My spoonful of sugar

Like that wholesome apple which keeps the doctor away, finding a piece of poetry regularly keeps the dreamer in me alive and well. I was heartbroken as a littler girl when I heard my Anne Shirley say, "I have grown too sensible for romance." I grew too sensible for romance too. So I am taking a higher dose until that sensibility is fought back and imagination pulses through me a little stronger.

The city? Yes.

I am afraid of the city to be honest, on my own. But how I love to explore it (if I am not alone), learn about it, and imagine living in it. (See, just a spoonful of poetry is all it takes, and I grow better.)

...It is a building beside a park, third window up, a dalmatian who wears a red collar to walk and sit beside with a book on a bench. A small balcony, a box with basil and echinacea, photographs pinned to the wall. Shelves with dishes and cups that stack precariously high because there is no room for them in the cupboard, pink soap and a sink to set it near. Creaks in the floor, honey yellow walls, a telephone, a rug and thick blanket. Jazz and old voices, newspapers, coffee stains and the little girl on the floor above who likes the Dalmatian. Art on the streets, music across the way, cars and bicycles and a laundromat. Opera in the winter, ice cream cones in the summer. Protests and celebrations, history and movement and the throbbing heart of the rest of country around it...

No commentary on why I don't think I actually want to live in the city. I'll just keep furnishing my apartment and walk a few blocks for bread and tomatoes and baking powder.

Without Athena?

I miss my copy of the Odyessy (did I ever have one?) - studying Greece without it is simply devoid. Of what, I'm not entirely sure. I think the fascination that used to come from the myths themselves is no longer coloring the study of politics and daily life, and I know certainly that 'summaries' never satisfy me. I feel like I spent hundreds of dollars on a giant summary - actually, thats exactly what I did.

Its entirely understandable. Teaching Western Civilization in just one semester would necessitate that fast moving, "just grasp the highlights of each century and the cultures which shaped the way the world now functions." But I liked how I learned it all in middle school far better.

I'll just have to keep studying on my own in order to look into those details that interest me so greatly once I graduate. Will I be able to do that? I hope so - it will have to be a discipline. I am not good with discipline. I desperately want it to be though, even if I only read one new book a month, and I hope I will do it. I know that learning can never come to a halt, since education isn't "the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire," and I suppose it becomes a matter of priority. Other obligations will arise, especially as life moves onward - I will grow up and out of the title of 'student'. In title only; my mind will always wonder and ask questions and find itself unaware of many things. In practice, I hope to continue questioning and searching for ideas and expanding them. Maybe the people who don't are really the ones who have grown old. Not to call knowledge the fountain of youth, but I do think it is some kind of fountain - its moving flowing, searching. I want to find out! I want to understand, connect - grasp and in some way, let it all become a part of me. Putting down the books and closing up questions to go the rest of life with your so-far answers is stagnant.

Knowledge is not the most important thing, but it is a great gift (even while it has come to be seen as a requirement in our part of the world.) Leadership will always require knowledge of something, it plays a great part in wisdom and discernment. Or maybe its the reverse; wisdom and discernment play a great part in knowledge. Maybe they aren't supposed to be forced independent.

Anyway. I miss the Odyssey and the Iliad and the art and the philosophy among the dates, events, and 'significant people.'

Abandon.

I need God to take away this perfectionism, this measured-and-counted way of doing things.
Love in its great power is not duty, obedience, task, or usefulness - it is excess, overflow; a spilling out of burning hot joyous desire.

Give me that God; how I want you!

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love, put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

S. Teasdale



Love is bold and love will risk things. It will risk failure. It will risk the pain of others. Love is passion, love is what I used to think it was. Love is not a tired thing, it has not been used too much. It is a tempest, a brilliant lightning cloud.

It is peace and harmony and stillness and order. But it is also fire and fight and tears and dirt. I want the scratches and the mud of Love on my hands, on my face.

He is Love.

