Trust Fall

 

The cuckoo clock click, click, clicks as I pull the pine cone weights up again. I hung the clock some four years ago, but the ticking is a wee fast, or a wee slow. It requires a perfect setting for perfect time and since I’ve never performed perfection in my life, I wait for a day of visitation by the divine, a day when the clock will keep the perfect time and I will then never again touch the wooden weight, and will eject anyone else who tries. Until then, I admire the artistry, the movement and the sound, and move on to opening the shades and tying the curtain back so I can see a peek of 3rd from the blue room.

This place is all art, the cuckoo clock, the sunlight making shadows on the wooden floor, the quirky, twisty willow in the big patio pot outside and the morning glory that’s been creeping up the branches all summer. And again, inside, the desert rose has been pushing out shining new leaves since the day it moved from a friend’s bedroom to its spot near the window here. I went to a gallery to see paintings and pictures of things I see every day; mountains, rivers, lakes, butterflies, people posing, people doing peoply things. Right now the shaky, quivering, high leaves of the water oak out the second story window in my home is more than I can thoughtfully endure. I can’t render adequate words, can’t take it properly inside me, the emerald greenery cutting the view of a sun-drenched, wispy cloud formation sailing slowly by whether I ever see it or not. I can’t figure out what to do with this kind of wisdom and beauty. I can’t own it, can’t take an adequate photo with my old phone. I can’t devour it and make it a part of me, but still, I try to capture it in this way, in the ways of words, making friends with failure again.

My jolly, funny Wheatens beg for an essay of adjectives to pull together the scenes of their frolic and folly, their carnival of comedy, their shackle-less hearts of joy bounding around a back yard. I would leave pristine paragraphs, heart-melting songs, lovely letters for my grandchildren, the great, great, greats and beyond. The yearning to leave something after I’m gone keeps trying me. And I see only art today, and that gives me a good chance.

Some days all the scenes transform, as if seen through gray, cracking glass, or viewed to the sounds of school bells telling your racing heart that you are late for class, unstudied for the quiz, ill-equipped for another day of the 7th grade. On those days, the roses whine about needing dead-heading because the old blooms are ugly and many, the Bermuda laughs while invading the garden again and very likely plans to take it over for good, the hum of the air conditioner that cooled and comforted only days ago, begins to whisper that I didn’t have the unit serviced this season, so who knows what issues are building in the box outside.

But today, I see art, and today I say I will only see art forever, and face failure again when it comes. A man said that when grief or terrible upheavals come, this is the best opportunity to send your loves notes up to God, to imagine your hugs, your surrender and devotion, to remember your bliss about the cords of love He’s wrapped you into Himself with. He called this worship, and this makes sense to me. In the pain, what’s real remains, and a worthy story has its proving ground, its rendering of art and worship.

You have a worthy story, an artistic rendering of life in its time, its scenes. And the rules of your life are golden and your scenes are soft, no matter how hard, in the light of this blazing context:

All things work together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.

Romans 8:28

Some days you wake falling, bored, unsure, slow-wafting into the abyss, flung away from a familiar plan. You’ve woke with the gray, cracked glasses before your eyes, you’ve accepted their strange fit with their poor visibility and you must strain the familiar strains to piece together the fragments of what you see. What appears is ugly, fearful, mediocre, and not what you’d planned.

I picked up a paper and a pot full of Prisma pencils. This morning it felt random and new, though I’ve done this before. I needed to make art today, so I stared at the paper and doodled the body of my favorite bird. I couldn’t remember how to add the head, but I tried. She looked like she was falling, so I drew her a blue sky in which to descend, I gave her some clouds for her free-falling. I wanted to encourage her, so I penciled the words, “Trust the Fall”, to comfort her. As I watched her fall, to my surprise, all at once, I saw the rays of a golden sun below, the sun she was falling towards, not away from, so I penciled in the sun. She was falling into the light, not into the abyss. “Trust the Fall!”, I whispered to her. I cheered for her quietly because it was morning, and I had only had a few sips of coffee. Instead of the free-fall, I saw, instead, a trust-fall, and soon she would see the sun, she only need believe. Her face now looked of surrender, I gave her innocent eyes that looked like ones who trust until they see.

Today, this place is all art.

Trust Fall

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