Confluence
Where the rivers met,
the repetitions became
impossible to miss.
Jim and I had been dating nearly a year
when I looked up and saw him on a ladder,
caulking the windows of my two-story home.
That side of the house stood only a few feet
from the steep drop of the bluff.
He had noticed work that needed doing
and offered to do it.
He had yet to tell me he loved me.
Watching him on that ladder,
I came to understand
the language he was already speaking.
We dated for five years while I continued healing
from the divorce.
His patience gave our relationship
room to grow. We married in 1997.
In the language of Ruth, he became my Boaz.
Years later, when I told him I wanted to earn
a master’s degree in counseling, we considered
what it would ask of us—
including our retirement funds.
With his support,
I entered the program
in the fall of 2007.
The calling had been a whisper
through my adult life.
By my internship in 2009,
it had become a vocatio—
from vocare, to call; kin to vox, voice.
The whisper had become my voice.
Nine years earlier, I had interviewed Kelle
in the little coffee shop inside Barnes & Noble.
We were considering her next professional step.
We placed her at what was then X.com,
where her role would grow
in significance over the years.
Our conversation became
the beginning of a friendship.
Its further implications
remained beyond our view.
When I began searching
for a counseling internship,
I remembered Kelle’s offer to introduce me
to someone whose counseling practice
might be a good fit for my internship.
The woman whose possibilities
I had once recognized
was now opening a possibility for me.
I wrote to ask
whether she remembered
our earlier conversation.
She did.
Her introduction brought me to Maureen.
When Maureen interviewed me,
every counseling room was already in use.
She offered me an internship
if I could arrange my hours
around available rooms—
moving among them as openings arose
during the day, in the evenings, or on weekends.
When her office was available, I used it.
Room by room, I arranged my appointments,
gathering the hours I needed.
On many nights, Maureen and I worked past ten.
She told me she had received generosity
at the beginning of her own career.
She wanted to extend it.
Only then could I see how far that conversation
in the coffee shop had reached.
Some might call it serendipity.
I recognized providence—
disclosed through the years
between one meeting and another.
In August 2011, with Maureen’s encouragement
and continuing supervision,
I opened my own practice.
The confluence was beginning to show:
the work of one season
was still moving through the next.
The florist’s eye for composition,
the musician’s ear for resonance,
the youth pastor’s attention
to another person’s becoming—
all entered the therapy room with me.
Ophthalmology for the Soul
began to take shape:
visual metaphors through which
an inward experience
could become visible enough to approach.
I created materials
and held a couple of workshops.
There was more I wanted to explore.
My private practice was growing rapidly.
Individual and couples work
claimed my attention,
and the larger creative undertaking
remained unfinished.
The questions that had drawn me toward it
continued to deepen
through the people I counseled:
how an image opens recognition,
how metaphor gives experience a form,
how language reaches
what a person has carried for years
without being able to name it.
I am returning to that unfinished work now,
with years of listening behind me
and room to develop what I could only begin then.
Alongside my counseling work,
I continued returning to my family story.
Photographs,
remembered rooms,
family records,
and conceptual art
became ways into experiences
I had carried for decades.
I believed my family would welcome
an attempt to make sense of our pain.
Many in my maternal family
received it as an affront.
I had offered a manuscript.
What I hoped would follow was recognition.
Their response became part of what I had to carry.
For ten years,
I returned to the memoir,
line by line.
Writing brought me into encounters
with my earlier selves—
the child interpreting the atmosphere,
the young woman seeking a place for her longing,
the wife struggling to give her needs language.
From the vantage of later years,
I could hear more than I had understood
when I first put their experiences on the page.
The manuscript became a place
where I could receive those lives within my own.
Art and verse emerged
from that sustained attention.
So did the desire to offer another person
a way into what they had carried without words.
Etched from the Soul began taking form.
The streams were meeting:
image,
language,
spiritual inquiry,
and the practice of
accompanying another life.
What had seemed circuitous
was becoming intelligible.
Recognition began
of what I wanted to carry forward
and of a form someone else could enter.
For Your Own Terrain
CONFLUENCE
Differentiation
Field Notes:
AVULSION
A river can shift
from an established channel
into another course
across its floodplain.
As sediment accumulates,
the riverbed can rise,
making another route
more accessible to the water.
A flood can initiate
the change in course.
In China,
the Yellow River
has repeatedly changed course
as sediment accumulated
within its lower reaches.
The course a river has followed
can cease to be
the course it carries forward.
So can ours.
Within a family
A family develops expectations
about the course
a life should follow:
work worth pursuing,
beliefs worth keeping,
stories that may be told,
desires that receive encouragement.
As our experience deepens,
we may discover a direction
that asks us to reconsider
what we have learned
to seek approval for.
An enduring interest,
a conviction taking shape,
a story asking to be spoken
can press against the course
we have learned to follow—
asking us to give our own judgment
a place in what happens next.
Differentiation is the practice
of discerning what we believe
and choosing how to act
while remaining attentive
to the relationships
in which those choices unfold.
We can listen
to another’s concern,
consider what it asks of us,
and speak from a position
we have taken time
to understand.
A life acquires direction
through the decisions
we learn to inhabit.
What keeps returning
across the seasons of your life,
asking for another expression?
—
What longing lives within
that returning current—
and whose response do you imagine
as you consider giving it expression?
—
Where might divine love be finding expression
through a desire you have carried for years—
and what form could you begin to give it now?
A FURTHER BEARING
In Louisiana,
the Atchafalaya offers
the Mississippi’s waters
a shorter route
to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Old River Control Structure
regulates how much water
enters that route,
helping maintain
the Mississippi’s present course.
A familiar course
can be sustained
by structures
that keep directing
the flow.
Within a family, too,
expectations can help sustain
a familiar arrangement:
whose judgment guides decisions,
whose plans receive support,
whose account of the past
the family accepts.
Giving an enduring desire
a considered expression
can change our participation
in that arrangement.
We begin with a choice
we can put into practice—
and learn how to remain
in conversation
as our direction becomes known.