“Land That Moves Back and Forth”

How un-firm is my foundation?

The verses of hymns still live in my lungs. They come without call, girding small moments with meter and sometimes even meaning. They haunt my humming, ghosts of grace wandering the halls of a heart that pumps not simply blood but hope, creeping through capillaries carrying both oxygen and overcoming. I cannot hear a Christian radio station without cringing. I cannot sing a vast catalogue of songs I once swayed to with such purity you could cut through my lifted arms and only find praise. My praise was played, a pawn in a power game so subtle most people in the church¹ that crushed my heart still think their pastor is that, a pastor, not a predator sniffing around others’ spirituality for his next meal. When praise becomes prey it’s hard to keep on singing.

But the hymns of my childhood still crescendo and crest. Sometimes I sing without thinking. Sometimes I sing and still mean it.

One such hymn entered my consciousness just a week ago, a good ghost of a good time when I still believed in belief with borders and faith with foundations far firmer than the dimpled thighs of my adulthood.

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord

is laid for your faith in his excellent word

I hope some of you are already humming. I hope your heart is haunted by good ghosts.

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I’m not sure there is one part of my body or faith that could be categorized as firm.

If I were a really daring substack author I would shake my ass before a camera right now for dramatic effect, because I’ve heard videos are becoming a thing here, a fact I detest almost as much as tiktok. If I wasn’t so pretentious, I’d jiggle and giggle before sitting back down to tell you that if you called me a universalist today I would consider it a delight instead of a diss. Then I would surreptitiously take a knife to the box you just placed me in and smile while slicing through packing tape, nicking a flap of cardboard for good measure, so that nothing could ever be sent in the box you put me in again. It must be recycled. It must become something other than a container to be discarded or used.

Last week I stood on sand that is, by my imprecise calculations, a thousand miles from the nearest coast. Three weeks before that, I could not stand. I sank in a bed surrounded by used tissues, the proof of problems and pain that my body could not contain. I sneezed out sorrows for weeks. I forgot that seasons change and time is not an hourglass in which I am stuck like sand. For at least two days I believed my body might be the bars of a prison cell in which I am serving a life sentence without parole. My mind made the future a fiction so sick Stephen King could not have imagined it. I would have preferred to live in a town with killer clowns than to keep living in a body with lupus and dead bones chaining me to continuous struggle. My therapist and primary care physician and husband pulled back some curtains and let in some light. Alas, sometimes I see through a glass darker than dim. Sometimes I am all night.

I’ve spent three whole months of 2024 seated. For three months, you could have said she doesn’t have a leg to stand on! and it would have been more than a judgment of my general heretical nature. You missed your chance!

Two weeks ago I started standing again. I cannot adequately describe the pleasure of putting on pants without wiggling. I could not possibly convince you that your legs are little miracles festooned with toes. There are some truths you have to learn by sitting for a long, long time.

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On Tuesday I stood on sand more voluminous than any beach my toes have touched. Three hours from home, sand stacks on sand beside fourteen thousand foot peaks. If you were to turn northwest, you could for a moment lose your place on the map. For a second, you could believe that you had blinked yourself into a storybook full of Arabian princes and flying carpets. Look in the right direction, and you will only see miles and miles of sand, rolling in hills larger than the stormiest sea waves, ready to harden your calves.

The last time I stood on these sands, I was dreaming up a book about joy. With dunes in the distance, Ryan and I snapped a photo by the Great Sand Dunes National Park sign, a ritual handed down by my parents who have stacks of family photos of our original six standing by signs larger than our family that represent some of the best memories wind and rain can’t erode. When the camera clicked, I knew that my book about joy had to start with those signs.

I stood at several before my body fell into the sinking sand of sickness.² Those stories made it into the book that is still becoming, a story that is as much about sorrow as joy.³

This year, I came to the sand knowing that standing is a sacred gift. This year, I stood on the sand humbled by my own shifting.

