in the dish I ate recently at the Gunshow in Atlanta. The meal did not match up to the memories it stirred up in my mind. But the walnuts were there and in the next few courses I found the real turnips and then, the texture of grandmother’s version of them in the cauliflower mash. And suddenly the crowd of people around me is family, my family. I see them clearly. They are tucked around the big table in the living room, the smaller one in the kitchen, the two card tables in the living room, and every spot of furniture and carpet that was big enough for a person to sit on.
I take another sniff of the warm walnuts on the plate in front of me, and I picture them soaking in a bowl of hot water. Yet, it is not the walnuts that were in that bowl, it was the dates. My memory was wrong.
Looking back, we did not have many of those magical moments that I remember before it all began to separate. Grandpa left us that first year and then, little by little the threads began to unfurl from the weaving. The final three-thread cord was five strands this year. A large dish of lasagna and a bowl of cheese biscuits took the spots of the ham and Aunt Maryann’s cornbread dressing. It was not the same, but then again, it was.
January 2, 2022
Am I a Writer?
A note from a university faculty member on my Creative Writing Fall 2001 portfolio.

“Your careful revision shows a high level of craftmanship in all genres…You really saw what to do to turn it into a good story.”
I am surprised to see this comment on the front of the writing portfolio I had created in college. I’m always fascinated by the strange feeling I get when I encounter something I should remember about my life. I have dreams often about having done something important that I’ve forgotten. I’ve dreamed about vision boards hung and big life plans typed up somewhere. When I wake up in the morning, the feeling that I have done these things is so strong that I start to look for them. So, when I discover that I have actually done something or been someone that I don’t remember, it makes me wonder if I really just dreamed it.
It feels odd now to think of myself in those terms – a writer. Though I stopped writing fiction many years ago, I have been a writer in some way for most of my career. That type of writing does not feel as if it should count though. What’s even more strange to me is how I look at what I am currently working on. I treat this book as if it is the first novel I have written, but it isn’t. Back in 2005, I took the story that garnered the teacher’s comment and turned it into a book. Reading it now, it was not a great book, but it exists.
In that same writing portfolio, there were several other pieces that I had no memory of ever writing. For some reason, finding this earlier collection of work makes me feel as if the story that I am currently working on is somehow less important or less special. It is as if my mind wants to hold onto the idea that I have become something new rather than finally giving into something I have always been.
There is a hopefulness in knowing that the other writing came from me too. Reading through the stories, I realized that I used to love these characters as much I do the ones that I live daily with now. The thought of clicking the save button for the last time on my current novel and never reading it again is hard for me to comprehend. I want to keep reading how he makes her happy, and how she is a force to be reckoned with. I want to keep reading what I have written with the kind of awe that only comes from not knowing what you are capable of. But the older stories are proof that I can say goodbye to one story and fall in love with another one. If I need any more evidence for this, I can find it in the pages of what I wrote this past year. Tucked into the details of a wall of photographs in one of the chapters is a nod of recognition to the first book. In another scene, a question about a friend’s brother is the thank you to yet another character I loved for many years. Though their stories will likely never be told, they live on in these small ways.
I know some day this teacher’s observation will come up again in my life. Just as it did last year and again this year, I hope it finds me struggling with fear about being a good writer. For it is the balance of this fear and hope that reminds me of who I have always been and propels me forward again.
June 29, 2021
Four Lessons Learned in 2020
What lessons did you learn this past year? How have you grown and improved?
This time last year was the beginning of a pivot point for me. I entered it feeling like I was in the last thirty seconds of a mixed martial arts fight, and I was pinned to a metal fence. I was exhausted, hurting, and trying desperately to keep things from sweeping my feet out from underneath me while I waited desperately to hear the bell that would signal the end of the round.
In 2020, the bell rang, and I sprinted hard for that safe corner. It was one of the best moments in the corner I’ve had in my life. Looking back on the past year, here are four things I’ve learned:
Mindset and perspective are everything. Be careful of where you let your thoughts linger. Reframe when possible.
You can’t change the whole world, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do something anyway. Be kind when you don’t want to be. Give when you can. And for me, live into the “Love Wins” part of The Abbey’s tagline.
Fire (my anxiety) is going to do what it wants. Find more tools that make it possible to work with it.
When being braver than you think you can be, remember that you are not alone. Look for the others that are out of the boat with you or reach back to help someone get out. Also, bravery doesn’t mean everything is going to be perfect or that you won’t be afraid. It just means that you sucked in a deep breath and did it anyway.
