Christa Wells

“All you need is a hill.”

I don’t know why it stayed, that little phrase. It sort of haunts me.  When I’m running (yep, that’s right, I run now…a little…I caved!), or when anything scary or squirmy or unpleasant comes along.

It was something Kim said as she led the creative fitness retreat where 25 female friends found ourselves sprinting and jumping and carrying comrades up two flights of deck steps in our arms.

She said, “Just about anyone can get skinny, but if you really want to change your shape, you need a hill, or some way to alter the intensity of your workout.”

Apparently, you can’t just run the same familiar, flattish mile through the hood day after day and grow really fit and strong??  (Though it’s a start!)

If we want to change our shape, she said…if we want to be shaped…we’re gonna need a hill.

Define “hill.”

Well…

I spoke to a woman this week who survived 15 years of spousal abuse, followed by the very near death of her newborn.

My friend just lost his father unexpectedly early.

My sister is allergic to just about everything except meat, veggies and fruit and aches and swells if she gets the wrong thing in her food.

Our Compassion children feel the actual ache of real, ongoing hunger and live in shanties and catch diseases through their bare feet.

These are pretty monstrous hills, I’d say.  And those who climb them with their eyes on the prize will be shaped into something of greater strength, wisdom and grace.

Me?  At this point and for the past several years, my hills have looked pretty much exactly like…well…gifts.

What We’ve Been Given

They ARE gifts.  Things have been entrusted to my care and nurture which require much time, effort and courage.  The weight of responsibility often terrifies me, and admittedly – sadly – I sometimes long to escape the expectations or needs of others.  To walk away from the everyday realities I’ve been called to.

One small part of this is that it has taken years and years for me to be able to play and sing on a stage and not want to throw up or pass out, so I feared “success” (more opportunity) as much as I feared failure.  Even the compulsion to create, or to share what we create, can at times seem a burden.

These are the gentle inclines I have been given and must lean into.  I can’t run from them or try to travel around them.  I must not judge them too great or too small for me.  These are the inclines I have been given.  

And you have yours.

They are the climbs that require faith and endurance and start us quaking and leave us sweaty and out of breath.  Improved.  Invigorated.  Stronger and braver.  Grateful.  Ecstatic.  Bone-tired.  Confident.  Dependent.

It’s a lovely song, but honestly…one cannot climb every mountain.  You can only climb yours, and climb them you must.

When we meet a hill, let’s face it: there will be no mountaintop experiences until we have sweated and cried our way up the incline.

So, I guess what I’m saying is: Cheers to getting in shape!

Some fun sound & images for you today!

A week ago, we crossed the mountains of western North Carolina after a 12-day trip to Boston/Cape Cod, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Needless to say, with the constant change of routine around here, my attempt to post anything regularly this summer did not pan out.

Ah, well.  :)  You had plenty to do and read without my help, I’m sure.

As you probably know if you’ve been hanging around here awhile, one of the best things about summer for me is the week I spend at Masterpiece Project in southern Kentucky.  This year may have been my favorite year yet.  Word must have finally gotten out, because we had more young artists than ever apply and sadly had to turn a few away.  It is just that special. Our theme this year was: Already/Not Yet, which was a provocative springboard for our camp-wide collaborative project.

View all photos from the week on the Masterpiece Facebook page, or subscribe to the Masterpiece Newsletter (email your addy to: gslrogers@gmail.com) to read articles by students & staff!

Growing up, we had no camp for creative students, but we did have parents who supported and encouraged our creative endeavors, paid for music lessons, attended performances, and gathered around the piano joining in our sing-alongs.  So last week when, for the first time in Masterpiece history, all my siblings and both my parents were at camp together at one time, it was the heartfelt plea of our dear Mom that we sing something together one night at open mic.  :)

Here we are obliging Mom’s request (l-r: Mandy Rogers Horton, Gordon Rogers, Jeremy Botts (dear old friend & artist/Wheaton College prof), and Reagan Mountain) with a song I wrote for the Definitions Conference (inspired by Hebrews 11, lyrics below).  I love that you can hear Masterpiece camper voices singing along by the end.

