It’s become recently obvious to me that I’ve been writing the same poem for over ten years. Seeking communion with God, the creative order, and my people have consumed my writing. I want to create something so still, so quiet, so present that you sense it for miles, like the earthquake outside of Oklahoma City that I felt even slightly sitting in my backyard almost 200 miles away. Listening to my own heart listen to others and to God all meet sacramentally in a loblolly pine, a frenetic barn swallow, or my son receiving the wafer on Sunday. I remember observing a friend teach an introductory art class, and she reminded the students that you can’t draw well until you learn to see well. This kind of attentiveness has demanded a lot from me, asking me to breathe deeper, walk slower, and pray with gratitude as I notice the things of my life.

My wife, Julia, and I had the chance to hear the pastor Trevor Hudson speak a couple of years ago, and he asked the audience’s grace as he rewrote an old hymn, “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.” While paying great respect to the song, he wondered aloud with us that when we turn our eyes upon Jesus and look full in His wonderful face, that, instead of the things of this earth growing strangely dim, that they actually grow much clearer. Through the love of Christ, we see the world as it is, “charged with the grandeur of God,” Hopkins says. Listening to Hudson and re-reading Hopkins have enriched my poetics and given me a grace I need to keep writing the same poem over and over again—a liturgy that invites me to witness the world around me more clearly. So, then it is with my marriage—my friend of twenty-eight years. I know that it’s common to hear married couples talk about how wonderful it is to marry your best friend. That’s not really our story. We met, hung out, and our attraction grew, and now, after twenty-eight years, we are learning, through the powerful embrace of the trinity, how to see each other clearly and grow in friendship. Our friendship relies on a loyalty and a stubbornness. From the beginning, we’ve reminded each other that we’re on the same team, even when the conflicts and distances felt thick and impenetrable.

These poems pay tribute to a quiet noticing. Everything we say and do is pregnant with meaning, and every visible part of our lives point to the invisible grace just waiting to reveal itself to us if we open up ourselves just a bit more to receive it. For me, like my marriage, my writing is learning how to respond, not react. The intentional slowness now puts me into a space where, only through God’s grace, I can see Julia’s life with a clarity that’s difficult to conjure on my own, especially when I’m simply reacting to all the stimuli around me. Both of us have just entered our sixth decade on this planet, and we’ve almost finished our third decade together; yet, everything feels newer. We’re learning how to embrace our own belovedness and see better how God sees us, which, in turn, helps us see each other better. Poetry, people; same thing.