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May 3, 2024 (reprinted from June 6, 2021)
from “Ordinary Time”
in Ordinary Time: Meditations from the In-Between
by Sarah M. Wells
Ordinary Time is for watching “the sunset through the pines in the valley below our home before the next episode of The Office begins.”—Sarah M. Wells
Ordinary Time: Meditations from the In-Between by Sarah Wells has just been released and we decided to celebrate its arrival with a rerun of our June 11, 2021 feature on the title essay “Ordinary Time” when it first appeared in Ascent magazine. Wells, who offered advice and help when The Humble Essayist was created nearly ten years ago, is a friend of this page. She describes her new book as “a soul-stirring journey through the pages of life’s liturgical calendar, weaving a tapestry of essays that transcend the ordinary and illuminate the extraordinary moments within. With a blend of introspection, humor, lyricism, and keen observation, Ordinary Time inspires readers to find the sacred in the seemingly mundane intricacies of their own lives.”
Wells is the author of poetry, devotional books, and essays, including a novella-length essay The Valley of Achor available on Kindle. Poems and essays by Wells have appeared in Ascent, Brevity, Full Grown People, Hippocampus Review, The Pinch, River Teeth, Rock & Sling, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere.
In this paragraph from her title essay she contemplates when Ordinary Time becomes something else.
Paragraph of the Week
I think about death almost every day these days. I’d prefer not to, but it doesn’t seem to want to give up its grip. There are times when I drive that my mind will flash, imagine what might happen if I just let go of the steering wheel, what would happen when my car strikes against the guard rail. Sometimes when we’re walking on the sidewalk and my son is riding his bike I picture his balance wobbling, him falling wrong and into the road and into the path of a speeding car, and I blink and panic and push away the way ordinary can become extraordinary in a hot second, just like that, just like that and everything I’ve written off as typical and mundane becomes scarce and precious and gone.
—Sarah M. Wells
Comment
Ordinary Time is the forty hours a week that Sarah Wells writes marketing plans at work. It is for making breakfast and dinner and paying for school lunches. It is the middle years when she turns 40 and her husband 42 “at the middlest middle” of their “middle-income, Midwest life.” In the liturgical calendar it is the time between Easter and Advent when “Jesus just walks around and teaches his disciples, heals a few people, holds a few dinners for sinners and tax collectors.” Her mother, diagnosed with cancer, is no longer in Ordinary Time, but in the Lent or Holy Week of her life—“maybe even Maundy Thursday” and since she thinks about her mother often Sarah finds, even in Ordinary Time, that she ponders death more than she would like. Ordinary Time is for watching “the sunset through the pines in the valley below our home before the next episode of The Office begins,” she writes. “Its bright notes rise orange and red until the green of the trees is made black.” It is for “time and stillness, habit, a solid night’s sleep for all the neurons to rewire and restore and recycle the day’s memories.” It is “when nothing tragic or ecstatic is happening,” but, as the Paragraph of the Week makes clear, Ordinary Time can “in a hot second” become extraordinary and what she has “written off as typical and mundane becomes scarce and precious and gone.”
—THE
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Three lyric essays by Steven Harvey appear in the newest edition of Great River Review. The first piece, called “Oakleaf Hydrangea” begins this way:
"The oakleaf hydrangea winking at me over the top of my book carves a saucy shape in the mind standing boldly as itself between me and the rest of the world, hands on hips as it were, the woody bush a swirl like the vessel of water it is named for..."
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Thanks to Tarn Wilson for her review of The Beloved Republic at the River Teeth website. She writes: “In his titular essay 'The Beloved Republic,' Harvey makes this heartening promise to those who feel worried and wearied, helpless in the face of 'war and tyranny,' that by devoting ourselves to lives of steady kindness, creativity, and friendship we are joining an invisible, benevolent army.” Read the full review here.
Brevity
Thanks to Brevity magazine for publishing the short prose piece “The Hermit Thrush.”
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You can read the entire brief piece here.
Zone 3 Interview on The Beloved Republic
Thanks to Amy Wright and the folks at Zone 3 for granting me an interview about my new book. Amy reads with discernment, asks great and surprising questions, and listens carefully to the answers. Check out the question she opens with in the sidebar--it goes right to the heart of the matter! See the full interview here.
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The Beloved Republic
I am pleased to announce that my fourth collection of personal essays won the Wandering Aengus Press nonfiction award and has been nominated for two Pushcarts. Thanks to the Press for this honor.
What is the Beloved Republic? E. M. Forster, who coined the phrase, called it “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” who “have the power to endure” and “can take a joke.” Pitted against authoritarianism, the Beloved Republic is the peaceful and fragile confederacy of kind, benevolent, and creative people in a world of tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouthed bullies. Taking Forster’s phrase for its title, my book can be read as dispatches from that besieged land.
Available online and at bookstores. Learn more at the author's website
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Folly Beach
Folly Beach is a book-length personal essay about easing fears of mortality and loss through creativity. It never loses sight of the inevitable losses that life brings, but doesn't let loss have the last word. In the face of the grim, Folly Beach holds up the human capacity to create as our sufficient joy.
—THE
“In a world of loss, creativity is the best revenge.”
You can learn more about the recent work of Steven Harvey at his author's page here.
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We at The Humble Essayist are in love with the paragraph, that lowliest of literary techniques. A sentence stands out as a noble thing: a complete thought. But what is a paragraph? And what, in particular, is a good one? You know it when you read it--that is our article of faith. So on Friday of each week, beginning on Independence Day 2014, the very day 169 years earlier that Henry Thoreau moved to Walden Pond, we will select a single paragraph from an essay or a reflective memoir and print it here along with a paragraph of commentary. We will choose paragraphs that are surprising, beautifully written, and, above all, thematic--illuminating the author's comment on life. Each paragraph of the week is, in short, a concise review of the writer's work. We hope that this page will introduce you to many exciting authors and their ideas.
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