Tag Archives: poetry

It’s Here

Come, thou long-awaited spring – decided proof that life goes on.  Bare branches, having lost all great glory as winter overcame resolve and strength waned, have waited {working so much harder to dig in deeper than can be fathomed} and now bud to give birth to glorious leafy-green life.  The brittle-dead fields are shedding that golden debris-blanket in strong March winds where green shoots have quietly emerged unseen, looking heavenward.  The tulips pop up and then out, the birdsong gets sweeter.

Come, spring ~ release us from heavy garments of mourning, from the dry burlap and twine of packed-away hopes to sun-warmed dreams as big as the cloudless blue-sky.  Let the seeds of desire and vision, though dropped barely {breath-held} hopeful into the black soil of despair, now ~ softened in the unseen tomb of dark ground and cold night ~  spring forth with gladness.  Life does go on, life is renewed in the spring rains via sorrowful tears.  So, come spring.

O spring, how grand the hope you bring, we look for you, we count the days, we hold onto promise barely, our anticipation growing.   And then, the crystal-blue light of the freshest of sunrises, a cloudless daybreak, diamond-dew on new grass catches the morning sun and sends it glistening back to You.  We are loaded in daily grace, divine benefits – veritably dripping in treasure.

All my springs*, O Lord, are in You.  All my springs, my seasons, my days, my hours, my minutes, my wretched body-soul-and-spirit, all of my life and new life, all life abundant, my past, my future, but mostly my today – this minute – all of it is in You, by You, for You and because of Your faithfulness.  I thank-You, Lord for the spring which vigorously compels me to concede that letting go or giving up what was cannot deplete nor diminish what will be…

Come now, spring.  Fully, finally.  Faithfully.

And for fun:

cardinal baseball

Winter has passed.  This must be baseball… :)

*Psalm 87.7 NKJV

Both the singers and the players on instruments say,

“All my springs are in you.”

 

Being Right.

Tested and tried.

For various companies, I have had to endure those tests for personality type or right brain/left brain analysis, so that whichever supervisor at the time could try to figure out how to get more work out of me or whatever (or perhaps why I was so dang amazing).  And basically, I have always, whether on a sliding scale or a grid, tested out on the brain thing almost dead-center.  One time slightly more in to the right and others just over the left line.

Today I tried again, online.  One test scored me this way:

Left Brain Dominance: (11)

Right Brain Dominance: (10)

Another scored me like this:

Left Brain 53%

Right Brain 47%

So see?  Close.

But here is the deal.  I think truly, I am supposed to be right-brained.  And that I am actually right-brained, but that some invisible lid has been placed to squelch it.  In fact, I can remember being a little ashamed when the numbers went more right – like I was going to let down the company because of it or something.

I started to do a quick Google search about right-brained people and this is the very negative menu that began to pop up.  What the…

When I experience art…

I love zeal and passion and creativity and creative people’s gifts and abilities amaze me.  When I hear an amazing lyric to just the most intoxicating melody, or read a poem which strings words together I’d never thought of, or experience a painting with colors that  actually make me salivate – first, I go utterly speechless.  Just…nothing.  Then I start trying to explain it in thousands of words…but can’t really.

And I wish to create like that too.  I want to be a poet and a painter, a singer and a writer.  I am happiest  during inspiration, those times heaven just passes through you and you get all things divine and can suddenly reveal them through whatever your art.

Mercedes-Benz: music

But creativity is only rewarded on Etsy and Pinterest.

I am mostly kidding about that.  But you know what I mean.  In job interviews, they never ask you what you last created – which would be so insightful, wouldn’t it?

And I think I have unwittingly, at times,  succumbed to the right-brain-bashing so prevalent in our logic and reason culture.  I actually had a pastor call me forward in church once to speak a “Word of Knowledge”* over me, during which he spent  15 minutes insulting me (and my husband and our two greatest-ever friends) for being creative, saying things like “right-brained people are just ‘differn’t,’ they’re just differn’t.”  And believe me when I tell you he didn’t mean that in a o-she-is-such-a-unique-creation-of-God kind of way.  I crept back to my seat in shame for being openly creative, passionate and colorful, for daring to live as a multi-faceted, colors-of-the-rainbow, life-filled, green-leafed, curious, and zesty reflection of the Creator.  And the lid is tightened.

Mercedes-Benz: paint

Dance like David; Preach like Paul.

There was a contemporary Christian song out in the 70s that I cannot find and I can’t remember the artist or even all the words, but what I do remember of the lyric is this,  I wanna dance like David, preach like Paul….

