P&S Sept 2021 GIFT

.........................................................6 .......................................................30 ............................................................34 ............................................................42 .......................................................50 Click on the section to jump to it

Elrena Evans

Happy September!

S

eptember often feels like a liminal space, doesn’t it? Depending on your season in life and geographical location, this turning from summer into fall can sometimes feel clunky, out of sync. My kids are going back to school, but the weather remains hot and humid — fall sweaters and crunchy leaves still feel like half-remembered dreams that might not come again.

But still, the season turns. Slowly, inconsistently, sometimes incongruously. It is summer and then it is not. The school bus trundles down the street.

My seven-year-old, perhaps wearying from endless days of sunshine, sits on the side of the pool — what I’ve dubbed the Parent Wall — while I go down the water slide with other people’s kids. He is already slipping into fall while I want one more summer splash.

••• We have what feels like several Milestone Years in school this fall — my eldest daughter is a senior in high school, my oldest son is a freshman, my younger daughter is in fifth grade and top of the pack in her last year of elementary school. (And boy, does she know it.)

Of course, with five kids, we have lots of opportunities for Milestone Years… and this year we also have a

seventh grader and a second grader holding down the messy middles.

Once upon a time, we had five kids under the age of ten. Now we are sharing the car with an almost-adult. Time is a funny thing.

Christie writes about time for us this month in Paper&String… how time is invisible and immaterial, available only as metaphor.

Amy encourages us to take the time to put a different lens on our life camera, to see the world made small. And Tonya tells us about a time when cheese scones became an anchor needed by her heart.

Ecclesiastes tells us that God makes everything beautiful in its time. I hope there is beauty in this time, for you.

September is for Remembering My Name

by Christie Purifoy

W

e cannot look at time. We cannot touch it or taste it or listen to it sing. Time has no scent, good or bad. And yet we do experience it. Mostly, we count it and track it and measure it. But what if, like mine, your brain is not hard-wired for counting and tracking and measuring? What then?

Though it is invisible and immaterial, I do visualize time through metaphor.

It is a line spooling out like yarn in front of me.

It is the firm, hardpacked road behind me. A day is a rhythm of three square meals, and the week is a series of seven blank boxes, like those “week-at-aglance” paper calendars I insist on using though I have a high-tech phone with a calendar app. A lifetime, I cannot really grasp. It is a mist. But a year within that life? Without question, a year is a perfect circle.

Until I look more closely. Then I see that it is a circle with corners. The year as I see it is an impossible shape. Circles do not have corners.

Squares and rectangles and triangles do. Even a baby without language but with dexterity with a shape-sorting toy knows that. Yet I am learning that impossible shapes become possible once we begin to see things that cannot be seen. Why shouldn’t time made visible look like a circle with corners? The path that is summer is ending. The circle of the year has been feeling flat, but I can see a turn approaching. A bend in the road, a twist in the yarn, a shift in the light: here comes September.

••• Both of my daughters were born in September.

In July of the year my firstborn daughter was eight, we packed up our Florida house for a move to Pennsylvania. Among our boxes was one filled with small wooden birdhouses I had purchased at a craft store. The birdhouses would be painted and decorated as fairy houses

at a fairy-themed tea party birthday celebration for my girl’s ninth birthday. I intended to set up those houses with paint and glue and dried flowers and Florida seashells on the front porch of our Pennsylvania farmhouse for third-grade classmates we didn’t yet know. This was the most important box in our van. The second most important box was labeled baby girl clothes. My fourth child, our second daughter, was due to be born two weeks after my oldest turned nine. The year of the fairy house birthday was the last year I did not plan two birthday celebrations simultaneously. I went into labor three days after the party.

My daughters’ birthday cakes are always decorated with garden flowers. September is the month of the year when the garden flatly refuses to stay outdoors. In every corner of my house are jam jars with dahlias. Every countertop is spread with apples from our trees or herbs from the raised bed just outside my kitchen door. The garden takes over the

house because this is harvest time. This is the fullness of summer. But the corners of my rooms are filled with flowers at this time of year, more than any other, for one other simple reason: I grow dahlias. Dahlias are late-summer bloomers, and most of the dahlias I grow are not grown as ornamental garden plants. They are shrubby plants with hollow stems that cannot hold themselves up without the messy assistance of stakes and twine. There is no temptation to leave their blooms undisturbed to grow outdoors. My dahlias are cut-flower dahlias, and in September they explode in flower, and I cut them and bring them all inside where I fill myself up, up, up with their beauty as if filling a root cellar in my heart that I will pull from all winter long.

