Down To The River

It’s been quiet around here. Some traveling, some fun work for Be Small Studios, the late summer loss of both sweet grandmothers in two weeks time, and the start of the school year have kept my days more than full. And I’m dancing around this idea of creative absence that I’ll write more about some time soon, but for now, this, from earlier in the summer.

We go down to the river to play. At the bottom of things, bare feet slide off slippery rocks, dip into silt and wonder; it is quiet here.

The river’s slow, all still on the surface. It mirrors blue skies and arching treetops like glass.

“Can I touch it, Mama? Can I put my hand in the water?”

She must have asked a dozen times, all the while her sister, jumps rock to rock, barefoot and unafraid.

She doesn’t hear my answer, all my yeses, because she can’t stop looking at the clouds beneath her feet. I come closer. Yes, baby, you can touch the water.

She stoops low and dips her little fingers in. Delight washes over her and circles make waves in sky.

When you are small, and toes can touch clouds by way of backyard swings, and river reflections, and capes made of bed sheets, the lines between faith and sight are thin as air, aren’t they? I wonder.

Does the nursing baby know anything but trust and love? She drinks it in all day long, a mystery.  I think about helpless, happy babies and I think about my grandmothers at the end of their lives.

I have seen more than one life arc with a return to simplest faith, and I am longing for descent the way she longs to touch the water.

I stop and marvel at clouds in a river, think about when things seem altogether upside down.

I hear lots of talk of downward mobility and upside-down kingdoms, racing away from empires and platforms and towers of Babel, going low and sitting long with the meek and brokenhearted. I hear lots of talk. And let’s be honest, I do lots of talking.

I think about the people in my life who embody this well.

The folks I know, the ones who earnestly see the small and the meek, who listen to the brokenhearted, are the small and the meek and the brokenhearted.

It is the woman walking through pain, instead of around it, and offering a hand along the way. It’s the one who delays her commute to listen and the one who brings soup. It is the one who introduces herself without a title, but with open arms. It’s the one who makes time for children to stutter out their thoughts and extends space and affirmation to a teenager who is growing, slow and painfully awkward. It’s the one who lays down agenda, and takes up compassion in the form of phone calls and apple crisp and permission to rest and exhortation to keep running the race.

And I think incarnation (God took on flesh) is the most beautiful and unfathomable part of the gospel.

photo by J Ted Barnett

It’s not long before she’s wading in the water. She bends low to scoop it up and begins to splash. She’s dancing down here on the clouds.

Story

In our dining room hangs a string of postcards, addressed to my husband’s grandmother and mailed nearly a century ago by her adoring father, Mortimer Lane. He and Mary raised seven children, and this weekend, each of those seven families gather together to play in the sun, raise a chorus of ruckus laughter, share memories from decades, centuries past. Two hundred descendants from a man and woman who loved well.

We swim and talk and wrangle toddlers with cousins and aunts and seconds cousins from around the globe.  Everywhere I hear stories, beautiful, broken, still becoming, tied together here with strong chords of love.

And after dinner last night, a group gathers on the third floor to belt the songs that Mortimer and Mary and all their children remember best. This Is My Story, This is My Song and Great is They Faithfulness and O Love That Will Not Let Me Go. Laughter erupts between songs, and great grandmothers chuckle and nod at wiggly children, and the words we sing are full of life. Ellie falls asleep in my arms, and I whisper songs into her sleeping ear. Laura follows a cousin’s lead and belts out words she’s still learning, and my eyes well up with tears, grateful to have been grafted into this story.

Joining my friend, Lisa-Jo Baker, in her Five Minute Friday link-up this week on the topic “story.” Join us and write for five minutes on this word? Or hop around and read what others are writing!

Morning by Morning

On Sunday morning, the sanctuary of our small village church is graced with a bursting vase of pink peonies. They’ve been cut from the garden of the retired music teacher who taught my mother flute and tuned my childhood piano. I never knew her, but I’m told his late wife gardened and served with a lifetime of small acts of love, and I tell him how much I appreciate this gesture – glorious homegrown flowers up there next to the centuries old Bible.

