I Wub You, RaRa...

Animal noises filled the air as we read a shelf full of books about monkeys and lions and dogs. We howled like hyenas before exploding into balls of laughter because we’re silly, too. We played with all of the cars, trucks, and trains, driving them over every surface in the house: up the leg of the dining table, along the back of the couch, across the smooth kitchen floor and bumpy carpet in the living room, noticing that the wheels turn faster in some places than others. We made sounds for them too: Vroom! Honk! Beep! Choo-Choooo! Rumble-rumble-rumble! We visited a friend and listened to a very old music box using our hands to feel the vibrations of its songs; then, we danced to the ones we heard on the radio.

Outside we observed a particular tree very closely. We felt the texture of the bark, we smelled the sticky sap. We crumbled up a pine cone into the dirt and even watched a line of ants travel up the trunk of our tree.

Finally, we landed on the kitchen floor for a snack of blueberries and milk. I suppose we were in a picnic sort of mood. After we ate, I said, “Let’s clean up our mess so Mommy doesn’t have to when she comes home!” We both stooped down to clean the floor. While I was wiping up blueberry juice, I felt the softest, little arms wrap around my neck and the weight of the most precious head lean against my shoulder. Then, the sound of one of the sweetest voices in the whole world to me, “I wub you, RaRa.”

“I love you too, Colby.”

My cup runneth over.

Aerial Flight

Come climb to unknown heights with me...suspending the reality of gravity, testing the laws of physics and the limits of our own physicality...

Balancing the weight of our bodies against the silken slings...

Folded and unfolding...twisted, tangled, tied together...unraveled and still unraveling...reunited to the rhythm of a song...

I'll say I'm a bird if you say you're a bird both flying on borrowed wings.

Our heads still in the clouds when our feet touch the ground...dancing awake in our living dreams.

Reflections on last Thursday’s ‘Art After School’ Class

Their small feet moving in the direction I guide them, my students and I walk up the stairs to the temporary exhibit, the unmistakable bounce of a 6 year old in each step. All girls, they chatter together about their day with enthusiasm and laughter until we stand at the entrance of the gallery where an awe imposed hush falls over our lips. They move in wonder around the space, sketchbooks in hand. I am reminded of being their age and walking through this very museum, of understanding that art was something more than a single piece of work, of falling in love with the visual image as a form of expression.
We are all quiet. We are all stopping where we feel most moved to look. We are all sketching what we see with both our eyes and our emotions. We meet in a seated circle in the hallway to pow-wow. “Remember, I asked you to look with all of your senses, to listen for sounds, to imagine how things might taste or smell, to think about how the different surfaces might feel if you could touch them, and to think about the way you feel when you look at the art that way.” They look at me, ready to speak. “I just want you to give me describing words right now.” And they begin:

haunted, eerie, escape, freedom, as cold as the arctic, sorrowful, broken, pain, rough, soured…

Their words continue as an echo of other responses I’ve heard relating to ‘Deep River’ and ‘Kin’.

The temporary exhibit is an installation by a black, male artist born in the late 1950s New York. The expanse of generational and cultural differences between he and my girls is drastic. They are white, 6 year old girls from Tennessee. Still, those differences weren’t barriers for connection or understanding. That is why I think art (all art: painting, sculpture, dance, music, poetry…) is magical. It can speak across our imposed divides of race, gender, place, and even time to the essential part of our humanity. It can afford us the ability (to paraphrase the words of Hugh Prather) to not only hear what someone says, but also feel what they mean.

rien que pour tu‏

Je veux seulement tous. 

Tu es le seul que je veux 
entre le soleil et la lune, 
entre la terre et les étoiles. 
Mon coeur bat pour tous seul...
...toujours.   

Mais tu ne saura jamais.

Swallow Me Whole

Swallow Me Whole (photo from Lookout Mt., June 2013)

It was your heart I lost when the world turned gold, 

beneath the blaze of secrets untold. 

After the fire has burned away,

these ashes of love are all that remain...

...even your ghost consumed by the flame. 

I gather my voice to call out to you,

but there is no answer for my heart to beat to. 

Tied together

by these threads of wind
and the fire that burned our hearts within. 

I feel the clouds could swallow me whole, rain me down, and you’d never know.

Matters of Life and Death: Sex, Life, and Death

Isn't sex about life...and death and God? It is the essence of life, the beginning of existence. Not only is it how new life is made, but also through it we may impart life to our lover. We may also impart death. 

There is a sense of rest and peace, shelter from the world and all the heartache and hardships and loss that are part of this often unyielding planet. Connected in safety, vulnerability, and complete surrender to our lover, there is life. But sometimes there is not safety. Sometimes it is scary. Sometimes it is the idea of life; but no love, no light exists there and giving ourselves does not mean we live on in someone else, but rather that we die there between bodies full of passion without love. And always we die to our individual selves in some way while becoming one with another—we can either die to live as one or die to melt away, part of us gone forever.

Sex is a sacrifice offered on the altar of another's body; a holy sacrifice that regenerates life through acceptance or destroys it in the rejection. There is so much breathtaking beauty and fragility in baring your body and soul, your heart is left weakened either to be rebuilt in togetherness or completely broken and hollow in the empty abyss that is "alone". That is why it doesn't end when it's over. Each time, we give a part of ourselves away, which leaves us continually searching for that which we've lost within another person (or several people). The lack of fulfillment is a symptom of death; life produces contentment and satisfaction. 

And the Spirit of God, as Author and Creator of life, sex, eternity is there in all of this. His face is not veiled, his eyes do not widen in shock and disbelief. He knows that He made us with this desire, this propensity for life. It is our reckless treatment of it that garners His abhorrence—this wanton treatment and casual participation in a sacred act of being. That is why I cannot treat sex with the same casualty that some may; because it is sacred. It is the soul's exchange of life, of death, of spirit with another.