Unpredictable Paths of Grace

When you grow up like I did, you try to know-it-all. Everything depends on it. Supposedly.

It has been a long time since "growing up", but still some strange place in your head never quite forgives you for not holding together what was never in your power to hold together anyhow— your parent's marriage, hoped-for joys of holidays and ordinary days quashed by volatility, or some other such thing.

Trying to be right, to know it all, brings the need for control; after all, it's so much easier to be right when you understand the playing field, have set the boundary lines yourself, inasmuch as that is possible.

Then along comes Life with a suggestion: let go, drift. In May's The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature, he takes this suggestion and experiences Creation as it is. There's a sense of encounter, immediacy, Presence that May cannot control.

For one year, I too felt such an invitation. Let go. Drift with golden grasses, morning dew, the stars. Then it came to an end, partly because my commitment was finished, but perhaps too because God knew it was time to set me in a new place of encounter, where I could not easily be in control.

Thus, my art pilgrimage, which I cannot explain in an authoritative way. On this pilgrimage, I work in media I never used before (soft pastel) in a form (abstract art) that I have virtually no experience producing.

At some point I must have wanted to relinquish the burden of being right, knowing-it-all (it is tiring, often perplexing). And this desire sent me on unlikely journeys— first into Creation, now into Art. As a Christian I would not have predicted such paths. Aren't there more "Christiany" travel plans God should have suggested?

No, I could not have predicted the importance of Creation and Art in my grace journey. But maybe this surprise is part of relinquishing the burden too.

"Falling" in soft pastels, by L.L. Barkat.

OTHER BOOK CLUB POSTS:
Glynn's In White Tanks
Monica's Stars and Sunrise

Serendipity Ripples

He hadn't expected poetry. Not from his own heart, hands.

But serendipity brought him to it. Or it to him. Or maybe both to each other. Who knew?

I think of this and I think of how I found Chihuly last week. Glass artist, designer, craftsman. Chihuly doesn't care what people call him; he simply cares that people look...



Finding Chihuly feels like serendipity to me. I don't know why. I found him in a little shop on a rainy day in Sag Harbor. It was the mist and the grey day that drove us there, over ferries, past an island, to that street, that shop. Chihuly himself had set out to be a weaver, but he lost a Fulbright because of a technicality, only to recapture it two years later... this time for glass work instead of weaving. The detour changed his life.

Which is how, I suspect, I found him in Sag Harbor. Or he found me. Who knew? I hadn't expected him just now. But serendipity brought the rain and here he is... and I've been flipping pages, saying "yes" to something about him and his work that I don't yet understand.


Sea at Sunset on Long Island, Chihuly book, photos by L.L. Barkat.

Found in the Closet

"Out"

I found you
tucked between
black pinstripe
and woolen

plaid. One strap
already slipped
from the white
plastic hanger

as if you knew
I would reach
through any minute
now, shake red

silk free of darkness,
slide you over my
shoulders, let your
sweet cherry bow rest

beneath my breast.
I remember now, you
used to belong to
petite Asian friend

of my sister. Did she
have a baby doll face
and what was the cut
of her hair? What would

she think if she saw
you now, making silver
headed church women
whisper and stare?

Why yes, this coming week we are digging in our closets for whatever poems me might find there. Please post your offerings by Thursday, August 27, for links and possible feature at High Calling Blogs. As usual, leave your link here in the comment box so I can easily find you.

Now, about my own closet poem. I wrote it because I was thinking how surprising it is to have something within and not know it, or not remember. That's how I feel about the art I'm finding inside. Where in the world did it come from? It surprises and delights me, like the red dress in my closet (which, by the way, I did wear to church on Sunday and received many compliments).

Mary Claire in soft pastel, art and photo by L.L. Barkat.

POETRY FRIDAY:
High Calling Blogs That Girl (Not the Other One)
Jim’s Concrete Patches
Kelly’s Grandpa’s Deck
Fred’s That Girl
Cindy’s Living Beyond My Wasteland and Wishes on Fire
Monica’s Homesick
Claire’s Really?
A Simple Country Girl’s Some Porches Connect
Lorrie’s Sword
Mom2Six’s Swing
Claire’s I Am a Rag Doll
Liz’s Rooms Outdoors
LL’s When Morning Comes, Today, and Girl (scroll down to comment 33 or so)
Linda’s Porch
Lance’s Porch Weather
Marcus’s musings Think Like a Poet and a Scientist
Glynn’s Found by the Pool
Jane’s Conversion
Yvette's Dancer

I'm Going, Wanna Come?

Life is a gift. That's what Lewis Hyde concludes when looking at traditions around the world, where women are "given in marriage" and men are given "as sacrifices." Quite literally. Says Hyde, "The people of Fiji saw the two as equivalent gifts, the woman who is "brought raw" to be married and the "cooked man" who is sacrificed to the godking.

Okay, can we freak out now? Because that's kind of how I felt when I read this chapter. Very distressed.

There was this one moment when I caught my breath though, when he discussed how children eventually go out on their own and "begin to feel the desire to give [themselves] away— in love, in marriage, to...work, to the gods, to politics, to... children." He says that adolescence is marked by "that restless, erotic, disturbing inquisition: Is this person, this nation, this work, worthy of the life I have to give?"

That's when I realized we all become teenagers again at certain junctures. Life opens, a new space, a turning, some kind of longing... and we ask the question afresh... is this person, activity, thing worthy of the life I have to give?

Just the other day, I brushed up my adolescent inquiry skills and asked that question. And decided yes. So I'm going. Wanna come? At least for the view, if not for the journey itself?

Wedding Dress in a Cage art, artist unknown. Photo by L.L. Barkat.

RELATED POSTS:
High Calling Blogs The Gift: I Am Woman?
Laura's Gift Labor