Saudade

"Saudade" is a word I learned in Portuguese that doesn't have an easy translation into English. It is the remembering with longing or imagining with longing. It is wanting but not having. But not a discontent that is bitter or demanding. more like a sweet memory of something that is gone from reality but remains-- in the haunting half-phrase of a tune that arises like a vapor in your mind. It is a fragrance you only vaguely recognize. Its like when the deer pauses in the meadow, bathed in golden light, and flicks its ears, and looks for something, then returns to her grazing. i awaken some mornings, with that sense that there was something I am supposed to remember, something important that eludes my conscious mind, that tugs persistently at the edges of my brain. I can't make out if it is an image, a word, a feeling, ---something. Like Dali's "persistence of memory" it warps out of recognition, hanging from the table beside my bed, behind the netting that veils my bed. It is a stranger I think I know, who attracts me. but no one I know. A face I cannot see.
It is sweet, but not altogether happy. It is sad, but not full of sorrow. It is an empty place, like a missing tooth, that has become familiar. Hollow,hallowed.

Remodeling Project

I was left with a fishing boat, a nice red-and-white Lund, and a boat trailer and no idea how to hook the lights up to the pick-up truck. I gave the Honda Ridgeline to my son. Sold the trailer and boat back to the dealer. Gave away another car, and ended up with a detached garage full of old skis, poles, boots, a weed whacker, a wheel-barrow, bags of lawn fertilizer, old paint, and field mice.

So I decided that it was time I created a real studio for myself, rather than working out of a bedroom. It took about a month to get the proposal through the local architectural review board. Another month to get it cleared out and then the fun of remodeling began.
Studs went in, thick pink blankets of insulation were wrapped around the new bay windows. Replaced the garage door with a set of french doors so that large projects or sculptures can be made and still make it out the door. Sky lights toward the north end shunt the weak northern rays deep into the room. A row of cabinets along the back will hold art supplies--the never ending collections of found things and colorful paints and pastels. There will be a deep sink for cleaning brushes, and a bath. The space that will be my desk has a view of pine trees and blue sky. One wall holds a Walker system to display finished work. There will be a mirror to check the painting in reverse. Laundry lines that pull across like you find in some hotels, will be a place to hang prints or works on paper. The electrician has pulled the wires across from the house and promises me power on Monday. Soon the walls will blush into a warm ivory; and the fanlight will stir the air. Light wooden planks will march across an expanse that was only concrete...The easels will go into place under the skylights. I will load up my brush and start a new work in this new space. I hope to dedicate this space--as I have everything I own, to the LORD who has given me the gift of seeing and the opportunity to learn art. Mainly, I hope to create work here as long as the Lord allows me strength. I hope it will be a place to lodge the weary; to teach young artists and to learn from the experienced; to encourage and display the work of my friends who are artists or photographers; and to be a part of the Jesus House experience. (more about that in another blog.) Now that we are nearly done, this team of craftsmen and workers, I celebrate the wonder that what is old can become new. It makes me smile, to stand in what was a dirty, disordered garage and see such beauty and serenity. Makes me wonder what else needs attention?

How does my garden grow?

Right now, the grass is yellowing and brittle from too little rain. Just as I set out to put sprinklers on the lawn, the drizzle began--most welcome. The day lilies by the front walk are starting to swell, ready to burst. The pink-purple petunias cascade from their baskets, the front ones full of blooms where the afternoon sun catches them. The basket in the back by the swing, is in too much shade and while it has verdant leaves, there are few blossoms. Sun, it needs.
The Burgundy mums, are massed by the white picket fence. Two white mums on either side of the green front door are welcoming I think. I need to change the door wreath from it's cheery, summer Flowers to more fallish selections. Maybe tomorrow if there is time, i will rummage in the basement and replace it.
I peruse the fall garden catalogues...and read a magazine article on "top Fall Projects"--My remodeling project is coming to a conclusion and the new bay windows overlook a rocky ledge, lined with large stones, perfect for a bed of perennials--Daffodils would be an obvious choice because of the flocks of deer who come into my yard nearly daily to graze, steal crab apples from the lower boughs, or to dispense seeds from the bird feeder. Maybe irises --tall, and sculptural, elegant royal blue tissues that unfold like origami into petals.
Then I think of the things it would be fun to incorporate over the next years, if the Lord tarries--a labyrinth for meditation and contemplation? Perhaps a small scaled water feature, adding the sound of water to the cricket's song and to the peepers call. I love the natural sort of rooms that are already emerging. I'm not sure why a garden is so satisfying? Perhaps because there is a Jungian symbol --GARDEN--that is imprinted somehow in our heart/ some information encoded in our DNA and handed down through the centuries--the need to know--even taste the earth. To tend it and from our efforts to receive fruit--colorful, fragrant, or flavorful....Our return to the garden to eat and to fellowship--to be known, to know, to belong--to celebrate--that great feast for which we long--That garden is what keeps us going when the beetles eat the rose petals, or the sun scorches the ornamental grasses, or the wind whips the willow tree. Gardening is a leap of faith, I half think.

