In Honor of Luci Shaw (1928-2025)
How one life flows into another life
Hello my dear ones. It’s been so long since I’ve last written (seven months shy of two years??) that the Substack editor has a slightly different format. Or maybe I just haven’t set my eyes on it in so long that I don’t remember what it used to be like. All the better to write this to you, to pick back up our correspondence.
I was waiting for the right subject, the right time, and I should have known it would come. An occasion has arisen that has unexpectedly prompted a fresh overflow into this little box of text. And for that occasion—moreso, for that person—I am eternally grateful.
The occasion is the life of Luci Shaw, whom I had the privilege of meeting once.
It was February 27th of 2022. Two dear friends had known Luci and her husband, John Hoyte, for years, and invited me to a late afternoon gathering at their home in Bellingham, a seaside town replete with mist and whales. It was a surprise celebration for Anne’s1 birthday, and when we arrived, I believe that I walked into the living room, introduced myself, and Jeff almost immediately announced his belief that Anne, Luci and I were “kindred spirits.” Luci smiled with delight and pulled me into a hug that was as welcoming as her home. I remember her showing me her beloved miniature bonsai tree that grew delicate leaves even in the graying winter of her kitchen window; hanging on various hooks on the wall, she had a beautiful collection of earthenware mugs that I chose from for my tea (I believe I chose one with two koi fish intertwining in the clay). The walls of their home were full of John’s paintings and photography, including one stunning line drawing of a tree, an Ancient Bristlecone Pine from White Mountains, California.
Everything was teeming with the fruit of their lifelong travels, from Santa Fe to Asia. There was a book of Narnia illustrations on their living room table. My favorite room was by far Luci’s office, which took my breath away when I entered, and indeed struck me with our kindredness. Every window and every eave was lined with delicate glass bottles, all of them varying shades and clarities of blue, all of them holding light differently as it passed through them. There were bowls and jars of carefully chosen sea glass and white shells, much like those in my own home. Her walls were decorated with religious icons and precious art pieces chosen over years, including some from the natural world, like a string of dried kelp.
It was as though all the precious things in her sight were gathered up to her, in her daily vision’s field. Her coffee table was piled with books, including those by Henri Nouwen and Mary Oliver, two influential writers in my own life. It was exactly the way I wanted my life to be when I got to be her age—surrounded by the kinship of family and the sustaining in-breath of words. Suddenly I could see my life, my hopes, swimming within and alongside hers. It felt like they were already living, as though the present and the future flowed together in one stream. Later, around the dinner table, lit with white taper candles, each of us with our glass of red wine, Anne looked around at all of us, her face lit with glow, and remarked “I imagine this is what heaven will be like.”
As for describing who Luci Shaw was and is, I am woefully unqualified, so I will often call on the strength of the words of others (and her own) and trust mine to move beyond themselves.
Luci was a lifelong poet, speaker, teacher, and spiritual writer who most of all lived and believed in a vital confluence between creativity and faith (the life of the soul). To her, they were one animus, seeds planted by a God who tilled and overflowed the world with beauty meant to be seen. Betsy Sholl remarks that “Luci Shaw sees in the natural world a dynamic incarnation of God’s love.” Her poems are “luminous, full of surprises and moments of delicious, holy mischief.” Malcolm Guite writes that her work is “full of fidelity to the nature of things,” yet also witness to the more imbued into every sight, wherein “every patch of light is a word, a beginning”2—to her, all of nature was struck with the quality of the seen. Her life’s work and daily labor remind us that the task of the writer is indeed an incarnational one—we must always be left open to the breath of the Spirit that makes the glory of God manifest in and around us, our true inspiring force, our breath for the bones3. We don’t know when this breath will come, but it always does. To me, Luci’s poems move and act like her own eyes, expanding and contracting alongside the vast and the small—indeed, they are “like windows opening to the soul” (per the jacket of her latest and final book An Incrimental Life).4
My favorite thing about Luci was her childlike spirit and whimsy, which was present and palpable even in the single encounter I had with her—she wrote from a very young age and never stopped, indeed approaching writing itself as a child would, waking each morning with an overflow of curiosity that put pen to page. A childhood tradition of writing Advent poems became her famous poem “Mary’s Song,”5 much like postcards to a friend brought about her collection What the Light Was Like. On his website, her husband John, a painter and inventor and artist in his own right, calls his life “a journey into light”6 and in tandem to this, Luci makes one of her central themes light itself, marveling at its qualities of illumination and transformation, writing that “light has the peculiar quality of transforming what it touches, like gold foil over wood.”7 Luci’s words ache with a bright purity and a deep profundity among the manifold things of our everyday. She has a God-given intuition that can only come from an ear that listens alongside an eye that sees8.