For a Faith Like That 

I ask for one thing

Of the gifts you could give me

What I want is what I need

Give me faith like an old oak tree

The faith of our fathers

Lord, plant and I’ll water

Plant and I’ll water deep

Til I offer like Abel

Til I bless like Jacob

Imagine like Abraham under the stars

Let me speak like Samuel

Let me dance like David

Remember like Moses where I belong 

For a faith like that

To wait the promise

When I can’t see the finish

To go the distance

Heart set for the city of gold

To welcome the danger

Knowing I am a stranger here

Lord, let me persevere

For your glory

Chorus

I pray that whatever comes to me along this way

I’ll follow you, I’ll follow you by faith

Lord, if I do it’s only by grace

By grace

Chorus x2

I ask for one thing

Of the gifts you could give me

What I want is what I need

Give me faith like an old oak tree

(c) 2012 kiss me not publishing

Also from our time at Masterpiece, fun was had by these three groups of songwriting students in our workshop on Day 1, as they got to know each other and shared some of their musical awesomeness.  Their assignment: rewrite the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and then create new music for your new lyrics.  Voila!

photo credit: Lana Kozol

photo: Lana Kozol

photo: Lana Kozol

photo: Lana Kozol

Every artist

seeks

space.

We seek silence or solitude,

communal space for collaboration,

a space to share,

a space to be heard,

a space unfilled that wants what we have…

I carve out summer space to write for new projects begun months ago and find the more I work, the more I feel I’m just getting started.  Songs begun on parceled scraps of winter nights aren’t really holding up in the light of recent pieces that seem more…sure of themselves.  More enduring in their interest to the writer.

(And therein lies a point: if even the writer finds the work dull and does not desire to play it again while it is still in the cradle sucking its thumb, the rest of the world will almost certainly feel the same way.)

With all this in mind, as I ready for camp next week, I re-share this post in hopes that you, too, will grab the handle of the blade and whittle yourself a room for writing.

Must.Write.Now.

It’s a bit obvious when the songwriter in this house has stayed away too long from writing, because she starts getting just a LITTLE bit grumpy.  A TINY bit irritable.  Easily IRKED.  Not by political leaders or financial crises or even by semi-big deals like being behind (again) on emails or (chronically) filing paperwork.

It’s much less rational than that.  Where there is no solitude, there is much loud exhaling at the very presence of human beings.  People and their people-y things, like shoes…hunger…chatter.

It’s not pretty…

So…for the well-being of my family: to writing I return.

…

Where have all the good ideas gone?

The writing road is often a thrill-ride attempt to grab all those great ideas that hover in cartoon bubbles around your head before they pop.

“Except when it’s not.”  (Dr. Seuss)

Sometimes I honestly wonder if maybe I’ve written my last good song, because: Where did all the ideas go?!

They arrive through books, blogs, sermons and (yes) conversations (those people-y things).  Soak…write…soak…write…soak…

I’ve been soaking for a while now without the wave rising up.  These past couple of weeks, I sense the swell coming but something isn’t quite there.  And I’m beginning to think it’s not always about the idea…

…….

What’s the Problem?

Sometimes it’s about trying to write in a way that’s akin to taking a quiet bath in the middle of Times Square.  And the billboards and traffic?  My own brain.

Maybe we fall into Consciousness and can’t get up?   Maybe the noise of a thousand tiny people in our heads telling us how to be and sound and watch out for this and don’t do that gets in the way of us carving out something fresh and true?

I forget to light the candle of Intuition that has always led the way …

Any writer can break down a great song for you and tell you why it works…AFTER it’s written.  More often than not, we’re not actually thinking about those things during the process.  Occasionally, a listener will point something out that looks like great crafting, and it’s a delight to hear, because I had never consciously worked it out.

We practice, study, listen and pack all the structural tips in the back closet of the brain.  But the really natural, poignant writing happens in The Writing Room.

…

The Writing Room

The Writing Room is not a physical place but a mental Safe Room, where almost everything the writer needs lives.  Stacks and drawers of metaphors, images, memories, stories, poetry, vocabulary, rhythm and rhyme line the walls (if you’re messy like me…maybe yours is more orderly).

