Posts Tagged ‘Natalie Vestin’
Sign-Seeking in the Dark
January 11, 2016
January is for sleeplessness. Maybe its cause is the temperature inversion that presses pollution down on the city of Saint Paul and holds the river still, pours itch into my throat and eyes as I walk. Maybe it’s the cold and the very real possibility that we would die if left outside long enough. I…
Read MorePrayer: When You Can’t Find the Words, Make Them Up
December 22, 2015
I spent much of this past summer watching my friend’s three-year-old girl, Mia, as my friend prepared for the birth of her son. I’d met Mia last year in Boston before her family had all moved back home to Beijing. Now, Mia was in Minnesota, living in an old Saint Paul house where she could…
Read MoreHere is Where We Wait
December 2, 2015
This summer, I climbed the rotting steps to the hayloft of my family’s barn to look for a plaque honoring the use of emergent DNA technology in solving the Brown’s Chicken Massacre case. The floor was soft, dipping a little as I walked, and I looked in slow motion through my great-aunt’s things: frosted glassware,…
Read MoreThe Dissonant Note
June 30, 2015
Faith wasn’t always without question. Faith wasn’t always so accepting, so joyful in its major key, its seven-note intervals. Once, doubt was desired, not just as a frame of mind but also as a bodily state. Prayer was an uncertain call to a God who might live anywhere, whose existence didn’t matter so much as the question that reverberated through flesh. Prayer was communication without resolution, felt only in the dropped notes flickering through the body.
Read MoreCrying Ocean
April 23, 2014
In Judith Kitchen’s essay “Direction,” she writes of traveling with a friend in Greece and being asked to step out of her cab on a dark road by a driver she doesn’t trust. She and her friend refuse to get out, not by saying no, but by huddling in the back seat and crying thalassa, thalassa. Ocean, ocean.
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