New Memory

16 June 2010

I emptied the sugar bowl this morning,
the Tour d'Eiffel disappearing through the hole in the lid.
That spoon hung useless on the wall, sat neglected
in the bottom of a box since a dark childhood
visit to the City of Lights.

Suddenly comes purpose, though
I keep running out of sugar. So much
coffee to drink, so many bottles of under-valued
wine to enjoy, so many sweetnesses to spoon out
that sometimes I forget the grief altogether
in the midst of forcing words, struggling to write
anything anywhere--keep poetry flowing
through the books that will someday fill
the shelves we have not built.

Those pages once were bound to be topped off
with bitter melancholy--so many caged and angry
women and their box of useless spoons.
I cannot possibly grieve again as I did back then,
and I wonder if there is less meaning now,
with joy and grief so unevenly matched--
one grown, contented woman stirring her coffee
with a new memory of Paris.

Deep Magic at 27 Weeks

Today, I am 27 weeks pregnant.

Yesterday, I picked up a paintbrush for the first time since I found out I was pregnant.

I don't think these two realities are coincidental. I've been on pins and needles throughout this pregnancy, waiting for the fateful 27 weeks to pass. Not that it's a magic number; I know it's not. Or maybe it is--"Deep Magic", as a friend of mine at church quoth (very C.S. Lewis of her...) the other day when the incessant back pain I'd been having for 5 months suddenly vanished in the middle of the Holy Unction service of Holy Week. Not magic--but God's hand, God's grace, God's peace--and the little girl in my abdomen finally choosing a more comfy position for what I hope will be the duration of the pregnancy.

I think most people would be surprised to hear me talk like that. The years between 2000 and 2005 beat a lot of things out of me, including the ability to speak in platitudes. But it has struck me constantly, in the midst of those years; in the midst of the Blessing Years that have followed, that God's grace and love and peace are not platitudes. And they are certainly not to be hidden away, but they are very precious, wonderful, mysterious, unfathomable realities that work even when we can't see them. Even when we are so reduced by our circumstances that we wonder if He's even there.

So--27 weeks. Not a magic number. But definitely a point of new vision, and hopefully a point of rebirth of creativity. Deep Magic.

Song Lyrics

I'm not a huge fan of the Christian music industry. A lot of the music played on Christian stations strikes me as insipid or manipulative jargon aimed at winning people into the Kingdom, or keeping them there, by means of an emotional high or, worse, an emotional low, when being faithful really has very little to do with how we feel. (Just as an aside, I know a lot of people who enjoy Christian music as a genre. I can completely respect that. I just don't tend to enjoy it myself.)

There have been songs over the years, though, that immediately struck a deep, deep chord of truth in me, despite my very strong bias against the genre. They may or may not have appealed to my emotions as they proclaimed, loud and clear, a truth which was not only valid, but vital. The lyrics below come from a song by a band called Tree 63. And perhaps the reason it strikes so profoundly every time I hear it is that they didn't try to say anything new or bend the Message to be "relevant". The song is scriptural, almost straight from the Psalms, and it acknowledges joy and grief, while praising all the while the God who works in all circumstances.

I heard it in the car on my way home from having a cup of coffee with friends after celebrating a liturgy with them this morning. I haven't heard this song since the Divorce Years, and while the trials in my life have morphed and eased dramatically since that time, it still brought tears to my eyes. Blessed be the name of the Lord--when I'm celebrating triumphs and redemption, or when I'm struggling with the results of my sin--blessed be the name of the Lord.

Blessed Be Your Name--by Tree 63

Blessed be Your name
In the land that is plentiful
Where Your streams of abundance flow
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name
When I'm found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out,
I'll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say...
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

Blessed be Your name
When the sun's shining down on me
When the world's all as it should be
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name
On the road marked with suffering
Though there's pain in the offering
Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out,
I'll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say...
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord, Blessed be your name

Sketching

Fiddling around with colored pencils. Not my best work, but I'm really stuck on the image.

Come, Lord Jesus

O come, O come Emmanuel
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here,
until the son of God appear.

O come, thou Dayspring, come an cheer
our spirits by Thine advent here.
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
and Death's dark shadows put to flight.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Sung by Steven Curtis Chapman here. The video is tripe, but the song is wonderful.

Chimera

12 December 2008
chimera: noun: a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.
inspired by The Weekend Wordsmith

This House is...
should have been built on Sanity,

but even a foothold is rare purchase.
At least the Cornerstone sits solidly
upon rock-hard, sound rationality--
he does not wander. The Little Ones go,
return again, find the House
in need of repair, but standing,
safe and warm, sheltering,
in her right mind.

