The Big Picture

The most wonderful feeling in the world to me?

Could it be "the taste sensation when maple syrup *SMAK* collides with ham?"

NAE.

It is the realization that God's plans are much more intricate and grand than I could've ever initially conceived.

Mirrors & Pathways

A good story -- whether related through film, print, or oral communication -- does more than entertain us; it applies itself to our life, seeping into our encounters and situations and influencing us to reinterpret them. By peering into a fictional world, we might be provided the opportunity to see into obscured compartments within our own reality.

My most treasured stories, the ones I revisit again and again, are full of flawed, three-dimensional characters with more than mere story-driving motivations -- their emotions and reactions are mirrors onto which I may safely project my own actions or that of another in order to gain a deeper understanding of human nature. Why would an abused child grow up to inflict the same wounds that infected their own beginnings? Why would a seemingly solid family man forsake his wife and children? Why would someone prominent in the public eye do things that would beg the world to tear them down and destroy them?

I have tremendous respect for the storytellers who are able to weave beauty and monstrosity into a character's personality. I can see great courage in disallowing the "white knight" of the story to pass through the pages of a tale simply waving Excalibur and confounding every purely evil enemy in his path. I guess that's why I especially love the work of writer/producer/director David Lynch. His characters begin as the paragon of innocence, but their purity is unraveled and their goodness challenged as they are caught up in the storms around them. Kyle McLachlan's characters in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks are my favorite because you desperately want the boy scout to succeed at his task without being tainted by his circumstances.

I find myself seeking explainations for seemingly irrational behavior right now because people that I've looked up to have disappointed me. One individual has made not one mistake, but a series of choices that required heaping amounts or deception and greed in order to feed his fantasies. His actions have already come to light -- some know more to the story than others, and rightfully so -- and I am watching the consequences of his choices work their way through the hearts of many, many beloved people.

The other person on my mind has made a precarious series of choices herself, albeit moreso within her heart than in physical action... so far. Her Jekyll/Hyde transformation has caused me to question everything I believed about the value of ambition and the pitfalls of following your heart down a path with no signs or handrails. Risks worth taking DO exist, and sometimes when God commands us to move, it's to a place that's out of our comfort zone so that we will depend upon Him to guide us there. In her case, though, I see no goodness or ultimate fulfillment in what she wants. I know without a shadow of a doubt that if she continues to pursue her desires, they will cave in and destroy all that she has worked for that is worth protecting.

If I could pinpoint the single deficiency that gives root to these terrible flowers of destruction, it would be this: love born not out of strength, but out of weakness and need. It immediately reminds me of Proverbs 9:17,18: “Stolen water is sweet;
And bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he does not know that the dead are there,
That her guests are in the depths of Sheol." Her meaning the incarnation of foolishness and indescretion.

By the same token, 1 Corinthians reminds me what true, fulfilling love looks like: it is "patient", it "does not act unbecomingly", and "does not rejoice in unrighteousness". The author of Phillipians wept as he wrote about those "whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things." I think he knew what it was to fight through life while growing heavier and heavier under the burden of his own poor, selfish choices. While he could be secure and encouraging in his own salvation, the scars from those past mistakes still function as reminders of our natural tendency to fail without the foundation of Jesus Christ and his teachings. Those who better understand how people fail are better equipped to forgive.

After the initial storm clouds of anger have cleared and I have a choice to make reguarding people like these two, what do I do? Do I fulfill my Christian duty by just praying for them? God, what would you have me do?

99.44%

Although I still await the official arrival of the midyear solstice, "every sign close to nature" (as Sting eloquently sang) points to madame summertime's arrival. Like trumpeteers before her approaching carriage, a violent summer thunderstorm shook Le Cottage Bleu with its mighty percussion during the hours preceding daylight this morning. In response, I sat straight up and flailed my appendages like a harpooned octopus, startling my poor husband straight out of a rather enjoyable fishing dream -- for this, I feel terribly guilty. He so rarely enjoys dreaming. Nine nights out of ten, he's usually arguing with his mother within his tortured head.

