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)

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.