Tending to Words

living a double life, untangling the noise, a bigger story than your own patchwork life

There are mornings when you have wished you were not the type of person who wakes up with a backlog of words that need tending. They will wait patiently only so long. And then they will be pushing against the bars of your heart and mind while you wash dishes, while you read aloud to your children, while you drive in the car, while you try to go to sleep. At last, you will get up at 4:30 a.m. or forsake the kitchen altogether or beg someone in your house for 20 minutes without interruption. And you will open up a journal with a crisp, white canvas of a page, take up your pen, and begin to coax out the words that have been restless and rowdy and downright impolite. You write them down with great relief. There is something beautiful about the way they look on the page—the loose scribble as the mind dictates and the hand translates.

At every moment, you are living a double life. The life you see, where there are children who need to eat and learn and rooms that need cleaning and the participation in work that pays bills and puts food on the table. The comfort and monotony of a routine. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime and all that is in between. But at the same time, you are living a slow, thoughtful life. It is the life of memory and experience, of imagination and hope. Words want to describe the first life as you move along through it and find that it means something. Words want to work out how this life is worth living.

Writing is relief. It untangling the noise of the mind, and emerging with a thread of language that stitches your life into a story bigger than your own patchwork life.

It is talking yourself down from the ledges of fear, of bitterness, of regret. It is coming back to the moment. To this breath. To this life that is the only life you know and the only life you get.

It is finding beauty hidden in the ordinary. It is seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, feeling again the things you are too busy in the moment to fully appreciate. But going back to them in memory. Writing them out is a prayer of thankfulness.

Eventually, you stop asking yourself why you have to do it. You stop asking if it is worth it, if anybody cares, why you should even bother. You know that if no one ever read a word of it, you would write, because it is the only way you know how to truly live.

*From my journal, May 2023

Thanks so much for reading my letters. It means so much to me that you are here!

Sending love and thoughts of a soft summer rain,

Mackenzie

From the family archive:

Randy has been writing a new song this week. I hear him singing it in the room beside me right now as I’m typing this newsletter. Hearing him play and sing is one of the best parts of my life. The song I’m sharing today is one I wrote called “Winter Love Song” that we recorded as a live video a couple of years ago. This song was inspired by a walk to town. I share a little of the story before we start singing…. Randy is playing the upright bass in this one. Hope you enjoy it.

From the podcast:

This is the story of my life as a creative soul–going all the way back to my childhood, my teenage years, the early years of college and marriage, and then into the wonderful and difficult and all-consuming seasons of motherhood (15 years and 8 children into it..). I share the things I truly needed as a creative child, teen, and adult, as well as ways I have learned to create rhythms in my life as a mother to make sure that these needs are met in my life. Tending to this part of myself is essential for me to be the woman, wife, and mother God has created me to be. I recorded this with mothers in mind, especially mothers with small children who do not see how they will ever recover the mental space that is necessary to process life and make creative work. I hope it will also be an encouragement and a help to mothers who are raising creative children. Thanks for listening!

My book is now available on amazon or wherever you buy books. Or if you prefer a signed copy, you can buy them directly from my online shop.

Umbrellas Journal now available. (8 x 10 inches, 108 pages)