I planted peonies last August. It is June now, and for all their leafy goodness, only two fuchsia flowers bloomed. One was decimated by a storm.

A dear friend tells me it will take three years: Sleep, Creep, Leap, she says. Let them rest, let their roots creep wide neath the soil, and that third summer, they will bloom strong and beautiful. Under the stars, I tell her how I pined for the pink peonies at church, and she cuts several stems of  her prolific white peonies, sends me home with a bouquet.  I add my one pink peony to their mix and smile every time I see them mingling.

Some stories have a beginning, a middle, an end all tied up with twine and sealed with a kiss. These ones can be told with satisfaction, lessons drawn out like fresh honey from the hive. They’re my favorite kind.

Some stories are larger, though, and we must make our homes right in the midst of the mystery. My six year old tells us at dinner on Tuesday that she can understand that God is here now, and that God goes on and on forever and ever, but she cannot comprehend how God has always been; how can God have no beginning?

I am ever grasping for a timeline too, wanting to know whether this is a short season to savor or a long one with hatches to be battened down.  I keep scrambling to arrange the scraps of my story into some semblance of cohesive narrative, a work that holds the tensions of grief and joy, longing and contentment. We live in a kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven in a world where we see only through a glass dimly.

Story arcs are made of chapters,
are made of paragraphs,
are made of sentences,
are made of words,
are made of letters,
are made of single strokes of ink.

On Friday night I spent the evening with my grandmother, whose mind is all but lost to Alzheimer’s. She has no use for timelines; she dances on them, her mind weaving in and out of time and place in ways I cannot fathom. I don’t see her enough, and when I sit with her, all her memories stripped (save the pervasive longing for her mother), I remember all the small ways she loved: walks around the block and apples slices dotted with peanut butter, scribbly letters I’d find in my college mailbox, chronicling which birds lingered at the old bird feeder Pops built decades ago. She hated the bluejays. I doubt she’d claim she ever did anything remarkable, but her life has made a deep impression on mine in a million tiny movements.

And even if I knew the times and seasons, it wouldn’t change the fact that there are always dishes in the sink, laundry to be done, always time to love, and every day ends with sleep. The small things become the anchors and I stop looking for lifeboats when my eyes sharpen to the new mercies each morning brings. I am learning to notice the birds.

These days I write less here, kiss my husband more, dabble with paint and make a picnic with the girls in the backyard. I fumble through days and fail to honor those I love in my tone and with my time, and I start again, knowing this story is still being written. I’m reading books printed on paper, and planting perennials and drinking water out of old mason jars like my mother does.

I’m not sure what happened to the flower offering after church, but days later, the retired music teacher stopped by with a Hoosier glass vase full of fresh cut peonies. I’d been up all night with a vomiting six year old, the one who can’t understand how God has always been, but knows that God is here and ever will be. I place the peonies near the chalkboard and write it out so I remember: Morning by morning new mercies I see.

Comfort {Five Minute Friday}

The rain drenches May’s magnolias; the last petals let loose, carpet the soaking earth.  Spring has come again, and there’s a kind of comfort in seasons unfolding, one after another, around, around, around.

My oldest asks for tea after school, and I see a little bit of my grandmother in her. And there’s a kind of comfort in generations of tea.

There’s a comfort in driving the roads whose wildflowers I once knew by heart, being hemmed in by the same gentle mountains ridges that held all my early years.

The more I listen to my own daughters’ stories, the more I remember the gifts of simple trust and holy imagination. Spring is come again.

Joining Lisa-Jo Baker to write for five solid minutes on the word Comfort. I love this sweet community of writers. Hop over and read others’ posts on Comfort from this week!

Framing the Fragments (Guest Post for Message in A Mason Jar)

Today I’m sharing about a dear friend, whose honesty and steady listening has marked my life and my painting. Join me at Darcy Wiley’s beautiful blog, Message in A Mason Jar. (psst- while you’re there, you can enter to win a print of the watercolor Nest!)

