questions, unanswered
the leaves!
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.”
—Mary Oliver, Mornings at Blackwater
It’s been a good long while!
I was trying to write to you here once a month during 2022, and, considering that I haven’t written since early August, you see how that’s turned out. But it’s been a mostly good and busy time—I travelled across the whole country twice in a span of two months, finally admitted to myself (after nine entire years of resisting) that yes I love teaching children, got an ulcer and another Covid booster and a really bad cold, and have indeed been writing a lot, though just not here. Some poems, some essays, some podcast interviews for my church, some marketing copy for non-profits, and a riveting twenty-five-page real estate investment guide.
And, mostly, I came home.
This was both shocking to the girl I used to be and a tremendous gift to the woman I have become.
I say this because my second move to Boise has come in fits and starts. The first time, three-and-a-half years ago, following five years of vowing that I’d never come home to this city tucked into the beautiful mountainous desert, I found myself back here after a short stint in California. I spent those last three-and-a-half years kicking and screaming and writing and crying and selling groceries and falling in love and wrestling with a million questions and making a life here for myself as I waited (and waited and waited) for God to give me a cosmic sign that my purgatory in Boise was over, that my life had (finally) been crafted perfectly and was ready for me to enter it. My summer in Pittsburgh felt like that chance; it was my golden opportunity to break out of the nest for good and launch into the world I’d spent the last three years pining for.
However, to my honest and greatest surprise, the minute I committed to moving to Pittsburgh, I felt conflicted. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my home, the West, the open expanse of the sky, the people and community I had come to love, the small city bursting with its own life and asking its own questions. I had, without my noticing, become a part of the place. And the tearing myself out of the fabric stung.
Three Rivers Heritage Trail, Pittsburgh
I still went to Pittsburgh, and spent two very lovely months there with my best friend and fifty kids with big feelings. We made a play, explored the wilds of Ohio, and cooked delicious meals. The questions that I thought I had answered simply by moving to the East Coast, by living in a city my college self would have been thrilled about, by taking a job I thought was objectively “cool” to everyone paying attention, surfaced again in a theme and variations:
Do I care more about loving God or being impressive? What is (actually) most important to me, God’s or other people’s opinion of me? Is the thing that moves me people, or my own art, or something else entirely? How much of my dragging feet is because of my pride covering my eyes from what’s actually there? What voices am I listening to, and do I want to be listening to those ones? Am I listening to my fears and these unfounded obligations I’ve put on myself, or my intuition tugging me in a different direction?
Am I okay with having a small life?
And then, as the summer drew to a close, for a number of reasons that I won’t get into now, I packed up my car and drove back, through Chicago, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake, through endless miles of cornfields (13 hours of them!), through mountains and valleys that sparkle with sunlight, beside rivers and underneath towers of red rock. Those persistent questions swirled through me like the thunderstorm that followed my car across the country like rain that makes it hard to see, even when it’s noisy and beautiful.
moving towards
All this time, my body was moving towards answers even when I didn’t have the words. As I drove out of Pittsburgh for the last time, I realized this move felt big because it embodied the answers to the questions about what I believed to be important. The direction I turned at this fork in the road would determine both who I was and what I was trying to be in the world. This surety in my choice to come home stunned me, this choice to listen (for once) to that holy tugging in my gut asking me to embrace my life. Not my friends’ lives, not lives of people I envy, not a noisy or particularly instagrammable, objectively impressive life, but the one that was unfolding in front of me. The life I was living. The life I am living. It was as if, all of a sudden, I understood that Mary Oliver line I began this post with: “the past is the past/ and the present is what your life is.” And above the cacophony of my own questions, Mary’s question to me cut through like a descant:
“will you live your life?”
my sweet Boise
I am back in Boise now, and even as I move through some of my old questions, new versions have sprung up in their place like wildflowers (or weeds, depending.) I am working through those age old questions of identity, purpose, and love. As I walk through the field of my spirit, as I wake up in the dark on a Monday to write (and doze, accidentally) before the craziness of the week settles upon me, these questions find a home in my body and settle in by the fireplace, wrapped in their cozy blankets to hibernate for the long winter approaching.
It often feels disparaging—I did not invite them to stay, these unwelcome guests. But as a friend said recently, these questions might be a long, hard journey and, as I consider them in the quiet hush of early morning, I wonder what it would be like to invite them to stay. To offer them a place to sleep, embracing these not-knowings rather than trying to force them into well-formed sentences with fancy words and elegant syntax.
tiny moon
Madeleine L’Engle knew how to do this. I’m re-reading her stunning book, Bright Evening Star, and it’s as if she is there beside that fireplace too, in an oversized chair with a cup of tea, reading aloud to the sleepy questions as the moon rises. Her writing reads like a friend. There are a few authors that write this way (see: Anne Lammot and Mary Oliver), and it feels like a particular gift.