••• On roads and paths, corners are pass-through places. They are nothing more than the bend that carries us from what lies behind and on toward all that is yet ahead. But if September is a corner of the year, as my mind insists on seeing it, then September is not an empty space to travel through. This corner catches me and holds me in a place of fullness. In September, I gather buckets of flowers. In September, we gorge ourselves on summer fruits even as the leaves of the crape myrtle trees outside the window begin to turn to flame. In September, every corner of this house is filled to overflowing with earthly beauty.

But there is also this: in two different Septembers my daughters have been hospitalized. Late summer is a difficult time for those with allergies, with asthma, and with anxiety. Summer’s abundance and its lack of school-day structure has its shadow side. I can remember praying on two separate occasions

for a daughter to be released from the hospital in time to celebrate her birthday at home.

Two times that prayer has been answered, yes. Illness, pain, suffering: these things catch us. They keep us from rushing ahead. But if September has a shadow side, illness has a silver lining: we are forced to pause and forced to be present. In a way, time stops—or at the very least, slows down. And without our stories of sickness, we would have no tales to tell of healing.

There was a September many years ago when illness had slowed me right down to a screeching, screaming halt. I felt stuck in suffering and could imagine no end to it. But that agony welled up in me like the voice of God, and I prayed as if grasping the corner of his garment. I felt like the woman the gospel writers remembered. She had great faith,

apparently—perhaps great faith feels like deep desperation. Perhaps faith comes when our longing is so enormous it pushes hopelessness out. If what I have had is faith, then I can tell you that faith is like a burning in the bones. It is like being filled with fire.

On most days, I am too busy moving to bow in prayer for long. I am too preoccupied to let the fire rise up in me. But September is a corner I have never been able to take at full speed. It is simply too full. There has been too much sorrow and too much joy, and even during simpler Septembers I am slowed by the weight of memory. I am slowed by the heft of this bucket filled with water. The dahlias are coming on fast, and knowing that the first frost will finish them, I am stuck here in the garden, cutting stems as if the ephemeral lives of flowers were worth more than gold.

••• A corner is the one place on the road where you are almost forced to look both ahead and behind. In fact, when the road bends there is less distance between ahead and behind, as if past and present draw nearer to one another in this strange turning present. When I imagine myself navigating the shift that is September, I imagine myself at the wheel of a car turning right and seeing the road ahead and—just there at the edge of my shoulder—the road I have already traveled. September is a hairpin turn, and everything, not just the road, seems doubled. It is summer fruit and autumn leaves.

It is one daughter then another. It is nine years ago, we came to this house and celebrated a ninth birthday. It is one more ninth birthday coming round the bend.

I once took a birthday portrait of my youngest.

She was seated in an armchair in our dining room, and she held one enormous stem from a ‘Cafe au Lait’ dahlia in her hand. In the photo, you cannot see her face. There is her hair and her sweet little-girl body, almost swallowed up by the chair, but instead of eyes, instead of nose, there is a swirl of rosey-beige petals. In the picture, she is four years old, she is just home from the hospital, and she is a dahlia child. In the Bible, we are reckoned to be like “flowers of the field.” It is not exactly a compliment. On our own, our faithfulness to God is a fleeting thing. But I look at this photograph of my daughter and understand, just for a moment, something of the depth of God’s love for us.

Time is not itself a thing; it is a way of measuring and sifting. Like God in the beginning dividing heavens from earth and land from sea, we use our calendars and our ticking clocks to separate and categorize.

With time as our tool, we bring order. We are better able to see and we are better able to understand because we have filtered the chaos.

And year after year of Septembers have helped me see and understand.

The woman who grasped the cloak of Christ did so because she believed ancient, prophetic words about “that day” when “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in his wings” (Malachi 4:2).

The strangeness of a “sun” with “wings” has led some translators to use the word “rays,” but the word has a broader meaning of “edge,” “border,” or, finally, “corner.” The woman who had been sick for twelve years knew that if Jesus really was the Son of God, there would be healing in the corner of his garment. And she wanted it.

