6 Things I Learned this Summer (2025) - something about hunger, wholeness, patchwork, and the way we remember
“It is I you have been looking for.”
says Kindness according to Naomi Shihab Nye
It’s a little darker each morning and the mums are out at the garden center. Most of my Wonders are back in school. Fall is coming, ready or not. This standing on the cusp of crispness means reflecting on the summer months to say so long and turn gently toward autumn.
1. Harvesting seeds can help you live in season and out.
It has been a long time coming and it was right on time. Two years ago, Mike and I finally saw the fulfilment of a hospital fever-dream in the midnight hours that we only caught the edges of fifteen years ago. We moved out to the country among the owls and evergreens. When we stood on the rickety porch of the old house stripped to the studs, we imagined a wildflower meadow rolling gently down from our new back porch. We imagined swaying grasses, wildflowers, and choice weeds to welcome bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.
Almost two years in, mostly we have grasses, and not all of them swaying. We are learning which weeds are choice. Our new friend, Joanie, is teaching us to harvest seeds from lupine, aster, self-heal, yarrow, golden rod and coneflowers each blooming in their slice of summer. We are collecting and drying seeds now to plant later in the fall.
It feels akin to the tiny seed planted fifteen years ago for Mike in a lonely hospital bed and me at home making soup for kids with a Black Lab in a ridiculous cone on his big bone head. It is good to know what season you’re living in and whether it is time to plant, harvest, wait or weed.
2. Keep asking questions about your hunger and thirst.
My youngest son asked for fresh-baked sourdough loaves as part of his birthday dinner – not one but two! I already knew my sourdough starter was hungry as I kept feeding it according to the recipe and yet it rose and bubbled only minimally and reluctantly. I had this nagging feeling I might have to ditch the whole starter and begin again. But this one had been a gift from my daughter, Kate, and had taken us through the isolating days of the pandemic. I have heard the sourdough bashers out there and yet I remember it as one simple way we could learn together while apart and a spiritual practice of patience and faithfulness with lessons in rising that continues to this day.
On her next visit, I asked Kate for her diagnosis. She took one look at the watery- thin consistency and knew it was hungry for flour, and more than usual. Part of the art of baking sourdough is knowing when to defy the recipe to feed it well.
My recent starving sourdough prompted me to ask more questions about my own hunger and thirst. Am I truly hungry, or more thirsty, simply bored or stuck in a feeling, my work, or a news cycle? Can I name what I am hungry for exactly? (not only physically, but deep down) What do my friendships, growth, marriage, body, mind, or soul hunger for? What do all of us need more or less of to rise and thrive? What of God’s hunger and thirst? How can we feed and water the deep longings of God’s Holy Spirit in our own lives?
3. When looking for wholeness, let patchwork get you started.
At the start of the summer, I spent a short weekend on Whidbey Island with four friends. We met back in high school when we all lived in Tehran. This was the first time we shared together our tender stories of girlhood friendship and a swift, disorienting exile that pulled us apart as the revolution began that ousted Shah Reza Pahlavi and brought Ayatollah Khomeni to power.
I felt uniquely at home, strangely familiar, and worlds away all at once. There are parts of my life that only a handful can hold well without a long explanation. These women are among them. As we shared our frantic flight paths out of Tehran, their stories broke my heart for the first time and others all over again. Like our flight paths in reverse, we were suddenly, sharply stitched back together around old wounds that needed attention. I had been searching high and low for resilience when suddenly our stories were a patchwork and resilience the needle.
I drove home listening to “The Lion Women of Tehran” by Marjan Kamali. After learning about a cento (Latin for collage) poem, I created a fresh poem from a collage of Iranian poets and some bits from my hand.
Lionhearted Women - cento of Iranian poets
by Terri Conlin
Beyond the seas there is a town
where windows are open to epiphany
and starfish wait like
tears fallen from a branch -
two steps to the flower.
Give me your hand.
We have sung the most beautiful of songs
in the blackest of graveyards.
Your candle brightens the ruins.
Let’s paint my poems with the color of our sky,
blue, bruised, and remembered.
4. I still need old-fashioned family road trips.
When we lived stateside, my family took road trips from Texas to Louisiana to visit our great-grandparents. The five of us piled into our Country Squire station wagon along with Barbies, Gi-Joes and silent fighting in the backseat, and headed northeast through the pines. Daddy had his thermos of Sanka coffee and Lucky Strikes. Mom had wrapped pimento cheese sandwiches in wax paper. We could make the drive in a long day and would arrive to garden-fresh cucumbers marinating in peppery vinegar, biscuits from scratch, and pies baked early that morning so, no stopping for burgers or motel pools.
