In Mrs. Schultz' classes in grade school we spent one afternoon making marbled paper. A box of pastel colored chalk was shaved to dust over a black, rubber busboy’s tub filled with water. The water was black and still in the tub. When the shaving fell into it, the tiny colored particles separated, some falling deep into the dark water, while others glistened and danced on the surface. When the colors were in place, we used a ruler to make a few gentle cuts across the surface of the water, allowing the chalk dust to swirl together in subtle currents.
She parsed out fine sheets of linen paper to us to decorate. Using paperclips attached to two ends of the paper's edge, we rested the sheets gently on the water. We held tight to the clips while the chalk dust kept the linen sheets from sinking. After several seconds, the paper was removed, then laid over baker’s racks to dry. One sheet at a time, the process continued until an end of the long tables that ran the length of the classroom was covered in chalky, marbled paper.
Sometimes life happens the way those amateur papers were created. The parts of us that seem to be intact and vibrant are sanded down to minuscule pieces and left to float in dark waters. In dark spaces, the heavier parts of ourselves float to the bottom, while the beautiful parts blend with each other and create something new; something that was impossible before we were destroyed.
On days when life is vicious and destructive, I try to remember the quiet movements of twenty-year-old paper over colored dust floating at the surface of an abyss. It’s scary to release what we’ve known, who we’ve loved and lived for. The heavy parts cling to us, bound with shame and hurt, not wanting us to become new and brilliant. But when the weight is too much and we finally let them go, the best colors of those experiences can create something unexpected and beautiful.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
Peace for Others
“I never wanted to hurt anyone.” I wasn’t looking at her. If I looked at her, it would hurt as much as it hurt when I looked at myself. She didn’t say anything. I wanted her to. I didn’t want her to. There was the complete kind of silence that happens when stars implode. The space between us had become so unexpectedly infinite.
When I met her, she’d been interviewing for a job at the bank. Her smile that day and every day after, released words and feelings that charged my thoughts. I wanted to know the world that had created her. I wanted to believe that she could heal me; make me believe that life would be what I’d always known is should be and I what it was just outside her eyes.
The fountains outside the bank on Eighth Street played in streetlight, throwing watery shadows along stone walls of downtown buildings. It should have been so perfectly romantic. It should have been.
I felt a not quite trembling hand touch my face. The hand, the face, both too young to know the memory that was being painted all around and within them. My eyes timidly searched the lovely face that had quietly, unknowingly pleaded for honesty. Silent tears had drawn thin paths across her cheeks. I curled my face into her hand. My whisper came with the muted amplitudes of pain of an exhausted soul. “Sarah…”
She pulled me into her and pressed against my chest. “It’s okay.” We stood there for several moments, both of us searching for warmth from and within the other. "I thought you were going to tell me you had cancer."
Our tears melted into a laughter that told us what Sarah already knew. It was okay. The most valuable gifts we give to one another are those that help us to know with certainty the infinite capacity we have to heal and to love. In unexpected moments when life is dark and there is silence in the scary places within ourselves, we can be for others what we can't always be for ourselves.
When I met her, she’d been interviewing for a job at the bank. Her smile that day and every day after, released words and feelings that charged my thoughts. I wanted to know the world that had created her. I wanted to believe that she could heal me; make me believe that life would be what I’d always known is should be and I what it was just outside her eyes.
The fountains outside the bank on Eighth Street played in streetlight, throwing watery shadows along stone walls of downtown buildings. It should have been so perfectly romantic. It should have been.
I felt a not quite trembling hand touch my face. The hand, the face, both too young to know the memory that was being painted all around and within them. My eyes timidly searched the lovely face that had quietly, unknowingly pleaded for honesty. Silent tears had drawn thin paths across her cheeks. I curled my face into her hand. My whisper came with the muted amplitudes of pain of an exhausted soul. “Sarah…”
She pulled me into her and pressed against my chest. “It’s okay.” We stood there for several moments, both of us searching for warmth from and within the other. "I thought you were going to tell me you had cancer."