Giant

30 November 2008, 6:35 PM
inspired by The Weekend Wordsmith

Some days everything feels
big, insatiable, unkind. I think
mostly Perspective is to blame--
tonight, all things feel
surmountable, and a pint is more than
enough to satisfy my appetite.

The Man Who Was Thursday

This book by G.K. Chesterton really is tremendous. I'm not sure if I got it the first time around, or the second, or the third, even with the very competent help of my Western Classics professor, Dr. Strait.

However, I finished rereading it just yesterday, and it became so very obvious to me what it was that Chesterton was getting at-- that God is so very big that one rarely gets a full view of Him, and most times what one sees most clearly is the back of Him, which is to say we see Him indirectly, through nature and through human relationships. And sometimes that reality is so difficult to look at, so suffused with suffering and pain, that we begin to believe that's all there is, and goodness must be an illusion.

But at the same time, when we do finally get around to the Front, and we look into the face of God, He is so very good, so very loving, so wonderfully beyond any dream we could have created in our finite minds, that the evil that exists in the world comes to the point of seeming, just for a moment, illusory, or like a cruel game that we have no choice but to watch play out before our eyes.

The difficulty is that both the Good and the Evil are very real and very present. Somewhere in our gut, we know this, and in our desperate attempts to work against the Evil, we often end up fighting each other, seeing devils everywhere, and nowhere. We find when we get right down to Reality, though, that God is not only at the beginning, commissioning and exhorting us to fight whatever evil we can, whensoever we can, by whatever means we can, but He is also in the middle of it, and cannot be ravaged by it as we are. And so He can lead us on through it, by whatever magnificent or ridiculous path He chooses, out the other side, further up and further in to His Goodness which is Paradise.

I found myself on the point of tears listening as Syme, the hero, says, "When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained... Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--"

Dear God, yes. If we could only get around front.

The Candles

2 October 2008, 11:00 AM

The candles always meant so much,
lining the walls and lit by my hand
before the others arrived, one for every icon,
pieces of sanity amid chaos--Life Givers.

The icons, the incense, and from day one,
the faces and their unlikely
welcome of one who should have been a thorn
by definition. The people were Christ to me,
have always been, will always be. They welcome

now another thorn. I lit a candle one last time,
prayed they'll love him well, remain
who they've been for me.

Stranger in a Foreign Land

28 September 2008, 6:05 PM

Worship is, or should be,
a familiar experience. That's how
the Sacred makes her way into
a heart- through the vein of gentle,
meaningful repetition of Truth.
Faces, as much as words, convey
the gravity, and the joy,
of understanding the Story is bigger
than we are, and yet it is very much
Who We Are. Something is missing,

out of place when the faces we know
are miles away, and the melodies
of the Holy Place are not our own.
Of course, every Home was once
a Foreign Land, and some things alien
may, with time, become ourselves.

They may.

White-Robed Sorrow

I wrote once about George MacDonald's book, _Phantastes_. My life was a chaotic whirlpool of grief and throbbing wounds at the time, and being the non-linear, analytical thinker that I am, MacDonald's fantastic worlds and seemingly random images of beauty, love, grief and the like touched me so deeply. Today I ran across one of the passages which meant the most to me, and I wrote the following about it to my husband:

"There's this scene where [the narrator and main character of the story] is floating along in a boat, making his way down river, and he catches a glimpse of a woman in white running through the woods alongside him. She stays with him right up to the castle. It was, for me, an image of the wounds we receive being faithful to lead us on to something else if we let them- to redemption I guess, cliche though that may sound. But one certainly cannot see it as such when the wounds are fresh and throbbing.

That scene in the book is a gift to me, because the character, and therefore the reader, is given a moment to stand back from the pain and view it somewhat objectively. To see the very thing that wounds us running along beside us in white, weeping for us, leading us on to redemption, is so very beautiful. I remember, though, that it made my heart ache for the woman in the woods. She was just a metaphor for other things, but I guess I think of her as almost a part of ourselves- the part that is wounded and has been lost in so many ways, and cannot completely enter into the joy of the present."

I need to go back and read that book again.

"As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love."

George MacDonald, Phantastes

Mandolin Rain

I rediscovered a song last night that I haven't really listened to since highschool. Bruce Hornsby & the Range had two songs that everyone knew, even if they didn't care for them. They were The Way It Is and Mandolin Rain.

I was always particularly fond of Mandolin Rain. I couldn't have said why back then other than the fact that I loved the way he played (piano), and I loved his voice, and his style, and and and... I guess those are reasons enough.

