On, In, and Around Mondays: One Name for God

"You see? That's a little bit of God."

I used to walk my children around the yard and say these kinds of things, pointing to some iridescent petal, or offering a a blade of grass to touch.

Today I was reading about the Gothic builders, who believed that the physical stuff of our world somehow reaches to the Divine. It is why they built as the built. Soaring cathedrals filled with light.

There is no cathedral here. But there is beauty. And this is what the medieval mind equated with God. Indeed, one philosopher of the time claimed that beauty was the only name for God.

As a poet, I see how other words can stand in for the word beauty, just as beauty stood in for God, in the medieval mind.

I look into my teacup, and say blossom-tea, and think of God unfolding into sweet water (thank you, Susan, for suspecting I would find this tea beautiful. I do.) I look outside my back door and say, moss-soft-and-life-green, and think of God.

Roses on the counter. Daughter turning pages. Piano, guitar, flute, waiting in the golden-sunset room. Plum candles. Japanese bowls. Forsythia swelling near my window.

Dostoevsky said that beauty would save the world. This morning, as I say its names, beauty is saving me.


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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

For a Nation, For a Single Life

I cannot wrap my mind around the suffering that is Japan, a nation. Neither can I conceive of the loss of a single life, at the home of a friend this past week.

Then my little girl brings crystalline purple into the house, smiles. "All the crocuses are open outside!" she beams. I cannot hold the experiences in tandem.

For a long time, I stare at the way the light is coming through crocus petals. The petals are already wilting, and I know that tomorrow they will no longer be a filter for light, for day.

I open pages to a book called, simply, Beauty. (Thank you, Kathleen.) The words console, though at the same time nothing could ever, ever console...

At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible to the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty...

All the frailty and uncertainty was seen [by the ancients] to be ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which presides over all journeys between awakening and surrender, the visible and the invisible, the light and the darkness.

I look at the crocus and see that the light has moved on. And I wait for tomorrow.

Don't Piss it Away

The last speaker of the IAM Encounter weekend was Dana Gioia. I've tried to read his poetry before and enjoy it, to no avail. But when he gave voice to it himself, I was quite taken. It made me glad that I'd at least purchased his book Can Poetry Matter? before the bookstore had packed up and disappeared.

And I have to say that it is Gioia's particular words, "don't piss it away," that have stuck with me. Imagine, a whole conference come to that simple conclusion.

For me, the conference had been going in a distinct direction: beauty, which I'd recently suggested might be my point of activism.

This is perhaps a "soft" thing that isn't always seen as important for business and success. Yet I'm coming to see it as absolutely essential. Because without beauty, we are droids or zombies or maybe remote-control cars— capable of power and activity in their way, but probably not transformative in the true sense of the word.

Some of the beauty that lives inside me has yet to be given voice. I felt that keenly after this conference. Some of the beauty that lives inside me simply needs to be owned and defended. And some of it is yet to be discovered.

How about you? What is still waiting to be given voice, owned, or discovered? Gioia has four simple words for you and me: don't piss it away.

On, In and Around Mondays: Doubting My Existence

"I feel like Ma in The Long Winter," said my friend.

Yes.

For me, it is not just the snow (today I looked out the window to find that somebody made more, again). It is not just the cold, and the colds. It is not even just that my spouse has been gone for a month to faraway, unpredictable places. Or that every day another region of the Middle East bursts into flame. It is, somehow, all of it put together, and a sinking feeling that somehow my particular kind of existence does not matter.

Over the past few days, it's been coming to me— this thing about my particular kind of existence. First it came on a sled. (Bring beauty to the world, I said to the open air.)

Then it came in the car: I am a beauty activist...not a chase, root-out, fight-injustice activist. Does the world need such as me?

At certain junctures, I have tried to be the chase, root-out, fight-injustice kind of person. This is the most lauded kind of Christian, after all.

But the other night, the truth of my existence came rushing in. I had listened to a TED talk (the root-out injustice kind) and my Elder daughter said shakily, "I didn't like her voice." I asked why. "She made it sound like something terrible was going to happen any minute." My Elder daughter has always been like this: such experiences disempower her, make her hopeless. But give her a paintbrush and an ugly surface, and she'll wake up and color the world beautiful.

My younger daughter, on the other hand, loves danger. "Isn't life more exciting when people are against you?" she has said to me.

No.

When faced with the prospect of changing the world by chasing, rooting-out, fighting, policing, I (like my older daughter) quickly despair and become paralyzed.

So, you see, here where The Long Winter continues, I'm doing the only thing I seem made for and able to sustain over the long haul... focus on sharing beauty.

This weekend, I picked up Bill Strickland's book again, Make the Impossible Possible: One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary. Strickland counters poverty and crime with clay, jazz, and delicate orchids... breaking chains with beauty.

