We rejoin our story now, fifteen or maybe even twenty years after my first blog began.

That was before I went to Marylhurst to get my first accredited degree, twenty years after my first and unaccredited degree. Before the kids were all launched into their own adulthoods, but while they were beginning to fly. It was before our oldest went into the military, and before my husband read all of Proust as a summer project (it took him more than a summer) and before my brief brush with (almost) ovarian cancer. It was after mono at age 40 (who does that?!), but it was before the MFA in Writing I earned at Pacific University.

I called that first blog, “Recollected Life”

I thought I was gathering a lifetime’s memories and making something of them then. I feel like I’ve lived ten lifetimes since. I didn’t know that’s how it goes in this life. I didn’t know a person could live so many lives in one lifetime or move through so many versions of themselves. Maybe not all young people do this, but I thought older people were steady and sure and pretty much doing the same thing in the same life all the time. I didn’t think getting older would be confusing. Hard, maybe. Sad, even. Maybe sad. Sometimes my grandparents seemed sad. It could happen, I figured. But I wasn’t ready to be so befuddled and so thoroughly discombobulated. I thought it was possible for a person to figure things out as they went. I thought I’d have that done by now.

Instead, I have learned to find the recombobulation areas.

So this blog is going to be the blog of a writer recombobulating. A writer with more than six and a half decades of memories, in her mind and in her body. A writer with thoughts about movies and books and stuff that happens – funny and otherwise. And also a writer who has projects going and wants to talk about them as they go (or don’t), and a writer entering widowhood who must either process her life, and his death, with words, lest she go stark raving mad. My recombobulation areas are always where I can find and arrange the words. My recollections – my collecting and re-collecting – are all collections of words. Me and Proust. (It amuses me to write that. Nobody ever had more words or more satisfaction arranging them than Proust did.)

But this blog will be one thing more than words. It will be Orthodox.

In January of 2022, we came into Orthodox Christianity on the Feast of the Chains of St. Peter. Ironic, I thought even at the time. We came from traditionalist Anglicanism, and traditionalist Anglicans might fight about the 39 Articles or the use of Latin in a Sung Mass, but we could always count on one agreement. We weren’t Roman Catholics. No Pope for us, thank you very much. No chains around us from the See that claimed St. Peter as its authority. I might talk in this blog – maybe – about all the reasons we walked away from that, but in Orthodoxy, that feast day is January 16, and that was our first Saturday/Sunday in an Orthodox nave for church.

On the first day of October of that same year, most of our little band of former Anglicans were baptized/chrismated (depending) into the fullness of Orthodoxy. And that feast day? It’s called Protection of the Theotokos. It doesn’t get much more Orthodox than that. Even at the time this made me smile. What a delightful arrangement of the narrative. The ideas. The words. How combobulating.

And that’s how I get to the name of this blog. It’s called Three Pillars because of the Three Pillars of Orthodoxy. These are the three influential saints who stood at the fork in the road of history when the “west” (the Latin church) went one way and the “east” (the Greek church) another. Or, really, when the Latin church veered off, away from the established Greek practices and mindset of the whole Church for the first thousand years after the time of Christ.

These three saints are called Gregory Palamas (defender of Hesychasm), Photios the Great (defender against the philoque in the Creed), and Mark of Ephesus (“There can be no compromise in matters of the Orthodox Faith”). I’m going to talk a lot about saints in this blog. Just so you know. I can’t help it.

And last but not least, and probably by far the most interesting thing I’ll post about is the chapel we want to make. God blessing our efforts, we have Big Plans (mostly big hope that we’ll have the strength to get it done). See, on this land there is what we in our generation call “the woodshed.” Really, it’s the first home of the first Lillegards on this property, which great-grandpa bought from the Kanaka Indians (they were actually Hawaiians, it turns out) in 1904. You can see it in the photo at the top of the blog. It’s the building in the lower left, with the largest of the shiny metal roofing on it, under those splendid trees.

Right now, it consists of the room in which the family lived during that first winter, the section in the middle of the building where wood was chopped and stacked, and a carport. Above these three sections is a second floor storage area. If God blesses these Big Plans of ours, we want to take the next few years to deconstruct the whole thing and cart away everything but that one finished room. The Doug fir floor and walls and ceiling, we want to oil and bring back to life. The over-aged and weathered siding, we want to disassemble and make things from, and the sides of the building we want to reclad in something fire-resistant. (Honestly, if a match touched it right now, the whole thing would go up like a cartoon and just be a pile of smoking ashes in about 60 seconds.)

We want to rotate it and turn its long side and its windows to the setting sun, and inside we want an altar on the east wall. We will not have pews, but a couple of benches along the west wall. We will lay rugs down on the rough but polished floor so we can make our prostrations when we pray. We will not have electricity, since it did not have any at first. A little wood stove will be its heat and lamps and candles will be its light, and inside, beside the altar, and outside, in the little peaks over the three sides of the porch will be St. Gregory, St. Photios, St. Mark. The Three Pillars.

Please subscribe if you want to keep up with any of this. I’d love to have you as company while I write and rearrange the words on the page and the buildings on the land.