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Wind and water have shaped these sands into dunes as tall as 750 feet. They are encircled by streams like a mother’s arms that hold the shifting dunes in place and return the grains that wander back to their home. Stand on these sands in October, and you might not realize you are crossing a creek that surges in waves that only exist in about six places in the world. The streams that surge over sand to the delight of children with buckets and shovels in spring and early summer disappear before fall.

But just because you cannot see the stream, that doesn’t mean the water isn’t there. Deep beneath the surface of the sand, here on the edge of the San Luis Valley, water amasses in aquifers. There is an underground sea in this valley so vast I shudder to imagine the Mad Max moments that could be in Colorado’s future. The water wanders without leaving. It doesn’t slip away. It sinks. It is held, underground.

This is a place of paradox, a desert sustained by water, land where scarcity and abundance are married in a union so whole only humans could divorce it. Diversity thrives in its contrasts. There are beetles who burrow here and nowhere else. In this place are wetlands that welcome freshwater shrimp and the largest migrating population of sandhill cranes on the continent. There are lives hidden in the howling winds smaller than imagination and as beautiful as bison. This wilderness of paradox makes home possible for lives that cannot thrive anywhere else.

Sometimes I feel less like a person than a paradox with a head and legs. Sometimes I am ashamed of the distance my heart can travel in a day. I ascend peaks of joy most people I know can only imagine. I weep at their base, bowled over by brutal winds. I trust and then I don’t. I hope and then I fear hoping. Sometimes I pray and then spit the words out like coffee gone cold. There is no part of my body or brain that is firm.

On Tuesday I stood on sand that shifts yet has remained standing for at least 12,000 years, probably far more. I had planned to explore seated, on one of the two sand wheelchairs friends of the park have donated to make it more accessible to all. Ryan and I quickly learned by experience that those chairs only really work if you are approximately a forty pound child. But, it turns out, though the wheelchairs barely work, my legs do. I took my trekking poles in hand and smiled at the thought of telling my physical therapist I tried.

I am in the stage of recovery where I cannot find the edge of my ability without reaching out for it day after day. I will not know if my bones are coming back to life until mid February.⁴ I am standing without seeing beyond sensation. I am tentatively trying to find my feet without knowing if my knees will keep holding me for life.

How often as adults do we get to begin again? How often do we get to discover whether our legs will hold us? How often do we get to risk tears or joy by simply trying again?

The day after I started learning to walk well again, I cried in Dick’s Sporting Goods because the pain of walking was so fierce I almost fell, even with a walker in hand.

This week, two days shy of two weeks into walking, I made it across a field of sand to the top of the first dune and back. I am wind-whipped and full of wonder. I am only beginning to see what will be sculpted by the storms of this season.

For longer than I know, the Ute people have called this sea of sand Sowapophe-uvehe, the “Land That Moves Back and Forth.”⁵

I have always wanted to sense the firm foundation of the hymns of my youth. I thought I did; until the ground grew wild and loose without my consent or desire. But now I am trying to look at my life like I look at the dunes. Awe ripples across my arms like wind where I was previously ashamed. I am home to paradox and power. I am held by arms that sometimes sink out of sight. There is water beneath my mass that you could not measure. There is life in my darkness that is worthy of protection. I am built of sand and sighs not sermons or lies. Land That Moves Back and Forth.

Me in the Land That Moves Back and Forth in 2020, 2022, and 2024

1. I struggle to call it that when cult is more precise. Oh yeah, I published a book about my experience of spiritual abuse, in which I didn’t call it a cult but did express way more than I did here. I hope it resonates with your own sense of shifting and need for spiritual safety. Get a copy.

2. Here’s a little bit about that, from June 2023:

3. Matt at Convergent, if you are reading this, please know that it brings me great pleasure to withhold my manuscript from you. Jk, the first draft’s almost done. Just need to cry about two more gallons of tears before I let you take a drink.

4. For those who are uninitiated to my particular form of madness, large portions of both of my femurs died from the high dose steroids that kept me alive when I nearly died in the summer of 2023, and I’ve been on a long road of recovery ever since. Here’s a post that’s kind of about that:

5. Michael M. Geary, Sea of Sand: a History of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 3.