Letter from Jenny

Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather. Memory rescues experience from total disappearance…It is astonishing how faithful experience actually is; how it never vanishes completely. Experience leaves deep traces in us. It is surprising that years after something has happened to you the needle of thought can hit some groove in the mind and the music of a long vanished event can rise in your soul as fresh and vital as the evening it happened. 
~ John O’Donohue

Dear Springhouse community,

I hope this letter finds you well. I am well and full of gratitude for the experiences I have at Springhouse daily. I am particularly grateful for the gift of spending my days with people of different ages. One moment you might catch me reading an old Irish tale with 5, 6 and 7 year olds, another day learning about Mayan cosmology with the Springhouse team, or twice a month you’d find me in my office in a peer mentoring conversation with Kim, one of our Trustees.  Because this year I decided to facilitate a writing and book making internship with Sarah Pollock, you now will find me down in the print shop on Thursdays with two of our teens. This time is proving to be quite an unexpected gift and I am excited to tell you about it.

I spend a lot of time writing. I write grants weekly, I write this newsletter monthly, I write books that we publish in our print shop, and I write articles for other networks. I do not often free write anymore, and therefore, do not freely visit my memories as much as I would like. This writing and book making internship is changing that story. 

Every Thursday at 10:45, we gather in the print shop and we choose a card from a deck of cards that has writing prompts on them. Then we spend at least 20 minutes freewriting in response to the prompt. After that, we read our writing out loud to each other. This can be very vulnerable, and therefore, very lifegiving. After we read, we have some lunch, and come back to make something creative in relation to what we just wrote. It could be a painting with words from our writing on it, a letterpress printed piece, or something else. I get excited for Thursdays now, and I don’t think I am the only one.

I have not given myself space in a long while to freewrite like this. As I do, memories come back from hidden places within me. These memories want to be heard, for reasons that remain a mystery to me, and they want to be delivered back through my writing with some kind of lesson for me and for the reader. Two weeks ago, I was surprised as memories surfaced in my writing from my early childhood. The prompt was “Have I enjoyed my life?” I felt a moment of reverent surprise, as these long ago memories showed me that they still had something to teach me. Here is a bit of what came forward in that writing...