New-Testament-Paul and Old-Testament-David are two of my heroes in the faith.  Both strong men, Paul was as good at arguing a case for even the logic in the mysteries of  the faith, and quite pragmatic in his understanding the workings of the Holy Spirit – as David was in penning words that that he must surely have heard in  heavenly realms.  We still sing his passionate prose today, pattern our music after that which so pleased the Lord.  One might be able to make a case for Paul being left-brained, and David, right.  For Paul being able to make a point by point, logical dissertation on the law and its’ fulfillment through Christ, and for David being able to lead a whole nation in raucous dance and worship before the Lord.  In undies.

Left vs right.

So, they say left brained people are more logical, analytical and objective.  And they say that right-brained people are more intuitive, thoughtful and subjective.  And I just think we live in a culture that rewards one and dismisses the other too quickly.  Think school budgets: what gets cut first?

This Mercedes-Benz (passion) ad says: “I am the right brain.  I am creativity.  A free spirit.  I am passion.  Yearning.  Sensuality.  I am the sound of roaring laughter.  I am taste.  The feeling of sand beneath bare feet.  I am movement.  Vivid colors.  I am the urge to paint on an empty canvas.  I am boundless imagination.  Art.  Poetry.  I sense.  I feel.  I am everything I wanted to be.”  And I might add: everything God created me to be + a wild-ox as spoken of in Psalm 92.

And I am just saying

Maybe I am just writing a declaration for myself, but I want to create like the Creator.  Can you imagine 6 whole days to create anything you want and then a 7th just to enjoy it all?  I want to re-learn to value what I instinctively valued as a carefree little girl (soooooooooooo many years ago), that pen-to-paper and color and glue and mess and trying-something-even-if-it-turns-out-disastrously just in case in the process there is that one moment of glory is not only acceptable, but strongly desired!  I want to add wild fits of invention and color into the ordered, mundane moments of my day.  And I would like for my left-brain, logical sensibilities to quit hampering my right-brain intuition and wide-open thoughts, which are the beautiful meadow-lands of my dreams.  Why the heck must logic  and objectivity be at war with dreams?

No right-brain bashing.  Not even by my own left-brain.

 

*Word of Knowledge:  This is a spiritual gift listed in 1 Corinthians 12.  It is a divine revelation of knowledge given by the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes these “words” are factual in nature.  An intercessor may impart things God has revealed to them about the person being prayed for, sometimes there is a calling out, like when Jesus told the Samaritan woman she’d been married 5 times and the new guy wasn’t even her husband.  In my writing above, I put “Word of Knowledge” in quotations because in retrospect, and with grace for this particular pastor, he was not sharing any supernatural revelation nor the heart of God at all, but rather his opinion that creative people are weird.  It was delivered as a Word of Knowledge, but was a sad misuse of spiritual authority, I believe.  And that is a huge topic for another day.

 

“Summer Night”

SUMMER NIGHT

by: Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

HOW sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:

The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves

A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake:

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Why Tennyson?  Because I was watching Anne of Green Gables (is she not adorable?) and Anne was quoting him.  I read his version of a summer night after recently trying to express my summer night thoughts and I wonder how on earth I shall ever be able to express, or communicate what I wish to say with such dripping clarity, such thought-provoking imagery?  Woe is me.

Quotes from Anne Shirley~

Mrs. Cadbury: Tell me what you know about yourself.

Anne Shirley: Well, it really isn’t worth telling, Mrs. Cadbury… but if you let me tell you what I IMAGINE about myself you’d find it a lot more interesting.

{ Anne Shirley: Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it. }

Diana Barry: I wish I were rich, and I could spend the whole summer at a hotel, eating ice cream and chicken salad.

Anne Shirley: You know something, Diana? We are rich. We have sixteen years to our credit, and we both have wonderful imaginations. We should be as happy as queens.

[gestures to the setting sun]

Anne Shirley: Look at that. You couldn’t enjoy its loveliness more if you had ropes of diamonds.

Diana Barry: I don’t know about that.

The Garden Alphabet

I admire poetic people, the ones who can express the deep feelings and thoughts of the soul with a new turn of a word or phrase.  I always wish I could do that, but I can’t.  If I could, I’d have written a thousand songs by now.  As it is, I can dream up the melodies, but I can’t get the words right.

But when I go to the garden in the early morning hours, my observations are downright Dr.-Seuss-like.  And they show up fast.  So today, sometime during the time I played in the dirt and pulled the weeds and watered the plants and argued with the spiders about territory and rights and got chased by wasps and picked the produce and swept the patio and plumped the pillows and drank some lemon water and de-weeded some pathway cracks, I observed this:

The purple petunias are pungent today, heavy and sweet with perfume.

The peppers are plenteous, parading in glory,  papilionaceous and pretty.

And it is not just that I have created 2 great entries for “P” for writing a children’s garden book (oh the dreams I harbor), but that those two things are perfectly and totally true today.  In my garden. 

purple-petunias colorful-ppeppers

images from google because I was just too lazy to take pictures…however, I have a lot more pepper varieties than this!