••• To say that time is a way of measuring is to say that time is a way of seeing. We separate and we gather in order to know what it is, exactly, that we have been given. And if a year is divided into twelve monthly measures, then in this essay I have been trying to understand the essence of September. What am I able to see and what am I able to understand through the lens of these days in particular? What do I see in these daughters, and these flowers, and these stories of hurt and hope and healing discovered in this corner of the year?

I see something like wings of light pushing into the darkest corner and furthest edge and even all the way to the place beyond death. It is a light that shines with particular clarity in the story of the bleeding woman, as Mark tells it. In Mark’s gospel the woman’s story is sandwiched within the story of Jairus’s daughter who died but was raised to life. The little girl was twelve, and the woman suffered for twelve years before Jesus told her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” Such strange words. Why did he not say, “I have made you well”? With faith enough, could she have healed herself long ago? I don’t think so. With great faith she reached out for what was offered in that moment, in that crowded encounter, but her faith had been forged over twelve desperate years—just as, over those same twelve years, Jairus’s love for his little girl had grown.

Perhaps that is what I see most when I consider September: an invitation to reach out right now for all that is offered and for all that has returned. We pick no dahlias and decorate no birthday cakes in November or March. I can store up a harvest for winter, but I must gather it first. Apples left on the tree to rot will do me no good in January. And so in September I get up and I reach: for nourishment, for beauty, for love, and for every good gift that sits, unnoticed, in some corner. But above all, I reach out to claim the name of my own belovedness, for like the woman who was healed, and the girl who was raised to life, and the two girls who were born to me in September, I, too, am called daughter.

with ANNA GRIST

The Gift of Boundaries

I

t’s barely halfway through the summer as I write this, but I’m already yearning for September. Just thinking ahead to it gives me joy. I’ve said it ad nauseum, September is my New Year’s. Not just because of the kids’ school schedules, but also because of the return to forced rhythms and the end of a season of intentional rest and recreation.

I’m all lazed out by midAugust. It’s needed and it’s glorious (especially this summer where it feels less confined and contained) but if it lasted forever, bad habits and acedia, which I’ve mentioned in this series before, would inevitably set in.

September is when I remember how well I thrive with rhythms and routines. When I lean into the part of me that craves a framework rather than a bohemian glut of unscheduled time. It reminds me that God sets limits to help us focus and thrive, not to stifle. The God who delights in creativity with wild abandon set that creation within the boundaries of science and math for good reason.

Being of a creative bent, schedules and routine always seem counterproductive in theory, but in reality, they save my life. Emily P. Freeman recently highlighted in her podcast, The Next Right Thing, the two kinds of schedules that makers (large chunks of time) vs. managers (hour long chunks) use and thrive under, and the need for both types of people to schedule like the other type at least once a week or so, for balance.

Even this framing of how my mind works frees me to embrace my innate need for long periods to create and think in, while realizing I also need those shorter chunks to be able to take care of paperwork and people.

So this fall, I will revisit the “the boundary lines (that) have fallen for me in pleasant places...” (Psalm 16:6) and realize those rhythms help me to be held and to thrive. I will look for ways to order my days, not on a rigid minute-by-minute schedule, but with an order and a progression and rhythm—a frame for my days so I have time and focus for everything I need to accomplish, one day at a time. This way I won’t burn out on service or settle into the ennui from over-pouring into creating, or overthink in the restful moments.

God gives grace, He knows the way He’s made His unique people that each will have easy strengths and awkward weaknesses, and there is wisdom and help available if we simply ask for it and look humbly for those further along than us to help us order our days.

September, then, reminds me of this grace and freedom in a framework. It reminds me wisdom is coming, and I can just take one next right step, then another, in the waiting.

Playlist: Time & Change

by Joshua Evans

T

he Paper&String September 2021 playlist is centered around the themes of time and change. The playlist features songs that fall into the genres of ambient and atmospheric techno, as well as other things. I hope you find the listening experience spiritual and transcendent.

Joshua Evans is a freshman in high school who is best known for his offbeat sense of humor, self-deprecation, being the accidental inspiration for Paper&String, and breaking into that one radio tower.

Click here to listen to this Spotify playlist

In Our Earbuds: Blindspot

By Jon Carlson

S

Click here to listen to the podcast

eptember’s the secondbest month of the year, surpassed only by October. But in the midst of nearly perfect weather, familiar rhythms of work and school, and occasional long weekends, there’s a painful, glaring outlier: the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

This year marks twenty years since 2001— twenty years of perpetual war, twenty years of ongoing xenophobia, twenty years of trauma.

