dear madeline,

I know we don’t align on all beliefs, but my, your writing is incredible. Deep, loving, heartfelt. I’ve missed this. I was so exhausted last night and yet I couldn’t allow myself to put down The Irrational Season. In one paragraph, you managed to explain more than I hoped to explain in any paragraph I’ve ever written.

The morning star is low on the horizon. There are three more stars pulsing faintly in the city sky. But even if I can’t see a skyful of stars they are there above me nevertheless; the Milky Way, our own galaxy swings somewhere in the vast dark about the city lights.

All those stars. Suns. More suns than can be imagined. Great flaming brilliant atomic furnaces, the bursting of their atoms providing life instead of death. Providing life for their planets….

O sing unto God
and sing praises unto his Name
magnify him that rideth upon the heavens
praise Him in his name.

JAH!

Thank you Madeline, for being so bold, for being unafraid to embrace, to admit, to sing, to write. Thanks for expressing yourself so well, even after teachers thought you were a failure. May we all learn to live and know that who we are now is not who we will become, we are in process, even if that process has mistakes, blatant ones.

I’m inspired by you. I will finish your book, it’s the best piece of literature I have picked up in a long time. I will reread others that I long took for granted of yours.

Oh, to have a conversation with someone so unpreoccupied with their neighbor that they can’t be fully themselves. I think I know no one like this.

Thank you for writing so I could read, be inspired, and hope for something More.

in a galaxy, far too familiar and far to foreign,

Kelly

(this impromptu letter was written to Madeline L’Engle, after discovering her writing (again) just yesterday, in The Irrational Season)