The Grapeless Daffodil

Hysteria

2011-09-02T16:05:00.000-07:00

HYSTERIA

*The reason the root word "hyster" refers to the womb is derivative of the word "hysteria" based on the sexist assumption that the womb itself caused uncontrollable, emotional behavior.

I am alive.
I am a healthy woman
I am breath.
I am free.
I am angry.
I am healed.
I hate you.
I am scared.
I am fucking tired.
I am alive.
I am mother.
I am wife.
I am Lisa.
I am the same Lisa as I used to be.
I am living.
I am dying.
I am bound.
I am free.
I am water.
I am fire.
I am healthy.
I am so fucking tired of feeling dizzy.
I want to be free.
I want to know beauty.
I want a re-awakening.
I am dead.
I am earth.
I am goddess.
I am listless.
I am Lisa Etter.
I am taking my blood pressure.
I am 134/84.
I am 180/110.
I am 122/95.
What the hell am I?
I am lost.
I have lost Lisa.
I am held.
I want my dad to be alive.
Fuck
Fuck
Fuck
I want holy baptism.
I want Eucharist.
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I

are my feet swollen with blood?

my ankles?

are my kidneys failing?

as I ran into the fountain I left this behind.
or so I thought.
this fear of death
this fear of life
this fear of suffering

this fear of not knowing him or her one more day.

locate me. surrond me. plunge me into the abyss of this earth.
unearth me now
good God I beg

of thee to grasp my hand

I have been chasing memories down like a hunter with a loaded gun for years.

2011-01-31T10:58:00.000-08:00

The Tragic Sense of Life

by the brilliant Gregory Wolfe

WHEN I first arrived at Oxford University in the early 1980s to pursue graduate work, I was all swagger on the outside, but that was to conceal the soft center of terror within. I had gone from being a big man on a small Midwestern campus situated between two cornfields to a nobody at an ancient European university whose “New College” had been founded in the fifteenth century. For one thing, there were the social bewilderments attendant upon entering a society where class was a more important and more complex phenomenon than I had ever known it could be. But in the end my greatest fears were centered on academic performance. I remember in particular being crushed by my tutor’s response to my essay on King Lear. My argument had been something to the effect that the tragedy of Lear’s humiliation and Cordelia’s death was mitigated by the spiritual insights these two characters had gained. In particular, I pointed out the Christian implications of Lear’s famous words to Cordelia:

Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies....

My tutor, who combined a gentle and kindly soul with a bear-trap of a mind, suggested that perhaps I was sentimentalizing what was in fact a shatteringly bleak ending—that I was missing the savage, tragic irony of the play. After all, he said, Cordelia is executed right after this speech and Lear himself dies from the shock. Within moments he is screaming “Howl, howl, howl” and is then himself dead, dead, dead. The play, my tutor reminded me, was deliberately set by Shakespeare in pagan times, so the characters have no access to Christian consolation, no heaven to right earthly wrongs and make everything better.

I don’t recall whether I blushed, but I was immediately overcome by both shame and gratitude. I not only sensed the merit of his challenge but I also felt liberated. My youthful, earnest religiosity had imposed itself on the text, papering over an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.

Naturally, this got me thinking, not only about the way that religion can become a set of blinders, but about my own experience, which had involved its share of personal tragedy. It also set me on a search for a faith that can encompass tragedy without reducing it to a meaningless episode, something left behind and forgotten in the larger story of redemption.

Over the intervening years I’ve become convinced that we all refuse tragedy at our peril, whether we are believers or not. The strange truth is that tragedy is largely absent from the pews and bookstores of the postmodern West. We study it in old books and plays, and we use it casually to refer to plane crashes and early deaths from cancer, but the full-blooded thing itself is gone.

The absence of the tragic sense of life is killing us.

In the culture I know best, that of the United States, tragedy is something that our founders believed they were leaving behind forever. They saw our shores as the new Eden. As it says on the back of the dollar bill, ours was to be a novus ordo seclorum, a “new order of the ages,” free from the dark and bloody entanglements of Europe. Farewell, ancien regime. At the opposite end of the scale from the finality of tragedy is the myth of re-invention.

