{imperfect prose} seeing rightly

I just want things to be normal.

At least, that's what I think when I'm most vulnerable and scared and down.  
Like when I've taken refuge in our teeny shower stall a little too long and I'm burning lava hot yet I don't want to step out of the rushing water that drowns out the droning in my ears, in my house, in my life.  I reluctantly step out and slowly turn, stealing a glance at the clouded mirror that hides my image behind a wall of wet.
I don't see me.
I stand there, naked and dripping, huddling my body around a towel, willing it to heal my deepest darkness.
But still, I don't see me.

Slowly, the mirror begins to drip, revealing jagged blurry pieces of my face, like exaggerated tear marks in negative.
I lurch towards the glass and hastily wipe it down, unable to stand the distortion.

And I see me.

Wet, stringy hair and a face that won't let go of its adolescent skin, despite it's aging eyes and I know, perhaps now more ever, that I will never really see me, will I?

Because these eyes need correcting, in so many more ways than one, and if left alone, they can't see rightly.

So I turn away...there's always this great turning away...and I rush to put on my clothes because I feel too vulnerable if I don't.

And then I sink onto the bed and remind myself to breathe into one moment, then the next.
And I sigh.

And then I remember...

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

-Antoine de Saint Exuperay

And I ask, how does one see with their heart?

The in-between place

It is my deep desire to learn to live fully... aware of place and time and moment.  For isn't that really what this life is...a collection of twinklings and heartbeats?

But how does one live in the in between places?  The suspended moments that stretch between our familiar have-beens and our future unknowns?  

How does one fully live there?  Because those places seem to have a different light to them.

They are like that fleeting time at dawn, when the sun has risen but the fog of night still remains.  Every thing...every molecule of air, even... is slowed and hangs in abeyance, shrouded in dew, drawn to the warming sun yet heavy with the weight of night...

Everything...just...is.

Is that it? 

Are the in between places where we actually learn how to just be?  Where we take the time to look slowly,  from left to right, from ground to sky, from places of remembering to places of imagining?

To give ourselves permission to dangle in the knowledge that, at that very moment, we are full of all that has come before and all that is to unfold and that that place is also holy?

Oh, that I would wrap myself in these hallowed days and never break free from their moorings.

“These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.” 

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Linking up with L.L. Barkat today

 

Weekends are for being together

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.  

~William Faulkner

Beautiful Things

Life has a way of just...I don't know....being what it is...
and days dawn, one after another,
and I find myself tangled in the messiness of it all.


Easter comes and it dawns with this cutting brilliance that is
at once
completely new 
and yet 
somehow 
wholly familiar
and my heart and soul swells to be privy to it at all.


I know that I should rejoice,
...and again, I say, rejoice...
that I should live as the Easter people do,
but it seems that I can't shake the hard idea that
in order for there to be new life
the old must first 
die.


Easter is Easter because of death.


Always,
there is the dying...
     to self
          to expectations
               to entitlements
                    to me.


And I want to... really, I do... I want to grab hold of the golden thread that connects me to You,
that holds me steady despite this whirlpool of the daily
but my head instinctively turns to the blur
and I soon forget what can hold me fast.


I keep forgetting.


I look around me and I think I see truth.
I see dew drops and bluebirds and birthday cake, yes.  These things are true.
But I also see pain and sickness and addiction and lies.  
These, too, are true.
Right?


So how do all of these things set me free?  I thought that that was what the truth was supposed to do...
set me free.


But I just get more tangled.  Choked.  Jaded.
And then I know, even more profoundly, that this is the essence of who I am...my baseline...my truth.


Like Emily...

"i feel utterly human. i have never felt more human. humus--latin for earth, or ground. 

and i need to be held in a way that makes me believe it's okay to be dust."

What I need is another death.

I need to let die 

my need to live life

the way that I think it should be...

Because my way of orienting the world and its happenings,

it's joys and it's disappointments,

all of it, really, is all about me...how to make life better, more enjoyable, more bearable, more... for me.

And that truth that I claim to see...the good, the bad and the ugly...the daily everything...

the whirlpool that blurs and pulls...

it is really proof that you are at work...

It is not proof that you are distant or removed or unjust or plain ole mean.

It is the promise.

"You make beautiful things

You make beautiful things out of the dust

You make beautiful things

You make beautiful things out of us"

Linking with Imperfect Prose

Naturally dyed Easter eggs

Let us permit nature to have her way.  She understands her business better than we do.  ~Michel de Montaigne

red onion skins

red cabbage leaves

beets 

turmeric

soaking overnight

close up of red onion skin dyed egg

close up of red cabbage leaf dyed egg

close up of beet dyed egg with turmeric egg in bottom left of frame

close up of blueberry dyed egg


Nature is the art of God. 
~Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1635