UpfromtheStump - Archive 55

17 November 2009 12:34am

I took a picture in a photo booth. Two friends and myself crowded tight into that little space, against my will no less. They pushed and smiled me inside, sponsored the quarters, cajoled and kidded until I was agreeable only that the photo booth would be a release from their begging. The curtain was pulled, the dark box grew warm from us being close, and we stared onto the blank screen wondering when everything begins. I'm not wanting to be in there. "Photo booths, how stupid," I remember thinking. I am a mindset of poisonous disregard. They are laughing and getting posed. I am stern between them, waiting this out. "What pose do we do?" they ask. They decide, without discussion, on 'fun'.

BAM, the flash goes off and the first of four is taken, me ironclad serious between two smiling excited friends. I am beginning to feel being somber is unlikable, so I prepare myself more acceptable for picture two. My friends are laughing, "ready?". BAM, I am cleverly and morosely fake-excited in this picture, creepy even, squished between their goofy anticipation. I am playing along grudgingly, getting the pressure off, faking it.

I crack. The feeling is too much. The thrill grabs me by the collar and tosses me into the sunlight. Something like joy bursts open in my heart. BAM, picture three and I'm awash in this huge sincere grin, a rush of feel-good from caving to joy. My favorite picture. I get happy just looking at picture three. BAM, picture four (final one) and I am ducking off camera, bashful. We pull the curtain open and wait for five minutes until it taps down into the dispenser slot. They are laughing again as we walk out into the Seattle night.

I don't want to be stern, and I am so often these days. I am tired of playing along. I want to break into that open heart always. I want love of living to be central to my soul. I want to be singing at all times, to be glad for the hour, glad for the circumstance, glad for what little I have. I am staring at that picture, now on my desk in front of me, and realizing how much better life is when I just let go.

14 November 2009 1:17pm

'At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, "Come down to the water." It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames'.

-Annie Dillard

10 November 2009 11:50pm

It took the place of just a regular thing, a normal routine then interrupted. That evening was supposed to be full of that nice post-work deceleration, sweet sitcoms, the lazy unwind from the wind. But delicate and quick, like forgetting to look both ways, everything became undone. And suddenly her history was thunder in her ears, a pained familiar voice streaming from the pressed phone. The serenity fractured like glass. And I listened as my friend bore the news with spasms while a buried reality bubbled up to the surface and broke.

It is over now, but it will take long to subside. Time in tall stacks will be needed in order that the memories, now freshly polished, might be picked back up and studied until they lose their luster and again become bad facts. The clocks will slow, a tired filter will be applied to reality, and each day's delicious routine will lose it's escape. But all this happening is right.

The arrival that night should have been softer, but the destination is spot on. I realized that this past history was a painful thing that had been shuttered away. It is open now. The odor is nauseating, but its open. And the plain and addressed condition of the main room is bleeding into that closet's dark corners. The boxes are slowly being pulled out and sorted. And I am privileged to be her friend, privileged to encourage and to watch as stability steeps slow through her heart like liquid taking hours up paper.

8 November 2009 1:16am

Favors shared

stories bared,

circumstance traded

futures laid.

Rising stressed

slowly dressed,

measured by another

easier than before.

A wide world

a wild life

Loose the pull

to disappear,

rise to find

26 October 2009 11:09pm

The open sky is clouded these days. People had said Seattle would be rainy. But it isn't actually. Its very cloudy and drizzled, but rarely are there heavy downpours. What people failed to mention, what people did not know about was the beauty of sunlight through a clouded sky this far up the northern hemisphere. It's difficult to explain, but the angle and the clouds make the light almost completely diffuse, which means it splinters and fractures on its fall to the surface of the world. By the time the light touches the tops of the houses in my neighborhood, it has been so tampered, so worked over, that it almost glosses down from every direction. The multi-directional light defines textures and surfaces too complex for direct light. And so the whole of Capitol Hill, the houses and streets and trees, are at times so imbued with a feathered radiance and delicate exposure that walking from inside to outside is like waking into color. And if a sheen of water from a recent light rain is added, which is common, then that previously mundane landscape is transformed into visual opulence, luminous and crisp beneath that soft grey sky.

What if things are like this normally? What if a single light source, direct and unmoved, does injustice to the world because of what it lacks to illuminate? What if the eye of God, which sees all layers, which knows intimately the complexity we fail to notice, sees like this all the time? And what if, in our attempt to mimic this true sight, our view of the world would gain such depth and appreciation that we would run and love it madly, without waiting or consideration?

My daily walk to follow Jesus, the path to God as I know it, is simply each day's growth to take on those eyes.

24 October 2009 2:44am

“Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water looking out

in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

in a culture up to its chin in shame

living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the back door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks that use us we are saying thank you

with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable

unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

our lost feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us like the earth

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is.”

14 October 2009 12:38am

I was told to do all this when I was young because it was correct. But I was so small, and I barely saw the benefit. Now, having kept it after all these years, I realize they were right. This really is the most beautiful and meaningful way to exist. And now my mind has a levied practice behind this way of being. My hands have a patterned motion that encourages all the rest of me on. Like a wooden house in the rain, everything expands with the sound.

Because of her m.s. she had not left the house for weeks. Now she was watching with unadorned gratitude the richness of our commercial district that sits only a block from our house, a district I walk every day without thought. And my invitation had been so tiny. I would be tempted to fashion it up into magnificence if it hadn't been so casually offered. "Want to come with me?" I had asked while zipping a jacket.

What a thing to know this secret.