Beauty is the Creator

A poet is the man who strives to communicate by means of abstract expression, formulating many sonnets to convey a thought. He calls beauty up from the earth and restores her majesty because he cannot endure her laying to waste in the ground. Ask me why I write: it is to sing- of life, love, misery, healing, and reckless abandon- like a nightingale into an open canyon with the hope that I’ll receive a song back from those who have been in hiding. To call beauty forth with a voice that is not entirely my own.

We are all poets if not by letter, then by action. Each moment, a line. Each day, a verse. Each person- all who have drawn in breath, in this sphere or other worlds- has been and become an epic poem.

Even then these epic odes are all threads; a variety of color, texture and weave, that are braided into one Story. The Story is Life, born in God’s mind before there was time. The Composer began with this line: “Let there be light” and all things were vividly set into motion, the Dawn of Time. You cannot avoid or destroy this notion; it’s nature is like the sun that rises and sets even if it cannot shine through the gray or stretch out across the shadowlands.

Light it up, ignite the fields to cast thirsty eyes upon this City on Hill. Or hide it beneath the shame of all you’ve laid to waste. But know this: by your silence, we will suffer your absence more than you can fathom.

God is a Poet, and you are His greatest work.

“For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe….For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

In other words, 7.0 on the Richter Scale

I remember December.

It’s a strange thing. When by some dizzying spasm of reality, you are up against the wall. You’re crashing into a low ceiling and the floor falls out from under you and you have no place to stand. It’s an earthquake in the soul, a sudden rupture from that quiet fault line that’s been there longer than you can remember. It was once a splinter in the earth, but its grown in time and in the colliding, chaos was rendered.

What was once peace, is now the quiet dread before an aftershock. The world’s been turned on its head and the emergency exits are locked. What you knew, what you thought you knew, is dead and what you feared is staring you in the face.

You’re a newborn just cut from its umbilical cord. Birth is much like falling, much like dying at first. It’s traumatic to be dropped headfirst from your safety net and severed from that which sustained you. Resurrection requires death, we pass over this fact with a hope that it won’t hurt much or that we can escape the pain.

Like any sane human being, I hate pain. I broke my arm once and by that fracture, for the first time ever I thought about how I wanted my arm to be healed and made whole. My body knew, too well, that something wasn’t as it had been designed, perfectly.

Suffering is the measure, the thing that screams, “I’m alive!” when you come up gasping for breath. The chill before dawn makes you long for the sun, or the warmth of your bed. You need light for exposure, but the film has only finished its work once its been developed in a dark room’s. For every action there is a reaction, but we’ve returned to physics which don’t always follow our ideas of right and wrong.

All I know is this: from what little loss I’ve experienced, for each precious thing taken from me,  I’m more decided than before. This is life and I’m here to stay. Amongst these everlasting hills, here to sow as much beauty as can be reaped. Contrary to popular thought, the pain hasn’t made me stronger but more aware than before. I see my castle for a child’s pile of sand, and high tide has had its way with my kingdoms. All of my treasures were trinkets that have been drawn back out to the Deep.

There is one thread by which I live and am held: God is good. God, the I Am. Is, a linking verb. Good, to be defined not by words but the quality of His perfectness as it returns day after day after day….the infinite holy.

We need you.

Generous Thieves

Camera, a few clicks from story. I can feel the earth breathing beneath my feet, she trembles in the stillness, straining to remain perfectly still under my scrutiny. It’s so quiet, I can hear the mist spreading its wings across the open fields. The street is fog-bound and the sky a low ceiling, I can run my fingers what is much like the sea; vast and unbelievably deep. Call me Ishmael, if only I had the means to set sail with Captain Ahab in search of that glorious infamy. They set off to worlds end to spear a whale, that monstrous mystic, what is my pursuit? If I were to leave these shores, for what sake would I journey? Why am I here, running over themes of Melville’s imagining?
Aperture open wide, shutter swift and set to respond. 10 seconds to go. Begin. Compose. Run. Be still, poised for that 1\120th of a second. Click. And the moment has ended. The grass is soaked, tinged with ideas for a gothic romance. Jane Eyre paced up and down the pathways of that lonely garden, where Mr. Rochester couldn’t help but chase after. Resistance fell prey and died in the arms of love among the winter trees, in the shadow of dementia’s estate.

Rambling, but this time Charlotte Bronte’s daydreaming has stolen away with me. Who knew that authors were such generous thieves? I’m tied to this ideas of life, love and tragedy. These thieves echo the schemes of a God eager to snatch us up from shallow graves. In the breaking, what was once whole is always being remade. Where the way has been lost, abandoned, repaved; there are bread crumbs among the fallen leaves. It’s in these traces, these evidences of grace, that I’m reminded “All who wander are not lost” completely. Romance is made in the ravaged and deranged, sincere and wanting always to heal the wound.

Love refuses to remain devastated, calling us further up and further in. That we might do more than catch a passing glance of the Everlasting.