Half Moon, Whole Heart

Last summer, I camped by the Salmon River for the first time. The riverbanks spread wide their stony shores, the August waters low. I drove shuttle for kayakers and practiced the art of waiting by water.  After a few hours, the water begins to speak.

Beneath a spring half moon, I’m back. Now the bars of rock are thin, rushed by water that flexes its green and fast muscles. Like men at a gym, this constant roil—noisy and strong. Yet gentle too, like mothers humming lullabies.

How do we hear the river?

When God speaks, we are often the crowd that hears thunder or angels—everything but his words.

I thought I heard the river telling of men and women. But I think it was also speaking of “other.” Of whatever it is I haven’t learned to listen to.

Perhaps the weight-lifting—wait-lifting—water is the sound of women building muscle beneath the frothy soft of their surface. Perhaps it is the song men sing when no one is listening.  Perhaps it is every word we open our hearts to.

When we see an other approaching and we hear nothing but the rush of water, we pretend that’s the only sound a river makes. Oh the strength and sweetness we will miss.

And now I am off to listen to distant seas. Here's to hearing.

Open my ears.  

Anna's New Book: The Heart Takes Flight

The Heart Takes Flight is a children’s book for grownups, celebrating all those who wake into their dreams. With its inked images and text, this illustrated vignette invites you to try on your wings.

Written & illustrated by Anna Elkins.

Anna currently resides in the mythical State of Jefferson, where she writes, paints, and teaches. Her words have appeared in various journals and books, and her art has been exhibited at home and abroad.

Available for purchase through amazon.com and select bookstores.

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A Heart Wakes: The Beginnings of The Heart Takes Flight

A couple of summers ago, I posted here about a card line I’d created called “The Heart Takes Flight.” Well, that heart has grown up, and the idea has turned into a book.

But back to 2010. That autumn, I was part of a team that travelled to the Bay Area to conduct a creativity conference called “Awakening.” I had been asked to teach on writing in the Spirit.

I had taught writing, but not in a Spirit-led sense. I was an itsy bit nervous. So I was glad that the morning I was scheduled to speak, the conference began with a long and gorgeous worship segment. I invited the Holy Spirit to tell me whatever was on His heart. I didn’t realize He would do so through someone else. Within a few moments, I felt a hand on my shoulder. A man began to prophesy over me. I had only met him once, when he coordinated the team on arrival the day before. I didn’t even know his name.

He began to speak of and into my life in the way a prophet can. He described my life’s callings and affirmed some secret questions I’d asked God and no one else.

Then he said, “You are a writer. You need to get started on your next book.” He didn’t even know I’d written a first one—years prior and still unpublished. When he gave me that call to action, I didn’t have an idea for a second book. I just knew I’d better start dreaming of one.

I learned far more than I taught that day.

That conference was a trip with Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry out of Redding, California. I came to study at BSSM from a small island in Micronesia, where I had been teaching literature and art. That journey is another story, except for this part: on my application to BSSM, I wrote a little vignette about being Sleeping Beauty and being awakened to God’s promises. Kind of trite, but true.

I didn’t remember the cards or the application during the Awakening conference. But when I returned to Redding, the idea of writing another book kept growing. I had enrolled in a writing class, mostly to meet other writers in the Bethel community. The instructor gave us writing prompts that wakened my poetry from its sleep. For one of the last assignments before the Christmas holidays, I completed a little storyboard about a heart waking into its dream. I called it The Heart Takes Flight. It charmed me, and I wondered if it might be the book I needed to write. But the holidays came and went. Life came and kept coming.

A year passed. I went home for Christmas and reread the prophecies that had been spoken over my life since I had been at Bethel. I read the one about writing a book and felt a little knot in my heart.

My storyboard called to me. I pulled it out. Aloud I said to it, “I need a writing retreat.” A few days later, friends of mine asked me to housesit while they went out of town for New Year’s. I packed my storyboard, my Japanese ink, and some brushes. I got to the house and fed the cat and canary. I covered the Balinese dining room table with thick layers of newspaper and began painting in the winter light that blossomed through thin silk curtains, birdsong my soundtrack. I painted line after line, “revised” the images over and over. For every simple image in The Heart Takes Flight, dozens and dozens ended up as the crumpled base for winter fires.

If I could distill my heart’s journey to its simplest story, it would be that of this inked heart. I wanted everything about the heart’s home—the book—to reflect that simplicity. The interior is black and white. The cover is so basic, that when you see it from across a room, all that is visible is a heart suspended in sky.

The Heart Takes Flight was to be both timeless and yet almost to feel as if it had been designed in the year of my birth (without the 70’s color trend of avocado-goldenrod-tangerine). The heart’s journey parallels my own: I was born in the natural, I was born again in the supernatural, and then I awakened into an understanding of how to live in both. And that is the background to a book with fewer words than this paragraph.

The Heart Takes flight is as complicated and simple as waking each day: as complicated as crossing from one world to the next and as simple as opening our eyes.

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P.S. If you'd like to help me get the word out, that would be grand:

• Feel free to forward this email or the amazon link to your friends

• Leave a customer review for the book at amazon.com

• Ask your local bookstores to carry The Heart Takes Flight

Enjoy playing in its pages!

Small Thought for the Leap Year

We may never arrive,

but we always enter in.

Wintering with Middlemarch

Over many cups of tea, in front of many fires, and on the brink of many nights' sleep, I enjoyed reading George Eliot's Middlemarch this winter. Here are a few, dog-eared treasures I couldn't resist sharing before shelving the book:

“To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.” (58)

“’’Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true seeing is within . . . .’” (178)

“He was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation.” (179)

“It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else.” (204)

“The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.” (307)

“She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to others—likely to tread in the wrong places . . . . yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by the side precipices where vision would have been perilous with fear.” (347)

“’By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.’” (365)

“Charm is a result of two . . . wholes, the one loving and the one loved.” (381)

“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?” (390)

“What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.” (465)

“Unwonted circumstances my make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze.” (584)

“’Of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.’” (689)

“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which was a seed of ennobling thought and purpose with it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.” (689)

“We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.” (731-2)

“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” (781)

{All passages from George Eliot's Middlemarch. Reprinted by Wordsworth Classics, 1994}