World in Peaceful Brown

November’s coming, and with it the irrevocable change. Gone are so many of the landmarks of beauty we have depended on since blossom’s first opening. This saintly, hollow beauty remains, a scattered, blurred collection of the bones of growth. We can reach so far now into the once electric forest, see so vastly into the bare shoulders of the valley. The leaves, quietly moistened by an icy rain, broken over by a few frosts, linger limply, clinging to path bends, jammed into rock wall crevasses. Goodbye to the sparkling Autumn, so easily sliding us away from Summer’s long soft embrace. Welcome in the quiet brown, the deep peace of a reflective long night.

Inside, I’m simmering down like the countryside. I used to wear my cause on my forehead, now it’s somewhere deep in my heart. Out of the throat, and into the living, values become as the word implies: valuable, a treasure for life, a jeweled pair of speckticles through which our heart peers. The flagrant, creative energy hasn’t stopped, nor my new fisthold on life, but the trees are barer, the explosion quieted. Whittle away a Winter, he’s on the tails of this peaceful bare-knuckle time when only oak remains clouded in dull orange and barely red. I’ll be okay; the growing season, though tempestous, was fruitful in the end, was giving to me rather than taking from me all along. For that, I am most certainly grateful.

Life in Flat Colors

The sky shifts from sapphire to mortar, and we look sideways at the lingering cadmiums; longer than last year, most certainly, we’ll just have to wait to rake the rest. I’m painting life in flat colors these days, outlined in bubbling sections like hillsides of Fall foliage. I’m painting in watercolors, and learning to let go, powering up like a ninja kid, and remembering first emotions, maybe even wanting them back. Did I squander them then? Or am I simply freer now than then, and cyclically returning to a place of opening creativity and enthusiasm.

So there then, a 15 year old playing in the leaves, not worried down with the craziness of before, just all of myself running to meet Time in non-linear fashion, only now.

Again in the flat colors of adolescence, I’m reaching out in energetic grasps to people I care about. Someday, though, I’ll have to stop crying for those I want to save. I go so far as to think that I’m not one of those who would sacrifice themselves for another, when really I’ve sacrificed such a large chunk of existing to hoping, to believing in others; my family. I’ll have to stop crying about it one day, and just help, and just plain help. Maybe I could just admit that I’d miss my father if he died. I’d sing him a song, I’d tell him good bye in a way I’ve never been able to. There are those who I feel safest around, those who might get lost, and so I fear for them. They’ve given me a little home on earth with their company, and I want them to get out alive, I want them to be all the happy things I feel in them, to experience their own goodness, and take joy. Little family of dreamers, sometimes sitting in the dust, terribly loyal, resigned, but pulling on the plough of change anyway. One furough at a time, just don’t get lost, just don’t cry away your part to help them, just get stronger ninja kid.

On turning leaves

Almost bursting, flying through life in eager anticipation of the next meeting of hand to paper. Art has come back to me, and this time finds a well of happiness and eagerness to grasp all around me in conceptual beautification.

Crow woman, I’m calling myself from within, who have you now become? They linger along the roadside of our lives; ever present, unaffected Nature, testing out the frail limit of our reach. What are you trying to tell us all? That God is ever-present, even when we least expect it. That we have a job to do, if we only look for it. At the gate of a new beginning, and watching the progress, I see standing a crow. They watch without displeasure or happiness, just keenly fixing their awareness on the happening, only hopping away when threatened. Patient, piercing eyes; remembering the steps we take, recording silently the choices, as we disregard them - those who who are not afraid to live with us in the tangled nest we made. I’m now meeting my crow, and unstopping the cork on possibility; a little afraid, as any facing the turn of Fall. Listen to the trees, though: Forget fear in the laugh of beauty, and unleash, sing along with her a trembling scarlet praise. We have been given life! It has been housed in the leaves that now wither, and thereby endowed us another year’s growing. We release them, in a singular chorus of praise, and glitter every hillside in warmth, love, and rejoicing.

Life has so quickly become a barely escapable tremble of creativity. I could stay up all night, just giving. I can’t remember ever feeling this way; not back in art school, when pain seeped out from each twist of charcoal or blob of paint. Now it’s seems just time to let it out, and be happy.

Prologue

I’ll be okay one day, when the back and forth of my weaving has settled into more reasonable limits. When talent can find its clear channel, when I can’t be oppressed by the nature of others, when beauty’s all I know. I’m working again on a collection - little scraps of happiness, little eruptions of quirkiness, morsels of sweetest clarity and thankfulness. Start another page, another canvas, another paragraph, and when a library tall as the oak trees is finished, I hope only to have found my real self in the process. When a collection begins, so suddenly does all life have meaning, but can excitement cloud my vision? I think I fear that all I surround myself with will blind me to some simple Truth waiting on reality’s plain stage for my gaudy curtains to rise. Without trust, though, my journey can never really begin, and once more my ramblings have led me to the point where I must recognize the omnipotence of Creation’s Laws. Should the path stumble down rocky crevasses, whatever I then reap will tell the tale, and I pray I be awake enough to hear a warning cry. Back and forth, gallantry and modesty, expressive and reclusive, fool-hardy and world-weary; find the middle, find happiness. All you have to do is what you can, all you have to think is what can be better, all you have to live is what you are now, and keep flying.

