If Only This Could Be Said

Round here she's slipping through my hands...

Round here she's slipping through my hands, originally uploaded by Lacking Focus.  

A Matter of Vision...Living on the Margins and a Thousands Little Deaths.

 

It's 5am and I've got a few songs, a few poems and a few posts rambling around in my brain. On my blog dashboard there is a "Quick Post" to just write something fast and send it off with all the preset formatting, even attachments...but I am stopped short, just for this moment by the big green PUBLISH button.
The old adage "Publish of Perish" automatically comes to mind."
If I don't publish something here within a reasonable amount of time there is a good probability (though there has always been some) that I may have "perished".
Thoughts of mortality become like the tides...responding to the magnetic pull of the moon. But this moon takes more shapes...like the big green rectangle of the green Typepad publish button.

It's been a long time since I have been able to write. All the false steps, the fears of unintentionally leading another down a blind path, making more mistakes, ending up in a place where you have to throw it all in and say "well that didn't work out so well...what's next" have paralyzed my fingers literally as much as the Bell's Palsy has paralyzed my face.

A confession. I have always been a vain person about my looks. I have always looked 10-15 years younger than my age. I have been "blessed" with good genes in the anti-aging area; but irony always comes to the rescue to say...too bad your genes don't match...your face may look like 40, but your heart looks like it's 80.

But the thing that bothers me most about the Bell's is not that I look 'funny' or 'lopsided', but the fear that I will no longer have all those 'micro-expressions' that communicate to people things like love, care, sadness, amusement, sarcasm...

It's a taste, a small taste of what it feels like to be one of the people society, organizations (churches) have pushed so far to the margins that they become, if not invisible, at least not worth looking at because whatever they have to say has been deemed 'nonsensical'.

What life is for them is so far from what the "powers that be" is so incomprehensible that all the things that allow us to communicate as one human being to another, all the communicable commonness has been frozen out.

Pain, sadness, joy, grief...all the things that make us alike become incomprehensible. Not because they are not being communicated (which might be a problem for me), but because the other side has chosen to be blind to all the little things that work to bind us together.

Theologies, ideologies aside, if you cannot look into the face of another and SEE that they love, laugh, break, hurt, wound just like yourself...the only thing that has the power to bring walls down has already been tossed aside.

I always thought that Christ's words about THOSE WHO HAVE EYES and THOSE WHO HAVE EARS...were just sort of some Hebrew punctuation to drive a point home.

No...THOSE WORDS WERE THE TRUTH...the other words around them were just something speaking to a particular occasion.

Just the fear of losing the ability to be heard and seen is like a little death...and gives me some insight into the thousands of little deaths those on the margins are forced to endure everyday of their life.

 

Photo: Helsinki, Finland...just snapping architectual detail while walking knowing that the photo will always have more to say later

Of Arrows and Holes and Other Bizarre Products of 'Natural Theology"

Extending a comment I made over at Bilgrimage about the nature of sexuality, relationships and complementarianism.

Count to Ten

Count to Ten

 

Four.  Seven Nine Ten!

    and she giggles at her childish joke.

I take a breath to correct her,

    but I stop. Am I handing her a knife,

signs to heavy for anyone to wield?

Am I teaching her tools that will become deadly?

One, In the beginng…,

Two, male and female, guns, 

Three in One, an equation that lit fires,

Five, to commit wrong with impunity,

Seven Nine Ten Twelve.

What sign is Forgiveness?

What symbol is Love?

That Mercy has no cipher

    is a wondrous Truth.

 

 

Photo: Taken in Helsinki, Finland, 2012

Power of Words, Spoken and Not Yet Spoken

 

 

I have great faith in all things not yet spoken.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

What Has Been Once So Interwoven Cannot Be Raveled

This Poem immediatly came to mind this morning as I read Bill Lindsey's Poem 

"Stories Are What We Have" at his wonderful blog, Bilgrimage

Did someone say that there would be an end,
an end, Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled,
not the gift ungiven.
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing.
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited--
only the strands grow richer with each loss
and memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flow to some real haven,
we who find shelter in the warmth within,
listen and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
as the lost human voices speak through us and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end.

All Souls by May Sarton

Photo:Fields of Eternity Series #5 

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