This spring marks so many things: eight years since I graduated high school and left home in Charlotte, Michigan for college in Chicago, Illinois. Four years since I graduated college and started a blog and got married. Three years since hubs and I moved into our own place and I became a fully employed writer. One year since I lost mom. And this year will probably be forever remembered as the birthplace of my book.

I was thinking about all of this on Saturday night, standing over my kitchen counter and chopping vegetables for dinner with my husband and best friend. There are few things that make me feel more grounded and capable and fulfilled than when I am preparing a meal for my loved ones, and that was when it hit me :

Somewhere in these eight years I became an adult.

And a wave of gratitude came with it. I am so deeply thankful for the community that helped me grow into myself, for the friends that have made themselves at home with me and poured into me all these years, and for the voices of other writers that have led me here.

Shauna Niequist’s voice was certainly among them. I was a sophomore in college when I was first introduced to her writing. She had just published “Cold Tangerines” and she came to speak for spiritual enrichment week at my school, and she also spoke to my nonfiction prose class. Since that first introduction when I devoured “Cold Tangerines” and soaked up her writing and faith insights, I’ve gravitated toward Shauna’s voice as a source of hope and nurturing. Her books have sat on my nightstand for months on end, in my own homage to patron sainthood and spiritual mothering.

It was her chapter “Hide and Seek” in Cold Tangerines that articulated the peculiar anxiety and joy of writing, and helped me cope with it. It was her chapter “Twenty-Five” in Bittersweet that taught me about the importance of self-care and authenticity in my early twenties. I vividly remember sitting on my dear friend Becky’s couch one afternoon, reading “Twenty-Five” aloud to her and Mackenzie, and how our discussion of that chapter lingered late into the evening over dinner and tea and dessert.

And now that I am 25, Shauna’s voice again nurtures my own, this time in her new book Bread & Wine. It’s a book about food and community, filled with delectable recipes* and beautiful stories.

But Bread & Wine is also a book about hunger, physical and otherwise, and learning to nourish one another. Her chapter “Hungry” is already the one that I flip back to and reread as a reminder to myself that it is beautiful to be hungry, not the shameful, joyless thing that society has made it.

“I wake up in the morning and I think about dinner. I think about the food and the people and the things we might discover about life and about each other. I think about the sizzle of oil in a pan and the smell of rosemary released with a knife cut. And it could be that that’s how God made me the moment I was born, and it could be that that’s how God made me along the way as I’ve given up years of secrecy and denial and embarrassment. It doesn’t matter at this point. What matters is that one of the ways we grow up is by declaring what we love.” (B&W, pg. 37)

We have an innate hunger, for physical nourishment and spiritual nourishment, for communion. And it is when we embrace and admit our hunger that we find the fulfillment and community we long for.

So, at 25, I am hungry.

I am hungry for good food and good company the way that I am hungry for the right words to express life. I am the kind of person that wakes up thinking about what I’ll eat for dinner, and who I’ll eat it with, and what words I will use to write about it later. I am hungry. And that is a sacred, beautiful thing.

Thank you, Shauna, for giving us the words to articulate our hunger and learn to feed each other well. 

–

*I made the Mar-a-Lago turkey burgers, sweet potato fries with sriracha dipping sauce, Green Well’s Michigan Harvest salad, and the simplest dark chocolate mousse, every last morsel of which was divine. I’ve also made her bacon-wrapped dates for several parties, and they are usually devoured within the first five minutes. 

My library is bursting at the seams with new reads. It started with Story Conference. They gave us one free book after another from all the presenters who have been published recently – Makoto Fujimura’s refractions, Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and Inciting Incidents, curated by Sarah Cunningham. I’ve been reading chapters of each of those here and there. Then Lore decided to send me two of her favorites – Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath and Tony Woodlief’s Somewhere More Holy. And then, when I was supposed to be picking up mushrooms and wine for risotto the other night and I wandered into another part of the store, thinking about how to spend my birthday money, J.K. Rowling’s new book, The Casual Vacancy, leapt out at me, and I knew I had to take it home. So now I have nearly a dozen new books to read. My only problem is that I want to read them all at once, and don’t know where to start. It’s a good problem to have, I think.

What’s on your shelf right now? Have you read any of these yet?

[Photo.]

Because I couldn’t help but fall in love with this passage, I thought I’d share it with you:

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past:

IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglassI’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme…


There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string. 


The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America. 


When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented. 


Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.”

- Nicole Krauss, A History of Love

[Photo.] ]]> http://www.bethanysuckrow.com/words-and-strings/feed/ 4 http://www.bethanysuckrow.com/my-to-read-list/ http://www.bethanysuckrow.com/my-to-read-list/#comments Sat, 14 May 2011 17:17:00 +0000 Bethany http://www.bethanysuckrow.com/my-to-read-list/