Single or celibate or chaste

Am following the debate in Christianity Today about what to use as a term for unmarried people in the evangelical church scene. Recently widowed, I find myself in this strange state. After thirty three years of marriage, I am somehow now not married. Some forms don't even give you a choice of widowed..but I don't think of myself as "Single"--which seems to me to focus to much on the lack of something.--as though I am missing something. Celibate has been suggested as an alternate term, to emphasize the calling of unmarried people to serve God and to serve His beloved church. I like the reasoning, but the term calls up the notion of monastic orders and promises to remain celibate for a life time. Most of us, ungifted with celibacy, may not wish it to be a life-time life-style choice. We may be waiting for some divinely ordained and provided mate some time in the future. In the present we are called to live a chaste life. But chastity should not be confused with celibacy as they come from different roots. "Chastity" is the state of being innocent or chaste, Chastity refers to sexual behavior of a man or woman acceptable to the ethical norms and guidelines of a certain culture, civilization or religion In the western world, the term has become closely associated (and is often used interchangeably) with sexual abstinence, especially before marriage. On the other hand, "Celibacy" is the renunciation of marriage implicitly or explicitly made, for the more perfect observance of chastity, by those who take religious vows. They may look the same in practice, but they have different motivations and values. Either choice is scriptural and should be honored for radical obedience to the Lord in the context of a culture that does everything it can to ridicule or assault the chaste.
Actually, I don't want to be defined by my marital status--any more than I think my race or age or gender should define me. I don't reject it, or these other truths about me, but I don't think any one of these categories is definitive for me And I hate being programed into "singles ministries" or thought of as having special needs because of that aspect of my life.
I prefer to be a person in the pew--who worships, studies the word, and engages in ministry and service with all the other parts of the "body". I'd love to see us cross all kinds of barriers that might be interesting statistically but are irrelevant for who we are and how we live our our evangelical calling.

Writer's revsionary life style

Writers group met today on Kent State's campus. It was one of those lovely, warm, sunny, Fall days when you stop to eat lunch on a picnic table and wish you didn't have to go back to the office.



There is the scurry of heavy traffic, commuter students trying to find parking. It is early in the semester and people are still attending classes. Syllabae are passed out around long conference tables and students text each other when the prof isn't looking. In between classes they talk about what they are dropping and why.



In the Women's Center, all is quiet. We listen to a poet read her work. There is silence. She waits for the group to write comments in the white space around the words. And then, slowly and thoughtfully, there are suggestions about a line break, a possible word choice that will fit the tone better. Someone offers a different title. The last line of one of my sevenling needs some kind of expansion on the idea of "Strange attractors"--from quantum mechanics.



We have worked together this way for nearly five years. I trust them to tell me when a word sticks out like an orange hat in an Amish buggy. I can ask about technical details, or word derivation, or about the usefulness of paring already spare lines. It takes a long time to trust that you will be given the best ideas a person has, because that's what we owe each other. Encouragement is wonderful and always appreciated. But sometimes the best friend is the one who sharpens your prose.



Almost always, what is necessary, is to think more clearly about the idea itself--to go for the pearl of great price. It is always worth the wading into muck, and the digging.



Critique and revision- Like breathing out and breathing in.

When a new poetry class starts at KSU

Now, I remember why it is each Fall I look around for some campus on which to study. Today, in the advanced poetry course, we read our first works to each other. No one was sick enough to run from the room, but it does take courage to read your first versions of new poems to a group of people you hardly know.

They were gloriously brave, colorful, honest, and true. There was music in the lines as they came from our mouths, quietly, then confidently. And the beauty of one poem hung in the air to bathe the next in some luminescent cloud so that the conference room was transformed.

The teacher, wise mid-wife of poems, dispensed with comments until they could all come forth--born into the world. Squealing for attention! Raw and red and angry, in some cases. In others, strangely still.

Now, this is an education...writing and reading, thinking, creating, revising, and speaking from our bony parts, where our flesh is connected, our of our bowels--our howls, our cries, our ecstasy.

Chautauqua vignette

Labor Day at Chautauqua is quiet and wonderful in its emptiness. A week or two earlier, when the Season is still in session, there's a melee of people, milling about. On the Fourth of July, when i was here last, nearly every house had a flag blowing in the breeze from the lake. Little kids from the Children's School dressed up like the statue of liberty or presidents and marched to the Amp for patriotic songs and waved lots of little flags. But today, they are only here in ghostly memories, years, even decades eliding. My grandson, my son, my husband, his mother and aunt and uncle all experienced these celebrations of a nation in this place.

Today the lake has a haze, water being drawn by the sun, up into clouds that are first filmy like the tutus of dancer, and then become cumulus, more like pom-poms. I watch sailboats tacking into the wind, fishing boats, speed boats trailing a ruff of white foam behind them. There is the labored puffing of the old Chautauqua Belle, a steam powered stern wheeled paddle boat. And the squeal of seagulls as they wheel across the blue sky and dip into the silvery tips of waves.

The gingerbread houses are vacant mostly, now, emptying one after another, into the open trunks of SUVs. There are beds of blue hydrangeas going to seed. Around the bend in the road there are vines with bright orange-red octagonal "Japanese Lanterns" and if you wait long enough, the sumac at the end of Hurst turns bright red like a stop sign. The sun is heavy, warm, but not hot. As though weary of the summer's effort and desirous of a break. High in the cedars there are orange and golden boughs, and the maples are red-tipped, some of the branches that have been stressed. There is the steady droning of crickets and locusts as though to reassure us of their presence. But early this morning, I heard a gaggle of Canadian geese forming up for their journey southward. Time for me to leave. To turn my hand to work and other things. I go with a backward glance.