Editor’s Note: I know it’s Wednesday and our scheme is to have Discovering Resources take center stage, but since it seems we have a fairly few new readers around these parts, I wanted to share something that gets at the heart of what we’re about. This, in a way that’s a little hard to explain, does. I absolutely love this post from wonderful writer, and long-time Story Warren contributor, Alyssa Ramsey. –Sam
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“Can we go to school the long way today?” My daughter’s brown eyes watched my reflection in the mirror as I stood behind her, brushing her hair. “The view is better when we go that way,” she said.
“Do you mean when we pass the big field?” I asked, returning her reflected gaze. She nodded.
“What do you like to see in the field?” I asked her.
“Everything.”
This was a first. My six-year-old is much like me: practical-minded, task-driven, and above all, punctual. She is the first of us to be ready each morning. She will stand in the kitchen — backpack on — and watch the clock, announcing each minute that passes until go time.
Even when we’re running ahead of schedule, she hurries her little brother along and asks repeatedly, “Are we going to be late?”
So I was surprised that today she wanted to go the long way. And that is why, even though her little brother had seen to it that we were running late, the long way is how we went.
In truth, plenty of other fields are lovelier than the one on Woehrle Road. Just a few miles north on 62, you pass sights much more pleasing to the eye: sprawling farms, ribbons of water bending between wooded banks, meadows wrapped around maple-crowned hills. By comparison, our little field hardly qualifies as a field at all. It’s really just a wide place between suburban gridlines — a few dozen acres the city hasn’t yet been able to wrest from the (no doubt wonderful) family who owns them.
But perhaps it is made lovelier for its incongruity with the edifices of industry and commerce huddled around it. It certainly is a welcome respite for eyes that are accustomed to the visual bam-bam-bam of development.
For maybe thirty seconds, the landscape smooths. You can look at it without having to blink away information overload. You want to keep looking.
Driving down the arrow-straight lane along the eastern side of our field, I risked letting my wheels wander off into the icy shoulder to look a little harder at the field than usual. I wanted to appreciate it with my daughter, to have it in common with her.
I think I know what draws her to that field. It isn’t the modest beauties perceivable to the eye: the subtle rise and fall of the land, like a topography of slow breathing. The ice-glazed skeletons of last autumn’s gleanings. The pond, frozen who-knows-how-solid, issuing a silent dare. The southern sun slipping upward, glancing across the expanse with shy eyes.
I think she is drawn not to the things she sees, but to what they awaken: longing. I know because I have felt it and hoped to feel it again. I have gone the long way in order to find it.
C.S. Lewis called it the inconsolable secret. It’s the deep desire to be able to slow, to enter, to quench an ineffable thirst. It’s an ache in my chest, a wild need to hold on to the invisible source of the beauty before my eyes. It is my soul trying to swallow.
The Germans call it sehnsucht. Maybe they can explain it better.
This longing has become familiar to me as I’ve learned to recognize and welcome it. But it is just beginning to awaken in my daughter. She’s never asked to go the long way before.
I glanced back at her. She was turned toward the window in her high- back booster seat. I wanted to say something, to mark the moment with a poignant phrase.
But her head rested against the seat belt. Her eyes were distant. I knew that my girl had gone where I couldn’t follow. Gazing silently out her window, deaf to her brother’s nonsensical chatter, she was listening to a language only knowable to her.
I didn’t ask her what she felt. She couldn’t have explained it any better than I can.
It is enough to know that she was willing to risk punctuality for the sake of something lovely. She is learning to differentiate between what is expedient and what is meaningful. I am overjoyed that she is beginning to listen to the call of a place whose rewards are worth the price of practicality.
It was a beautiful, sad, holy thing to watch my daughter slip into that place and beyond my reach. But it is a place she must go. I pray she will learn to seek it often, and to take delight there. I pray she will hear in it whispers of a Name.
I will gladly go the long way to get her there.
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Featured image by Shauna Raymer
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Alyssa, you captured the beauty with your words. *sigh*
What a lovely post, Alyssa. This is so much of what is missing in children’s lives today. But it’s missing in everyone, not just children. And I have this theory that the reason it’s missing is because people mostly don’t know what to do with it, how to heal it, or that there’s any expectation of it ever being satisfied, and so it is just squelched, buried, hidden away.
Yes.
So true, Bryana. Sometimes I forget and do that myself.
So much of our lives is spent trying to smother this longing, this ache. But you? In this piece? Have made friends with it.
Thank you.
So true.
Thanks, Kelli. I like the way you put that, like the longing can be a friend. That’s what I’m hoping for my kiddos.
We have a field like this in the middle of our town. Until this winter it was home to a herd of long-horned steer, a sight incongruous with our Michigan suburb. There’s been a for sale sign up for years, and it looks like it’s now changed hands and the cows are gone. I already miss them, and wonder what busyness is going to fill that space.
But this morning our world was covered in hoarfrost, and beauty was everywhere, and my heart ached in a good way. Even if the cow-field goes, there is still space for sehnsucht. My children are seeing it, too.
The morning this post went live, I saw a for sale sign on our field as well, and it says, “Commercial/Multi-tenant.” It’s so sad when those little gems get lost. But it also makes them all the more precious. And to see your kids’ eyes opening to it — such a gift.
Really beautiful, Alyssa. I have known landscapes like this, fields that woo me in their plainness. There is a sheep farmer on the river here, his property is breathtaking and shockingly out of place amid the chaos of development just a smidge up the road from him, but whenever I drive by, I breath slower, I treasure the fields dotted with wooly sheep, and the old stone house that sits at the front gate. It is a place for slowing, for daydreaming.
That sounds lovely, Kris. Everyone should have such a place. 🙂
This is so beautiful.
Thank you, sir.
Alyssa,
I just keep reading this over and over and over again.
Thank you.
That means a lot, Ming. Thanks for the encouragement.
Alyssa, this is so incredibly beautiful. I have decided to use it with my teaching this upcoming Sunday. Know that a home group in Dallas is benefiting from your work…
Hey, that’s so cool, Tom! Thanks for that.
So great, Alyssa. Thanks for writing this.
Thanks, Laura! Btw, every time I glance at the followers on the SW page I do a double take and think, “Wow! Bob Costas likes Story Warren!”
Holy Cow, Alyssa. This post took my breath away. And this line stopped me cold:
“She is learning to differentiate between what is expedient and what is meaningful.”
Thank you.