While the events of that day caught most of us by surprise, there’s a lengthy history that led up to it. Reporter Jim O’Grady explores that history in the podcast series Blindspot: The Road to 9/11.

Jon Carlson serves as Lead Pastor of Forest Hills Mennonite Church and as moderator-elect of Mennonite Church USA, the largest Mennonite denomination in the United States. Jon is fascinated by the intersections of faith, culture, technology, and tradition, and in his free time enjoys a good cup of espresso, a dense book, or a long-distance run. Jon and his wife, Lyn, are raising three young children in Lancaster County, PA.

Join us every month for

Have a breath of garden air sent to your inbox on the first of every month!

If you’d like a subscription for yourself, CLICK HERE! If you’d like to GIFT a subscription, CLICK HERE!

This Place Called Home from Tonya Salomons

I

woke up with a start and shot straight up in bed. It took a full minute before my disoriented brain could catch up with my reality: This was my bedroom now. Four days previous we moved to our new home. And while it was an exciting time and our new home is a dream, I wasn’t yet feeling settled.

Moving is exhausting and I had been waking before the sun for the last two weeks.

Scrubbing my hands over my face and wiping away the cobwebs of my dreams, I grabbed the clip I keep by my bed and pulled my errant hair back off my face. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and ran my feet over the floor looking for my slippers. Quietly, I made my way across the room and stepped into the hallway, easing the door closed behind me. My husband, Brian, does not share my insomnia and he was looking forward to sleeping in.

“Coffee,” I muttered to myself as I made my way to the kitchen. I fired up the Nespresso, poured some milk into the frother and waited, somewhat impatiently, to wrap my fingers around the warm cup and take my first sip of the bracing brew. Coffee in hand, I tried to settle on the couch. I had brought my e-reader out with me, but even my newfound love for all things Kathy Reichs and Temperance Brennan couldn’t keep me captivated. Standing up, I opened the sliding door and stepped out on the 15th floor balcony and paced while sipping my coffee. Not even the pinks and corals of the dawning sky held my attention.

I needed a tether, something to anchor me to this new space we now call home. I needed to feel energized and alive, but mostly I needed

to feel comfortable. My thoughts wandered to my new kitchen, the gleaming, brand-new appliances right there at my disposal. I hadn’t cooked or baked in weeks and I had missed it.

When you’re packing up a house to move, at some point you just call uncle, pack the contents of your kitchen, and heat up frozen dinners or order take out and use paper plates and plastic cutlery.

No wonder I was feeling disoriented and unsettled. For a long time now, the kitchen has been the one place where I feel the most grounded, the most present. And my absence from it was becoming obvious. My body turned back

through the patio door before my brain could register that I was going to put that brand-new oven to good use.

Mentally, I flipped through my recipe repertoire; searching for something tasty and comforting, yet simple—and something for which I knew I had all the ingredients.

The move had rendered the cupboard and refrigerator bare. Scones! I pulled out the looseleaf recipe from my binder, washed my hands and began to gather everything I needed.

It didn’t take long for me to notice my feet firmly planted on the floor or to feel the disorientation evaporate. I cut the cold butter through the flour mixture and the familiar rhythm of preparing ingredients to be transformed into soft, cheesy scones was a beginning to help me claim this new space as home.

About an hour later, the smell of something delicious lured Brian out of bed and he joined

me in the kitchen just as I was pulling the golden-topped scones out of the oven. Five minutes later, butter melting into every nook and cranny, we sat on the balcony to plan the day’s tasks. And I could tell my heart had finally found the anchor it had needed.

Home—it was beginning to feel like home.

Download the recipe as a letter-size page or a recipe card, just click on the images below!

Chicken Curry with Sweet Potato

by Jonathan Purifoy

O

ur family really enjoys fall in the northeast U.S. —tv the cooler evenings, the changing colors of the leaves, the scent of cider and pumpkin bread. This meal combines some of our favorite fall flavors and colors.

Download the recipe as a letter-size page or a recipe card, just click on the images below!

To download this printable page, click here!

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

- Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

with CHRISTIE PURIFOY

M

y father grew many flowers in the garden of my childhood, but he did not grow dahlias. I first encountered dahlias in the pages of Martha Stewart Living magazine when I was a young wife and mother living in a thirdfloor Chicago apartment. At that time, I grew petunias in window boxes on our balcony and a few vegetables in a plot I shared with friends in a community garden ten blocks south of our building.