Drawing: The other side of my heart - hellobaby

Wearing away to Happiness

Dried corn leaves skittering across the road. It’s Chester County, the hills are small and undulating, the corn a formidable fortress between winding road and distant farm. The trees seem taller, the leaves entities with life of their own which one could easily mistake for fluttering crows or wriggling voles. One has a relationship to the roads here; like a member of the family, or a life-long next door neighbor friend.

Ash tree, growing in a Pennsylvania forest, from twin roots to an open palm of thanksgiving to the Lord. Ash tree, who can’t help being tall, though it cries spinning tears each end of Summer. Did you think yourself beautiful once, long ago, before rough soil had to be broken to accommodate growing roots? It wasn’t really beauty when I checked off all the boxes of experiencing and needed a bland surrounding to make myself seem bright. When I sacrificed reality for happiness, and real love for what I could comprehend. It’s not really living till you don’t have all the answers, not really you without a few dead branches, a lichen covered trunk or an uprooted stone or three. The trees survive by reaching for the Light first, then become themselves through the trials to such a goal.

When I let go of all that came to me in this life, who am I? I’m starting to see a little clearer. The ability to forgive this life, and myself therein, would bring such happiness. There is such wisdom in clouds, so much grace and majesty in Sunlight, in trees and air that all which seems to torment us is banished by the louder singing of their great song: God has made us, and He is infinitely perfect.

Day is just Beginning

A brown, bronze and purple Fall, and I’m wanting to start out again. Seems strange to want to begin new journeys just as Autumn sets in, and then I remember Frodo, setting out on his great adventure on his uncle’s birthday, September 22nd. So, it turns out I’m a little behind, after all. A shooting grass stem when bent around, reveals each fragmented tangent, each broken start, and yet retains the complete arc. Are lives made this way? Uncontrollably whole, though we try our best at times to break them.

I’ve learned that even when I have plenty to do, I still gnaw myself to pieces. Never wanting to let myself exist, I now find myself situated in just such an environment as to challenge this notion, to throw it into relief, so that I address it. If I can allow myself to live here, than I can find a little space for myself just about anywhere. This doesn’t mean I should launch a virulent defense, throwing caution to the wind, or an open rebellion. It means finally setting out on the journey I’m meant to take, the one I long to take: the journey to my happiness, the one I can’t even really name yet, which seems to be a quality of all great adventures. God exists, and I am a woman on a path to find Him. This is all I really have, what The Grail Message has given me, and what I sense to be at the heart of the matter.

I’m so easily confused, always asking for permission to exist. With each step, a scary past is hemming the progress, and fear is tightening the ligaments that should send me forward. Strangely, I don’t want protection, just freedom; not safety, just peace. But even saintly leaves get tossed about in the wind, and they don’t loose their purpose, they never relinquish the vital job they fulfill. Growing leaf in me, unfurling in a stormy Spring, where do you point? Upwards, to drink in Light as if It were purest water, to right and left, for new perspectives, and downward, in earthy humbling prayer. Little leaf, don’t loose your way, the day is just beginning.

Painting: Unwelcome Return - Alan Lee

Dream we can Evolve

The kitchen drawers are almost filled with things. Little pieces and scraps of maybe’s that all too quickly swallow what space I allowed for them in the early days of kitchen planning. I remember being fascinated by my mother’s church clothes as a child. The smell of them, the itchy texture and secret relief that I didn’t have to wear them. The delicate prospect of one day wearing jewelry, of sliding fully grown feet into tan sensible heels. The great mystery of panty hose. Somehow attracted to tiding myself up, to buttoning away the awkwardness, the wildness, the strange pieces that didn’t really fit. Buttoning away love, controlling my sensibilities, I would know what to do, I would be at peace. I would have traded the uncertainty of my strange little self for a scratchy waistline, for paste pearls, for what I dreamt maturity tasted like.

The woman she was before our mother is so tantalizingly close when we are children. Her clothes even remain in the back part of the closet, the part the folding door hides as it opens. She made the choice to have you, she made a choice she couldn’t have expected would affect her so deeply, and she left a path thereby, one she had been forging since her own parents loosed their hold. All my mother’s old things have the same smell, and a similar imprint of her thoughts. She was making the same mistakes I’ve made; she was choosing a life by trying, too. Forgive me, then, for being so angry with the self I see in your eyes. I tried so hard to be different by your experiences, I tried to prove we could evolve, and leave our daughters with a bit more. My clothes are different from those you used to wear to church, but my heart fell down the same hole, tried to button itself away behind that which is ideal.

Let’s set up a mini-wish, along the way: healing my relationship to other women. For a while now I’ve simply avoided the question, and made a little womanhood on my own. But what does womanhood mean in the larger sense? What could be possible when individual efforts meet, when one plus one equals three? I don’t want to be a threat to any woman, and I want us to heal, to collectively preserve the glory lent to us, in each shining point of light. I want to forgive this womanhood, and I want it to forgive me, too.