I found out about Luci’s passing from a Facebook notification while standing at the foot of the enormous Christmas tree in the center of Gig Harbor, moments before it was illuminated with a shower of color, lifted up into light in the freezing air. It’s odd, because I never check Facebook, nor do I believe I had notifications on. Nonetheless, in the hours after, I had a spiritual experience that was reminiscent of one I had when my Nana passed on December 27th of 2021—a near exact two months prior to my visit with Luci.
My Nana showed me the love of God with her life. A pediatric nurse and a devoted wife and mother, she was no poet, however she did write a note to her family as her memory faded that is as much a poem as anything I’ve ever read. In the moments after finding out about her death from a phone call from my weeping mother, I instinctively went out for a walk, as though my grief propelled me into the larger world. Snow had just begun to fall.
That walk, and those in the days after, was an exhale of peace, an illumination as true as it was bright (though it was evening, and snow was falling, covering all). As I walked the path up from her beach house where I was staying by myself, watching snow fall in the lit halos of street lamps, even the streams beside the road frozen over with transparency, it was as though I were walking through a vivid sonogram9. As though she had just been born, and I were somehow simultaneously pressing the cool of the instrument to my own skin and witnessing imaged all around me in the visible world an echo of the throne of God, sounding from within the walls of my own delicate heart—indeed, I heard and saw His heart as it beat for her, as though I were standing just outside an open door and yet remained within.
In that moment, hers became a life flowing with His and into mine as white over the world.
After this experience, leading up to my visit with Luci, I was absolutely overflowing the bounds of myself. I was in my early twenties, and I seemed filled with my own youth. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I slept soundly in my Nana’s robe and woke from vivid dreams. In those immediate days after, my hours were wrapped in the quiet lamplight of solitude in my Nana’s living room; and yet I made everything a communion—hot onion soup that I warmed on her stove; store bought grape juice and baguettes; the films I watched, the books I read. I wept with gratitude as I ate and drank these in, as though I were melting from within.
Everything was imbued with meaning. All the Love that had been poured into my life suddenly returned to me, and longed to be poured back out of me in song. Luci writes in Breath for the Bones that “creative Christians, by means of their ‘baptized imaginations,’ may be able to help integrate the universe by…seeing the whole picture as if through God’s eyes…and saying, ‘Yes, I see. This is connected to that. There is meaning in it.’”
Yes. That’s what those moments were. A baptism—of my self and my sight, where the world was made up of Him, of the simultaneously seen and heard, and I became one with what I saw.
I am still writing about that—and things that happened since I’ve been gone. But it’s all so inextricably bound up with my words here. It’s all so potent and yet so indescribable it makes me want to dissolve from language itself, to weep into more than myself.10 These are the moments that sustain me.
The December night I learned of Luci’s death was decidedly different than when I learned about Nana’s. Quieter. Like witnessing the silver of a receding tide. It came with a darkness that was earned, an ache that was very real, just as receding as my very life. Both of these Decembers—the first, made of my sacramental exuberance, the second, made of all I have passed through and that has passed through me, but no less sacrament—couldn’t be more different poles. Yet they rest upon the same fulcrum. In both, my breath was made visible.
