delicate wings, barely visible…a reminder that each of us has them…right there…ready and waiting. sometimes we search inside for answers; this painting tells that story for me. we stoke up the fortitude. we call on peace to enter our souls. we ask our heart to hold on. we forge through what will invariably challenge us. but our wings, gossamer and full of grace, gifted to us by a magnificent Love, give us the lift. we know that no one can clip those wings. they belong to us and we can soar back (or forward) into ourselves. when we are ready.
to view or purchase david’s painting on his gallery site, click below:
“…well, i will walk by faith, well, even when i cannot see, because this broken road prepares your will for me…” (lyrics from a really great 2002 song by jeremy camp called ‘walk by faith’)
trust. practice. faith. repeat. not necessarily in that order. through the ages, a common challenge – faith without seeing. ‘we’ are no different now than ‘they’ were ‘back then.’ faith. it’s ambiguous.
it’s funny. you might think that the most faith-reinforcing moments come during a service and this true for some. as a minister of music for three decades, i have always sought to create those moments for others…when all things come together: music, lyrics, emotion to amplify the words (and the word) spoken in the service and resonate within someone’s heart and reinforce their feelings of faith. it is a job i take seriously; sometimes you only have one chance to help connect a service with a person’s heart, one chance to reassure, one chance to raise awareness, one chance to have them ask questions within their faith, to challenge their assumptions for and otherwise.
for me, though, the most faith-reinforcing moments are outside of the faith-based venue, be it a church, temple, cathedral, mosque. they are the moments that i can feel the hugeness of this universe of God and my absolute tiny-ness within it: walking in the woods, standing in the sunlight, looking out on a mountain, holding hands, seeing the moon rise over the lake, watching the surf, seeing love pass between two people’s eyes, hearing my children’s voices, finding the right chord for a song, eating breakfast on the deck in the sun with cardinals, hearing music swell…
as a minister of music, i have heard a lot of sermons and been at an un-countable number of services. think about it. (and this is not counting all the years not spent in this position, nor does it count all the extra services at certain times of the year…you’re thinking, “ok, ok, ohmygosh, we get it!” ) so thirty years multiplied by 52 weeks multiplied by at least two services a sunday (sometimes three, but we will round it to two, as you roll your eyes.) that equals 3,120 services and sermons. and let me just mention, some have been…ummm…way better than others. so you would likely deduce that i would know all the stories of the old and new testaments pretty well by now. well, i beg to differ with you. for me, those stories are peripheral.
what really counts for me is the stuff you can’t see with your eyes, the things you can only experience: love, kindness, peace, generosity… simplicities. complexities. these are the foundations of my faith. faith in goodness. faith in being held. faith in grace. choosing actions that are life-giving. knowing that if i fail today, i can try again tomorrow. walking the broken road, faithfully believing that there is a higher power that i can’t see but i can experience. one that surrounds me in my joy and in my pain. ptom, in his lenten sermon the other evening, said, “God is for you.” it takes a little (read: a lot of) practice; it’s a new day every new day. but i believe.
more than once i have been in a moment when i thought, “this is a slice of heaven.” everyone has them. like this scene, it may be on the beach. it may be in the woods. it may be in the rocking chair with your tiny baby. it may be on the mountain in fresh powder. it may be listening to music while running (or sitting quietly) or reading poetry in an adirondack chair. it’s different for everyone. regardless of where it is, of when it is, of what it is, everything feels in balance and all feels well with the world, at least in your little piece of the world. we feel grateful and alive. and we wish for more of those moments.
what if we treated every breathing moment like that? like a slice of heaven.
every summer i break one of my two little baby toes. every single summer. last summer alone i logged tons of miles on my $2 old navy flipflops as a result. i even talked about it on this blog. what did i learn? in particular, what did i learn THIS time as opposed to all the other times? i learned to either 1. slow down a little 2. watch where i’m going a tad bit more 3. never go barefoot. the thing is, i’m pretty sure it will happen again. i’m still learning.
i haven’t fallen off my bike in quite some time (and hope not to cause these days it will hurt much more than it used to) but i can relate in countless ways to our chicken marsala monday in the melange this week. i can distinctly remember taking off the training wheels and teaching the children to ride their two-wheelers, running down the sidewalk next to them. for that matter, i can totally -and (yougetthis) viscerally- remember teaching them how to drive.
