Good morning, dear reader and welcome to The Ruins Newsletter. A sanctuary, removed from the endless loop of scrolling that saps your spirit. A reflective retreat set apart from the too big world. A cottage in the woods of your heart, inviting you to brush your hands over the rosemary-lined path that lead to its front door.
Once arrived, you can sit next to me on the porch and help me to unearth optimism. Some days with a hammer, some days with a shovel. And some days with a pen.
Share your thoughts on the new logo I am playing around with this week. Its not perfect yet, but I think it has possibility. Not minimalist!
Confident Humility? Or Humbled Confidence?
I have been writing this piece for twenty years.
I predict that I will be writing it for twenty more, God willing.
For most of that time I thought it was a piece of visual art. A mosaic. An image of an idea that keeps slipping through my fingers. A wet otter of an inkling. Slick and fast moving. Every time I think I’ve caught it on the work desk, or today on the page, it dips its head below the water and disappears for another few years.
I want to marry these two words. Humble and Confident.
I want to entwine them into myself so that, when I do things, you can see a person doing those things with the confidence of experience and the humility of her place in the world and before God.
I love how they seem to be at odds with each other. Both words can spark negative images. Humility can mean beaten down. Brought low. On your knees. Confident can be misunderstood as prideful. The ego run amuck. I am looking for ways to bring the two together. Balanced.
In order to do big things, a person needs confidence. But in doing the big things, failure will come. That is a guarantee. If a person can’t push through the pain of failure, the big things won’t get their chance to happen.
Some words fall out of favor through the centuries. I think humble is a word that is misused, misunderstood in today’s lexicon. You can read a deeper dive about humility and pride in this great article from The C.S. Lewis Institute.
As with so many of my searches for meaning, it is my chickens who help me understand.
If you want to learn humility, get some chickens.
Ordell invited me recently to remember how playing God works out for me. Every single time I have tried to interfere with the delicate process of a broody hen, it ends in death. There seems to be no middle ground. If you don’t know what a broody hen is, you can watch this beautiful short film about how it works. A quote from the story…”she puffs up like a feathery hotel with chicks peeking out from all angles, warming them perfectly.”
I have raised my own chicks in carefully heated troughs in my living room. An undertaking full of wonder and delight in the beginning weeks and plagued with impatience and get these damn birds out of my house curses in the final weeks.
But, like as yet unrealized Ruins art, a broody hen is full of possibility. She draws me into her potential. She radiates the energy of what may be with silence and stillness, and a bit of crankiness. And maybe most importantly, she knows more than I ever will about how it works.
This short video below, by me, sums up the absurdity of my journeys with broody hens. Replace the horse being led to water with a hen and a fancy antique teacup and you get a proverb bespoke for my life.
You can bring the teacup to the hen, but you can’t make her drink.
Imagine sitting in one spot for 21 days, only leaving once in a while for a quick bite to eat and a few gulps of water.
Today is day 20 (or maybe 21) of my broody teacup hen and her eggs. I will spend the day obsessively checking in with her, listening for the familiar high-pitched chirps of new babies. Then I will obsess some more about whether to move her to a safer spot once the chicks have arrived.
You may already realize…this piece is not really about chickens.
It’s about how we see ourselves in the world as we move through it. How we make one decision and then another. How we slowly build a bedrock of skills that help us feel able to build more skills. Maybe those skills will become a castle. Or a career. Or just a chicken husbandry hobby. Hopefully the skills build to tactics and eventually strategy.
And its about how we can be reminded by nature and time, that all of our hard won confidence can slip through our fingers in an instant. But that’s not exactly right. The humility of failure must happen to gain the confidence. Even when a piece of our grand strategy fails, we have the opportunity to patch the wound and work the muscle around it to become stronger than it was originally.
I made a Venn diagram, trying to clarify my thoughts on this. It may not be exactly right yet, but it helps me. Notice my correction of words. Adversity is better.
When I watch students, or just the people around me, fear making mistakes, or fear the adversity, I think about these two words and how they need to be married within us for true balance.
Please bless me with humbled confidence in the coming days as my teacup hen becomes a mother and I remember that letting her do it her way is my role in the miracle. Even if her 21 days end in adversity.
I will keep you posted…
Thank you for being here as I dig for optimism. Some days with a hammer. Some days with a shovel. And some days with a pen.
Feeling so much resonance to this. I would add to the center, the Venn overlap, understanding/growth. Not that individually confidence and humility don't have their own unique lessons, but the tension and crucibility of that overlap space yield more complex and profound rewards.
Thinking about what you said - in doing big things, failure will come and you have to push through. Wendy Wayne, my very best friend in the world and the wisest person I knew, died of cancer 11 years ago. Several things she said often, especially when speaking to groups, I thought of when reading your insightful meditation. One was "Erase the word 'can't' from your vocabulary and see only possibilities, not obstacles." It's a way to think of failure as an opportunity. A door closes, another opens. The other thing I remembered was that Wendy said "Take risks to enrich your life. Push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Walk as if you have a pebble in your shoe - be just a little bit uncomfortable and try new things." It feels like pushing yourself into potential, maybe not failure but at least not success - but who knows what rewards are out there if you don't push and try? (That's one reason I did a honeycomb. It was new, uncomfortable but I wanted to do something new.) So in your failure crossed out to be adversity, I might do adversity/opportunity.