Back in June, Mike and I took a road trip to Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks with our oldest son and his family. These Wonders are ages 10, 7, and 5. We made it a screen-free, stay-at-roadside-motels-with-pools-until-you-make-camp, sight-all-50-states-lisence-plates kind of trip. We hiked to roaring waterfalls and quiet shorelines where we practiced skipping stones. We slept in tents, roasted marshmallows over campfires, and got cricks in our necks from stargazing. We saw bears, wolves, eagles and bison herds in the valleys. We marveled at geysers, mineral pools, boiling mud pits, and the architecture of Old Faithful Lodge. Park Ranger Faye taught us the difference between horns and antlers, and we let the kids be bored sometimes.
We found license plates from 46 states including Hawaii on the way to the airport back for their return to Georgia. Then two weeks later, I spotted a Rhode Island plate on a car parked along the street outside our church. I called the Blueberry immediately to share the find. And so, our game and connection continues with smile.
After our road trip, I wanted to plan a trip with the rest of our Wonders, even the one due this fall. I came home and wrote this in my journal.
Dear Wonder No. Nine, Wonder of mine,
We don’t know who you are just yet,
who you will become in this mean world.
I wanted to leave you a tender, truer place
with ladybugs and lupines, books to read in the public library,
Park Rangers in our National Parks -
and photos that we had been there.
I dream of taking you to bison valleys,
hearing geysers in your voice,
seeing mineral pools in your eyes,
eating crisp waffles with blueberries and bacon on Rendezvous Mountain.
If I cannot stop the loss, I hope to meet you there.
Maybe you’ll discover Naomi’s kindness,
the kind that ties your shoes
with loops of sorrow
and looks for you everywhere.
5. Our windows don’t have to be either closed or open. They can be jalousie.
After a four-year discernment process, our church congregation voted to leave our denomination, join with another congregation, move to a different location, and invite our non-profit partners to come along. To say it has been a long, soul-searching, challenging, complicated, heart-breaking season is to put it too mildly. It has been at once disorienting and miraculous. It never should have worked, except Holy Spirit.
Our new-to-us sanctuary is a humble, mid-century modern, A-frame building built in 1964 with pews, a bell tower, stained glass, and no air-conditioning. Our community is cobbled together from several congregations and none. We are a patchwork people - dear, different, full of toothy questions – and for now, without the container of a denomination. We take our shape in Jesus. Among us, for us, in us, and through us for the sake of others. We hope to embody welcome, humility and joy.
For weeks as we were drenched in sweat, clearing-out, scrubbing-down, and sprucing-up our new church home, I liked to pause and glimpse daylight spilling through stained glass windows in the sanctuary. I looked at those stained-glass windows many times on many days. Even so, as we sang on our first Sunday in late summer, I was surprised by a cool cross-breeze where it had only been stuffy and suddenly realized those slender stained-glass windows on the side aisles were not fixed. They were jalousie windows like the clear pebbled ones on a crank handle in my Gram’s kitchen in Galveston, ready for any hurricane flung out of the Gulf of Mexico. Both the word and memory popped into my head unbidden, reminding me how long I have noticed and loved architectural details. You may know these as the adjustable glass-louvered windows on an old RV’s, good for keeping rain out while letting air flow through.
While I knew the word, I only learned at this writing that jalousie is a remarkable French word for both jealousy and screen or shutter. Sometimes life needs jalousie rhythms, the kind you can adjust as life churns with chaos and grief and even in a hurricane, remains shot through with Grace.
Our wrestling in finding, staying, leaving, or returning to a church community can wring us out. Wherever you are in your journey, take care and remember these words from George Saunders,
“Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible.
Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more,
until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
6. I remember things by rooms in a house.
I was trying to remember an event from my childhood and since we moved to and from the States several times, sometimes places and events get mixed up in my memory. Especially if we moved within a city before we moved away.
I wrote a few lines in my journal . . . that house had a flat roof that had to be shoveled in the winter, the yard was to the left when you came in the front gate. One summer, I had a surprise birthday party there and kids filled the yard and the front porch. That was the house with the copper fireplace near the kitchen and an open staircase our dog, Suzi, was afraid to climb up, I stood on those travertine stairs in a long velvet dress Mama made. We shopped for the fabric together. My bedroom was at the top of those stairs. In my bedroom was a birdcage with two parakeet in an iron cage swinging on a stand, an old iron bed where Annie and I talked for hours, and a large cork board full of ticket stubs, dried flowers and Polaroids.
I had a feeling I was mixing up houses and events. So, I called my younger sister who apparently did not recall things by rooms in a house. She remembered places by alarm – that was the house where our brother had a bloody nose and his dog, Frank, ate your bunny. Mama gave your boyfriend a perm at the kitchen table and the whole house stunk.
We laughed together and at each other’s gorgeous quirks. We were together in these places, but we weren’t building our memories with the same blocks. It makes sense that I went on to study architecture and she to be the most caring teacher I know. It’s true what Maggie Smith suggests about writing can apply to life,
“Chances are, there are some sparks in your earliest pieces –
that predict the big, beautiful fires that will burn in your later work.”