It was moonless (at least, the moon was obscured by cloudcover). Rain fell instead of snow. A strange thing had drawn me out to the water. I’d stood, wavering, on my lit front porch, looking out at the visible seam of water, as though afraid to step out. But then I’d seen something—a boat, perhaps, with a single red light. It hovered and moved so calmly and silently over the water I half-wondered if it was a UFO.
Nonetheless, as it neared midnight, I found myself on the beach below my home, the boat having passed. Similar to before, I knew I needed to be in nature, to be held by her greater arms, to at the very least commemorate Luci in the world she loved so much. I asked for a sign.
I saw the lowest tide I had ever seen. Seriously, I cannot render to you (even in photos) how receded was this tide—the distance from my landlord’s house to the tideline felt gaping, nearly moon-like. The neighbor’s glowing buoys were beached and exposed. Entire docks at the end of boat launches had visible mechanisms, evident undersides. The Salish Sea had pulled her waters back and let me peer into what had been hidden in her darkly luminous inside.
And a poem happened to me, grown out of what I saw. Starfish of all sizes and colors—more than I had ever seen before, from the size of my thumb to that of my father’s palm, from deep purple to vivid orange and icy blue—were hiding in the great folds of wine-dark kelp, in the rippling clarity of small pools. I saw a single white-armed starfish, peaking out from where it had been hidden beneath the corresponding white of a giant shell. And in light of all this, as I walked and I looked and set my little light among them, I had the overwhelming, whimsical sense of God as a hiding, mischevious mother11. Suddenly, the beach became the moonlike landscape of my womanhood. I felt how writing itself is like labor, expanding and contracting from the point of the self and into the greater Self. I could sense the way I will gather years to me like the layers of a shell that hardens and calcifies around what is essential, letting nothing leech away with time. The way I will live into my years and collect what I have seen and heard like glass in jars.
I thought, I must look and look until every smallest thing is precious as a child in my sight.
Some of the discarded images from that night are woefully, laughably overexposed. I was often searching in the dark, holding a blind lens, relying on a single light source. Luci, the photographer, would have captured them better. But here they are nonetheless. A personal archive. A mnemonic device.
My sole task was one that Luci made her life’s work: to look and look and look. To hear and hear and hear, as though all were sound waves rippling from the structures of the world inside. I suddenly saw that Beauty is Love given evidence—as Luci writes in Thumbprint in the Clay, “Beauty is Love taking form in human lives and the works of their hands.”
In the spirit of Luci, I was participating, as I had a few Decembers before, in the sacramental beauty of nature, of God’s design as Love given form.
This was a banquet of sight, a table set with bread and wine. In spite of the scarcity of what I have read from her innumerable words, these were enough. And I remember how we sat around the table at Luci and John’s home, their quiet and generous hospitality, amid our small snackish meal of crackers and croissants and cheese, of simple tea and wine. I still have a red flowered napkin from that day, tucked into one of Luci’s books that she signed for me. At the table, Luci talked of finding a coat in C.S. Lewis’ infamous wardrobe as she presided over its transfer to Wheaton (her alma mater), how she prayed and hoped for some hidden treasure. She talked of her doubts, about Jesus on the cross and God forsaking him. John told a story about one of his relatives—perhaps a great uncle—who had laid the designs for an optical invention that would measure color in light. How John (or perhaps someone else) had finished it after the uncle had gone blind with age, as Milton had. How John had placed it in his lap, how his uncle’s hands had traced his own designs and he had dissolved into weeping.12
At the end of our visit, when evening had fallen, I remember John helped me into my coat. I remember saying goodbye to Luci near the doorway leading from the kitchen to the garage.
“Keep doing what God has called you to do,” she said, so simply that it was almost unceremonious. She welcomed me into a hug with a laugh (or maybe it was just a smile, but its warmth felt like a laugh). And with her words came a quiet generosity, one that would bear fruit and flower long after she had spoken over my life.
