Baptism
There’s a new trend in books, what they’re calling “burn it
down” stories—stories about women who hike a thousand
miles or move to the other side of the world or start
something crazy or risky or bold.
This is my “burn it down” story, essentially. What I’m
burning down are the expectations I’ve long held for who I
had to be, what people needed me to be, and the distance
those expectations created between God and me, and
between the people I love and me, and between the beauty
of the world and me.
A million years ago—or twenty, really—I bought a card
at the little hippie gift shop in my college town. I glued it to
the front of a notebook, and scribbled in every direction,
every inch of those pages. And this is what that black-and-
white card said, from the Japanese mystic Masahide,
“Barn’s burned down. Now I can see the moon.”
When I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I was a mystic, a
little bit of a hippie, a voracious reader, a lover of the water
and the sky.
And now I am inches from forty, a mother and writer,
and the more I peel the onion, the layers of selves and
identities, the more surprised I am to find that the self I want