To refuse tragedy is to refuse to live in history, for history is the story of conflicts and injustices that cannot be merely undone. Perhaps that is why America believes it can help to re-invent other nations: history is not an obstacle.

As I listened to the radio a scant six hours after the space shuttle Challenger had broken up over the skies of Texas, a nasa engineer came to the microphone and said: “We can fix this.” After 9/11 we pondered military strategies. Today we not only deny tragedy; we hardly pause to mourn. Not when the can-do spirit is on the line.

As tempting as it may be to lay the blame for tragedy’s demise at the door of an impoverished religious sensibility, I have to say that secular modernity is also indifferent to the tragic sense. Where are the great tragic masterpieces of modernity? Where are the symposia in the New York Review of Books on the death of tragedy?

My intuition (and perhaps the beginning of a mature response to my tutor) is that tragedy is only possible when the deepest metaphysical questions are still available to us. If meaning is socially constructed, there can be no cosmological baseline against which to register a tragic circumstance. One man’s tragedy is another man’s farce. From Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, and Racine, tragedy only makes sense when we can ask the questions that theodicy asks: why does suffering often seem to be out of proportion to guilt; where are the gods, or God, in what seems to be an unjust cosmos; how is it, to use Lear’s words, that we are “more sinned against than sinning”?

I recently asked the literary critic Alan Jacobs where he finds tragedy in contemporary literature. His response is that the form has left the West and migrated to the global South. In particular, he singled out the Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Ben Okri.

The one American writer whose work I believe rises to tragic stature is Cormac McCarthy, at least in his Border Trilogy, and this is in part because these novels are about the confrontation between American characters and the global south as found in Mexican culture. The protagonists are true American heroes—you might call them the last cowboys, anachronisms surviving into the nuclear age. They are everything cowboys should be: self-reliant, laconic, courageous, attuned to nature, willing to fight for what is just. And when they cross the border into Mexico they become entangled in tragic circumstances from which they cannot extricate themselves.

Take John Grady’s odyssey in the first book, All the Pretty Horses. Displaced from his grandfather’s ranch, he goes to Mexico in search of opportunity—especially if that means working with horses. No sooner does John Grady cross the border than he is confronted by his comic double, a bony youngster named Jimmy Blevins who has run away from an abusive home. When the frightened child-man Jimmy loses his horse during a lightning storm, he is determined to get it back, though the Mexicans who find it are unwilling to give it up. The cost of his ill-fated quest will have terrible consequences not only for himself but also for Grady.

But if John Grady seems to tower above Jimmy Blevins in depth of soul, he pursues a similar quest to fix things, to restore what was lost, even if the cost involves the possibility of violence. McCarthy allows the reader to see Mexico as a place of lawlessness and treachery, and yet there are innumerable small hints that it possesses a generosity and wisdom America lacks. The Americans, individualists who think in terms of property and its restoration, fail to register the hospitality and communalism of the Mexicans. John Grady believes that he loses his paramour, the daughter of the padron on the ranch where he works, thanks to Jimmy Blevins. But in reality he could never have had her: too much history, class, and culture separate them. He cannot fathom the idea that powerful forces beyond his control can only be endured and not fixed.

A broken man at the end of the novel, John Grady wakes one morning, shivering and alone. He sees a group of Mexican peasants. One asks him where his serape is. When John Grady answers that he has none, “The man loosed the blanket from his own shoulders and swung it in a slow veronica and handed it to him.” The word “veronica” here comes from bullfighting, where the toreador swirls the cape around. But of course Veronica (“true icon”) is the traditional name for the woman in the Gospel whose cloth bears the imprint of the suffering Christ on the road to Golgotha. John Grady’s tragedy is that he cannot grasp the tragic sense of life. This man of action cannot see the heroism of the wizened old Mexican ladies kneeling beneath garish statues of the bloody crucified Christ, women who celebrate the Virgin Mary because of her active embrace of suffering. Like Oedipus’s, John Grady’s virtues blind him to his own limitations before the brute order of necessity.