we’ve been watching the olympics. athletes of inordinate ability who had to start somewhere – and, for sure, who fell in the process. not afraid of failing, but keeping on keeping on. being an ace anything is far off. do any of us ever really get there?
as an adult (ugh, i guess 58 qualifies me if for no other reason than sheer number) there are a lot of things i still want to learn. a few years ago i wanted to throw pots. i spent more than i bargained on for clay and lessons and studio time and more clay and ended up with the most wonderful tea light holder. (ok, i also threw a cereal-size-bowl and a few other assorted incredibly-shrinking-bowls as i struggled to center them and not have the clay collapse on the wheel.) let’s just say i was not gifted at this. but it did (and still does) make me laugh. and i know that i will someday try it again and i will add to my assortment of teenytinyclayobjects in which i can store paperclips.
when we see my amazing son and his boyfriend, we seem to be developing this tradition of bowling together. now, even though i live in wisconsin – and it is practically a law to be a good bowler here – i am pretty bad at bowling. every now and then i do something (like pick up a spare or get a strike) and am shocked, but most of the time i am aghast at how the ball creates splits in the pins and i find myself leaning while watching it careen (generous term) down the alley. the thing i must say, though, is that each time i do a little better. and the reallybadscores will, if i dedicate any time at all to practice, perhaps improve. mostly, i laugh. and i wish i could bring that to ANY thing i am learning – be it a new sport, an artform, a study of some philosophy or political issue, or – a big one – relationship. we fall. we get up, brush ourselves off, ask for grace and try again.
even though there are so many venues of crashing, the recording studio is a prime place to watch yourself fall down. you’ve written music, lyrics. you’ve practiced and practiced – there’s muscle memory in each measure. you’re ready, water and coffee by your side. (for me, not so much water once in the studio as it ….toomuchinformationalert…makes throat noises i can’t avoid.) and then you start. there’s so much riding on the line. and some days? some days you can’t get through a track. something is amiss; something is wrong. the first track of my first album was recorded in a studio in evanston. ken, my producer, was a stranger to me and i drove down with a posse of friends. i felt a little nervous, but mostly felt confident i was prepared. hours later, i had recorded the solo piano track for galena (the album released from the heart) and ken gave me a cassette tape (how funny is that?!) to listen to. i put it in the cassette deck of my old chrysler blue minivan and turned it on. and was appalled. rigid playing met my ears. it sounded nothing like me or my playing, or my piece of music, for that matter. all that confidence translated to a coldness, an unemotional-ness instead of a good track. i called ken (who i barely knew then, but now the same brilliant producer who has produced 14 of my 15 albums) and he suggested that, “maybe you should just write the music and have someone else play it on the recording FOR you.” what???!!! uhhh, i didn’t even know what to answer that would sound in the least bit polite.
and so i painfully listened to the recording again and sat back down at home on my bench. and i realized i needed to be ready -at any moment- to fall. THAT is what would make the piece sound like me and sound like, well, music. the rawness, the every-moment-ness, the vulnerability to mistakes and moving beyond them. that is what would make it shine as a learning. preparation is wise, flexibility is a must, a sense of humor is required, confidence is irrelevant, perseverance is utmost.
yesterday i received a message of generosity. i was struck by its kindness. it read, “dear kerri, though politically i am on the opposite side of the spectrum of you, i want to tell you i always love reading your articles. we are both wives, mothers, lovers of nature, animals and our families. i choose to take what you write in and love to live in it awhile…”
common ground. we have common ground, despite our differences. and we can meet there – on that good earth – to celebrate the ways we are the same. in generosity.
too often we cling to our differences. ptom talked about the icy grip of our own stubbornness and i cringed thinking of the times i had fiercely hung on with that icy grip. we believe it is our right to harbor resentments and hatred. we hold our deposits into a grudge bank tightly, haughty looks on our faces and in our hearts. there is a common ground there too, but no generosity enters that place and the soil is tainted with our own ideas of self-importance.