As I listened last night, though, we were sending our daughter- my step-daughter, I call her Epona- back to her mom after a short visit here with us- me, my husband and my son (the Yob). Something in the song struck a chord with the situation- the joy the kids bring with them, a portion of which walks out the door with them every time they leave, the bittersweet sadness that's a part of daily life in a blended family, the irrevocability of all the little broken pieces that led us to this place where we get to redeem as much as we can, and learn to live with what can't be borne. The joys come and go, and we always know in the back of our minds, or very much in the forefront, that what we have will never quite feel whole, but you'd have to wrench it from our cold, dead hands if you wanted to take it away from us.

MANDOLIN RAIN
Bruce Hornsby & the Range

The song came and went
Like the times that we spent
Hiding out from the rain under the carnival tent
I laughed and she'd smile
It would last for awhile
You don't know what you've got 'til you lose it all again

Listen to the mandolin rain
Listen to the music on the lake
Listen to my heart break every time she runs away
Listen to the banjo wind
A sad song drifting low
Listen to the tears roll
Down my face as she turns to go

A cool evening dance
Listening to the bluegrass band
Takes the chill from the air till they play the last song
I'll do my time keeping you off my mind
but there's moments that I find, I'm not feeling so strong

Listen to the mandolin rain
Listen to the music on the lake
Listen to my heart break every time she runs away
Listen to the banjo wind
A sad song drifting low
Listen to the tears roll
Down my face as she turns to go

Running down by the lakeshore
She did love the sound of a summer storm
It played on the lake like a mandolin
Now its washing her away once again

Listen to the mandolin rain
Listen to the music on the lake
Listen to my heart break every time she runs away
Listen to the banjo wind
A sad song drifting low
Listen to the tears roll
Down my face as she turns to go

The boat's steaming in
I watch the sidewheel spin
And I think about her when I hear that whistle blow
I can't change my mind
I knew all the time that she'd go
But that's a choice I made long ago

Listen to the mandolin rain
Listen to the music on the lake
Listen to my heart break every time she runs away
Listen to the banjo wind
A sad song drifting low
Listen to the tears roll
Down my face as she turns to go

Snowballs with Baba

17 December 2007, 11:26 AM

I watched my African put on
his warm against the bitterness
of a belated Kentucky cold snap. There are
few things he hates more than winter,
and there’s not enough snow on the porch
to justify the donning of his gloves,
his scarf, his hat, his lined winter coat,

yet he dons, and I smile,

because I know why he goes
to the purported tundra. For my little boy
is out there in his too-big snow gloves,
clumsily shoveling the paltry powder
into a plastic bag. He wants to be
the only kid with a snowball next summer,
and this man-not-his-father
won’t let our precious boy
gather his dreams alone.

Speaking of works of art...

The latest addition to my heartstrings, Lilliana Green, or as I'm calling her, Li'l Green, held in the arms of a beaming mother Mattie. Have you seen those little baby dolls at Wally World- the ones that are supposed to look like newborns, with their closed eyes and soft features? That's EXACTLY what Li'l Green looks like.

My sister in Houston also recently had a baby- li'l Devin- but as I still have no pictures of her, I can't brag on her via my blog. Hint hint...

Knots

3 May 2007, 1:07 PM

You must be persistent, Love.

There are so many knots
to untie. This means that you must
be patient, and also have a willingness
to help soothe rough edges, worn
raw from years of rubbing up against
harsh realities which could not be
escaped any sooner than I've managed
to writhe and wrench free
with the one go-round granted.

You must be merciful, Beloved.

There are so many tears
to dry. this means you must
be gentle, even when the salt begins
to sting your eyes; crust along the edges
of this lovely glass of wine.
So many times the brine will mix
with moments meant for gaiety and smiles.

You must be willing to see, my Love.

There are so many colors
in those tears- so many gifts kept
through the years, waiting for your hand
to come and draw them out, as it has done.
So many shades of purple I'd forgotten-
I did not know so many hues could hide
within the Shadows, waiting for their moment
to run down my face, give you a taste
of this rending grief, and every little hope
still waiting in the wells, all for you...

Shades

13 July 2007, ~4:30 PM
Vavin Café
Paris

A million shades of green, one of blue
as I sit listening to you read aloud from a book
I’d not have considered a year ago- I didn’t know it.
A world has opened before us since we entered
autumn and life together, and I wait to discover
the many shades of green we still have not seen
together.

As Weary As I Am

3 July 2007, 4:22 PM

Somewhere in the midst,
between creation and resurrection,
I'm certain there was rest, though I'm grasping
with little hope of finding it. I wonder,
four days hence, if I'll have to be content
to heed His call to wake,
as weary as I am today.