It is precisely here that a true theology of tragedy can begin to take shape. The notion that Christianity is somehow alien to tragedy—that it is simply and straightforwardly “comic” because the resurrection makes for a happy ending—could not be more radically wrong. In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar singles out three essential elements of tragedy: that the good things of the world cannot sustain themselves and are lost; that this places us in a position of contradiction or alienation; and that this condition is bound up with an “opaque guilt,” in which individual moral responsibility cannot account for all suffering, leaving us subject to a mysterious “inherited curse.”

According to von Balthasar, Christ does not banish tragedy but carries it into the heart of God. Christ “fulfills the contradiction of existence...not by dissolving the contradiction but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end,’ as love....”

To go to the end means...not only entering total defeat, the total bankruptcy of all earthly power and every project of salvation, but to go to the end of the night of sin, in that descent into hell where the one who dies and the one who is dead come into an atemporal state of being lost, in which no more hope of an end is possible, nor even the possibility of looking back to a beginning. And this as the conclusion of a tragedy of earthly life that itself already stood under the law of contradiction: since God’s omnipotence wished and was able to make itself known ontologically in the Incarnation as powerlessness and unutterable limitation....

This may sound grandly theological, but I would argue that it has the most concrete and far-reaching consequences for the way we experience the world. If faith is to remain true to experience and not become a sentimentalized blindness, it must be permeated by the tragic sense of life. Unless we can believe that God has willingly submitted himself to the harsh necessities of the created order, then we will be helpless when those necessities lay us low. We can only lean in to these forces, and know that such a posture is not passivity but action of the profoundest sort. Passion is not passive.

My tutor was right to challenge my reading of King Lear, but is it possible to embrace the fullness of this tragedy and yet see in its darkness an echo of the divine self-emptying? I think so.

For von Balthasar the resurrection is not “in any way a fifth act with a happy ending” but a mysterious affirmation of a love that can bear tragedy to the end. That is why, in the forty days that followed it, Christ was not magically made whole but bore the marks of his passion, and would not rest until we placed our hands—and our hearts—inside them.

April 18th

2011-01-15T14:32:00.001-08:00

My womb is ripe

With words

Left unspoken

Tantalizing- it seems-

Holding the olive branch

Dangling, washing, rolling, cutting, suturing, ebbing, diving, flowing

Over me.

Take over me…

You whose life is pulsating within my being

Dragging me gently between the depths of dark and light

You are it.

Harrowing my earth with your promise

Tilling my broken soil to make way…

Above me.

Breaking through the clouds

Raining down…

The water

To glean the harvest

Of this life...

The memories that have left me

Return to me

In you.

As a Midwest storm

Through my childhood window

With a double rainbow.

Meandering through my memories...

2010-10-14T07:09:00.000-07:00

This beautiful, crisp and glowing Michigan Fall reminds me of my favorite Mary Oliver Poem. I would like to share it with you all:

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry

2010-07-19T15:03:00.001-07:00

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Harrowing

2010-02-11T19:41:00.000-08:00

Harrowing

The plow has savaged this sweet field

Misshapen clods of earth kicked up

Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view

Last year's growth demolished by the blade.

I have plowed my life this way

Turned over a whole history.

Looking for the roots of what went wrong

Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.

Enough. The job is done.

Whatever's been uprooted, let it be

Seedbed for the growing that's to come.

I plowed to unearth last year's reasons-

The farmer plows to plant a greening season.

By: Parker Palmer

The Eucharist

2009-11-27T15:46:00.000-08:00

The world is changing. . . . It is starting to utter its infinite particulars, each overlapping and lone, like a hundred hills of hounds all giving tongue. . . . Above me the mountains are raw nerves, sensible and exultant; the trees, the grass, the asphalt below me are living petals of mind, each sharp and invisible, held in a greeting or glance full perfectly formed. . . Walking faster and faster, weightless, I feel the wine. . . It sheds light in slats through my rib cage, and fills the buttressed vaults of my ribs with light pooled and buoyant. I am moth; I am light. I am prayer and I can hardly see

- Annie Dillard

Heavy

2009-11-04T10:20:00.001-08:00

The time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer
and I did not die.
Surely God had His hand in this,

as well as friends,
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it–
books, bricks, grief–
it's all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down."
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled–
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep wave,
a love
to which there is no reply?

