Rachel Starr Thomson

No one who lives stands still. One begins to ask questions as soon as one can speak. Indeed, my first utterance, if I am to believe Mother, was not a single word but a coherent question: “Where’s Daddy?” I must have wanted to know. The young, at least, always want answers . . .

The only reason for asking is to get an answer. The only reason for seeking is to find (not to maintain one’s ‘Seeker Status’). The only reason for an open mind is to fill it with truth–as open eyes are to see with. Or an open mouth to snap at a bit of steak. Otherwise, a mouth that just hangs open indicates vacuity; and a mind for ever open on all the great questions is no less a mark of vacuity.

But when one finds–finds love or finds truth–it becomes (or ought to become) a constancy in one’s life. Those questions are answered, and one needs no longer be concerned with them, except to help others seeking answers. But new questions pose themselves . . .

- Sheldon Vanauken, Under the Mercy

Socrates said, famously, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Sheldon Vanauken, less famously, wrote, “Examination of one’s life goes hand in hand with contemplation: first the seeing it as it is and then the thinking about it.”

Solomon saw, and thought, and wrote, “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.”

David, in his own pursuit of wisdom and of wisdom’s God, prayed, “I will delight myself in thy commandments, which I have loved. My hands also will I lift up unto thy commandments, which I have loved; and I will meditate in thy statutes.”

Contemplation, examination, understanding, meditation–none of these things, I have realized, come easily or naturally or without effort. Thought takes time, it takes quiet, and it takes deliberate effort. We have to soak. If how we spend our minutes is how we spend our lives, then the more our minutes are full of sound bites, the less our thought lives will ever develop. We will stand before God not with minds that have been enriched by meditation in His Word and His ways, but with a severe attention deficit and a Twitter feed.

So that is why I’m making Internet changes. I’m a writer, a Christian one, and so I have a certain responsibility to think about things, to pray, and yes, to meditate. I’m afraid that if don’t rein in my Internet habits (which are very accurately portrayed in Debbie Ohi’s cartoon, below), not only will I never really think thoughts worth thinking, but I’ll actually train my brain to zone out and go looking for something new and exciting every thirty seconds.

The fact is, life is distracting enough without us exacerbating the problem through bad habits.

I’m not actually going to disappear from the online world. If anything, I’ll be here more. But I’ll here contributing: writing blog posts like this one, recording more of my own pilgrimage in the hopes that it will help or encourage someone else. I’ll be surfing far, far less. I’m planning to use Google Reader to keep up with my favourite blogs, but I’m only going to read them once a week or so–all at once, as though I’m sitting down with a magazine. And then I hope I’ll pay more attention to what they have to say, and be able to contribute something to the conversation because I’m not “just looking at this photo” and “just skimming this article” and “just updating this status” while I read.

Oh, and if you see a lot of FB status updates and Tweets, I’m not being a hypocrite–I’ve started using a social media manager (HootSuite) that lets me update everything at once without getting lured in by news feeds. I think I’ve cut my Facebook time by about 80% since I started using it last week.

The Internet is still a new world. It has so much potential for good, and so much potential to fry us. The difference will be in the choices we make.

So here I am, trying to make good ones. And here’s to you, as you do likewise.

I am considering some pretty serious changes to my life, mostly regarding how I spend my minutes. (Annie Dillard said that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And if I may add, how we spend our seconds, our minutes, and our hours is how we spend our days.)

Here’s one area that needs to change:

(Used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com.)

Debbie wrote a whole post on her own struggles with Internet misusage which is worth reading. Like her, I’m not planning to go cold turkey and stop using the Internet entirely. Instead, I want to use it a lot more deliberately, with intent and purpose.

More about that coming …

“It’s too late . . . I’ve come this far, and I’m not giving up now. Beauty is leading us home.”

“You may find nothing at all. Or else a tyrant who takes away your freedom.”

“And I may find the freedom to choose what is best and go on choosing it. All the time. Free of disappointment. Like kites that fly for their master for the joy of it. Without strings.”

“It saddens me that you cannot imagine life without someone to serve.”

“It saddens me,” said Cal-Raven, “that you think joy comes any other way.”