She lives in faraway Texas now, but these little-ones-playing-wildly-in-the-background days we talk on the phone nearly as much as we did in junior high.

It was autumn when she told me, gently: “I love your work, I really do. But it lacks some of the tension and messy brokenness that makes your story yours.”

I wasn’t expecting so much honesty, but wounds from a friend can be trusted, and few people know (and love) me so well as this particular one. She knows I draw little birds and acorns, favorite lines of Christmas hymns and a whole series of eggs, all expectant, full of April hope. These are the pictures I want to hang on my fridge, to call me towards home and invite me in to a place of daily abiding.

I shuffle around her words, awkwardly mumble something about not adorning my walls with images of a bleeding heart twice flattened by a Mack truck.  And this wise friend, she didn’t pull her words back or defend them at all. She just let those words sit a while….

{Click here to continue reading at Message in a Mason Jar. Don’t forget to enter to win the print Darcy’s giving away while you’re there!}

A Study in Brokenness

In writing and in life, I harbor a growing appreciation for folks who can wrap one white-knuckled fist around hope and let life’s broken ugly drip from the other open palm. I think we need both- the truth of a kingdom coming, the reality of new life, unfettered hope and the acknowledgment of the hard, broken, the dim glass we see through.

My own small faith came nearly unraveled when I could not make sense of my sister’s unexpected death. Over time, my heart was stitched back together, with ample doses of listening friends, unafraid to sit with someone in grief. Now I can’t sing the melody of redemption and grace without the weight of this broken world lending it’s low, dark harmony. And now, the tension is leaking off the brush, too.

The more I paint, the fewer words I scratch. Somehow, wishy-washy watercolor seems to hold more than letters and punctuation, and these days, I prefer it. So last week, I slipped two new prints into my etsy shop.  These ones – the nest and the cup. These are the beginning of a series: A Study in Brokenness.

These images are my grasping to capture the hard places of a kingdom come and not yet come.

These are for the mama bird holding their breath, letting her hatchlings take fumbling flight.

These are for the dreamers burying well-laid plans, unclenching fists to the One who births dreams.

These are for messy middle where redemption is veiled, and hope is deferred.

These are for the beautiful ones pressing on, waiting for restoration.

These are for the brave ones taking flight, and remembering the place from which they came.

These are for me, and for you, friend.

I would love to hear, how you hold on to hope in the midst of brokenness, what Scripture or words or images quiet your heart in the hard times?

{And if you’d like, hop over to Be Small Studios for more on these prints, or follow Be Small Studios on twitter and facebook. And check back in here tomorrow – I’ll share a guest post about how the words of a friend precipitated the art.}

Tell Me Again

The pile of laundry in the corner of the bedroom’s grown large again, a testament to my bent towards ideals over systems. A testament to a good many other things, too, I’m sure. Let’s not write about that.

***

Read it again, the words fall from their lips before mine utter the end…

Again, again! My life is full of litanies:  storybook on repeat, a piggy back ride, the walk home from school, washing the rugs, welcoming friends in.

***

There were words spoken months before we exchanged vows, an old college friend gave her three fold manifesto on newlywed marriage:

Don’t get a TV the first year – be creative with your time together, at least for those once-in-a-lifetime first 12 glorious months.

You will be living mirrors for each other, walking around seeing your deepest beauty and grittiest grime reflected right back.

Preach the gospel to each other everyday.

All three have proved good advice; but I seem to have forgotten the last.

***

On Tuesday night, when shame wraps tight and threatens to choke, I ask him straight: Preach the gospel to me, please. Don’t tell me I’m doing the best I can, or that everything will be okay. Remind me that in the midst of this broken world and my sin-sick soul there is a redeemer, One who makes whole and makes new. Tell me the story of the cross, and sing of the empty tomb, of Pentecost and the garden and the pearly gates.

