PRESSING IN

I have fallen more in love with transforming the interiors within us, than with those that surround.

_____________________ 

I see myself sitting alone in my studio, my long, weathered table-turned-desk looking out to the Great Danes running through the sun-drenched garden. And I remember letting out the kind of audible deep sigh that startles oneself.

This contemplative place, surrounded by flowers. I should have felt so energized and exhilarated. But honestly, I just felt so incredibly tired.

[We would find out later that what I was feeling was not from lack of inspiration but the early stages of a serious disease, one that did its best to try to interrupt my quest to uncover a deeper purpose for the next stage of my life.]

Despite the unrelenting fatique, I nestled into my design studio and began to put structure to the idea of writing about transforming spaces—not only the ones that surround us, but the ones deep within. Soon after, The Journal was born with the help of my friend and pastor, Jordan Abina, who championed my commitment to publish a weekly blog while secretly wondering if I really had it in me to hold to this ambitious pledge.

My first entry, French Women Don’t Snack, was written as an homage to my little French mama, Jacqueline, while serving to introduce my readers to the very French part of who I am. The image which accompanied the story is of me, standing in a busy street-scene in the middle of The Cannes Film Festival, celebrating my sixtieth birthday.  

Eight months later I would be sitting in a chemo chair.

I’m infatuated with going back through The Journal to uncover the constant foreshadowing of my life: I see my writing as a sort of prophecy expressed in my own words. Throughout this first of two-hundred-and-forty entries to date, I mention DNA five times—

“There are thousands of embedded DNA cues that make us who we are today. I imagine there are a hundred little memories that inform the ‘you’ that you are now”—

It’s as if I knew what was coming, cancer that is. Maybe, on some level, I did. Would that really be so woo woo? As far as I’m concerned, that’s the way the supernatural unpredictable miracle of our everyday life really works.

Through moving and Ron’s retirement from the college, chemotherapy, covid and the aftermath, I haven’t missed a single Saturday, not one opportunity to share something fresh and even surprisingly intimate with you. If you think this is in some way “bragging,” it’s this essential message that you’ve missed—

We are only as strong and powerful as we choose to live.

From long hair to bald, and now my own version of a pixie cut, I have sought to remember, and discover, who I am through the profoundly simple act of anchoring myself to chair, and pressing into 104 keys all the hard and wondrous things that need to be said.

What steadies me through all of it is the continuity of the golden threads that teach me of myself, of life, and of you.

I call these stories my “love letters” because in every way it’s true. Here, I allow my soul a broad and borderless expression of what it means to find beauty in the hard moment,
to discover wonder in every little thing, and to cultivate an existence of living all in.

Cancer did its best to detour me. Ironically, it framed a richer destiny instead.

This pressing in, even in the midst. It teaches that the best of us is discovered when we linger, instead of moving quickly past.

What is your life’s work that is longing to be set free?
Are you waiting for stability or permission?

Truth: It is not the hard thing, but the avoidance of it, that keeps your destiny locked in and away.

Could I predict where this journey would go when I started? Absolutely not. But I have agreed with myself to put one word in front of the other, until what has been experienced has been heartfully shared.

“These are the stories I tell over a cooktop. Like my primordial ancestors who bragged about the hunt around an open fire, my prized catch are the remnants of the past that show up in real-time, every day…whispering, reminding, coaxing me to value the what was and begging me to make the ‘what is’ more beautiful”—excerpt from French Women Don’t Snack, the first entry in The Journal, Janene Kraft

NOTES:

I am living through a catharsis season, one that has challenged me to take stock of who I am and what I have accomplished, and to conceive of what more I can do with my life.

We all come to this place, now and then. Which brings me to thinking about what you’re doing with the minutes you have—

Right now, if you could write one sentence that encapsulates who you are or hope to be, how would it read?

Here’s the bigger question: Are you pressing on or pressing in?
The first assumes a bit of denial, a failure to examine, a rushing ahead and through.
The second is where the supernatural lives, where we mine the secrets to what feeds and expands the soul.

I am not asking rhetorically; I genuinely want to know. Tell me in the comments, and I’ll share it with my readers next week. Because when you commit to something in the witness of others, it’s more likely to take tangible form.

When we profess in writing we learn things about ourselves. “Let’s see what God wants to say to me today,” I say before my fingers press the keys.

The greatest journey unfolds when we allow ourselves to examine who we really are.

IMAGE: Remember this girl, the one with the impossibly long hair? This is me [and an image of me] sitting at my long table in my Napa studio, looking out at the garden. On this day I invited a photographer to capture the launch of [former iteration] my new website, and The Journal.
So much has changed, in my life and in yours. But I am still and forever pressing in.