(from The Ale Boy’s Feast by Jeffrey Overstreet)

During my recent series on The Auralia Thread over at Speculative Faith, I had the privilege of interviewing Jeffrey Overstreet. We talked about art, surprises, questions, and this final book itself. He said he’d immensely enjoyed the interview; it posted on my birthday–so that made it even more fun.

Rachel: Before we even start, let me say thank you for an extraordinary reading experience. In The Ale Boy’s Feast especially, I found myself reading a story that not only enveloped me in its world and characters, but caused me to look at my own life differently. I’ve been challenged to pay more attention to the beauty that surrounds me and think about the realities it might be pointing to—and to stay faithful to the dreams God has given me, knowing that ultimately they will lead me to Him. That might not even be exactly what you were trying to say, but I appreciate the message!

Jeffrey: Thank you so much, Rachel. I wanted to tell the best story I could, given the time and resources available to me.

I knew that my job was to pay attention to the characters, their decisions, the consequences of those decisions, and the textures of the world in which all of this took place. As for any “messages,” well… I wasn’t going to worry about that. I believe that a storyteller should focus on bringing the story to life, and messages will emerge on their own. If the storyteller stops and concerns himself with delivering messages, than the storytelling suffers and becomes heavy-handed.

So I’m delighted to hear that the story meant something to you. I learned a lot from following these characters around, and if readers learn lessons of their own, that’s an extra blessing.

Rachel: The Auralia Thread’s most obvious theme is art, and the power of art to call us beyond ourselves. But it certainly isn’t the only theme. What other themes were in your head when you began, and what themes have arisen in the writing process? Have any surprised you?

Jeffrey: It all started with the question, “Why do most people reach an age where they fold up their imaginations and put them in a closet? Why do most people decide that make-believe is just for kids?”

But later, that led to questions about what leads people to lose their curiosity about the truth, and to set up camp in a particular church denomination or a particular political party or a particular academic discipline and to toss away the lenses that might help them see the truth more fully.

I think that almost any theme I could highlight would be a theme that surprised me. I didn’t go into the story to explore themes. I went into the story because a question inspired a picture in my mind—an intriguing picture of a society that made imagination illegal. I wanted to step through that picture frame, explore that society, and get to know the broken-hearted character who was so grieved by it.

As a result, pretty much all of what transpired surprised me. I didn’t start with an agenda to fulfill or a lesson I wanted to deliver. I was curious about characters whose stories are still teaching me lessons.

Rachel: Speaking of surprises, what other aspects of the series have surprised you?

Jeffrey: Many of the relationships of the characters changed considerably over the course of the series in ways that really surprised me.

Read the rest of the interview here.

So, are you intrigued? Ready to read the series (or finish it)? I have a book to give away, and you can win it here at this blog. But you must do something, because I’m all about reciprocal giving.  In a comment, link to a review you have recently written and posted online. I will pick a commenter at random for the win. Check back here to find out if your name has been drawn!

And thanks for coming along on this tour. It’s good to be back.

He tightened his picker-staff grip, desire rotting into resentment. Most creatures of the ground had vanished from the Expanse, caught by the underground menace or fleeing its clutches. Krawg had pursued that rusty-hinge chirp, compelled by hunger and, even more, by a longing to see feathers lift a mystery into the air, to hear a song take to the sky.

So when a cry pierced the dusk and a solitary shadow winged low over the river–a stark and simple rune written on the sky’s purple scroll–he held his breath.

Beauty.

He glanced about to make sure he was alone, then smeared his tears with his sleeve. It was a bird. A bird with tousled crestfeathers and a ribbon tail gliding northward. In Krawg’ chest a pang rang like an alarm bell. He wanted to join the bird there, suspended.

“Ballyworms, Warney. What’s wrong with me?”

(from The Ale Boy’s Feast by Jeffrey Overstreet)

Quoting from my review at Speculative Faith of The Ale Boy’s Feast (all of which, including a plot synopsis of the whole series, you can read here):

I loved The Ale Boy’s Feast. As the above plot summary indicates, it should not be read apart from the rest of the series—but read within its context, it’s a challenging, moving story that is both a heart-pounding adventure and a heartbreaking song. Jeffrey Overstreet’s writing has only gotten better, as even those characters who appear only for a few scenes are depicted with the detail that makes them human. His prose has all the density and mystery of poetry, demanding that readers pay attention. Not in any way a simplistic allegory, this book nevertheless offers us a lens through which to see ourselves, our world, our stories, and our history; a lens through which to cast aside deception and embrace beauty and truth.

