Before the dawn

February 3, 2014 By

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Before I wake I want to feel breezes dust my face and kisses so light they fail to touch my skin and I want to roll to my left and curl up in you.  And when I close my eyes I see bursts of blue and gold and crimson red and I will shudder at the  chill.

Before I dine I want to slow cook and rise high and marinate for a long while so you’ll see my heart poured into what is spread before you.  A feast that I created for the first look when you take a bite and nod.  Yes, my love. Fit for a king.

Before I hit midlife  I want to cry so hard for a suffocating loss that takes my breath and stomps it into concrete.  Because when redemption gallops through darkness I will admire it more like a stallion racing and sing my thanks like butterflies wings flapping, fast and quick my heart will dance as his muscles pound on racetrack sod.

Before my heart is hardened you appear like the twinkling of dawn and you take my breaths and blow them back inside of me. And as I run you run and as I dance you dance and I scream for you to leave me be because I do not deserve such pretty talk and such beauty.  But as you drive away in a cloud of dust you turn the truck back around and come back to the place where you started.

Before I sleep I want to see you resting on your left arm because I’m reading and you can’t stand it when I’m reading so you tickle and fuss and we roll together tangled in heat for your fierce jealousy of the words that capture my heart.

Before I grow too damn old I want to rest upon your strong arms and you will remind me of our summers and our winters and our glory days.  I will smile and shuffle on at the memory and the taste of you when you’re long past gone.

Before I die I want to have strength to offer praises, for as it turns out, this ain’t no middle-ground life.  I thank God for what was good in my future that I was too blind to see. For redemption that was inches from my face and yet my inveterate stubbornness prevailed.  And with wrinkled skin and a burned heart I turn to God and cry out in gratitude for the blessings so freely given.

Before I complain, instill in me gratefulness.  Before I judge, let me show mercy.  Before the dawn, grow my boldness.

Before I give up completely, allow me to persevere, for the future is coming right around the bend.

 

Photo:

http://(threew’s).flickr.com/photos/wynandbasson/11449434875/sizes/m/in/photolist-irKm6z-8Sbek8-32Re6G-cZXNW-dS2LVn-dB8JTy-jde5Tm-9epjtp-9UMsaB-dEtbXt-4yaQVV-awwtbq-9PN17E-9PMYMq-9PMYqb-9PN21G-9PN2kE-9PN1AE-9PMZDU-71cMAJ-foyNxk-9PN2GJ-ihF34z-6AbJYU-2iJ35S-7Xso5Y-cZXLN-cZXSP-cZXEG-cZXR5-cZXGz-iq6i5A-4f4Vfh-dPR9zF-jX6rc-7ipEVu-d1cqUq-8goiju-9DxCgU-3F7r2Q-7D6pQk-5YQfMp-7xzQtA-2JKNkb-7xzPME-7xzNYd-kLWHV-aNuK86-737Y7b-545aje-ab4dUT/

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love Tagged With: , , , ,

Was Jesus Beautiful?

January 18, 2013 By

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One of Chris Bohjalian’s characters in Midwives dressed two-clicks above.  You can wear wrinkled slacks and smell like used cigarettes if you want, but I’m showing up in heels, my blond highlights blowing past you in the dust. Being beautiful is the closest thing we know to power.  And in this world, power is life.  So yeah, I get it.  I understood the urge to hide what’s inside and cover it all up with a jacket.  Our insides are dark and insecure, and the meek don’t live long in this bitter place.  You can say all day that beauty is skin deep and only comes from the inside, but when you want a job on 11th Avenue, you shed that fallacy and get with the program.  Bust out the Bergdorf suit.  The black one that makes you look slim and intimidates the competition.  Because you only have one shot and one first impression. Wear quelques fleurs.  Buy Burberry. Make it count.

So it makes total sense that Jim Caviezel got the part of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.  He’s stunning, really.   Just peer into those brown eyes and neatly-trimmed beard and tell me you wouldn’t want to listen to that man talk just to see his mouth move.  Who wouldn’t want to see Jesus with straight teeth and soft skin and strong biceps?  It makes us cry quicker and weep more deeply and feel more connected with a man who is attractive. It’s more tragic to see Marilyn Monroe die than some prostitute from the Fifth Ward. Because Marilyn was beautiful, which to us means she was more worthy.

And yet Jesus was not beautiful.   “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces,
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” Isaiah 53:2

I thought of the Sermon on the Mount, where the poor in spirit inherit the Kingdom of Heaven and the meek prevail.  Where we should be less attuned to beauty and its false sense of security. Jesus turned the whole world on its head, and suddenly all we ever saw as value just fades like blood from a cut that bleeds in a bathtub with a champagne glass and a handful of pills.  What a waste of a beautiful life. 

