From this Quiet Place

Here I am, blowing the dust off of this website, seeing as how the last post I made here was in October 2020. A year of thoughts, writings, painting, poetry, parenting, marriage, beautiful memories, late-night tears, off-screen work, and real-life digging has found me a year later on this website with something new spinning in my mind.

I want to try something new. I hope you’ll have grace with me as I figure out how this will work but I’m a bundle of ideas, and I am not one to take my time jumping into inspiration.

I’ve continued to write and most of it has ended up as lengthy Instagram captions, run-on sentences in a Google Doc, or it’s buried in the tanned pages of my journal. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years stretching my time, my energy, my skills, my ideas. I’ve found my arms full of words, poetry, gardens, vintage items, watercolors, recipes, chicken feathers, and maybe even my thin sanity at times. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to create and think and dream, and I’ve wanted to find a way to share all of that. And I think I have the early simmering of how I want to bring that to you.

When Jed and I moved into this house only 4 years ago, we started gutting the interior, spackling up old cracked walls, tilling the fallow ground, and we began making this 120 year old farmhouse a home. We live in lake country, which means it’s incredibly flat. For two kids who grew up in the shadow of the mountains, (Jed in the Green Mountains of Vermont, and me somewhere between the Catskills and the Adirondacks), we sorely miss the rise of the horizon in every direction. But this little old farmhouse is on a tiny little hill just outside of the city. It’s just high enough to get longer sunsets, a slight view, and wild whipping winds in February. 

Not longer after we moved in, I hung a quote from Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” on our kitchen wall. 

“His house was house was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley."

We named this little two-acre plot “Cnoc Tearmann” (pronounced knock tear-mon) which means (in Irish) “Sanctuary Hill.” We wanted our home to feel safe. To be a haven of beauty and grace and truth. To cultivate life and all of the good things the Lord has given us. We want it to be a home where the Gospel thrives, not just for our family, but for anyone who sits with us in the messy in-between of construction projects, raising kids, and living life. We want it to be a place where when anyone stepped inside here or brushed shoulders with this place, they’d breathe a good and easy sigh, and feel that “evil things do not come into that valley.” 

So this has become our moniker and my hope as I continue to write and create. I opened an Etsy shop under this name and for awhile we were tracking our house renovations under this name. 

I thought I’d start to share some of this work “food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all” with you.

Here’s my hope —

Every month, I’ll share poetry, some that I’ve written and some that I love. 

Recipes that hit our table frequently enough that I no longer need to look at them.

Writers who find their way to our hearts. 

Paintings I create. Garden seeds, tips, and ideas. 

Ramblings and questions and friends who I love.

Discount codes and sneak peeks to the Etsy shop, vintage items, things I create, and the things my family builds.

And continued, as usual, the raw feelings I have about how much I love Jesus, the gospel, the work of digging in to the ground we’re planted in. 

I want to do this well, so I won’t promise you a weekly post. But I do promise that every time I sit to write, post, or share, it will be from this grove the Lord has given us. And as long as I have breath in my lungs, I want you to feel at peace here just as if you were coming to my house for dinner, and to know that an extension of my home is this little corner of the internet. While the world thrashes and rages, and some dig bunkers and stack their shelves for the apocalypse, I’ll try to keep sharing the good good things from this little knoll. This little viewpoint. This little sanctuary hill.