I find myself at a loss, really, to sum up all I experienced as I read this book. I feel that I have read many different stories and could review them all, or I could just rise on a whirlwind of words, images, impressions—of glassworks, kites and kitemakers, golden ale, underground rivers, far northern mountains, toys, wings, love, death, nightmares, tears, men, women, and children. I close the covers and savour the names, the places, the accents, the people.

I can’t really do it all justice. The best I can do is encourage you to read this book, to read all four, and savour the feast with me.

I shall post my recent interview with Jeffrey tomorrow, and give you a chance to win a copy of the book. Until then.

In this, my first CSFF tour in quite some time, I am proud to feature Jeffrey Overstreet’s The Ale Boy’s Feast, easily my favourite novel of the year. In the next two days I’ll be posting my review, and interview with the author, a book giveaway, and quotes from The Auralia Thread itself.

Today, the links:

You can visit author and film critic Jeffrey Overstreet at http://lookingcloser.org/fiction/.

You can buy a copy of this magnificent book here  (this is my associate link).

And you can visit the rest of the tour(ers? ists?) at the links below. My apologies for the relative brevity of this post. I am battling an uncanny number of obstacles to being online at the moment. But even so, I’m glad to be here :).

Gillian Adams
Red Bissell
Grace Bridges
Beckie Burnham
Morgan L. Busse
Valerie Comer
CSFF Blog Tour
Shane Deal
Chris Deane
Cynthia Dyer
Andrea Graham
Katie Hart
Ryan Heart
Bruce Hennigan
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Dawn King
Inae Kyo
Shannon McDermott
Shannon McNear
Karen McSpadden
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
John W. Otte
Sarah Sawyer
Kathleen Smith
Donna Swanson
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Dona Watson
Phyllis Wheeler

With my inner world crashing around me, I did all I could to recover the walk I’d had with God. I searched my heart for sin and repented. (I made some pretty forced confessions.) I fasted. I prayed. I got other people to pray for me. I did all the right things, all the things that are supposed to transform you into a God-loving, on-fire, dwelling-in-the-presence believer.

And none of them worked.

One thing remained, but it scared me. I thought it was a cop out. That thing was trust.

Could I just give up my striving and trust God to still love me? Could I keep coming to Him in prayer and just assume He was accepting and hearing me because of His Son? Could I trust Him to still lead me and to have a reason for this strange separation, this apartness which I was so sure could not be His will?

Of all the articles I’ve written recently, this one is closest to my heart. We see dry seasons and struggles as signs that God has abandoned us or we have abandoned Him–but the truth may be something quite different. You can read the whole article here:  http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0002419.cfm

Sarah Holman is a young writer and homeschool grad whose articles are sometimes published in Home School Enrichment, the magazine I copyedit. She has just self-published her first novel, and when she e-mailed to say she going to embark on a blog tour, I volunteered Inklings as one of the stops. The info below was provided by Sarah. (As for the future of Inklings … I’m still thinking about retooling.)

Destiny – it’s a word that plagues Maria Morris. What does God want her to do with her life? Should she go to college or does God have other plans for her? When her parents go missing during a business trip, Maria embarks on a quest that will change her life forever. Trying to fight against an overbearing Milky Way Government, Maria travels to earth in search of a lost prince and some crown jewels. Her faith is tested, however, when a new law is passed. Will Maria be able to find her parents and the crown jewels before it’s too late? Is she strong enough to stand up for her faith even if it means never seeing her family again? Most of all, will Maria discover her true Destiny?

Though this is Sarah’s first book, she has been writing for years. Her articles have been seen in many different magazines, including Homeschool Enrichment, His Wonders, The Kings Blooming Rose and more. She also posts regularly on her blogs The Destiny of One (http://destinyofone.blogspot.com/) and Meditations of His Love (http://meditationsofhislove.blogspot.com/). She is a homeschool graduate and lives in central Texas. When not pursuing her passion of writing, she can be found taking long walks, reading, sewing or spending time with her family.

The Destiny of One will be available on May 14th at www.thedestinyofone.com.

What to see where The Destiny of One blog tour will be next? Go to http://destinyofone.blogspot.com/ to find out.