Last year, I found joy.
May 9, 2021
Why do I Pray?
Why do you pray? Or why don’t you pray?
In the four years that I was in Education for Ministry (EfM), there was always a point in the year when the conversation would turn to prayer. Growing up, I went to mostly Baptist and other evangelical churches, where prayers were created on the spot. The people in those pews knew how to string words together from Dear Lord to Amen. Most of the people in my EfM class had grown up in the Episcopal Church, which has a whole book of prayers for every occasion. Want to express some gratitude to God? It’s in there. Need a prayer for an election? Covered. Many of them found praying with their own words much harder to do.
In talking about prayer, we would often share what prayer looks like for each person. So, as I think about this question – why do I pray (because I do pray) – my mind immediately goes to what I do. For me, I have three ways that I do it:

As if my voice were connected to my feet.
This afternoon, we did a prayer walk around Avondale Park and a few blocks in the Avondale community. Our goal was to listen to and watch what was happening around us. We sought out the places where we felt God and hoped to hear God telling us what would happen to us next. There was more talking amongst ourselves than there was prayer in the traditional sense. I like to think God was the introvert walking along at the back of the group taking everything in. Then, when we sat on the grass at the park to talk through what we were hearing, he whispered questions to us. He did not stand up, point to an empty house, and say, “That is your house.” He whispered, “Have you asked anyone else what they are feeling called to do?”
When I lived in Franklin, TN, I used to pace and pray. I walked in circles in the living room asking God to bring me a friend to ease my loneliness. He answered that prayer in the most beautiful way. In more recent times, I told God that I no longer wanted to say that prayer. I wanted to be alone. He ignored that prayer. Thanks goodness He did.

As if God were in the passenger seat of my car, gripping the seatbelt for dear life.
The second type of prayer I love is the great debate in the car. This started when I began working. I had enough time from work to home that I could have a good, casual conversation with God. I have figured out a lot about my theology in those conversations. I have cried and laughed in the same conversation. Those are the ones where I have felt God the most.
In 2020, I stopped commuting to work and did not make the hour-long trip up and back to see my mother like I used to. I am not a very good driver, often distracted by my own thoughts, so I found the time outside of the car to be a blessing. Tonight, though, I am realizing that I lost something last year – a way to pray.

As if I am pressed down by the world.
The last type of prayer is the fervent one where I am kneeling on the floor and my forehead is pressed down into my hands. Those are either the desperate cries for help or the overwhelmed cries of joy. Those feel like the most reverential. I am presenting myself in front of a God of great power and love in those moments.
The other day, I stopped working in the middle of the day. I went and knelt in front of our makeshift altar area and said a prayer. I remember it feeling like a very significant, holy time. Today, I have no clue why.
When my grandmother was close to dying, I knelt in the floor of my mother’s house and prayed. I gave God an either or situation. If it were His will and could be done with complete healing and no more pain, I asked Him to keep my grandmother alive. Immediately after that I gave him the other option. Let her pass quickly so that her pain would go away. My prayer that night ended up being about preparing my heart to accept either answer.

But why do I pray?
I’ve talked so much about how I pray, but I can’t seem to get to the answer to the why I pray. My view of God is of a personal relationship. I pray for the same reason I call my mother. I want to be in relationship with God. I don’t want to worship something or someone that is distant from me. I want to believe that I can have a deep conversation with Him or pretend that He has a sense of humor. I want to believe that I feel a presence in the room with me. And that by speaking things out loud, even if it is just a low whine in the back of my throat, that someone hears me. That someone cares.
April 5, 2021
Broken but Not Falling
I find courage in music. I listen for lyrics that put into words the feelings of boldness I need and have started collecting them.
The following piece was inspired by the chorus from the song “Fortune” by Soen. The words of this song speak deeply to my experiences and the places in my life where I have struggled to find light. Each section is a response to a single line in the chorus. I recommend that you listen to the full song first and then read.
The Inspiration:
A Reflection on “Fortune”
Listen carefully.
You’ve lived a long time without knowing this. I don’t expect you to figure it out right away or accept what I am going to say to you. But, I have faith that one day, you will understand. You will see the truth of this.
Happiness can be a real thing.
Two things, love. First of all, you are capable of being happy. You are worthy of being happy. It is yours for the taking or being. Secondly, it depends on you to make it happen though. You have to choose that. You have to fight for it. You can’t wait for the world to grant you happiness. It is yours to do.
Battles will still happen.