Self-consciousness is most definitely NOT in the room.  Self-consciousness takes up lots of space, distracts from and suffocates art.

On a great day, the process is vertical, spiritual, intuitive. In that space we are free to focus every fiber on serving the song at hand. In that space, every syllable matters, every melodic nuance is measured and shaped, but it happens not in a lab but on a birthing table.

Like any good birthing room, the baby is delivered after hard labor in a safe and relatively serene environment.  And she looks a little like her parent and a LOT like a brand new thing that never existed before.

So, yes, by the time you see this, it is likely Tuesday, so perhaps “Tune Tuesday” will be more appropriate.

I got caught up in children swimming and restoring some beauty and order to the chaos that is our master bathroom.  What is it about cleaning out one nasty drawer that can give one hope about the rest of life?  As if it all hinges on getting the toothbrushes lined up again and untangling lost necklaces.

Ah, well, I’ll take it.

But Music Monday.  I decided this week to share what was likely one of the most influential songs of my early songwriting years.  I was in 11th grade, I believe, when Suzanne Vega’s “Solitude Standing” album struck a chord in me.  My little sister, Mandy, was in 7th grade, and this song was our favorite on the album.  To this day, you will occasionally hear the two of us sing it – every word by heart – a cappella on some random sunny day.  Listening now to just the opening guitar pattern brings such nostalgia.

Who knows exactly what it meant to my 16-year-old self, but the melody itself, simple and serene, and the refrain:  ”Oh, hold me like a baby who will not fall asleep, curl me up inside you and let me hear you through the heat” made me feel less alone.

Suzanne’s use of language in lyrics left an enormous footprint on my own path as a writer, though I have yet to come close to her mastery of the art form.  Thank you for your work and inspiration, Ms. Vega.

“You have hands of raining water and that earring in your ear, the wisdom on your face denies the number of your years, with the fingers of a potter and the laughing tale of a fool, the arranger of disorder with your strange and simple rules…”

At least for the summer, I thought I’d challenge myself to a little more sharing here.  So, Mondays are for sharing music, whether mine or something I’m listening to a lot.  Today, this tune keeps coming to mind and heart.  More inspired lyric-writers than Linford and Karin are hard to come by.

All my favorite people are broken
Believe me
My heart should know

Some prayers are better left unspoken
I just wanna hold you
And let the rest go

All my friends are part saint and part sinner
We lean on each other
Try to rise above

We’re not afraid to admit we’re all still beginners
We’re all late bloomers
When it comes to love

All my favorite people are broken
Believe me
My heart should know

Orphaned believers, skeptical dreamers
Step forward
You can stay right here
You don’t have to go

Is each wound you’ve received
Just a burdensome gift?
It gets so hard to lift
Yourself up off the ground

But the poet says, We must praise the mutilated world
We’re all workin’ the graveyard shift
You might as well sing along

All my favorite people are broken
Believe me
My heart should know

(As for) your tender heart—
This world’s gonna rip it wide open
It ain’t gonna be pretty
But you’re not alone

‘Cause all my favorite people are broken
Believe me
My heart should know

Orphaned believers, skeptical dreamers
You’re welcome
Yeah, you’re safe right here
You don’t have to go

‘Cause all my favorite people are broken
Believe me
I should know

Some prayers are better left unspoken
I just wanna hold you
And let the rest go

The dogs determined to gain entry to the vegetable garden.  Dragged out the extra roll of weed-blocker and decorated the yard in bits of black plastic.  Bless them.

The gentle deer we love to watch, thrilled at the wide-open invitation, feasted overnight on the mammoth leaves of prolific zucchini (the only thing I grow really well–sorry, kids) and the wild tomato vines that never did get caged.  They even chomped all the little leaves off the green bean plants Sammy and I planted from seed.

The kids were sent off to soccer camp this week, along with the husband, and in the packing and shipping process – because of my dedication to using this time for writing and not cleaning – not one shoe or bag or non-perishable food item has found its way home.  All is on floor or counter.

I snatch every possible minute of solitude to write write write; thus the piano room is littered with papers and headphones and pens and moldy coffee cups.  No company coming in this week, thank goodness.

