It's all new to me, this trying to grow comfortable in my own skin. This breathing deep and saying, "It's okay." Why is it excruciatingly hard to accept how He's formed us? The Potter must grieve over stiff, stubborn clay.
I keep returning to this long ago journal entry:
I picked a vase full of sunflowers, the final act in this Day of Preparation for Lord’s Day. The floors are done, the windows not, and I am tired. Indifferent to the lateness of the hour or the weariness of the body, I need to come and sit here, press these keys and watch letters shuffle into words on the screen. It is my streak across space, falling into words and landing softly.
I tell no one of these rendezvous with 26 letters. Like the Perseids, this act of dancing with curves and lines occurs in the out-of-the way hours, unbeknownst to they who call me daughter, friend. Day dawns, the bell tolls, and I slip away home.
Every apprentice knows, painfully so, of the chasm to be crossed in the journey towards skill. Loose and awkward, my knitting of words is not something to be paraded. And who would understand?
“You are the mother of six---you don’t think your life full enough? And writing? Maybe gardening, baking, quilting…but writing? What kind of a product is that?”
But it is not about product. This writing is about process.
“Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive.
The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write.
To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.” — Henri Nouwen
This scratching, trying and difficult, probes new, tender spaces within. No, I know not the destination, but I know the direction: the essence of me.
Gentle questions muse in my inbox: how do you mother, educate, keep home…and clumsily work at casting on rows of words?
My whispered, tentative answer: And how do I breathe? Some soothe with rocking while needles click. I settle with the pattering, however maladroitly, of keys. You make time, no matter. To enrich and under gird the rest of time. Breathing hangs in the balance.
And sometimes I simply do all of it, the job of me, rather poorly:
“Indeed, the great paradox of [the life of one who writes] is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.” ~ Betsy Lerner
But this, all of this, is about learning. And when it matters, we become good studies.
A star shoots across the inky night draped outside my window, skimming the drowsy sunflowers.
Like Perseids, I am His handiwork, made this way.
And it's okay.
Lord, You formed each clump of clay uniquely. What can I do today to accept how You shaped me, a work of Your hands?
.JPG)