I did not say “after all the battles won.” The battles will be lost, and it is going to be okay when that happens. The ground will be littered again with the ragged pieces of your heart, confidence, and everything in you. But, still…
But, you are not alone this time.
Not just you, standing alone in that desolate place of loss. I will be with you. I will have my arms wrapped around you, holding your tired body up. When you cry that you can’t do it again, I will remind you of how strong you are, and we will believe again. You and me. We will believe in hope again.
And, it doesn’t matter who knows.
I know you’ve been trying to make yourself heard and to push yourself out of the shadows. You still matter whether they know who you are or not. You still matter whether you succeed or fail. For you are not valued by what you can do or what your name is, you are valued because you are you. Uniquely and undeniably you.
Or, how many times you are in that dark place.
Yes, we are in that uncomfortable dark, scary place, and yes, we have seen this place before. But, this time, you are not alone. Turn on the light inside of you and see your way out of this. You may have to grope along the walls or crawl at times, but you will find that sliver of an opening and you will leave this dark place again.
You are doing fine.
You don’t have to be whole or put together at this point. You don’t have to have it all figured out. No one has it all figured out. To be crumpled up, torn to pieces, shattered…is to still have lived. Don’t forget that even broken stars still shine. Keep rising. Keep looking for joy. Keep holding on to your hope. You are okay.
March 17, 2021
Making Peace
This was written as a sermon prompt for The Abbey worshipping community. It is a reflection on the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple (John 2:13-22 (LectionaryPage.net).
I’m not a table flipper. In fact, if I had been with Jesus and the disciples on that day, I would have probably been nervous, watching the reaction of the religious leaders. I might have even made some excuse about the long journey we had been on, lack of sleep, or the fact that Jesus had not had a good breakfast that morning. Inside though, I would have been proud of what he did and envious of his ability to do it. He saw the same injustices that I did, but he was willing to do something drastic about it.
I’m a peacekeeper. I see the injustices in the world, but my knee-jerk response is to try to make the world get along. I want conflict to end and for us to find some common ground. The problem with that is keeping the peace often allows injustices to continue and ultimately, the relationships are broken beyond repair.
Jesus was a peacemaker. There’s a difference between the two. Peacekeeping often avoids conflict. Peacemaking often requires conflict. I heard this important distinction recently in a podcast episode by Joshua Luke Smith. He gave me a new perspective on the word “confrontation.” He said we need to stop looking at confrontation in negative terms. It isn’t arguing with people on social media or going on a crusade against the world – though both of those might happen. Confrontation is reconciliation and restoration. When we try to keep the peace in our relationships, we often do not speak up when we’ve been hurt. When we do that, the relationship becomes broken by the unspoken words and feelings between us. But, when we seek to make peace, we reach out to the other side. Sometimes, that is simply opening a dialogue where both voices can be heard. Sometimes, that is calling injustice behaviors out or doing something bold to make it difficult for the injustice to continue being hidden.
I’m scared to be a peacemaker. Ironically, I realized today that I have every trait to be one according to an enneagram definition of it. I am a people-pleaser, friendly, agreeable, cooperative, adaptable, trusting easy-going, and empathetic. I may never flip a table, but maybe I’ll have the courage to write or say something bold one day. All I need now is a stronger desire to make peace rather than try to just keep it.
How can we be peacemakers instead of peacekeepers?
March 8, 2021
A Peek Into My Mind
Do you tell yourself you can’t do something? What is it and why?
I can’t get out of my own head. I’m firmly in it right now, and I’m not even planning on sharing this with anyone. I probably won’t even open it up again after tonight. But, I’m thinking about who might read it, what they might think, what I’ll think when these start popping back up in the memories app in Facebook. That’s produced a whole new fear – the Facebook memories thing. I didn’t even think about that when I started posting things back in August. Now, I’m pretty sure I am feeling like I should stop. Yep, definitely should stop.
I stay in my head so much that I post and “hide.” I turn the ringer off my phone and put it on the charger. After I post the piece that goes with this one tonight, I won’t look at social media again until I have breakfast in the morning. I’ll think about it though. I’ll wonder if anyone has given it any “love.” I’m shaking my head. It is so difficult to see my weirdness being typed out in front of me. It’s hard to hide your weirdness when it is staring back at you.
As I’m typing, I am wondering if I’ve said something poetically. I then wonder that if I did, was it really poetic and do I even know how to judge good poetry? And there you go, I’ve used three different versions of the word poem – four now. I am a strange bird, I know.