Forested mountains are burning in Colorado.  Human beings born perfectly healthy are destroyed by poverty and abuse and sin, and I’m tempted to see the world as one big chaotic mess.  A lovely idea, Lord – just not working out.  Beauty and goodness are dragged across the lawn in shreds.

But I looked again, and I saw daisies abloom in my messy yard!  Lots and lots of them huddled in happy mass.

I saw color on the cheeks of happy kids.

I saw that we’d eaten well, really well, this week, filled to the brim with the fruit of local farms. (Thanks, Go Local Produce!)

I opened Garageband and heard good, strong melodies born just yesterday.  Yay!!!

And, surprise!  Cute little tiny baby green tomatoes surviving the stampede.  Hello, tiny little green tomatoes!

All is not lost.  Rain will come.  The gate will be fixed.  We will keep sowing and planting and going out to harvest the Good and the Beautiful and the True.

Yes?

…..

What do you see?  Something damaged…something that survives?

No fancy words here today, just these clips of a few utterly deLIGHTful moments around the piano before our guests (Carolina Story , Jeremy Stanfill and Star & Micey) left this week.  These guys were traveling through, playing at the Broad Street Cafe, and we stayed up into the wee hours of the morning talking on the back deck, telling stories about family history and travel and, after I turned in, politics and economic theory.

Artists traveling together and supporting one another on and offstage is perhaps one of the greatest beauties I have witnessed.  Not fighting for spotlight but living inside harmony and lyric, swinging arm in arm as a collective (my new favorite word, as of this morning, when I watched THIS.)

Anyway, grab your coffee, sit in and listen for a few slow moments as we rotate on the bench and sing each other’s songs?  And see them in person if they come your way!

I love a long drive alone.  Ten hours between Nashville and Raleigh give me lots of time to process, remember, imagine.

My sister understands when I say I’m afraid I will always want what I see across the fence.  There seems to be something just out of reach – not a goal or achievement, but an intangible deep-soul satisfaction.  Occasionally, I find myself in a moment I want to hold, but before the thought is formed, it is behind us, slipping away in the rearview mirror.

I want for nothing, but I want everything.

When busy, I crave solitude.  When alone with an empty calendar, I am unwanted, failing and flailing.  I sit at a suburban Starbucks, smell cigarette smoke from another table and imagine I am elsewhere – some far-off city, Chicago, New York, San Jose, Costa Rica.  Not altogether content to sip my mocha here in North Raleigh, USA.

I drive and my eyes alight on something of Beauty, and the heart burns with a mingling of intense joy & grief together, and I question all of it.

Is it weakness and a disposition toward discontent?  I think it is, at times.

At other times, it has to do with an intrinsic understanding of this: We walk a long road home fruited bittersweet.  Glory glimpsed roadside stirs a hunger for home that we don’t always correctly name in the moment.  Instead, we call it “Nostalgia” or “Aspiration.”

Souls seek the Unseen through the seeing of our eyes.  It’s hard to not get hung up on the Seen.

2 Corinthians 4…

Yes, Wordsworth caught my attention with his Ode: Intimations on Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home.

Today, I give thanks for the roadside beauty that keeps my feet moving in the direction of the radiant Unseen.

I flew up to Indiana on Tuesday to be with Wilma Dean when her little brother passed away.  Grandma is almost 88-years-old, and old Uncle Pete…he is still her “little brother.”

Pete was the tan-skinned, puppy-eyed boy–one of Ralph & Alma’s nine kids – who grew up to be an Indiana farmer like his dad before him, and was known as the one who chased  you down to plant big, wet kisses on your cheek no matter your age or gender.

When my dad and I drove into the town that seems barely a town, and walked into the humble funeral home whose door opens into the street, I didn’t expect to feel so much really.  I was there to support Grandma…and maybe also because some small part of me is awakening to the fact that something is being lost.

Something I was never certain about until now.

Roots were a vague idea to me, as we moved from army post to post while cousins and great aunts and uncles shared life together in the Midwestern fields.

