Lindsay Eland - Middle Grade Author

My son, Isaac, who just turned six years old always asks the most interesting questions.

Conversation 1:

    Isaac: “Mommy, what is a brain?”

    Me: “Well, it’s a…it’s the thing inside your head that looks like a clump of cooked spaghetti noodles. It helps you to think and feel.”

Conversation 2:

    Isaac: “Mommy, does everyone die?”

    Me: “Yes, Isaac, everyone will eventually die.”


    Isaac: “Even people in Kansas?”

But one of the most interesting questions was one he posed the other day.

    Isaac: “Mommy, what is a life?”

    Me: “Um…ah…well, well it’s a…let’s see…Here Isaac, why don’t you have a glass of milk?”

Questions like this used to scare me. Fear of not knowing, of not being sure beyond any doubt always made made me feel out of control. Kind of like I was teetering on a skinny branch at the top of the tallest tree, being blown back and forth by the wind.

But now I like those questions. Instead of making me afraid they make me smile.

Smile at the fact that life is beautiful and hard. And that I might not know all the answers, but I do know about what is important. And it’s not whether or not I feel in control. It’s whether I love and laugh and live.

And so now, when the questions come and I am once more up in the tallest tree on the skinniest branch I think, isn’t the view perfect, doesn’t the wind blowing against my face make me feel so alive?

We live at 10,300 feet. The snowy peaks of the Rockies are in our backyard, our front yard is filled with jagged mountains so high they seem to touch the throne of God himself. It’s not unlikely to spot a bear or an elk, and foxes romp in the meadow every morning and every evening. We have warm afternoons and cool mornings and evenings. The crunch of pine needles are under our feet and the smell of cool, clean earth is all around.

I love where I call home and, to me, it is the most beautiful place on earth.

Last week we drove through Kansas, the landscape stretching out like a giant blanket with no wrinkles or bumps–starched to perfection. So different from our crumpled up mountains. We kept going until we got to Oklahoma, tornado country, flat as a pancake griddle and just as hot.

Kansas is not for me, nor is Oklahoma.

But I can see their wide-open beauty. Gasp at the sight of fields filled with sunflowers, soft wheat blowing with the wind, lightening streaking across a never-ending black sky. A wildness all its own.

There are different kinds of beauty all around us if we choose to see…really see and look and pay attention.  And I think those people who are truly happy, who fully embrace life, and who seem to have it all, are really those that really see beauty all around them.

And specifically for writers, that is our job. To find beauty in those hidden places of life, of love, of pain, of joy, and of sadness and reveal it to a world that, in a lot of ways, has lost its hope