I read the article about dahlias with something like horrified fascination. Who were these people who grew flowers like farm crops? And why did they do it? The more I read about pinching buds for bigger blooms and staking plants with bamboo and twine, the more convinced I became that I would never grow dahlias. I remember closing the magazine with something like relief. At least now I knew that I need never concern myself with dahlias!

They clearly were not the flower for me.

But the flowers have had the last laugh, I suppose. Without entirely understanding how it has happened, I have become one of those people who grow flowers like farm crops. I cut and stake dahlias all summer long, dig up

the messy, muddy tubers on cold November days, drool over dahlia catalogs in winter, and begin the cycle all over again in spring when I plant out the tubers I have kept in storage for months.

And why do I do it? For beauty, of course. For beauty feeds our hungry souls as much as garden produce feeds our hungry bodies. And few flowers offer as much colorful beauty at the end of the growing year than dahlias.

Some varieties may begin blooming in early summer, but most dahlias don’t really begin flowering in earnest until August, and the flowers that come in cooler September and October weather are the best of all.

Some dahlias make great additions to a mixed border. Look for dwarf varieties that will not need staking. For the garden, I especially love dwarf dahlias with burgundy or almost-black foliage. They make a lovely, shadow-y contrast with all the green. If it’s cut flowers you want, then have fun reading catalogs and exploring dahlia flower shapes. There are pom poms and collarettes. There are waterlily types and spider types. There are enormous dinnerplate dahlias and itty bitty miniatures. And if you aren’t sure you want to dig up and store dahlia tubers in the fall, remember there are no dahlia police.

Cut your plants back to the ground, give them a good mulch blanket for winter, and keep your fingers crossed that they grow back. And if they don’t? You can always order more.

The Practice of a Limited View

by Amy Knorr

So often, we live life looking through a wide lens. We take in so much at a time that we miss the small but beautiful, the short but important, the simple but weighty. What if we took a moment to put a different lens on our life camera? What if we literally made our view small for just a few minutes a day?

How might that change how we live in our wide-lens moments?

Click here or on image above to watch Amy’s video

Click to download the accompanying PDF which includes:

• Practice Preparation & Materials • An Invitation to Practice

Tell me a story about September!

S

eptember in Canada is when we start looking for snow dustings and stop worrying about bears so much. It’s when we stress about how the kids will handle school and their new grades. I get excited, like Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail, about bouquets of freshly sharpened pencils. It’s when I can fully reembrace my preferred uniform of sweatshirts, leggings and socks with Birkenstocks. This is when air gets more alert and awake in the

mornings and evenings. It’s my New Year’s, it’s time for new rhythms and taking stock of the past year. It’s my reset, my fresh page, when my hopeful outlook is the most Anne Shirley-ish.

W

hen I was sixteen, the day before my junior year of high school, my family moved 150 miles from my hometown.

For those first weeks of September, our family of five stayed in a cramped hotel suite while we waited to close on our new house. Every morning, after continental breakfast at the

hotel, my dad would drive me to my new school, where I shuffled miserably through humid halls, shoulder to shoulder with two thousand strangers. Every afternoon I would float forlornly in the over-chlorinated hotel pool and dread the next day. Overall I was an easy-going teenager, not rebellious or angry, but my parents recall me wailing that they had ruined my life that week, as I hunkered under the hotel desk for privacy to call my suddenlylong-distance boyfriend.

At the end of September, I skipped my new school’s homecoming dance to use my newly minted driver’s license to return to what I still thought of as my real home, to attend homecoming at my old school with my old friends, who had known me since kindergarten.

After the dance, I sat in the dark on the merrygo-round on my old neighborhood playground and cried about how familiar and safe it all felt, and about how it was no longer my home.

At my old school, I played the bassoon, but at my new school you couldn’t be in any ensembles if you didn’t play in the marching band, and since the bassoon isn’t a marching instrument, I was given a flute. At my old school, I walked to and from school every day through the woods with my two best friends, talking, crying, laughing. At my new school, I rode the bus, and sat alone for the long drive along the highway. At my old school, people knew me. At my new school, people spread rumors about me because they didn’t. I felt lost, no longer myself.