i was talking to d the other day and we passed a place in our town that always reminds me of a plethora of memories, some of which are not entirely pleasant. i am grateful to the menopause wizards who have somehow blocked the synapses in my brain making it impossible for me to remember all the details of the unpleasantness and difficulty that took place there. the details have become fuzzy; ok, who am i kidding? the details aren’t even fuzzy. it’s more like a very low dense fog. it makes it impossible for me to hang onto the grudges i’m sure i’m “supposed” to still have. i can’t remember them. for that matter, i can scarcely remember all of what happened. what a good thing. instead, with no credit to me or any intentional decision i made, i remember the positive things that happened in that place, on that good earth. i can’t help but wonder what might happen were i to intentionally make decisions that way…releasing the things i have felt that have made me cling to useless negative energy.
i can’t help thinking that our world would be radically transformed if we could release the grudges (and over-important-ized-memories of how we were somehow wronged and prejudices and bigotry and inequity and walls we have built) that hold us back from meeting together, from finding common ground. we could choose to celebrate the ways we are the same. in generosity.
it’s there. the possibility. the space around us could become saner, with grace for each other, a place of peace. on this good earth.
living with an artist means you get to poke around inside their passion. you get to see the things that paved the way, that set the stage, that were behind the scenes. you get to hear the stories of mountains climbed and deep valleys (read: chasms) scaled. an artist’s story is not a straight line and an artist’s art is fluid.
it also means you get to go through the piles, so to speak. i’ll play songs for him that never made it anywhere, onto any album, nor any stage. he’ll show me paintings or sketches that didn’t get framed or hung or shown or even looked at. sometimes i will just go downstairs into the studio and page through the painting stacks, traveling in time through my husband’s work. color and space and frenetic movement and paintings that breathe air; all tell a story about the place he was in when he painted them.
in a recent stroll through paintings, i stumbled upon this one. i pulled it out and sat down – right there on the floor – to gaze at it. there is just something about it.
grace. strength. i was struck by the beauty of its simplicity.
it made me think of so many women i know. my beautiful girl kirsten, who made her first turkey after spending a day on a snowboard on mountains she had never even seen a short three years ago. linda, tossing hay to a horse with a pitchfork and hugging alpaca, never before retirement dreaming of such a thing. marykay who wisely makes brownies (gf!) for every occasion, creating inroads for people to talk and share and become a part of a whole. jay, who is zealous about the children she works with at schools, a social worker beyond compare. jen, who stretches herself to learn new things at all times, while standing strong for her husband, stunned by changes in their lives over the last year. which brings me to randi, with a similar story and the same dedication and generous spirit. daena, who grades papers and reads elementary school novels in-between playing her handbell parts, because she is more than prepared every school day. susan, who, singlehandedly, day after day raises three young men and teaches them to see this very strength and grace in women. sandy, who quietly and fervently and proudly stands strong for the LGBT community. heidi, a writer who bravely serves up pizzas with a frantic pace, because it helps her family. dianne, who tirelessly works side by side with her pastor husband, keeping a full-time job and volunteering for, well, everything. beth, who posts a picture of her stunning chemo-bald self every time another friend is diagnosed with breast cancer. my sweet momma, who was kind every single time and didn’t see differences or lines, even in pain, even in dying.
the list is unending. and it made me think this: WOMEN. WE’VE GOT BACKBONE.
because it’s true. in this time in our world, who of you cannot think of a woman or women you know who are the picture of strength, the picture of grace. i want to celebrate these women. i want to encourage these women. i want to honor these women. i want to celebrate, encourage, honor each of Us.
with his permission, i’ve taken the liberty to redefine this painting and design it to be a print, a mug, a journal, a totebag, a pillow, a cellphone cover, cards…i felt that more people could see it this way. with only one original brush-to-the-canvas painting, more people could have it this way.
please forward this to women you know. not because there is a link to purchase Stuff – but because it is a Truth and as many women (and men) as possible need to see it…just to be reminded. add names to the list. in our herculean (and extraordinary) lives, let’s make this a herculean (and extraordinary) celebration.
i can’t think of a better time to further the celebrating, encouraging and honoring than right now. at a time when each of us WOMEN needs to be seen as strength and as grace.
we ARE women. and we DO have backbone.
if you want Stuff
(like prints, mugs, journals, totes, media cases, stationery, pillows)
common ground. we have common ground, despite our differences. and we can meet there – on that good earth – to celebrate the ways we are the same. in generosity.