During this little story time inside of me, she asks questions and leaves them, unanswered, on the page. I am baffled at the sheer volume that she willingly offers up, answer-less and at peace. She puts words to those human quandaries that might never reach conclusions, and gives her readers space to consider the mystery of this life, this baffling wonder of faith and truth and God’s coming to be with us as a real life human man.
There are questions like:
“Weren’t people trying to make decisions for God instead of listening?”
“Weren’t they trying to make the unexplainable explainable?”
“Were we looking for an inner image of God in ourselves or an outer image?”
“If you don’t forgive sins, what will you do with them?” (that one is Eugene Peterson.)
“Aren’t we told that faith is for things we don’t understand?”
“What do these words mean? How is Jesus our redeemer?”
“Dare we receive (this redemption?)”
“How many heard what he actually said and not what they expected him to say?”
“What has happened to us? Why are we not alive with joy?”
“What would Jesus write in the dirt today?”
and, the most beautiful quote:
“Was there a moment, known only to God, when all the starts held their breath, when the galaxies paused in their dance for a fraction of a second, and the Word, who had called it all into being, went with all his love into the womb of a young girl, and the universe started to breathe again and the ancient harmonies resumed their song and the angels clapped their hands for joy?”
Just to name a few.
Perhaps I love Madeleine’s writing because she is willing to be like Jesus, and willing in the way I want to be willing.
She carves space, through her unanswered, imaginative questions, for mystery, for wondering, for a changed perspective, for a changed heart, because she does not insist on knowing everything. She does insist, however, on asking questions. This is hard for me.
As I read more of Jesus’ life, as I grow slowly in this wild, mysterious way of Jesus, I have realized how little answers Jesus actually gives those around him (and how little answers he gives me). But Jesus gives us so many questions, and appears to genuinely love to sit in them with us, which is lucky because the older I get, the more questions I ask in return.
In that wonderful friendship story where a paralyzed man’s companions lower his mat through a roof in front of Jesus, and Jesus forgives the man’s sins, the Pharisees (with a skeptical attitude that is uncomfortably familiar) ask themselves “who is this man to forgive sins? How much can we actually believe him? Aren’t we the judge of that?”
And Jesus, as is his pattern, answers not with an argument or a shame-inducing rebuttal but with a question: “Why do you question this in your hearts? Is it easier to say to the paralyzed man ‘Your sings are forgiven,’ or ‘Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk?’”
With Jesus, no question is rhetorical, and, in the paradoxical way of this kingdom, no question demands an immediate answer. I think Jesus wants us to sit in these questions that we might not ever have answers to, these in-between, grey spaces where things are hard and feel scary to talk about.
new house + sunrise
I’ve said this before, but oh, how important this statement has become for me in my own growing, and how rarely it is spoken aloud: there is room for doubt in the kingdom of God.
There is room for doubt in the kingdom of God.
There is room for questions. Jesus doesn’t just not mind them, Jesus loves them, and even more, Jesus loves the person asking them.
If social media tells us anything, it’s that we aren’t terribly good at asking questions, but we are pretty good at making up half-truths. We know how to make ourselves feel better, and believe pat answers just because they’re what we’ve always been told. And why do we do this, when the person to whom we are most afraid of asking questions told us to ask, to knock, to seek? Why do we do this when the that same person is knocking at the door of our own heart, yearning (beyond comprehension)to be with us?
As we near the last few months of this year and the end of this piece, I wonder, what questions form the walls of our hearts? What would it look like to soften those edges? Are we speaking our questions aloud? Do they have room to breathe without a demand for an answer? Is it possible the questions are the answer?
What would it take to sit in the uncomfortable not-knowing? What would it take to extend grace to others and ourselves? What would it look like to hold our questions up to the silence and hold tighter to our hope that something is on the other side witnessing us?
And in the meantime, what are we moving towards? Is there fulfillment and joy in that place? Who are we becoming? Are we trying to make the unexplainable explainable?
To close, here is a line from Rilke that I love:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
More again soon,
Alyssa
p.s. I’ve added a few new pieces to the Features tab above, so check that out! I’ve had a few new poems and essays release and most are free to read online. If you enjoy them, please share with others you think might like them as well!
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