On the night I learned of Luci’s death, at the tide’s edge, I looked up and found myself directly across from the lighthouse on Tanglewood Island. It seemed to wink at me across the water, to close its one eye as it turned its face, in its mechanisms of lamp and glass, inward toward a greater light.
All the while, rain fell on my own exposed face. This was the first night of rainfall from the atmospheric river that would flood innumerable creeks and streams and break levies and displace people from their homes. In the days that followed, there was a staggering sense of the relentlessness of both life and flood. How in wind and rain and devastation and loss there is still a promise rained over the world as rain and snow that does not return empty, but as Word.13
I think now of the stream that flowed, quietly and powerfully on the night beach, into that greater Body that would overcome the world.
Luci wrote to the very end14, and indeed, when I read her work and think of her, I have the greatest sense that my dearest Nana, and Luci, have been met with their greatest Hope. The Eye all the beauty is within and behind and beheld by. Where my Nana’s love flowed from her as true and full of simple words as herself, Luci’s life speaks to me in another language, this other mode of being, this artist’s way that God has pressed like a seal on my own, and I am so grateful for those moments following their deaths where I felt—in varying and special ways particular to them—as though I were touched briefly with the runoff of heaven that flowed down from a great and unseen stream, an umbilical cord tethering me to the dark sky, to the clearest hope we have ever known. I can feel its instrument press cool into my very skin, as real and imbued in me as a given love.
This is a confluence from Mind to mind, made of the stuff that flows through mind and soul (indeed, the substance of the soul that moves through the mechanisms of the mind, the hidden pathways that animate the body as it floods with more than itself).15
Later that night, I set out all of Luci’s books that I owned at the end of my bed, including those she had so generously signed for me, in spite of the little I had read of her (and all I have yet to read). I set them out as though waiting for Nana to read me to sleep.
In spite of all that remains shrouded in winter dark, I know that Luci’s voice will run through my life.16 A life poured out unto the very end. All I know is that the sign I asked for became inseparable from my living. Held in my very eye. All I know is that in spite of all that has gone unseen and all I am blind to, there is an ever inward and outward sight, flowing above and within and beyond the quality of the seen and into that flood of greater light, descended into me and ever beyond me, within me and alongside.
Perhaps the calling that Luci was referring to in our last meeting was the calling all of us have heard and will hear again: to give ourselves utterly away. To a reader in words both spoken and written, to a friend, to a husband, a child. Maybe to someone we will have a meal with exactly once. Not to the dissolution of the boundaries of our soul but to the building up of love that gives itself over into a second life. Because we trust that in our most meager of offerings, in the scarcity of our selves, in the bread and in the wine, He gives fully of Himself.
And I’ll leave us with this, an excerpt from one my favorite poems of Luci’s—
“Take These Words”
To be a poet you must write
more than you know, hoping it to be true,
that the words will have a life beyond the moment,
taking the shape of their meaning, like rain
filling a bowl—drops gathering into a fullness
that is wholly fresh and drinkable.
This is the utter fullness of a life lived in light of God. A life that gives itself away—flowing into another life.
Words (and Currently)
I only recently fully encountered the spoken-word poetry of the late Andrea Gibson, and their poem “First Love” quite literally took my breath away. Also “Tincture.” Be sure to watch the video of them being spoken (please, they remind us all that poetry was always meant to be embodied). Andrea’s film Come See Me in the Good Light is a devastating yet joyful chronicle of some of their final months and performances, and their partner Meg’s writing on grief is some of the best I’ve ever read.
Trivarna Hariharan - I had the privilege of meeting Trivarna in the fall of this year and being a part of her class on grief and love. She writes more from the body than from the mind, and this can be felt in her very presence, even from worlds away. She recently remarked to me on the qualities of water and skin, how they touch just enough to change the other’s temperature—this is how it feels to have our lives intersect so. Follow her on Instagram and keep up to date on her writing classes and offerings.
