Weekend Exhale is a slice of creative margin and embodied attention. You’ll find bits of poetry, discussions of art, and embodied practices that keep me centered and living slowly in a culture that often pulls the other direction. If this work resonates with you, please consider becoming a subscriber. Or you can buy me a coffee. I’m so glad you’re here.

In Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, a series of troublesome events sends the Land family out West in a heartbreaking, often hilarious, and entirely winsome American road trip. After getting snowed in with an unexpected new friend, the Lands—comprised of the young and asthmatic Reuben, his verbose sister Swede, and their miracle-working father Jeremiah—find themselves in a field of coal veins. The landscape in this scene is otherworldly. Though the earth’s covered in snow (it’s the middle of January in North Dakota), the group encounters an apocalyptic scene, where fire licks upward through cracks in the earth, melting the snow and warming the air enough for them to set out a picnic:

“Fire, and rising steam, and specks of light—the specks pooling and runneling then blinking out to be replaced by others. The fire came from a split in the earth that had opened and zigzagged away through the hills. Smoke and heat and sporadic low flames issued from this crack and from others branching outward. It was a fearful sight for young readers of Scripture…

Roxanna told us how generations ago lightning had sliced into an aged cottonwood whose roots ran across a vein of lignite. The vein was narrow and deep and the fire settled into the coal and spread inchwise until here, a hundred years later, it lay before us, a snaky glowing web reaching away into the evening.”

This scene sits at the burning center of the book. It comes at a time when the Land family is learning to hold heartache and hope in equal measure. Death and destruction are all around them, and yet collectively they’re following their hearts (or the Spirit’s leading, depending on how you see it) toward a new sort of life.

To the Lands—who are well-versed in Scripture and anchored by their belief in the age to come—what rises from the depths of the earth seems to carry something truer and more elemental than the world on the surface can understand.

If you don’t know what to write/journal/say, start with desire.

What do you want?

This is an unwieldy and scorching question, particularly for women in our culture. I identify as someone who’s fairly in tune with my emotions, and even for me the question feels too sharp to hold.

It can feel like a cruel trick to name a desire, like you’re inviting the inevitable bait and switch that comes after. Get too close to your true desires, and you might as well be Icarus, false wings strapped to wobbly arms, waiting to be burned.

Oh really, you’d like to make a living as a writer? Good luck with that.

So you want to move to the big city? Well, have you heard of so-and-so who moved there? It was a total bust, and now she’s back home, living in her parents’ basement.

Naming a desire requires both vulnerability and risk. And it requires a level of honesty we’ve grown accustomed to avoiding in polite company.

When we pretend we don’t want whatever it is we really want, we’re able to hedge our bets a bit. Then, if that thing doesn’t pan out, there’s no harm nor foul. No losing face or having to explain to anyone how what you really hoped and worked for didn’t pan out.

But on the flip side, when we pretend we don’t want what we want, we preemptively cut our deepest desires off at the knees.

Maybe you’re like me and your inner critic is exceptionally good at predicting what other people might think or say about your actions. She’s read the room, she knows the possible perceptions, and she’s convincing and informed. It feels foolish not to heed her warnings.

But there are other voices that rise from the depths, too.

On Envy

I read once that envy is an arrow, pointing you toward the life you want.

What we envy, we often want for ourselves. And what we want can point us in the right direction.

When I see someone pursuing a kick-ass, large-scale writing project, I feel a pang of envy in my gut—not because I don’t want them to be happy and fulfilled and successful, but because I can’t help but feel like I’m meant to be doing the same. I just haven’t quite managed to do it yet.

I used to feel guilty for those envy pangs. But now I’ve come to listen to them, look forward to them even. Now, when that old feeling crops up, I ask questions of it: What does this envy point me toward? What does it have to teach me? How might I adjust my course to get there?

In this way, envy can be a teacher. But in my experience, envy isn’t enough to sustain a creative endeavor. After it points us in the right direction, the matter becomes something different entirely. The question then becomes: How do we live creative lives that have no use for envy, because they are fulfilling in and of themselves?

On Obsession and Instinct

I know there are clinical ways to approach a creative project or a creative life. I’m fully aware that a person might pick a project based solely on its ability to adhere to a lucrative formula, or its likelihood to appeal to the masses, or the simplicity with which it can be achieved.

I’ve just never been able to do anything creative this way. I have to find something that snags my attention, catches my breath. Something with enough gravity to pull me down a rabbit hole into another dimension.

Practicality has its place, but when it comes to how I expend my attention and creative energy, I want something—a painting, a figure, a story, an image—that can bear the weight of my obsession.

This process is more instinctive and unmappable than we give it credit for. There is no formula or map to find the thing that sticks in the mind and in the body. When it comes, it feels as elemental as breathing or surviving or making love.

It feels, in short, like this (from Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Heat”):

My mare, when she was in heat,

would travel the fenceline for hours,

wearing the impatience

in her feet into the ground.

Not a stallion for miles, I’d assure her,

give it up.

She’d widen her nostrils,

sieve the wind for news, be moving again,

her underbelly darkening with sweat,

then stop at the gate a moment, wait

to see what I might do.

…

Then she’d return to what burned her:

the fence, the fence,

so hoping I might see, might let her free.

I’d envy her then,

to be so restlessly sure

of heat, and need, and what it takes

to feed the wanting that we are—

What is catching and holding your obsession these days? Where is your envy pointing you?

Here are a few reports on obsession from over here in my world:

• The color red

• The mythological figure, Scylla

• Dark academia

• Unexpected fashion pairings (I can’t unsee the advice my friend Jessica gives to wear “the wrong shoe”)

• Vintage Swedish decor

• The work of Donna Tartt (see dark academia above lol)

• Hadestown the musical (we’re going to see it soon!)

• Feminine rage (see Scylla)

• Ice, books about ice, etc.

• Apple and pecan compote

Here’s to setting up a wee picnic on the banks of our truest desires.

Obsessively yours,

Hallie