Rinse (First Rain)

I've been dry as the ground, this season. The grass had turned to straw and twine. Smoke billowed from a new hill every day and even the deck wood and telephone poles looked thirsty on the backdrop of crispy beige foliage, parched.

Crumpled and bitter, I've fought my tongue around every corner. Thirsty, threadbare, and dried in drought, dust was all I could manage to cultivate upon these lips, and from this weary heart, gasping.

And though I had better things to do, things that couldn't wait, I pulled out the paint box and dirtied my brushes and smothered the canvas large as life with paint and longing. It felt like air and space, so I opened windows, then, and dotted frantic with the mix of pink and white, and I was a fish, brushstroke by brushstroke, caught and released, and released, and released, and released.

Children slept and hours passed, one and then another, dark but for the colors on the canvas, and with the music swirling, I smelled it strong and sudden. Struck with alertness like a whiff of strong coffee, I recognized in the dryness the aroma of rain.

The ground opened to receive it and my heart opened to receive it and I could breathe again, breath so full it tasted like color. I swam. And the music and the rain and dust made painted fingerprints upon that canvas where my soul spilled in splats and curves. I laid awake and watched it fall until clouds and trees were backlit with foggy air and it's all still hanging there this morning…a misty linger like even the air doesn't want to let go.

The TV tells me we'll be dry again in an hour but I plead silent with my eyes to the sky like I'm pleading with a lover not to go, not to go. 

Don't go.

When You Fight to Illuminate Hope - Imperfect Prose on Thursdays

I am tired and too delicate for this world. 

It all seems to fly at me at once today, an assault of worldly concerns and it feels like just too much and I whisper for Jesus to come and come soon and all the while I feel like a hopeless lunatic just waving my arms as the merry-go-round spins. 

Let me get off. I want the ride to be over.

...

Continued here over at Emily's place for Imperfect Prose. Join us? 

When You've Lost Your Muchness

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“You’re not the same as you were before.  You were much more “muchier”.  You’ve lost your muchness.”

So says The Mad Hatter to Alice in Wonderland.

And it resonates because I too have lost my muchness.  I think sometimes it’s just slipped away…melted… when I lack inspiration and the energy just won’t come to create or tell stories or do the things I know I was created for.  But it didn’t melt.  I see now that like an avalanche my muchness has been buried, rubble-topped and stunted deep beneath… my muchness.

Stay with me here.

The valuable muchness that I have been given, and yours too – the vibrant soul full of life and words and gifts for the sharing collapses so often between the muchness of life – piles of stuff and lists and emails, things to clean and things to store and things to buy.  And the muchness of life is suffocating, sometimes – the life that pulses with the Spirit and love and all things magic and miracle gets buried beneath the keeping up of the life that no one ever designed us for.

Have you lost your muchness?

Are you, too, gasping for grace-swirled air beneath the rubble pile of the rat race?

The Lord is keeping me up at night with a laundry list of the things in my life I need to let go of in order to make room for the abundance waiting outside my door.  Things, obligations, expectations, and even ideas.

There is muchness within me, waiting to get out, kept prisoner by an entirely different kind of muchness.

And so, I begin a journey of release, of letting go of the muchness I hold in my hands to be full of a muchness that arouses my soul, awakens the life of abundance that we’re all designed to have.

  

Where in your life can you let go, today?  What can you surrender to make room for that which is so much more? 

Nothing. Something. Miracle.

I’d forgotten how much I love baking.

 Busy hands and a busy mind -- stress and anxiety and fretting about things to come – had kept me from it mostly since I’ve been here.  A birthday cake here and there, a batch of mix-box cupcakes, a quick glazed little number when company arrives… but that little white tin of baking powder sits mostly untouched these days, especially after my stand-mixer went on the fritz last November.

Tonight, there was quiet – if not in my home, then at least internally – and here I am reunited with this former flame, inspired again by granulated sugar and berry-stained lips and the magic that happens when the elements clash and the fiery heat is applied.

There is peace here, tonight.  It smells like warm blueberry cake and crème fraiche with fresh strawberries and tastes like enchantment, and rolling berry pulp around my tongue I can’t help but awe anew at the miracle of seeds and dirt and sun that collide into this – a strawberry!  A cantaloupe!  A tangerine! 

Miracle, I say, and nothing less.

And, too, it seems miraculous to me this chemical reaction we call baking happens at all, and perhaps that’s why I love it so.  It is creation, a very ode to our Maker, to toss in a bit of white powder with more white powder, and with a little help from the animal kingdom (or an improvisation thereof), throw in a splash of this and a crack of that, and whip it all up together in a glass dish, subject to extreme temperature, and there we have it… something beautiful and succulent is born.

So we feast with our eyes and our mouths and our tongues are transported and hearts are lifted and bellies are filled, and this, too, is miracle.  Before there was nothing, and now there’s something… and it’s miraculous.  And so goes all types of creativity, it seems. 

There isn’t, and then there is, and it is good. 

And it is the Creation Story again and again playing out in our breakfast and work days and knitting and speaking and singing and loving and painting and scratching out this chicken scratch for the world to see – Nothing. Something. Miracle.

It is Monday and another week I am blessed to count blessings, to slow and recognize all these miracles in all their forms:

- A whole house smelling of blueberry cake and strawberries.

- My husband, serving this week on a mission trip in the Dominican Republic.

- A fruitful answer to a long-ago desperate prayer.

- So much wonderful encouragement from fellow bloggers.

- The delicious anticipation of a girls’ getaway with a friend I haven’t seen in way too long.

- A sense of taste.

- A surprise greeting card arriving by mail today from a pretty amazing guy I know.  Return address?  “Left side of the bed”.  Guess who it was from? *wink*

- This week, less talking, more writing.

- Little Caleb, climbing up in bed with me in the wee hours for just a quiet closeness we both must have needed.

- A family’s blessed increase.

- Redefining home and the painful process that brings me so readily to my knees.

- Canteloupe and tangerines and all the delicious miracles that fill our kitchen.   

*Update:  After this post went up, I got a call from my amazing mother-in-law, letting me know that they were passing down my husband's great-grandmother's sorta-heirloom Kitchen Aid stand mixer down to me.  She hadn't read this post, but it was a timely gift, fitting for what I had just shared here hours before. Love when things like that happen, don't you?  Little ways that God wraps His arms around us with the grown-up equivalent of a surprise treat.  *smiles*