The music is not working as well tonight. It is a new group, and it is good, but my brain is trying to listen, laugh, have an internal dialogue, command my fingers to type, and keep the rest of me alive. I’m going to be tired after this essay tonight. Now, I’m wondering if I should have timed this. For most of these essays, I get to a stopping point, and then I think to myself, should I stop here? Have I typed enough? How long did that take? Genius writing should take a while to do. Of course, who am I to say anything that I’ve written is of genius quality. I should have written about the fact that I can’t drive a manual car. I can do it intellectually, but I’m definitely in my head when I do it in a real car. There’s no way that my racing thoughts are going to let up enough for my brain to be able to tell my feet to go up with one and down with the other at the exact right time. Plus, I have to listen to the car’s engine. And there you, go a mini essay in a whatever-I’m-calling-this-piece-of-writing. Tons of hyphens there.
Should I keep this going or put myself out of my misery? Part of me wants to summarize it, post it, and get on with the rest of the evening. The other part is having fun making fun of myself. It’s getting worse. I really should stop it. But, if I do, will I leave something out that someone needed to hear. Not that anyone is actually reading these. And there’s another can’t. I can’t write anything worth anyone’s time to read. Don’t get me started on my first book or the second one which seems to be going down in a burst of flames. I so wanted to work cow patties into that last sentence, but my brain wouldn’t form the thoughts before my fingers got to the letters.
That’s it. That’s all.
March 7, 2021
Letter from my father to his parents from Vietnam – Dec. 10
In the two and half page letter my father wrote to his parents, most of it is a discussion about the weather. He remarks that someone told him that it was cold back in the states. Then, he talks about how Vietnam has two seasons – “hot and dry” and “hot and wet.”
This stuck in my head because it is one of the safest topics you can talk about to someone. When you meet someone, commenting on the weather is a go-to topic to get the conversation started. Yet, in this letter, my father is connecting with his parents from halfway around the world. He doesn’t need the weather to get the conversation started. He needs the weather to make what his life is in that moment feel normal again.
Right after the description of the weather is what I expected to read when he gave me this set of letters. He talks about how “Charlie” fired on them the night before. He compares the enemy fire to the louder sound of the firing from his unit. He’s heard them enough that they have become normal to him. They are so part of his daily routine that he sleeps right through them.
I have heard cannon shots a few times in my life, and they have always startled me even though I knew they were coming. I can remember the vibrations from the sound in my chest. I think about my father in his bed, his eyes closed, and his chest vibrating from the concussive blows of the guns nearby. I wondered if for a second his heart rouses his brain and then his brain reminds his heart that it is our fire and not the enemy that it hears.
I think in life, we can become so desensitized the trauma around us that we no longer see it. We walk past homeless people with our eyes closed. We see injustice and we don’t question whether we should fix the system that is broken that caused the injustice. We accept hate and complain that there is not enough love in the world.
At this time in our society, there are huge 105 mm howitzers blasting away and vibrating our hearts. Sometimes, we listen to our hearts and for a few seconds we start to move to action – whether fight or flight. Then, our brain tells us that it is our fire and not the enemies or that even if it is the enemies, it will not affect our sleep tonight.
What does it take to make someone hear the 105 mm howitzers again and to care enough to make them stop? Because on the other size of the field or mountain of the war is someone like my father, sleeping despite the sound of rounds falling around him. Maybe he is huddled into a small space underground or camouflaged in a tree. I wonder if the next day, he wrote a letter to his parents talking about the nuances of the “hot and dry” season they were having and at the end mentioned that he was not afraid of the enemy fire falling around him.
What is to be learned from this moment? What will stick with me after I leave this time? There is a song I heard recently that I have fallen in love with because it does in me what the title asks it to do: Did Trouble Me. Trouble me, oh Lord. Trouble me in a way that my heart startles from its sleep. Trouble me in a way that shushes my brain’s excuses as to why I should not stand; why I should not speak. Trouble me, Lord, in a way that makes me rush across the field to the man on the other side of the war.
In the earlier part of this letter, my father mentions that he received a package from his parents. Very likely, that package contained at least one tin of chocolate-chip cookies. My grandmother was known for her cookies, and I have fond memories of receiving my own box of baked goods in December for Christmas. In my mind, I can see my father grabbing that tin of cookies as he rushes out of his tent to stop this crazy war. If only cookies could make the barriers that divide us crumble, make hatred cease, and heal our hearts so that we could live in peace. Do trouble me, Lord. Do trouble me.
The Inspiration

March 7, 2021