Tell me slow, tell me again.

Joining Lisa-Jo Baker for Five Minute Friday. We gather and write for five minutes straight on one word. Join us? This week’s word is again. Hop on over to Lisa-Jo’s to read some of the other beautiful Five Minute Friday posts.

Meditations from a Snowy Day

Sometimes winter is study in contrast: fresh-fallen snow adding weight to heaven-stretched bare branches. It’s a black and white world, and I see, say the obvious.

But Sunday, when clouds came down and kissed the ground, all the white fields bled into fog-shrouded sky. Only the very small space before me held its shape, stayed faithful to line and form at all.

And sometimes I can see far across the river with clear eyes, but other days (this same winter season) I can only speak of the small radius of my arm’s length.

These fog days, I learn to keep the circle close: tend the meditations of my small heart and love the ones who pass through my doors – let mystery hold the rest. Limited sight can be a view-finder, an invitation to offer my all in this present moment. I learn by failing, to drink up the Word; let loose of what’s happening outside my limited sight.

How can I see into another’s heart, know what tomorrow holds? All my sight is through a glass dimly.

Tomorrow the cloud may dissipate, and surely spring will follow winter; my heart and my vision will expand, but this day, I am centered on small, true things that I hold close in the fog and in the clear.

(All photos taken with my phone. Lesson learned: when adventuring on snowy days, bring real camera!)

(in)RL Conference 2013

Just in case you haven’t heard…

There’s a conference in April that you can attend in your living room {or a coffee house, or almost anywhere}. It’s called the (in)RL Conference and it’s put together by the amazing crew at (in)courage. Let me tell you, the folks over at (in)courage are the real deal. These are women who love community. (In)courage creates space and conversation to encourage growth and whole-hearted living both online and in your own real life community.

The idea is that you register, tune into the webcast Friday night, and then watch the rest of the webcast together with friends (and food…) on Saturday.  Last year, I registered for the first ever (in)courage conference, and watched it huddled under a blanket, contentedly all by myself. A series of streaming videos initiated conversations about justice, service, and sacrificial love that have stayed with me this year.

This year, I’ll watch it with friends, make it a party. If you are longing to connect with other women in your life or celebrating the community you already have, think about hosting a meet-up in your area. Or, sign up and watch it in your jammies like I did last year. Either way, it will be well worth your time.

Today is the first day of registration, and you can check it all out here!

On Marking the Days {A New Year Post}

When I was a child, and her own mother was dying, my grandmother would invite me to sit next to the hospice bed, my little feet dangling. She’d hand me the latest copy of Ideals magazine, and ask me to read the printed poems and prose to my great-grandmother’s fading ears.

I am grown now, and just before Christmas my daughter came home from school with her first collection of Kindergarten poems. A generation has passed, and this week I sat heart-heavy next to my grandmother’s bed with only whispers of I love you, longing to cement the lines of her face and sweetness of her smile into my mind’s eye, wishing I’d brought an old book of poems.

It is a new year and I have no resolutions or great aspirations, not even a simple one word for the year. These days, I don’t so much mark my time with calendars pages or liturgical schedules. I am simply leaning into the seasons: the wintering months where dormant dreams sleep and the awakening hope of someday spring, the heat of long summer nights followed by the decadent descent of all that autumn glory, again, again, again. And the rhythm of this created world holds the melody of my days and years.

I count the seasons by early sunsets and snow-buried gardens, the hope of song birds’ return, and the quiet heartache on the anniversary of the last day I saw my sister laugh in this life. Days and months are marked by memories that ground me in my story: that first, very long date exactly one decade ago, where we talked India and art over an order of steaming chai and an apple sliced up, peanut butter on the side.

I am not old, but already my days are filled with remembering: life beginnings and last embraces, little mittened hands held on winter walks to school and anniversaries of all kinds. I ache with remembering, sit with it – feet dangling, let it draw me back to the One writing all these days before one of them came to be.