Thursday, January 5, 2012
Bosworth Family Newsletter - 2011
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Prologue (7-9): Play Me Some Soul Music

November brought me a soul-awakening experience with sound--sounds sung to me, sounds of fireworks exploding, and sounds of my own voice, combined with those around me, melting into unison. Work took me to Orlando in early November, and the conference I attended took me to Epcot. There, amidst crowds of strangers, I tossed a coin (thunk) in Italy's Trevi Fountain, and made my way to the Stage of America, where, by happenstance, my friend and I discovered Richard Marx performing within five minutes of our arrival. Somewhat skeptical of a grand performance, we sat in the back benches so as to leave quietly. We stayed for the whole performance.


Next time--Prologue (9-11): Road Trip
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Prologue (3-5): Imprinting the Land

Dillard's passage inspired me to revisit the land with my own brood. Maybe something would leave an imprint. At the suggestion of Sydney's physical therapist, the uphill hike around Cress Creek gave direction to desire.
When we arrive, I close my eyes, blinking at the bright sun that glints against interpretive signs along the trail--signs imprinted with discoveries about the faulted land near my native Rexburg. Cress Creek tells the story of the land along the South Fork of the Snake River in Eastern Idaho. Cottonwood trees, some housing eagles' nests, surround the Snake, their leaves shaking with bright yellows and oranges in the late fall wind. Cattails rest in the low marsh. Along the trail, we learn that Indians used the land for food, trappers for pelts, and later settlers for homes and farmland that now expands across areas neighboring the Cottonwoods. At each subsequent age, the land has served a new need, but part of it always remains unchanged.



Wait for it. We close our eyes, and the world turns around again.

Next week--Prologue (7-9): Play Me Some Soul Music
Friday, October 21, 2011
A Year of Annie Dillard :)

For me, Dillard's book is about rediscovering how to live a vibrant life through the unblinking eyes of childhood. She notes, "Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world" (160). Dillard (and recent life experiences) have "propelled me reeling back to the world," despite Doctorate classes, managerial work, and single motherhood with three young kids--or perhaps because of those things, I've been given a second look at life.
In my reawakening, I began wondering: What if I read a few pages of


Prologue: Let Reading Go to Your Head
In 1955, when Dillard was ten years of age, her father

Let reading go to your head. Imagine, invent, fantasize--then act. Try it, and I'll try it along with you.
Next week--Prologue (3-5): Imprinting the Land
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Embracing the Fall

Look around; Fall descends. Gathering in the rest of the garden's produce (three weeks ago), I realized that years have flown by since I last experienced the fullness of summer, fat and pregnant with life, with love. Over twelve years ago I remember visiting the Pacific Northwest, living in a summer daze of butter and banana pancakes--filling my thoughts with hazy July poetry, a daydream of sunlight resting heavily on leaves, as glinting glares and shadows played across my closed eyelids. Not even so long ago--nine or ten years perhaps--I rode motorcycles, climbed cliffs, filled my rooms with green, growing things, bathed in icy rivers, watched fireworks, and laid content in a twin bed I shared with Summer and the full August moon. I sighed, heavy with satisfaction those summer nights.

Years pass as I keep waiting to feel that same fatness, that same content-ment in the heat of July and August. Yet year after year, the warm weather burdens rather than relieves. I wonder now if the summer of my life will ever return--if fall and winter have become my permanent realities. Still, I've found peace in those non-anticipated months and seasons. I may no longer experience Summer as I once knew her, at least in my current time and space. Yet God has compensated with a fullness of fall and winter, unexpectedly so.
Can fall--a season personified by death and decay--truly be enjoyed? Can such a thing be embraced? Certainly. Most of my favorite metaphors involve food. When my daughter, Eden, spotted a chocolate bar last week, she remarked, quite frankly, "I like chocolate..." and after a considering pause: "Pickles are icky and yucky." She spoke candidly, with no pickles in sight. Life, as Eden has begun to observe, can be chocolate one moment and pickles the next. What reaction is more human than to desire the sweet, the summer in our lives, while dreading the bitter and acidic? Perhaps strangely, then, I've observed my own appetite for vinegary foods. Maybe my taste buds predestine me for sorrow; I have, after all, always enjoyed pickles, lemons, and sour cream. Fortuitously, the Lord called me to Romania, a land filled with sourness, and sadness.
So, rather than holing ourselves up at home, I bundle the beasts and head out to harvest mazes where we easily lose ourselves in the dark--and we embrace the cold, the unknown, the fear, if just for passing moments. I walk with young ones out to our frozen garden, tearing the last summer fruits from their vines. We mulch leaves and spread them over the now barren earth, hoping that some day in the future the dirt will bloom again with life. We venture out to barns together, taking candid shots of our new family, thanks to an extremely talented and giving sister (I love you Megs), and we walk as Adam and Eve--thrust into the stark realities of life. Still, we do so smiling.

I once believed the term "Fall" (as in the season) originated from the action of leaves descending from trees during the cooling period that precedes winter. Upon further reflection, however, I recognize tangible links between autumn, death, and the Fall of humankind. When God thrust Adam and Eve from paradise to tough things out in a dry and unyielding environment, they experienced a dramatic shift from sweet to sour. They descended, just as the leaves do, from paradise to earthen reality. As the melodic Danny Elfman croons, "Whoever said that life on this planet would ever be paradise?" I guess I never had that promise of paradise--none of us do. And that's the way life goes... everyone around us ends up feeling the same sensation of pain, sooner or later. At some point that pain will end; at some point spring returns. Apart from the seasons, however, it's an elusive, mysterious return. What do we do in the intervening minutes, months, years? As I await a return to the plump, heavy ripeness of summer--the easy joy and laughter, the days of skinny-dipping and sandstone hikes, when visions of dancing in a summer dress beneath swaying boughs of a twinkle-lit backyard tree could become a reality--I enfold myself in the engulfing, bitter wake.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Wrestling the Unmaker
"War is the Unmaker's ally, because it tears down everything it touches [...] fire, murder, crime, cupidity, and concupiscence break apart the fragile bonds that make human beings into nations, cities, families, friends, and souls."[...]"Sposing I believe you," said Alvin. "Sposing there's such a thing as the Unmaker. There ain't a blame thing I can do."A slow smile crept over Taleswapper's face. He tipped himself to one side, to free up his hand, which slowly reached down to the ground and picked up the little bug basket where it lay in the grass. "Does that look like a blamed thing?""That's just a bunch of grass.""It was a bunch of grass," said Taleswapper. "And if you tore it up it'd be a bunch of grass again. But now, right now, it's something more than that.""A little bug basket is all.""Something that you made.""Well, it's a sure thing grass don't grow that way.""And when you made it, you beat back the Unmaker.""Not by much," said Alvin."No," said Taleswapper. "But by the making of one bug basket. By that much, you beat him back." (128-29)
The EMP