Pongo just recently released its newest anthology of youth writing, Where Hope Seems Impossible, gathered from several facilities around Washington State, including the Child Study and Treatment Center, where I had the privilege of serving for several months. Several of my youths’ poems are included, which brings me unspeakable joy.
The art of Polish painter Paulina Krajewska, who writes icons, otherwise known as “landscapes filled with silence.” They are deliberately un-gilded. Her descriptions of her work usually consist of a single line of scripture, set by itself, while the icons respect and draw into themselves “the simplicity and incomprehensibility of the Divine mystery.” These are renderings filled with the silence and expansive dark of the “unguessed divine world” depicted in Scripture and in turn written in every human heart. Each painting is a “theology of intimacy and delight […] ardent and filled with light." They hold in hand the quiet flame of God. The artists states that “Only when the Word is fully reflected in an image, with all its purity and beauty, then I realize that the icon has been completed.”
Icon by Paulina Krajewska “Mary Morning Star”
Gleaned from Breath for the Bones (Luci’s book)
See Luci’s poem accompanied by an artist’s original artwork here. Also, per Luci’s website: “like Mary, I believe that we too can become pregnant with God.” She had a preoccupation and found poetic genesis in motherhood and the figure of Mary, per her collection Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation, the entire first half of which is filled with poems solely about the moment of Gabriel’s meeting with Mary and its incarnational aftermath.
Find a similar sentiment in Luci’s wonderfully written obituary here: “Her eye for beauty joined her ear for word and lyric phrase, juxtaposing the many patterns of nature, faith, and relationships.”
“A sonogram, also called an ultrasound, is a medical imaging test that uses high-frequency sound waves to create real-time pictures (sonograms) of organs, tissues, or a fetus inside the body—most notably the heart and uterus—helping doctors diagnose conditions, monitor pregnancy, and guide procedures. This painless, non-invasive test involves a transducer sending sound waves that echo off internal structures, with the echoes processed by a computer to form an image on a screen.”
I’m gleaning this from the prayer “let my words be more than words,” which is perplexingly difficult for me to place, it has become so much a part of me. It is either from Kathleen Norris’ Acedia and Me or The Cloister Walk. It could even be from Luci’s book Thumbprint in the Clay, which contains another line that speaks deeply to me, which Luci writes and narrates as she experiences the sight of a particularly piercing sky in a parked car: “as though my transparency were something He craved.”
God as a mischevious, hiding mother: I cannot for the life of me dredge up where this reference came from, but I know it was either from a theology or a psychology book. Perhaps it’s hidden somewhere in Dan Allender’s Sabbath. The metaphor of course extends itself to this mother (analogous to God) lovingly revealing herself. Additionally, as I have mentioned, Betsy Sholl, the Poet Laureate of Maine, describes Luci’s poetry as “holy mischief,” and Luci herself was a mother and surrogate mother to many budding artists.
See John Hoyte’s memoir The Persistence of Light, the chapters of which are organized by light and color. Also see his latest blog post
Isaiah 55: 10-13—As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
From her poem “A Few Suggestions of an Insubordinate Idea”—
Start a blaze hot as fatwood. Fling
a glitter of ash over the ocean, pocking it like rain.
Ignite a burning bush. Transfix the universe. Then,
having found a mind of your own, come home.
Burrow my brain. Be one of a neuron couplet
that breeds a host of your own kind.
Marilyn McEntyre situates Luci’s work in the legacies of Hopkins, Dickinson, and others, whose “shadows fall gently across her lines” (as hers will inevitably fall across mine, my own “seed in the humus of told thoughts” (per Luci’s poem in the footnote above)). This irrevocably reminds me of the teachings of composition scholar David Bartholomae, who taught one of my mentors, Peter Wayne Moe—particularly his writing “Against the Grain” included in Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers.
“A poem happened to me” will stick with me forever.