My Story from The Edge

I believe that the truest stories are non-linear. 

I have always found straight lines are hard to draw free hand. 

I grow distracted by their length and prefer the slight curve of words that circle back around and remind us of who we were before we knew the person we were becoming.

My name is Stephanie Lynn Price. 

My name means fresh beginnings like a seed accidentally released into the wind until sooner or later it finds itself embedded in the thick, sticky soil. I admit my preference to the state of restrictive stuckness over any freedom the wind promises to provide.

The first outfit I ever wore was the loose-fitting wedding gown my mother wore to hide her swollen belly; the first home I ever knew. My story began as an accident and so I have spent my life trying to do everything on purpose with a plan. 

These things may or may not be connected. I’ll let my therapist decide.

I grew up under the shade of my parent’s secrets, running through forests making mud pies out of acorns, miniature pine cones, and the thick dark mud from the bottom of the creek bed. I was most often a horse, sometimes a deer, occasionally a dog with wings. 

Growing up in New York meant burying myself in leaves, and snow, and sunshine and coming inside only when my mom had cleaned the house to the point at which she could forget any of us lived there. I craved to be remembered without ever realizing how often I had been forgotten.

The last person to notice the scars on my arm was a woman wandering around a locked down memory care unit. She softly dropped my arm and walked away before I answered her “what happened.”

I blame convenience more than cowardice for all the truth left unspoken. We are a busy people and most of our lives seem to be spent marketing an image to sustain us. 

The truth is, we all learn to wear long sleeves in one way or another. 

If she had stayed, I think I would have told her the truth that these were the scars of clawing my way out from the stories I had buried myself under. There is a comfort in sharing secrets with people who we know won’t remember.

I graduated college, got married, went to seminary, had a baby, got ordained, served two churches and never noticed the distance the wind was carrying me nor the miracle that, against all the odds, I had bloomed in midair like some aquaponic anomaly.

For 3 years a large ceramic pot sat outside the front doors of the church holding a scrawny apple tree. This temporary installation represented the partnership between the traditional church where I have served since 2010 and the new church I have been working on planting since 2015. As I entered the church I would fuss over the tree as if she were my child while appreciating her patience with me as if she were my grandmother.

Last summer I knew she wasn’t doing well. Her color changed to a dark, ill-auburn. She stopped surprising me with the fanfare of green buds. The doctor visited, felt her trunk, broke off a branch and gave a deep sigh. We needed to plant her right away and even then, she would most likely die.

Unlike trees planted in the ground, container grown trees are continually establishing their own ecology inside the container. While their more fibrous roots and pre-established ground connections give them a significantly stronger advantage, an exception to this is found in container trees that have been in pots for too long. These trees develop pot bound roots. The best bet you can have when you come across these plants is pulling apart the root systems until they’re no longer developing on top of and around each other.

The truth was her roots had nowhere to go, but round and round, and by the time I caught on, it was too late. I said we needed a place to plant her and when I came back the next day she was gone and two new ceramic pots with freshly planted purple and blue pansies sat at opposite sides of the church doors.

I grieved the loss of a tree whose absence remained as unnoticed as her presence and woke to a community that rests in the shade of symbolism while I longed for a family that digs in the dirt planting the seeds of that which they will never call their own.

I stood outside the doors with feet planted in the concrete stain of the trees pot and wondered how long I was willing to remain invisible to feel safe and what it would take to pull apart the root systems I was tangled in enough to break free.

Mary Oliver once told me, in words written on a page, whispered to my heart,

“And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility of your life.”

I roll my eyes at mother’s advice sitting at the kitchen table as a child being lectured pretending not to listen. Mother Mary, floats over the charade and pours herself a fresh cup of coffee.

 “I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of my work and love, a handsome life.”

There is a long silence. 

My hands holding my head as my eyes absorb the life that exists beyond the glass wall. 

“Where will we go from here?” I want to ask her. 

But the page has ended and she has gone to rest up while she lays waiting for my arrival into the next chapter. A transition from forest to field. I have argued with myself long enough to realize there is no one waiting to offer the permission needed to begin breathing again. To take up space. To live out in the open. Sometimes all it takes is the sound of our voice in the silence of a room to startle us into showing up.

On Saturday mornings we gather in an undeveloped field cluttered with prairie dog holes, prickly cactus, and unpredictable weather patterns. Under tents, settled into lawn chairs, we remember the invitation to live in a world without walls and find our structure in the vision living between us. We read liturgy, we celebrate communion, we pet dogs and sing dogs. We share breads and muffins and cinnamon rolls and break out again to walk the prairie before leaving the Land for the places called home. Our work is so The Land will one day become more than what it is but our purpose is to gather in surrender to the possibility of where we already are.

I believer there are a million starting places for the stories we choose to tell. 

The risk, of course, in any story is to become tangled up in our own endings. 

Still, I have always found the hope to be, that somewhere in each ending, we rediscover an opening to the place where we began.