These people who climb the branches of our family tree were part of the landscape of my childhood, but I wasn’t convinced we had much in common.  I could never keep the names or lineage straight when we visited, and as much fun as those annual family reunions with the long folding tables in Uncle Bob’s garage were, it was just one day each year or two…and I felt my siblings and I were sort of the odd ones out.  Welcomed…loved, but…visitors.

Often when we  can’t have something, we decide we never really wanted/needed it anyway.

But when I stepped into the funeral home and felt the hot grief in my chest and behind my eyes and I couldn’t stop the relentless flood, I knew it wasn’t only for Uncle Pete, or for kind Aunt Frankie, now widowed, or for young Brandon and Kinnea, who have shared daily life with their Grandpa Pete. 

It was for all of these faces gathered together, these hearts that knew my Dad when he was a boy and watched my parents fall in love…the only people left in this world who knew and loved my great-grandma, whom I also loved.

These who have followed our life journeys across states and seas and have cared for my grandparents in our absence.  Our roots really are entwined, and they are beautiful, interesting humans, and there is something good between us.

But the nine are now two.  Those kids grew up and started something, and now just two remain – Grandma and her baby sister, and what did we make of the time?  Why didn’t I know all their names?  What stories were left untold?  What will happen to the tree when the last of the nine have gone?

I am not afraid.  But I am struck that the connection, however fragile, does actually matter.  To ME.  I did want it, afterall.

Roots. 

I have looked for them in a spiritual sense, allowing the warm body of believers around me to be my extended family since I left home.  There is that.  The Church.  Good roots.  Faithful branches that hold.

And maybe that’s all you’ve got.

Or do you feel you have nothing but parched roots and broken branches, because your family is gone or they are here but torn in some way worse than absence, and you don’t realize there might just be a way to find siblings, parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents yet…

Be encouraged…

It’s really never too late to start a family.

It’s not too late to start digging for roots.

Photo credit: Terri Trimble

Thinking about motherhood this week, as I watch the kids make secret plans for Sunday. Aware of how this phenomenon called parenting alters a person.  As she pushes her child away from her body and into the world, she begins the work of teaching him how to separate from her.  Slowly but surely, she prepares him to leave.  And at the same time, she learns to how to push herself towards him and his needs, away from her own.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.

Some of you feel you have no mother to celebrate, even if she is living. Some were wounded and betrayed by her. Some have just been born into motherhood and are terrified of the responsibility.

We have this in common, all of us having been born to a flawed woman in need of grace.  If you haven’t found something to celebrate in your own mother, perhaps this song will be a peek into the possible. A hallway of hope for the children who come into your life, to be mothered by you in some way. After all, everyone needs mothering.

My own mother?  She’s just beautiful.  If you’ve met her, you know what I’m talking about.  She will never claim any talent or physical beauty, though it’s there.  But time has taught her how to shine in the most marvelous way.  This woman knows how to love.  In fact, she doesn’t know how not to…she doesn’t leave a grocery store without hugging a cashier.  It’s what she was born to do.  And the love of the Maker through this little redheaded woman has sent out millions of ripples across the waters of humankind since 1948.   She is leaving a legacy of love.

I’m so grateful.

This is a little something I wrote this week and late last night, Aidan said he’d work a little FLIP video magic for me.  As you can see, we are a very high-tech family.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

*TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES WITH YOUTUBE VIDEO POSTING.  To view, click HERE.

Oh, Your Love (Christa Wells)

I know that you knew

You raised us to leave you

Raised us to run with a torch in our hands

I know that you knew

What your love would do

Sent us out sailors with the wind at our backs

I know that you gave

Without keeping record

Except to be certain you had nothing left

I know that you gave

Til it hurt though you never

Admitted anything but the joy and gladness

Ooh, your love always carried us

I know that you followed us

Late in the darkness

Pulled up the blankets, covered us in prayer

I know that you followed

Our paths to independence

With a great deal of patience and a little bit of fear

But ooh, your love always carried us

I know that you see us

The way we were back then

You can’t let go, you can’t really let us go

But I hope that you see how

You took those little children

To the light that leads us all to our true home

And ooh, your love always carries us

Oooh, your love will always carry us

I know that you knew what your love would do

Your family loves you.