- Mary Oliver

Words to what there are no words for....

2009-09-27T19:20:00.000-07:00

How do we honor loss in our culture?

It seems to hem us in from every corner of our lives...no one is untouched by death.

And yet- doesn't it seem that the care and process of honoring the dead, of honoring the death within us is treated as if they are table scraps...

How may we, as mourners pick up these scraps and elevate them to our table. Allow them to be present with us...clear a place for them, so that we may feast on them as memories, suckle on them as painful as it may be-greet them.

What would it be like to take the ONE SECOND that we are allotted to grieve and multiply it to a lifetime? What would it be like to be a people who remember? How do we honor the dead? Where is the place on this earth for grieving? Where is the designated aisle that I may find to walk down... where is my place in this world as one who grieves daily? Where is my flag I should wave- that i can pass to you?

I am in Seminary because I deeply desire to enter more deeply into the way of my own grief, walk in that way and meet up with God there. It is there that i long to grasp His hand and ask others to join me there. I want to sing there, beautifully, as we craft a way together to cry out "why God why?!", shaking our fists in the air, crying out, yelling out and yet still holding hands full of red roses that symbolize hope. Together we will point to the moments of redemption and call them out, cheer them on as powerful!

This is why I study....

Today I had a day of deep grief...

and this poem below is an attempt

to put words to what there are no words for...

grief.

mourning

death....

may you all journey deep within the walls of your grief and come out grateful...

(please note that this poem is written with the intent to be spoken...so- will you please do me the deep honor of imagining me actively engaging this - of course with all the right poignant pauses!! :))

roaches desecrate the wood

that once

fed the fire

so they walk 3 miles further

and three miles back

to bake the bread , that feeds the ache within their stomachs

the screaming started at 1am

when the child remembered

the smell of that morsel that at one time had fed her frail frame

she had forgotten

the goodness of its taste

the wonders of it matriculating on her tongue

the way it makes her feel in her toes

when the warmth wanders just a bit down

past her belly...

the hugs she throws up in the room

when she feels whole

like parts of her are full enough to fill other parts

you see- she walks everyday.

everyday she wakes and walks

to soothe the torment of her empty vessel

to make flames.

to make flames for her family.

to stare at the empty eyes of the people

across from her she once knew..

to chew on the remains of the days

that held laughter

and dreams

these are the memory days

the days were she imagines the desert

to be full of daffodils

daffodils that grow grapes.

the memory days

hold within them

visions...

the clouds become his face

and they reach out for her hand

folding each finger back, ever so gently until only the pointer remains

And he thrusts it up for her, towards the sky

running/ leaping/ galloping

she runs across the mountain top pasture of her dreams

as if her finger is a flag

a flag that says

mourn.

she runs. and runs and runs and runs and runs and runs....

until, her sorrowing heart weighs her to the ground

her heavy body forms itself a place in the sand

her fingers buried deep within...

...she scoops up the handful-watching carefully as it pours to the ground

whispering to each small glimmer:

“its okay”.

Mary Oliver Poem

2009-07-29T15:22:00.000-07:00

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.
-Mary Oliver

Liturgy: Breathing Prayer

2009-07-01T12:06:00.001-07:00

Liturgy: Breathing Prayer

by Christine Sine

Inhale: Breathe on us, Spirit of God
Exhale: Fill us deep within
Inhale: Speak to us with the language of our hearts
Exhale: Speak to us in ways we can understand
Inhale: Breathe in us, Spirit of God
Exhale: Fill us with new life
Inhale: Teach us the language of love
Exhale: Teach us the ways of compassion
Inhale: Breathe through us, Spirit of God
Exhale: Fill us with kingdom ways
Inhale: Send us out to do your will
Exhale: Send us out to transform our world

Breathe on us, breathe in us, breathe through us.