Thinking on that, I felt a small melting into hope... maybe such as me can matter in the world, after all.



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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

On, In, and Around Mondays: The Keeping Phrase

"I want to be thinking about dancing again, and paper art, and how we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love," I told my friend.

We'd been talking about something that saddened us both. And it was good to talk. It is always good to talk.

But when we were done talking about the sad thing, we moved on to other things: dance, paper art, and the fact that we both own more art than our wall spaces can accommodate.

For my part, the art comes in a constant stream from my daughters. I was reminded of this as I tidied for a visit from Bradley Moore and his wife. (Yes, we had to have tea, and I had to show them my copy of the beautiful Neruda's Memoirs: Poems.)




Anyway, as I tidied for Brad's visit, I kept thinking...

we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love.

And suddenly it became this statement I wanted to say again and again. Because, it's so easy to stay with the sad things in life, to focus on the negative, to forget...

we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love.




we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love.




we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love.




---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...



All art pieces in this post are by Sara, 13. Used with permission.

Casting for Beauty

Water washes over my toes. The sound of ocean ebb-and-flow eases tension. I stand, camera in hand, waiting for sun to set. Or I search the sand, the rocks, the waves.

He stands too.

A fisherman, waiting.

I hold up my camera as if to say... I'm fishing too, see? He moves on, becomes a silhouette against the dying sun. I watch him casting, casting. Fishing for dinner.



I am fishing too. Casting for beauty. With my lens I reign in a speckled rock.




I capture an accidental sacrifice— jellyfish rotting into amber blackness, spreads a star of beauty near what I call my lemon and peach shells.




With my digital memory I take home a garnet ball I now wish I'd put in my pocket, heavy as it was.




The world is lemon sherbet.




The world is peach sherbet too. I gobble it up with concave glass.




A red rock watches me. And I watch it. Subsumed, reincarnated, subsumed.




Here is a golden striped beauty, soft, so soft.




If I spent forever on this beach, beauty would break me. I would fish and fish and fish. Someone would find me on the far side of morning, belly up, an accidental sacrifice. Would they guess I'd simply been casting for beauty...


Long Island Rocks and Shells photos, by L.L. Barkat.

Of Bridges and Violins and Words

Day begins to slip away on the Brooklyn Bridge. Eldest Child has run ahead with daddy. Youngest is at my side. We stop, countless times, to look at the water, the wires, the people, and now the Manhattan Bridge. The sky is a painter's palette dabbed with slate blue and powder blue and pinks. The Manhattan bridge (how many times have I passed it by?) is an arc of loveliness, a masterpiece of shape and color embracing the city. I have never see this bridge in just this way.

But today on foot I see you, Manhattan bridge. I see you, sky above, and river beneath and city beyond. And I feel a bit of the way I will feel just a few weeks hence, when I hear Sophia, little child, play Chanson de Matin (not Sophia, this link... but just a clip of someone else playing the Chanson... not nearly as achingly). Tiny Sophia too will be beautiful, leaning in, pulling back, touching the strings of her violin as if she were caressing velvet. Coaxing the sound into the air, into my heart. So, so lovely. The notes tumbling towards an end where they will become so thin and high that I can hardly hear them, yet can hear nothing else in the world. Until I feel I am completely broken and completely whole, completely empty and completely filled.

I have felt this too when I have tasted the intoxicating writing of Ann V. Or when I have seen the icy glory on my street.

What is this I am touching, tasting, smelling in the far corners of the world and right here at my feet? What is it, but the Divine, breaking in, oozing, enveloping, exhaling. Sometimes I am too weak and sometimes too strong to take it in. Make me, O Lord, this day, just right and ready. For the bridges, the sounding strings, the tiny child, the words, the weather... for You.

Manhattan Bridge at Sunset photo, by L.L. Barkat.

STONE CROSSINGS:

Ted's book club post Howe's Cave: Baptism

Consuming Beauty

We cannot co-exist with beauty, without facing the instinct to consume it. That's what Caitlin Neufeld says in her article "Buying into Beauty" (Geez, Summer 2007). Our consumer attitude, she asserts, runs the gamut from wanting to share a sunset, to wanting to write a story, to wanting to take a picture. Sex and picking a flower were also included in the list.

I pondered her thoughts and wondered what beauty really means. Isn't it by nature something that stirs up desire in us? Without that desire, would we really be talking about beauty?

In the end, I couldn't help but wonder where the fine line is between consumption and celebration, exploitation and appreciation. It seemed that for Neufeld there was no line at all. To want to preserve something by taking it home in any form, even as an inspiring memory was problematic. And so I left her article with a haunting sense that, indeed, I might be judged for consuming beauty.


Beautiful Skyscape at Secret Spot photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.

NEW LINKS TO THIS POST:

Nikki's What the Heavens Declare