(I dreamed once of the field where I was flying. I flew with cardboard and feather wings, but I also fell, when I started to think about how I was making myself fly.)
I want freedom and passion and pursuit, and I want to soar because I have been caught by love. He is my wind and my flight. I want to get lost.

Hevel

I used to be angry at my desire to make art.

Even if I could become as skillful as I desired, so that I could express accurately what I see beneath my own eyelids, and perhaps then truly create things that communicated, and meant something; even if I could come to that point, I would be doing something purely 'metaphorical.' A representation of reality, a viewpoint, an idea - but nothing real and tangible in and of itself. An image would not put clothes on the back of a naked child, or fill the bowls of starving families with the food they need. Oh, I was told, but perhaps the profits from selling your work could do so, perhaps you can raise awareness and cause something to be done by inspiring others. Perhaps your images can tell the stories of those who hurt. Then they will yield something tangible.

Perhaps.

Yet that does not soothe the itch that frustrates and torments me; I want something deeper.

I do not want to accept that art is simply an aesthetic means to a valuable end. That it is only luxury, something that does nothing real on its own but hangs on a wall while the meaningful work is done. It passes away without moving, walking, breathing.

How can you worship, and please God, and bear righteous fruit without that motion? How is art, not the offshoots of art, worth anything?

Paul does not write about color and shape, line and space, balance and rhythm - the elements of artistry that catch my breath and make my heart constrict. Yet I see them in the world around me, and I am joyful in who God is in such a way that I rarely ever am in a sermon about what He does for us.

Depart from me,

I never knew you.

I know a piece of Him in the kind of beauty art is - His art in the world I know around me.

I still only catch a glimpse, a fleeting moment, where I understand why my passion truly matters, why there is a Divine magnitude to its importance. I am remiss when I do not catch those moments to my chest and press them into my very person, understanding it and recognizing how it is woven into the everyday work of my hands.

One such moment I wrote last year among my prayers, and it echoed through my mind as I watched a film in design class this afternoon. Rivers and Tides is a documentary that displays the work of Andy Goldsworthy, explaining some of what it means to him as the pieces are shown. His materials are moss and earth, leaves and petals, stones and reeds and icicles. He works on the beach, in rivers, in pools of water that have been caught in the rocks. The artwork and sculpture he creates are specific to the land he is working in, and much of what he does will not last more than a few hours; some of it will scatter within minutes. Ice melts as the sun rises, sand shifts with the wind, red pigment in a stream dissipates and settles on the river bed.

Yet his creations are beautiful, and while they do not last, that doesn't diminish their beauty in any way. Somehow instead, the beauty is intensified, because it is so real.

Show me, O Lord, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life. You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Each man's life is but a breath. Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro. He bustles about, but only in vain; he heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it. But now O Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.

And so I will fling my diamonds heavenward.

The documentary is called "Working With Time." I am struck by the 'with'. He intentionally builds a sculpture on the shore, knowing that the tide will come in a few hours. Instead of ignoring, disguising, or attempting to run away from that reality of life, he uses is, and allows it to give life and beauty to what he does. I was watching him spend hours gathering together driftwood and branches - bustling about for what seemed in vain - arranging them into a swirl that captures the motion of where the river meets the sea, and remembered my prayer. The waves come in, the tide carries away the swirl of wood, and the sculpture itself moves in the way that the art was created to communicate.

I wrote last fall in my prayer book about Psalm 39.

My life is small and fleeting, and I can take nothing from it but my love and the things I send ahead of me - the offerings of beauty and sincerity lifted up for my God. I could live my life here, gathering sparkling gems to the edge of an ocean cliff to throw them into the sky above. I could roam the world collecting precious pearls and amethysts to pour into the sea for Him, just because it is beautiful, even for only a moment.

My earth-life is a fleeting second as existence stretches forward. So am I going to be a glittering second of time that was dedicated to the God of everything who has no beginning and no end?

My art is small and fleeting and I do not know if any of it is sent ahead. But it can be a diamond flung toward heaven.

And that is why I think it matters most.