I, on the other hand, enjoy the luxury of experiencing dreams that are mostly pleasurable, if not simply curious.... I often dream of houses, lands, forests, rooms -- spaces to occupy and wear like a sweater jacket, meaning that their character remains, even as I take it on and mold it to my proportions. Many times an object or an idea from a dream will hook me, and suddenly I have the image permenantly affixed within my head and I'm set on a mission to retreive or create the incarnation of the dream-thing. Awainting in the cluttered storage facility of my mind are a hand-carved stone fireplace mantle, an open-air library, a rough-hewn shipwood table, an underground Spanish mission with tiles and candleabras worked into the walls of its catacombs, an old crone's house where vegetables stew and herbs and roots are dried from the pine rafters... this is the stuff of my summer reveries. Fortunately, I need not wander far from home to see them realized.

Our marriage home has become an other-world reflection of these subconscious desires; under the direction of husband-dear -- who inherited from his maternal grandmother's discernment for visual harmony -- he and I have created a living space that have incorporated many of these elements, even without him realizing it! So many of the things we've chosen as a couple to bring into our home point toward his eye for beauty and my preference for whimsy. The little wooden and plaster fat birds peeking from random corners of my kitchen belong to that dream world. So does the recycled church furniture. A library -- open air or not -- is a completely achievable goal, and we're well on our way. Even the pond concealed by a curtain of shaggy adolescent pines has been a visiting-portal for so many of the places I've taken comfort in, even if they only exist in my imagination.

I'm grateful for the fruits of an overactive imagination. I think it's a gift to have such a lens through which to view my life. I know that it pleases the Creator when gifts He has bestowed are developed with the intention of furthering His work, yet many people might not place nightly appearitions within this category, considering it a rather spooky and intangible. But I do. I told one of our "kids" Wednesday night that sometimes I fail to see God's hand in what I've done until I look back upon it and am able to identify his fingerprints all over what I believed was my personal masterpiece. Manipulating one's environment to reflect a heart that rejoices in all that God has given can be a way of "multiplying talents" (Matt. 25:13-30).

"....whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." (1 Cor. 10:31)

The Swarm

My anger is a living fire
thinking its own terrible thoughts,
storming inner cities,
a swarm of drunken birds.

But can you smother, in good conscience,
the animation of breath,
even laced with embers?

We are the single priveledged creature
charged to refine the wildness in wayward beings...
how could a furious heart be different?

Fiction & Restriction

I wish I could remember the common names of those flowers!

Tempermental bursts of warm weather are beckoning me back into the cool wooded hideaways back home....

At the gated ending of an unnamed county road there lives a little old man and a not-so-little old woman. They are the best of friends, the oldest of lovers, and the easiest companions. Each summer, I find myself on their crooked wood plank porch, rapping on their screen door seeking permission to swim in the ice cold spring-fed swimming hole on their property. As I've grown older and less interested in tramping through the woods (or perhaps more fearful of lyme disease), I've begun looking forward to my visit with the ancient land holders even more than my dip in the gorge. Simply being around them as they go through their comfortable petterns of survival captures my imagination, giving birth to buds of story and song characters that threaten to bloom into a complete project....eventually.

Right now, I'm molding the not-so-little old woman into the wilderness "sage" character so essential to quest-related tales; her home, though aging and deteriorating at the same speed as her physical state, is a living, breathing character in and of itself. The chaotic prolificacy of her garden is a manifestation of her lively personality, cultivated and refined through decades of hardscrabble survival. I write her because she is all that I aspire to be -- skilled in ways of trial and observation, practiced in tragically forgotten ways, harded by the elements while somehow remaining boldy feminine.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

And now, I look at my work. My hands. Messy pen and ink would testify I've earned my keep. Even a typewriter requiring a pint of elbow grease to operate might convince me that my current profession provides bread honestly earned. But what am I still doing here, in a chair, before a window, typing on a soft-touch keyboard, awaiting some DeSoto to arrive and declare my secret worlds sacred?

It is not my heart to abandon my life as I know it. What's missing is vocational purpose. Occupational passion. I know that against all guidance counselor conditioning, I will never be a rat-to-cheese, 40-hour-a-week commuter at the core of my being. I crave self-definition in channeled, sweat-bourne expression. The mere thought of having to turn over decades of uninspiring work energy in exchange for the safety net provided by online bill payment and low health care deductibles send me spiraling into a professional depression.....

There is work, then there are responsibilities. The question is, Quigley, how does one persue one without abandoning the other??? There must be a way. Musty must must.