Spend Your Afternoons

Finishing our book club, and a giveaway!

William H. Rau, Cliff View, Summit of Alleghenies, c. 1895

first… a giveaway

We’ve made it. We have arrived at the last chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Thank you to everyone who has kept at it, even as the “summer book club” turned into an “autumn book club”!

I’m doing a giveaway this week for everyone’s who has stuck with it and finished Dillard’s book with us. If you win, you’ll get a leather journal for future outdoor explorations and journaling.

To participate, do the following:

• Post or share one picture from this summer/fall’s outdoor challenge. It can be a picture of creeks, mountains, back patios, butterflies—whatever you have.

• Tag me in your picture, or send it to me via email. (Instagram: @gracywrites, X: @gracyolmstead)

I’ll assemble a montage of our summer / fall adventures, and pick a winner.

---

We’ve explored a lot together this year—both in Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and in our communities. So what is the “end,” or aim, of all our exploring?

The purpose is twofold, I think. First, Dillard answers some deep questions at the heart of her book. Here at the winter solstice, Dillard turns once more to the subject of suffering, death, decay, and loss. She turns again to theodicy. Is beauty itself a mask, a facade meant to tease us in the midst of life’s tragedies? Is God cruel? Is the world a horrific place?

Dillard replies in the negative here, at the end of the book. “No, I’ve gone through this a million times,” she writes. “Beauty is not a hoax…. Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it.”

It is essential that we account for what is. We should not not shirk the brokenness of our world. But Dillard refuses to let darkness keep her from the light. The world calls us to mourning and to glory. As Dillard powerfully puts it, “The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly…”

And so the second purpose of this chapter is challenge. Dillard calls us to see, and to live wildly. Not to live with complacence and comfort, but with abandon. She quotes Thomas Merton as saying, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” Dillard adds,

“There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys of itsy-bitsy years on end.… The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”

Dillard reminds me to prune back the deadness of life. To live with eyes wide open. And when things start to get glassy and blurred, dull and frayed, she reminds me to start paying attention again. The whole world is charged with the glory of God. I just have to see it.

A closing poem for you, from Gerard Manley Hopkins:

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.