Counterweights

Shannan Martin is a cook at a community kitchen in Goshen, Indiana. In this collection of personal essays, she introduces the concept of "counterweights": a practice of holding both the suffering and beauty of life in honest tension rather than minimizing pain or chasing false optimism. The book is organized into four thematic sections, each pairing a term for hardship with a counterbalancing term such as miracle, longing, plenty, or belonging, and is interspersed with lists, recipes, poems, and prayers that serve as additional small counterweights.

Martin grounds the concept in two unlikely sources: Rainer Maria Rilke, the nineteenth-century German poet who urged readers to let both beauty and terror happen to them, and her father, Dwight Garber, a blue-collar laborer from rural Ohio who taught that carrying something heavy becomes easier if one carries something equally heavy in the other hand. Martin applies this physical principle to emotional and spiritual life, arguing that "true abundance" means receiving everything rather than striving for false equilibrium. She cites chef David Chang's idea that real balance is two opposing forces in equal measure. Counterweights, she insists, are not about silver linings or toxic positivity but about holding everything in honest tension: both/and. She states that counterweights are widely accessible, personal yet communal, and cannot be bought or sold.

The first section, "Madness + Miracle," opens with "Holy Ground," in which Martin reflects on gardening, faith, and community. She introduces her husband, Cory, the chaplain at Elkhart County jail, whose guiding belief that no one should have to die to experience God's kingdom reoriented Martin's theology toward present, embodied engagement with the world. She recounts a trip to El Paso, Texas, where, lonely and hungry on a deserted Labor Day evening, she followed strangers to a public park alive with dancing and tacos, and her loneliness dissolved through proximity alone. In "Grief," Martin recounts a foot injury at The Window, the community kitchen where she works, that spiraled into a months-long medical ordeal. The swelling spread and persisted; specialists could not diagnose the cause. She broadens this into an argument that grief encompasses everyday sorrows and need not be reserved for catastrophic loss. She eventually received a diagnosis of May-Thurner syndrome, a vascular condition requiring nightly compression wrapping.

"Lyrical Lament" recounts the collapse of Martin's church community after she learned that a prominent lay leader was a convicted child predator whose status church leaders had concealed from a vulnerable congregation. When Martin and Cory called for transparency, leadership turned against them, weaponizing the concept of mercy and trying to silence them. Amid this institutional betrayal, the couple discovered an unexpected counterweight in Taylor Swift's music, playing every album chronologically and finding an outlet for rage and grief. After months of fruitless advocacy, they left the church. Martin cleared her dying garden to a Taylor Swift playlist, recognizing she was not destroying flowers but clearing debris for new growth. She reflects on the aftermath: permanent scars, but also a remnant of people who survived and emerged with new resilience.

In "Shadowboxing," Martin explores attentive foraging for beauty, recalling how her adopted son, Silas, as a toddler navigating grief and trust, would cling daily to tiny found objects as an instinctive counterweight. She describes filling a vintage shadowbox seasonally with small treasures as an exercise in embodied hope. "Sea Glass" reflects on her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary during one of the hardest years of her marriage, comparing long partnership to sea glass tumbled smooth by decades of surf. "Patio Naps" connects her privilege of napping outdoors to the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allowed municipalities to punish people for sleeping in public, and argues that protecting rest is a sacred communal responsibility.

The second section, "Lament + Longing," opens with "Reclamation," in which Martin insists that acknowledging "this is my actual life" is the first step toward agency. "Curtains" uses her habit of changing curtains seasonally as a metaphor for her transformation over two decades: from conservative government work and sheltered farmhouse life to casting her first Democratic vote at thirty-eight and running for city council at forty-six. "Starling Murmurations" describes the emotional toll of online political hostility and recovery through small counterweights, interweaving the communal flight patterns of European starlings with Frederick Douglass's vision of shared liberty. "Prayer" offers a candid confession of Martin's lifelong struggle with prayer, from childhood terror through encounters with prosperity gospel theology, the belief that faith guarantees health and material blessing, during infertility. She describes a halting six-minute return to prayer one morning for Marcellus Williams, who awaited execution in Missouri. Williams was executed that day. Martin concludes that prayer need not look a certain way. "Bear Hugs" celebrates sustained friendship and recounts Martin witnessing four men simultaneously overdose near her workplace; she watched a woman wrap one of the men in a long bear hug, an image she connects to the argument that human presence blunts the force of fear. "Choosing a Mug" describes her ritual of rotating over fifty mugs seasonally on a vintage display rack, framing this habit as a liturgy of choosing comfort and delight amid the uncontrollable.

The third section, "Poverty + Plenty," opens with "Community Kitchen," in which Martin describes her work at The Window. She reframes the Beatitudes, the blessings Jesus delivered in his Sermon on the Mount, not as a checklist but as a paradoxical poem that draws people toward proximity with those who suffer. "Lemons" uses aging, donated fruit as a metaphor for attending to the body's senses, recounting a year of therapy during which Martin had narrowed her emotional range to anger alone and her therapist used embodied practices to coax her into feeling. "Kroger" frames the local grocery store as a symbol of communal belonging, recounting a catastrophic 2018 flood that destroyed it and left the neighborhood in a food desert.

"Mary" recounts the 2019 death of Lamekia Dockery, a Black woman incarcerated at a work release center on a shoplifting conviction, who vomited and pleaded for help for six days while corrections officers dismissed her symptoms. She died of sepsis from an untreated intestinal ulcer; no charges were filed. Martin reclaims the biblical Mary as a revolutionary, drawing on liberation theologian Kelley Nikondeha to argue that Mary's Magnificat envisions the proud scattered, the mighty dethroned, and the hungry filled. Citing Black theologian Christena Cleveland, she contends that a more expansive view of Mary reorders who society considers sacred. "Hevel" recounts the death and resurrection of Holy Alliance, the Sunday school class Martin and Cory formed among incarcerated people at their former church and later rebuilt in a new space. The class debated whether the Hebrew word hevel means "meaningless" or "vapor," choosing the latter: "We only get to do this once." Martin describes current Sunday gatherings with baptisms in a plastic farm trough, doughnuts and coffee, and weekly prayer requests.

The final section, "Barriers + Belonging," opens with "House of Figs," in which Martin meets Kelley, a fig-growing neighbor, and reflects on how proximity dissolves assumptions. She connects the essay to the biblical city of Bethany, which means both "House of Figs" and "House of Misery." "Morning Tea" describes Martin's twenty-year ritual of making Earl Grey each morning as a liturgy of self-care and presence. "Home" explores the meaning of home through Martin's relationships with friends who lack housing stability and introduces her concept of "hotmesspitality": hospitality stripped of performance, where the only goal is connection. "Libraries" celebrates public libraries as sites of unconditional belonging, noting that during record-breaking cold, the Goshen Public Library served as a primary warming shelter while 250 churches sat empty.

The book closes with "First Bloom," an essay about peonies as Martin's flower of reckoning. In 2020, her peonies bloomed as George Floyd was murdered; in 2022, as children were massacred at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. Martin frames the book's closing argument: Joy is only an act of resistance if it fuels justice, and counterweights are not escapism but sustenance for the ongoing work of remaking the world. She closes with a vision of "belonging gardens, with room for everyone to grow," insisting that reaching for hope is often just as easy as bracing for disappointment.