This is the first (and best) of all refrigerator poetry. It reminds me that the line between the mess of everyday and the wholeness of art is sometimes very slight. And yet, there is a line. Transforming ordinary raw materials (a pigment, a word) is not as easy as it looks.
If the raw material is depleted or broken, what then? Light from darkness. Beauty from ashes. Is it possible?
Those are cosmic considerations. This … well, this is more like a post-it note turned poem. And yet, when Williams turns the ordinary into something lovely, I perceive a giant’s theology on a dollhouse scale.
It’s a mystery. One day (in a succession of many, many such days) you are a still and brackish puddle of water. No movement. Not much life. Then, something imperceptible happens. Perhaps, Someone breathes just a bit of Himself over the stillness? And the still puddle begins to trickle. It’s no river, certainly, but there is just a hint of movement, just a hint of renewal. Some fresh spring has begun to flow.
Nine months ago I began writing a story. My story. For the past five months the draft of that story has sat, locked in my computer, untouched. But this week I opened it up again. I started rewriting, tweaking, adding new thoughts.
It feels good to be at work again.
The only problem is that I’m feeling, here at the end of the week, just a bit dried up where words are concerned. Perhaps it’s only laziness, but I feel better remembering George MacDonald’s words: “Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.”
I’m giving myself over to idleness for the next few days. Let’s hope it’s of the sacred sort.
Meanwhile, since I have few words of my own today, here are the words (and a few images) I’m carrying with me into this weekend:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth, and I will fill it.”
Taken yesterday by Yours Truly. Ok, it was six years ago. It just feels like yesterday.
I read tall, teetering stacks of parenting books when I was pregnant with my first. Not one told me how much it would hurt.
Oh, sure, they talked about childbirth. The pain of it. I read a lot about that, and I was prepared. Well, as prepared as you can ever be.
But not one of those books prepared me for the pain of loving.
To love a child is to hurt. Desperately. They seem to grow and change by the minute, and this growth is both a good thing and a terrible loss. Every day you are saying goodbye: to the baby you held, the toddler who made you laugh, the brave one who left for her first sleepover. And on it goes. They’re relentless, these goodbyes.
I have never looked at old photographs without an almost physical pain. Of course, there’s pleasure too. But you expect that. It’s the pain that feels so strange. It’s the pain that seems to demand some sort of answer. God, does love have to make us cry?
There’s a song by the group Mumford and Sons called “After the Storm.” My favorite line is this: “There will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears and love will not break your heart.”
Do you believe that? Do you believe that one day love, like everything else, will be perfect and whole? That one day there will be no more goodbyes?
Peter told us that “[Jesus] must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything” (Acts 3:21). And I can’t help but wonder: when he says “everything,” does he mean everything? Will God restore everything that we seem to lose in this life?
Will there come a day when love will not break our hearts?
It isn’t that I had no time for reading this weekend. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday tucked up close to a window, book in hand, enjoying the cool breeze. It’s only that I played Gungor’s just-released album as background music, but the story this album tells refuses to stay in the background. I kept lowering my book in order to pay better attention to Gungor’s stories.
Ghosts Upon the Earth is an album* to listen to from start to end, from God creating (“Let There Be”) to creation worshipping (“Every Breath”).
I’ve written quite a bit about waiting. This song, “The Fall,” puts it so much better than I ever could, especially when the line “turn your face to me,” becomes a duet.
I have sometimes wondered lately if I am waiting on God or if God is waiting on me. I think that the same can be said of our world. We look around at all the misery and wonder why God seems silent. Some pray, “God, turn your face to me.”
But how can we forget that God whispers the same words to us? God waits for his creation, he waits for us, and he cries, “Turn your face to me, turn your face to me.”
* When I introduce music on this blog, it’s because I’ve already purchased the song (or, more likely, the entire album) for myself, and I think you should too!
I keep a book of quotations. It looks exactly like any other journal, but it’s for a different kind of journaling. Journaling with the words of other writers, if you will. Here I scribble down quotations from all kinds of books: poetry, theology, memoir, literary theory, fiction, you name it. I write down anything I want to remember.
Sometimes I use these quotations later, in my own writing or maybe just in conversation. But, it isn’t really about utility. It’s about beauty. Language can be so beautiful it stuns. However, I am generally reading so much, so quickly that I need a way to hold on to those beautiful bits that I just can’t bear to let wash down the stream of words, words, words.
In The Poetics of Space the French philosopher* Gaston Bachelard tells us that “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
That is pure poetry and reminds me, once again, that I will always find more truth in poetry (and myth, and story, and art) than in the dictionary.
Like many introverts, I imagine, I am happiest when in my own home. I also love the purely abstract idea of houses. As a middle-schooler, I wanted to be an interior designer. As an almost-college student, I considered architecture. Ultimately, my desire for fame and fortune led me to study literature. (For those perhaps unfamiliar with the current job market in the humanities, I should explain: that was a joke.)
After ten years of English lit. and babies, I finally did finish with school, and we left Chicago. I have missed my Chicago home for one year and six months. When I picture what it is that I miss, I see what Bachelard prompts me to call my “dreaming spot.” A soft green chair is huddled up against a corner window. A tall built-in bookshelf is just on the other side of the window, and through the glass there are rooftops with one-hundred year old chimneys and treetops that shift from bare, to bright green, to rich green, to shades of fire, and back again.
When I leave this Florida house, I am sure that I will miss the big bay window that shelters my writing desk. I still have the soft, green chair, but I no longer spend much time there. I prefer the hard-backed desk chair, here by the window, where I can see vegetable beds, ripening citrus, water, and (when I’m lucky) river otters. Right now, this is my spot for dreaming.
For me, one of the saddest and most troubling verses in the Bible is Matthew 8:20 where Jesus tells us, “‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’” To follow Jesus, is to say, “Lord, I will make my home in you.”
But we have also been given a promise. In John 14:2 Jesus says, “’In my Father’s house are many rooms . . . I am going there to prepare a place for you.’”
I love houses, mine (wherever it happens to be) most of all. I simply cannot imagine having no place (let alone a cozy, book-filled place) to lay my head. And so I stumble upon yet one more difficult, beautiful paradox: my desire for Home is God-given and good, but this fact gives me no right to hold my house in a possessive, white-knuckled grip.
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.’”
(Matthew 16: 24-25)
*Lest anyone formulate an unduly high regard for my intellectual habits, I must admit that I do not actually spend my days reading French philosophy. I encountered this quotation in the travel section of my Sunday New York Times. Poetry can find us in the most surprising places.