Our tears melted into a laughter that told us what Sarah already knew. It was okay. The most valuable gifts we give to one another are those that help us to know with certainty the infinite capacity we have to heal and to love. In unexpected moments when life is dark and there is silence in the scary places within ourselves, we can be for others what we can't always be for ourselves.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Friday Afternoons
North Callaway R-1 high school in Kingdom City graduated ninety-three students in 1995. The cinderblock and brick building faces northwest along a flat stretch of Highway 54, one hundred and ten miles west of St. Louis and a universe from urban complexities. The building is surrounded by corn and soybean fields, parted to make way for rural education and football. It was built in the uninspiring styling that accompanied 1960’s mass utility construction. Still, the richly green grounds of NCHS and the clear Midwestern skies above it helped remind its students that they were part of something more unique than the simple, low-ceiling construction that surrounded them.
I spent four years at North Callaway being introduced to friendship, love, heartache, disappointment, glory and every other emotion that would take the rest of my life to explore. The people I discovered and learned from gave me a simple pattern for life that I’m happy to be reminded of on blue sky Missouri afternoons with summer winds and flicking leaves.
Friday afternoons in October were the best part of being a teenager. A stream of kids would parade from the high school into a dusty, gravel parking lot that held a collection of cars as mismatched as those who climbed into their warm interiors. Jamie Moser’s tan Cadillac sedan, Nick Kauffman’s restored 1966 red Ranger pick-up, Roger Atkinson’s white Mercury Cougar, and my little red Honda Civic hatchback. There was a race to get out of the parking lot and onto the access road before the buses lined up. It was a time to feel complete freedom and to express it with squealing tires sometimes enhanced by heavy dosing of Clorox bleach.
More often than not, my brother and our cousin, Rhiannon, were passengers with me. Toad the Wet Sprocket or Janet Jackson would play on a cassette in my in-dash Sony stereo as we’d put the windows down and drive the back roads home. The roads were scattered with crumbling asphalt and meandered around old farms that had been firmly rooted in Callaway County for decades. It was all so familiar and comforting; the white farmhouses with gray or green shingled roofs, moving combine teams mowing down thousand-acre fields, cavernous hay and livestock barns, irrigation lakes and everywhere the smell of autumn.
I’d drop off Rhiannon, before Marc and I parked the car under the shade of pear trees at home. Both of us silent, we'd drag in whatever bags had accompanied us to school. Inside, I’d close the door to my bedroom and fall across my bed. I remember the contrasted quiet of the house after a day surrounded by 400 adolescents. Quickly, I'd fall into an afternoon sleep that would allow me to spend midnight hours with the friends I’d just left as we watched movies, went to a game or talked about the confusion of teenage life at one or another of our houses. As my eyes settled, they had no way of knowing how different their world would look when they’d open fifteen years later.
It’s not October, and the summer heat of Missouri is causing thunderstorms separated by amazingly blue skies and alabaster clouds. Still, the release of Friday afternoon and the unsophisticated hopefulness of a weekend throws anticipatory smiles over my mouth. It’s a special set of circumstances that have allowed me to know the world in uncomplicated Friday afternoons filled with color, music, friends and the subtle love of home.
I spent four years at North Callaway being introduced to friendship, love, heartache, disappointment, glory and every other emotion that would take the rest of my life to explore. The people I discovered and learned from gave me a simple pattern for life that I’m happy to be reminded of on blue sky Missouri afternoons with summer winds and flicking leaves.
Friday afternoons in October were the best part of being a teenager. A stream of kids would parade from the high school into a dusty, gravel parking lot that held a collection of cars as mismatched as those who climbed into their warm interiors. Jamie Moser’s tan Cadillac sedan, Nick Kauffman’s restored 1966 red Ranger pick-up, Roger Atkinson’s white Mercury Cougar, and my little red Honda Civic hatchback. There was a race to get out of the parking lot and onto the access road before the buses lined up. It was a time to feel complete freedom and to express it with squealing tires sometimes enhanced by heavy dosing of Clorox bleach.