Connected...

2009-06-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

"While there is a lower class,
I am in it,
While there is a criminal element,
I am of it,
While there is
a soul in prison
I am not free."
- Eugene Debs 1855-1926

... CONNECTED...

Hope is like a road in the country;
there was never a road,
but when many people walk on it,
the road comes into existence.
- Lin Yutang

The slow learning of hope...

2009-05-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

As I haved walked past the motel next to me over the past few weeks, i have heard kids playing in the little bitty space of concrete between the motel and the sidewalk. I have seen their eyes peer through the fence as i walk past, fingers sticking through, and laughter echoeing. A number of times I have tried to talk with them through the fence, but, as good little kids are taught- "don't talk to strangers!" :)
Yesterday, i decided to go over to the motel and introduce myself to this family. I had a great excuse... 4 free tickets to the IMAX theater downtown, so i fugured that would make me a bit more approachable! So-, sure enough, i rounded the corner and saw a little girl sitting inbetween the fence and her motel... she was soo stinkin cute! I asked her if her mommy or daddy or grandma/grandpa were home? And within a matter of seconds 7 people surfaced out of the dark hotel room, TV blaring- into the beautiful sun-lit day. I introduced myself as their neighbor, gave them the tickets and asked if they wanted to come play in the garden. Then i left...
no more than 15 minutes later, the three kids and their mom came over to the house and we played together in the garden for hours. I pray it is the beginning of a friendship that will bridge love and dignity, hope and opportunity to this family that is homeless (they live in a truck outside our house...they just use the motel to go to the bathroom).
The timing was ridiculous, as this week, our church recieved a grant to help enable homeless famlies to defeat the evil of the housing obstacle of paying first and last months rent (this IS what keeps most homeless people homeless!) Soo- please join us in praying for this family, that we may journey with them well....

Here is a poem that I wrote in reflection to yesterday:

The little boy said, "mommy, look!"
as he pointed
to the icon of Jesus that hangs on our wall.
You are recognizable...

to the homeless.

The man reached out his hand
squeezed mine
as he said
he wanted "to go to the arms of God"...

to the dying.

The cross swung back and forth
around his neck,
17, sczhiophrenic,
a "teddy bear one moment, beast the next"...

to the lame.

They live, 5 of them,
in a van.
3 children, 2 adults.
night time bathroom breaks are "interesting"...

she says.

They laugh as they 'pop'
open the baby pine cones to see what lies within...
Star and I gaze at one another,
Me- in awe, Her- at ease...

You are recognizable.

The poor show us the hope
that we left at the alter,
with all our crimson
and gold

we took home only the crumbs of your bread.

We merely sip of your blood.
Our gratitude, for what...a slosh?
We sleep warm, we worry much...
while ever still watching those birds in our feeders...

Yet, in YOU they trust... in YOU they are found.

Our backyard went from being a backyar to being a Community Garden!

2009-04-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! well- it has been quite the week already! I am so bummed b/c i am longing to share with you our pictures of the community garden that over 20 people helped to create in our backyard this past Sunday but I can't get the pictures to download! :( STAY TUNED... FOr now, here is a new poem i wrote in reflection of our time:

Memory of the Trees

The morning dew
reflects the memory
of the night sky

stars brightly glittering

Each blade of grass
a family member
in the world of things

blows ever so gently

Birds pluck the petals
that fall to the grass
a new days watering.

Sing us your song...
the sweet one that
arouses our toes to tap

and our pious laws
to clap
and embrace the one

we turn our backs on.

2009-04-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

Hello all.... I thought that today I would share a poem with you that I wrote about 6 months ago... I wrote it about my dad and me.

