Understanding How Religion is a Creative Pursuit

This post was originally written by Ashley Mae Hoiland for bycommonconsent.com. The following is an excerpt.

There I am, a little sprite of a girl, lion-haired and scrape-kneed, taking bouncy skipping steps along the dirt path. Quiet morning sun peers through the leaves like the light through stained glass at the front of a cathedral. As a thirty-year-old, I stand at the top of my childhood hill and look down. I can see my 8-year-old self stopping to bend near the ground and hold some leaves between her fingers. I hear the scuffle and scrape of dust and rocks beneath worn tennis shoes. My tiny self is alone and canopied by the canyon oaks and crooked spruces.

I almost remember perfectly the visceral magic of endless possibility I felt in this space. My parents were both new to the church and the missionaries still drove up the long canyon road and the steep driveway to our house every Monday evening—we knew so little. Our naïveté left us unencumbered and free, because the few facts we really grasped on to were handed to us by the joy we felt as we were sealed in the temple just months before, or when the ward wrapped their arms around my parents and celebrated their goodness.

I stand and watch from the top of the hill, near the old sandbox and clothesline—the hill we sledded down with cousins the one Christmas it snowed in California and we went straight past the wire fence and down into the bushes. I put my hand on the oak that stood watch over us as we played, and I can almost see through to the chicken pens and the tree I first read Black Beauty in. I look down to see the young me kneeled down mixing water and dirt. She is intent. She is open and prepared to create whatever comes from the mud. There is no sense that it will be something. There is no reason for it to be something.

Read Hoiland’s full article at bycommonconsent.com.