And I stop in my tracks, with my expensive blond hair and a diamond burning a hole in my finger.  I rip the pearls from my neck and they spray around the living room like popcorn in a movie theatre, dirty and scattered.  I stand with my head thrown back and scream at darkness, this dying and rotting skin holding up my broken heart.  Beauty can’t be trusted.  We gravitate like animals to what we believe will breed more cleanly, and will produce a more perfect fruit.  Yet as we click toward this devil, who lures us so strongly in the name of self-preservation, Jesus stands.

He looks at all that caged-in ugly, and we are suddenly free.  And I am filled with awe.  Because I have never before been faced with such raw power.  Something that grips my insides and holds still my heart and quiets my rage. A power to raise the dead and clean wounds and move mountains.  I’m not worthy, as all this darkness pours out at his feet, from my blond roots to my trembling fingers to the buttons on my Bergdorf suit, and there surrounded in pearls on the floor I lay all my shit bare.

I just lay it all out bare at his feet and weep.

We should all strive for “the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.”  1 Peter 3:3-4.  Past the skin and the suit and the jacket of insecurity, there is great peace.  I want that peace to penetrate through these blue damaged eyes, two-clicks above this world, walking tall.  As it turns out, beauty is not power.  But God’s power is so exceedingly beautiful.

—-

Photo Credit:

The Passion of The Christ: Philippe Antonello

Filed Under: Inspirational, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

brown paper stories

May 16, 2012 By

I hate to use the word artist to describe myself.  I’m not covered in tattoos and don’t work a night shift at IHOP.  I’m not struggling to make ends meet, recovering from a drug habit, or walking around with paint on my elbows.  I’m a lawyer, for goodness sakes.  The amount of artistry it takes to craft a well-rounded, persuasive argument is only appreciated by a select few.  To everyone else, lawyers are just suits whose mouths open and shut and money comes funneling into their pockets every time they answer the phone.  As if.

But even now that I’ve made a conscience decision to walk away from practicing law, it’s hard.  Hard to call myself a writer.  Hard to create things simply for the pleasure of creating them.  I feel a need to aim that ambition, the same one that fueled me through honors classes and bar exam courses and clerkships, directly into the heart of the creative process.  It’s not good enough just to write.  Any fool with a laptop can do that. I need to be validated.  I need to be paid.  I need for this to mean something.

But art is subjective.  What makes one person laugh or cry or want to call their mother might be pure drivel to another.   My husband read a blog post once that I found particularly emotional and decided to point out an inverted quotation mark.   Thanks, dude.  Glad that hit you right there in the ticker.

When I was writing my novel, I stayed up into wee hours of the night pouring my heart into the story.  I went away for writing weekends.  I traveled to Upstate New York and rode cabs alone in Manhattan and hired babysitters in the stale Texas heat just to finish.  It took almost four years of painstaking rewrites and hundreds of deleted pages.  An editor helped me comb out the background narrative and useless rookie mistakes.  But then, I expected my hard work to pay off.  I would find an agent.  I would get published.  My words would matter.  

And yet here I sit, after putting two children to bed and wiping off kitchen counters and throwing in yet another load of whites.  I don’t have the look of an artist, sitting here in black-rimmed glasses and an oversized t-shirt, with a box of triscuits and a jar of peanut butter by my side.  I instead resemble a slightly-crazy person, ignoring reality and doing what I didn’t think possible:  I’m giving in to my instincts. I’m not published.  I don’t have tangible validation.  And yet I keep on going because I simply cannot imagine a world in which I have to stop.  I put my hands over my ears when that small little voice starts screaming in my head.  No one cares.  Quit while you’re ahead.  You’ll never make it as a writer.  Damn you, little voice.  You are meaningless.

I thought perhaps I’ve not been praying enough, or listening enough, or being present enough in this writing process.  I stopped myself tonight, standing right in front of the microwave, and prayed that God would reveal to me the best path.  How I should be reaching people.  Or perhaps learning not to care so much about what those people think.  After all, I can’t move mountains.  My name might not be in marquee lights. But I can certainly speak with passion – words driven straight from the heart that was formed and blessed by God in my mother’s womb.  My heart is ravenous with emotion.  My soul is aching to be heard.  My hands tremble at the thought of writing about sadness and joy in a way that has never been done before.

And then it comes to me: God’s listening.  I create simply for the joy of creating.  My words are an offering and a sacrifice, and I can imagine no other audience that matters more.

I am an artist. I offer up these small gifts, my brown-paper stories filled with sparkling words.  And that matters, even if no one else is paying attention.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Religion, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,