Its as if I saw

His last breath fly

-out into the universe

I saw it in the stars

In the wind it gently

-Evokes my tears

it slipped through my hands

as I leaned in to kiss it

- now I chase it

tackling the slow

melancholies of

-my memories

what was is now

as the child in me

-reaches out to grab

and push the breath

back in

-that it may never end

shoved down my throat

is the ache

-that is building its castle

it crumbles on me

while I search

-to find the remnants

of the picture

before it was ripped

-my tongue cries out

I lick each torn piece

Hands shaking

To put it back together

The gaze

Of each face before me

-Envelops my body

Lifts it to the moon

Where light thins into darkness

And the breeze brings me back

-my breath….

Temma's Marriage

2009-04-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

This is a poem that I wrote today as i was reflecting on how hard it is for me to sometimes accept the love of my husband and the love of my God. This is what came out of me as I grappled with this today. I speak of a girl named Temma in it- it's funny because I just can not seem to rid myself of her. I was first introduced to Temma by my friend, Matt about 6 months ago. Temma is the daughter of a famous artist named Tim Lowry. Temma is both physically and mentally impaired and has had to live in this vegatable like state all of her life. Now in her mid 20's, Tim and his wife continue to be the sole caregivers to their adult daughter. Tim experiances his daughter, Temma to be his modern day Mary as in all that he creates, she is his muse. She is in every one of his paintings- often with life happening all around her. Temma has become my modern day Mary too. Today I pictured her at a table with God eating- she looked so angelic as she reached across the table to grab a strawberry. As she did that, I pictured myself under the table scraping up crumbs and then scurring over to a corner to eat of them Butm then Temma held up a mirror to my face and showed me who i was, then i was beckoned to the table to join them, where Temma handed me a strawberry and Jesus washed my feet. Hoe often i feel that it is my job to wash God's feet as i don't allow him to love me... this picture overwhelmed me beyond words...and this is the poem that came from all this...

Please takea moment to check out Tim's work and meet Temma...I pray that she touches your face as she does mine so often : http://www.timlowly.com/resources/temmaonearth.html

TEMMA'S MARRIAGE

The crumb has fallen
it is my feast
in the corner

where I hide

he beckons me to
join...
strawberries dipped in chocolate

disjointing
only knowing
how to pour oil on his feet

wipe with my tears

she sits next to him
his shining muse, Temma
mirror in hand

my face calling back

to allow his kiss
tenderly
to wet my feet

as i suckle sourly-sweet red delights...
cock my head back with laughter
to heavy to hold...

My Breakfast: a big spoonful

2009-03-31T08:19:00.000-07:00

"What if Christ lives in us, in the world-not barely, not like an idea or a metaphor, but like a breath. What if the love and grace of God is something that is radically present to all our senses. Maybe not as present to our rational minds, and yet all the time keeping us alive- as Jean-Luc Marion suggests, a presence so enormous, so permeating, so thorough, that it's often mistaken somehow for abscence."
-Debbie Blue

It's just time...

2009-03-28T22:21:00.001-07:00

I was inspired today...

A few of us gathered in my living room, amidst tea, strawberries, chocolate, a baby's gurgling and betty megge's licking to bring a dream to fruition. This dream is to create a community garden in my backyard... A garden that will bring together people from all walks of life to tend to this land that we have been given, to harvest a crop- together- in the midst of what the city's inhabitants consider an eye-sore. We, the people of this area, would like to inspire our community by creating beauty and nourishing our souls and bodies through our tilling, planting,watering and gleaning. We will eat together back here , in just a few short months- under the gleam of the sun...and it will be good. Now, this is truly the church.

And I am in awe...

So- I have been gazing out my window thinking...

I must write.

And i write often.

It is time for me to share the trappings of my soul with you, so that we may grow together and be connected.... That's why I want to do this...Because I need you, and so- I must believe that you need me too..

So- in this- are bits of me...
And all of this... is worship.

Planting the pieces of me

The sun is starting to shine

As I pull open the blinds

Of my own unhappiness

Wind chills me

And I remember

Shivering

When I was young

The windows open

Sweet smell of moisture

Droplets falling

Plop.

My tongue- the catcher of these dreams.

That were

That are

Amidst all of this

To say thank you

Is to pray.

Is to breathe…