Summer in the Valley
I fell in love with this valley three years ago, in the summer.
Jenna Griffin loves foreign music, old cookbooks, public transportation, and sunsets in new places. After graduating with degrees in writing and French, she is spending her first post-grad year as an English teaching assistant in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France.
One Strawberry
You can’t care that deeply for every suffering thing,
Even I know this much.
The Margins
What does it mean though for a place to be ugly?
This Home
I’m thankful for that strange sort of nostalgia that sits in my stomach when I read about my past lives.
Burnout Blues
It’s worth checking to see if these roots are healthy and balanced.
Still Learning from Mister Rogers
The reason we try to change as people is because we all have the power to change the world.
I Can Be Your Mother
She said that God had brought us to her, that we were like her children, and that she could be like our Romanian mother.
Winter Blessing
May you warm your body under thick blankets, your hands by radiators, your feet in old slippers.
Foreign Prayer
But do we ever really comprehend what happens when we try to meet with God?
Of Mountains and Muses
“I’ve forgotten how to hold a prayer. If I ever really knew how… there are different ways of speaking to God, of hearing his voice.”
Desert Bloom
I mean the real world, the one that roots and flowers and rots and hunts and shivers and casts its eyes to the moon and howls and sinks into dirt and blushes into color.
Four Meals with Strangers
Danke, Louise. Obrigada, João. Merci, Jess. Gracias, Vera.
Meal With Five Strangers
I am the fifth stranger here, and perhaps the strangest of them all. I am passing through this place. This will be my only night in the city, and then I will be gone.
If God is Love
Your body is not your enemy. And if you think it is, then treat it like an enemy: love it. Do good to it. Bless it. Pray for it.
Crocuses
Still, I’ve never felt the same level of attachment in any of these places that I’ve felt in Romania. When I step off of the plane in that country, it feels like I’ve come home.
Last Days
In your last days in this little town, you will start to see things as you saw them in the first days.
Bloom and Grow
I think when we look down on children it’s because we have momentarily, or perhaps chronically, forgotten that little kid inside earnestly whispering, “Don’t forget me. I’m still here.”
The Church at Rocamadour
She is
Smoke-tinted,
Wood and silver,
Vessel of the divine
And of acceptance
This Was the Year of Living
This was the year of living with my parents, with my best friends, with a stranger. This was the year of mint tea and French TV shows, of cooking for my friends and of touching the North Sea.
Crying on Public Transit
Eventually you have to look these fears in the face, and you have to sit with the things, both true and false, that you believe about yourself.
First Person
You are always you, always becoming you. You’re always your own first person, over and over and over.
Autumnal
I learned to love the fall, to really love it, at the foothills of the French Alps, in October, two months after my friend drowned in Lake Michigan.
Works of Light
The light pooled on the horizon, stretching like taffy, growing and receding. When it faded away in one direction, we looked behind us to see it growing in another corner of the sky. It seemed to breathe.
You Look Happy to Me
They’re not always noble or pure, but then of course neither am I. We try our best, and sometimes people climb mountains just to see us blossom in the cold.
Fragments of an Education in Zion
Though they stay with us in a way, miracles do pass. The mountain disappeared almost as quickly as it had come, the sun set quicker than we imagined it would, and we had far to go in darkness.