More often than not, my brother and our cousin, Rhiannon, were passengers with me. Toad the Wet Sprocket or Janet Jackson would play on a cassette in my in-dash Sony stereo as we’d put the windows down and drive the back roads home. The roads were scattered with crumbling asphalt and meandered around old farms that had been firmly rooted in Callaway County for decades. It was all so familiar and comforting; the white farmhouses with gray or green shingled roofs, moving combine teams mowing down thousand-acre fields, cavernous hay and livestock barns, irrigation lakes and everywhere the smell of autumn.
I’d drop off Rhiannon, before Marc and I parked the car under the shade of pear trees at home. Both of us silent, we'd drag in whatever bags had accompanied us to school. Inside, I’d close the door to my bedroom and fall across my bed. I remember the contrasted quiet of the house after a day surrounded by 400 adolescents. Quickly, I'd fall into an afternoon sleep that would allow me to spend midnight hours with the friends I’d just left as we watched movies, went to a game or talked about the confusion of teenage life at one or another of our houses. As my eyes settled, they had no way of knowing how different their world would look when they’d open fifteen years later.
It’s not October, and the summer heat of Missouri is causing thunderstorms separated by amazingly blue skies and alabaster clouds. Still, the release of Friday afternoon and the unsophisticated hopefulness of a weekend throws anticipatory smiles over my mouth. It’s a special set of circumstances that have allowed me to know the world in uncomplicated Friday afternoons filled with color, music, friends and the subtle love of home.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
The Course of True Love...
I remember the in-and-out breaths that made his chest rise and fall and rise and fall. There were tiny chill bumps on his skin where it was uncovered, pale and blue in streetlight’s midnight shadows. His legs pressed into mine, my arm resting on his stomach. In the quiet hours before the ocean, I learned about how it feels to love with no obligation. No expectation, no remove.
I rose on my elbow and watched the subtle flicking of his eyelids as he dreamed. He was in a world I couldn’t share with him and I wondered if he’d invited me in; if he felt the perfect pain of absence that reminds us of the feelings that matter most. I would spend one hundred winter days wanting those tingling emotions that happened when he’d return, and knowing with certainty that he wouldn’t.
I moved my left hand to the warm point where his shoulder met his neck. The feel of his skin, his warmth has remained on fingertips that have searched so many others for what they won’t find again. His lips were still as I touched my finger to them; his breath exhaling deeply. In twilight silence I leaned forward and kissed him with the gentleness of forever. His hand reached up and rested softly on my own; his tender acknowledgement of our uncorrupted world.
As I lay down on a pillow beside him, his touch remained. My breaths fell into his and I prayed for remembrance. “The course of true love never did run smooth.” And I wonder about what he found in the darkened silences we cannot share. Was he greeted and comforted? Who holds him and was he allowed to look back? On blue shadowy nights with unanswered memories, I miss the silent music of true love.
I rose on my elbow and watched the subtle flicking of his eyelids as he dreamed. He was in a world I couldn’t share with him and I wondered if he’d invited me in; if he felt the perfect pain of absence that reminds us of the feelings that matter most. I would spend one hundred winter days wanting those tingling emotions that happened when he’d return, and knowing with certainty that he wouldn’t.
I moved my left hand to the warm point where his shoulder met his neck. The feel of his skin, his warmth has remained on fingertips that have searched so many others for what they won’t find again. His lips were still as I touched my finger to them; his breath exhaling deeply. In twilight silence I leaned forward and kissed him with the gentleness of forever. His hand reached up and rested softly on my own; his tender acknowledgement of our uncorrupted world.
As I lay down on a pillow beside him, his touch remained. My breaths fell into his and I prayed for remembrance. “The course of true love never did run smooth.” And I wonder about what he found in the darkened silences we cannot share. Was he greeted and comforted? Who holds him and was he allowed to look back? On blue shadowy nights with unanswered memories, I miss the silent music of true love.
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