What’s going on here?

My name is Connie Matisse. 🐸👋

And this is a long-haul writing project where I read a chapter from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, allow a conversation to develop between myself and the text, and write in response to it.

The seed for this project was planted in the summer of 2021 in a season of personal chaos that culminated in a face-first fall off the edge of the proverbial cliff and a surprise soft landing in the Big Hands of Grace. In that season I re-read Lord of the Rings and went through it like a portal to chambers of my interiority that’d been patiently awaiting my arrival. I became acquainted with the Aragorn, Arwen, Gollum, Saruman, Gandalf, Goldberry, and Frodo inside me—and the divinity inside them. I started getting curious about the relationship between social and spiritual liberation.

When I started the project in October 2023, it was already kinda-sorta vaguely about God, but always a little apologetically, held back by my fear of being misunderstood, miscategorized. That’s shifting. Recently in my writing and in conversations with God I’ve started playing around with the discarded Catholic vocabulary of my childhood. The resurrection is not the resuscitation of a corpse is a phrase I’ve been chewing on. I understand that overtly religious sounding language can be heavy baggage. I trust you’ll stay discerning and curious.

I believe that everyone and everything is a teacher. This season I’m sitting at the feet of Thomas Merton, Saint Theresa de Avila, my two girls, the Hungry River.

You don’t have to be familiar with Lord of the Rings or fantasy to read this newsletter, and you don’t have to believe in God, though having disdain for people who do will be a barrier, and is perhaps something I’d urge you to be curious about. Some other things I might write about include the sanctity of children, kismet encounters with snakes and frogs, long-term partner romance, mistake-making, sense-making, world-building, power-over vs power-within, mountain biking, matriarchy, altered states of consciousness, being angry, being happy, having a body, and abolition.

As Thomas Merton says, everything that is, is holy.

Will you look into the mirror?

Many things I can command the Mirror to reveal […]and to some I can show what they desire to see. But the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. But which is that he sees, even the wisest cannot always tell. Do you wish to look?

(J.R.R. Tolkien, The Mirror of Galadriel”, The Lord of the Rings)