I never did make the kinds of friends I had before, or learn to love it there. But once all the secure riggings of my teenage identity were stripped away, I discovered new things about myself. I didn’t mind being alone. I wasn’t afraid to try something new without a friend by my side. I took art classes for the first time and discovered I was good at it. Despite the discomfort and loneliness, I unlocked a new sense of freedom and steadiness in myself. I didn’t like it at the time, and it all seems silly now, but looking back with the distance of

a few decades, after many more significant struggles, I see the beauty in it. At the time I felt adrift, but now I see that maybe the time when I felt most lost at sea was the time I was learning the most about being at home in myself.

Now, entering a new September as an adult, with very grown-up worries and fears, I feel even more at sea, and the seas feel stormy. But I’ve learned to feel confident in the waves, and to keep my eyes on the One who can calm the storms.

The Team!

Christie & Jonathan Purifoy

live at the old farmhouse in Pennsylvania called Maplehurst and built the Black Barn. Christie earned a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago before trading the classroom for a picket-fenced garden and an old writing desk. Now she writes books and raises kids and chickens and tends the trees that gave Maplehurst its name.

Lisa-Jo Baker is a

third culture kid, former attorney, reader, writer, and storyteller. Every Wednesday on the Out of the Ordinary Podcast she and Christie explore the surprising ways that cultivating ordinary life leads to extraordinary stories. She is endlessly fascinated by people and how loud her children are.

Elrena Evans first had the dream of

sending you a care package from the Black Barn. She’s a writer, editor, and dancer, a mother of five, an ally and an advocate. A new Paper&String care package every month is her gift from us to you.

Allison Sheeler Duncan studied English

and theology at Eastern University and is now a writer and editor at a university in southeastern Pennsylvania. She enjoys growing flowers and heirloom tomatoes, watching superhero movies, and trying new recipes.

Anna Grist is the western Canadian in our

midst, working on Paper&String from the Rockies near Calgary. She creates all the design and layout and contributes a few illustrations and snippets of writing as well as laughter and well-timed GIFs. She’s a wife and mother to two human children, as well as twins Quill & Ink (pictured).

Amy Knorr is an educator, speaker and

writer who loves to create contemplative spaces in real life and online. She is in a Nonprofit and Spiritual Formation graduate program with a spiritual direction certification.

Amy has shared a nomadic married life with her husband, Dan, for 21 years. She is mom to two girls growing tall and a son she will hold again someday. She enjoys a good laugh, a quiet moment, a furry doggy face, a challenging trail and a cup of hot tea.

Anna Kocher is an artist living and working

in the greater Philadelphia area. She’s an art teacher, a painter, and mother of three. When she’s not teaching, painting, or parenting she can be found reading, tea in hand and Ella Fitzgerald on the record player. She lives in a creaky old house with her husband, her kids, her dog, Mystic, and Edmund the cat.

Tonya Salomons

lives with her husband in Canada’s largest city.

During the day, she works as a registered social worker, but at night and on the weekends the kitchen is where she finds the space to recharge and finds her joy, feeding not only the body but the soul. She admits to reading cookbooks like they are novels while sipping copious cups of coffee and eating chocolate chip cookies.

by Elrena Evans

Click here to download a printable version of the prayer

God of all time Of beginnings and endings Of the turning and twisting of life Be with us.

God of all time Of before and after Of laughter and tears Be with us.

God of all time Of impermanence and eternity Of longing and fulfillment Be with us.

Amen.

paper&string founders

elrena e vans executive editor c h r i s t i e p u r i f o y c o l u m n i s t & p h o t o g ra p h e r l i s a - j o b ake r columnist •

a n n a g r i s t a r t i s t i c d i re c t i o n | g ra p h i c d e s i g n & i l l u s t ra t i o n s troy cady • jonna fantz • jen goodyer spiritual practice contributors a m y k n o r r s p i r i t u a l p ra c t i c e s a n n a k o c h e r i l l u s t ra t i o n s p a t t i o l s o n a d m i n i s t ra t i o n j o n a t h a n p u r i fo y subscriptions & finances al l i s o n s he e l e r d u n c an copyediting t o n y a s a l o m o n s re c i p e c u ra t o r all inquiries contact: p a p e r a n d s t r i n g @ b l a c k b a r n c o l l e c t i v e .c o m p.o. b ox 8 0 1 3 , w e s t g r o v e , p a 1 9 3 9 0 u s a

click here to subscribe to paper&string! click here to gift paper&string! a l l c o n t e n t © B l a c k B a r n C o l l e c t i v e • a l l r i g h t s re s e r v e d