Watercolor and Ink

And some words. 

I miss you.

Happy Father's Day.

One For My Children

I'm a little heartsick about some of my students this year.

You see, I don't want them to leave to go the middle school.

The side effect of long talks tutoring after school and carving out time for walks out to the baseball field and caring and hurting and getting exasperated and loving is that you get all interwoven until you forget that you're not technically flesh and blood. 

And then they leave, and it feels all wrong. 

I was feeling torn up about one of them in particular (who I would keep forever if I could, and I mean that) as I was leaving school. 

I'm so full of feelings that I'm inarticulate. I sound like a 10-year old writing in her diary, but that's the best I can do right now. 

Why does public education have to stink so much, especially once the kids hit middle school? I mean no disrespect to the teachers who put their hearts unreservedly into their work, but the reality is that some of these kids I love so fiercely are going to have to fight hard to remain decent human beings, let alone become the sort that see higher and deeper to the big elemental stuff life is really made of. I pray they have the fight in them. 

I wrote 20 letters between yesterday and today, trying to pour as much as I possibly could into black and white to give to some of the students who I thought needed words the most. I don't know if it'll do anything permanent, these words. But at least my children are leaving with words in their hands as well as their heads. 

After school today I went to a book talk a friend was doing at a local library about Alzheimer's and about his journey caring for his grandfather. It was a great talk, honest and compelling and thought-provoking. 

The only thing I had left in me to do with all that brewing inside--the first-time-around children, and the second-time around children--was to listen to some good music, to wade in the creek in the dusk, and to try to let things settle. 

Some days are like that, I guess. 

Life's no cakewalk.

And I need to keep learning how to trust God with all of it--the messy, the confounding, the raw, the hard to understand. 

Ego

There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself.

                                                                                                              - Oswald Chambers

This is a hard thing. 

We tend to cling tight to self, even after coming to the faith. Giving up our right to ourselves means not only using our gifts even especially when no one sees and holding up our weaknesses to the light, but it also means surrendering the hopes that go unfulfilled, the yearnings that lie unsettled beneath the surface.

Giving up our right to ourselves is not something we do to win accolades, to impress others with the lofty heights we've reached and the sanctified air we're breathing. 

Why, yes, thank you, I have worked hard to attain humility.

No.

It's invisible.

It's internal.

It's a take-up-your-cross-daily-and-follow-Me sort of task we've been set. 

Part of giving up your right to yourself, I think, is giving up your right to being spiritually extraordinary. Don't take that the wrong way. Self becomes an exponentially more insidious foe in matters of the spirit, in matters of faith. Part of giving up self might mean becoming okay with the fact that God might plant you in a small garden out the back door of a little house that few people ever visit. And that doesn't mean that you cannot live full, cannot live in a way that God smiles upon. Perhaps part of making God smile is stretching down roots in secret places, shining a little light in hidden spaces, touching one soul at a time when everyone else's backs are turned. 

Perhaps the important part is growing in that garden rather than wilting in self-abasement.

Shining though the light be faint and only one other pair of eyes sees through the darkness you're dispelling.

Thanking God that He's helping make humility easier to come by.

Words for A Wednesday

When is it, I wonder, that life settles into a furrow that feels like home? And is a furrow a place to which you're called because it signifies that you've learned contentment, or is it a place to be wary of because you're slipping into complacency? Or does it depend on who you are and how God's breathed into you--you in particular? I don't know the answers to these questions.

Dad has been in the home-est home of all for 7 months today. Life since has sometimes felt inside out and unraveled; other times it's felt more sacred than I've ever known it to be. Time is fluid and makes absolutely no sense anymore. During some moments I've never felt so disembodied, as though my soul is suspended somewhere a couple miles up watching all of this walking and talking and living going on down below, disconnected. In other moments I feel as though the parts of me that think and feel and believe and hope are buried inside so deep that when I talk to people my voice sounds muffled in my own ears. And at still other times--the most disconcerting times--life feels eerily normal, but normal in a palette of faded grays and dirty whites when what I really want right now is sunflower gold and mossy green, chicory blue and the color of everyone's eyes. When the color does come now and again, it comes in flashes, blinding and breathtaking. I want the color back, but perhaps all of life is shifting light and changing shades.

I know that grieving takes a long time. Yes, the nature of grief has changed; I feel air stirring in new spaces inside of me that weren't there before. More than anything else right now, though, it's simply confusing. I think it's a combination of lots of things right now, not just missing Dad. Life is packed down to the minute these days.

For those of you who check in on me here occasionally, I hope you know not to worry at all when you see that I'm pretty much writing about the same thing over and over again but in different words. In the deepest sense, I am well. Truly. For some reason, though, it has become hard to write about anything but this business of loneliness, of missing what was and what's never been that has taken hold of my spirit. Other topics have been creeping in occasionally, but I understand that to those on the outside seven months is a long time to write about the same thing. Perhaps it's getting stale. It is a long time to be so introspective. That's just what comes out in the writing, though. For the past many months I've written when I needed to get something out because it was getting too dark on the inside. Once it's out there's a bit of release.

Life apart from that has been brimful. All I can really say is this: If you want to feel small, teach. If you want to love, teach. If you want to be a single person who feels like she has dozens of children to bring up right, teach. If you want to learn, teach.

I'm glad God is patient.

I think I've been trying His patience.

And I'm glad God is love.

Because I'm pretty certain it hasn't run out yet.

Running On Empty

That's what you said I was

as you filled my 5-quart capacity oil reservoir 

with 4 quarts of oil.

You can give me words to read or a page to fill, 

perhaps a room full of children,

or even a friend with a busted heart,

but please don't give me 

all of those contraptions beneath the hood.

You see, he always poured things in 

and took things out, 

worked magic to make mechanized metal

run past its life expectancy.

Now you're reminding me that my car needs 

more than a belly full of gas, 

and suddenly I'm hit with a barrage

of everything-all-at-once,

and I realize that the very last item 

on my priority list reads, 

"What's under the hood." 

I also realize that during a normal year

(which this isn't)

at the very top of that list 

would be a scrawled reminder:

"June 8th--birthday card."

But this year that item somehow 

didn't make the list, and I miss it. 

I miss him, and I wish I still had a reason

to get out my watercolors and ink,

to crack a corny joke inside the fold, 

to say "Happy birthday."