praying for wind

they tell me my words are beautiful 
but they don’t see the chunk of coal 
smoking between my collarbones 
always just— about— to go out—

about to sigh away to softest ash 
a black smear over my laboring lungs 
with only the memory of a blaze
until at the last— possible— moment—

a Breath whispers the spark into a flame
just big enough to keep me praying for wind 

This one is for the artists. Actually, I'm sure in every area of life there is something like this. Art is the context I was coming from. I wrote it during NaPoWriMo this year, that pit in the middle of the month when you have no idea how you're going to mine any more words out of yourself, when your creative soil is Dust Bowl dry.

It's funny, because I say that I love to write—I think I’ve even told people I’m a poet, which often feels like a ridiculously grandiose thing to say. It's a big part of me, this wordsmithing.

What I don’t tell people is that it’s also something that feels terribly fragile and tenuous. Fragile in the sense whenever I sit down to write I am seized by panic that this will be the time when I just can’t do it. Tenuous in the sense that after I finish a poem I wonder if I have any more than me. What if, one day, I just can’t do it anymore? What if the words just turn into March slush and slosh around in me like dead leaves in an winter-long eddy, only the winter never ends and the slush never thaws and I’m just a muddy mess of inarticulate mumblings? What if I've already written the best thing I'll ever write?

“You’re the one with the words,” people sometimes tell me, when they can't describe something or they think that I should say something about something. I always feel a rush of pleasure because, if I'm honest, I want to be known as that. And then I feel rush of terror because what if I'm not? What if I can’t keep that reputation up? I’m worried not just about the reputation but the reality of it—what if I run out words and creativity and that artists’s eye?

And so we come to the breath. The ancient Greeks spoke of the muse, whispering ideas in your ear, a fickle beast, who is silent on most days and roars with demands on others. In the East there is also the idea of breath and energy moving through all things, connecting and sustaining them. The Juedo-Christian tradition, as it tends to do, weaves together elements of both.

In Hebrew breath and spirit are often the same word. It’s the word used in Exodus 31 where God tells Moses who the master craftsman who is going to oversee the building of the tabernacle, the place where God will live among his people: “And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.” The Spirit, He helps us grow in love and joy and peace—and in workmanship and creativity and technical skill, too. I need to do more research on this idea. But I believe He is the ultimate muse, the breath animating our life and all our efforts, from prayer to pottery-making to poetry.

That terror I come to the brink of every time I want to write, it’s good because it drives me to you recognize what is always true: I need Him. For everything, including my artistic pursuits. And because He is not an impersonal force or capricious godling but the one I can, crazily, call Father who lives still with the scars of what he endured for me, I can trust Him to keep bringing me the words.

This isn’t a foolproof formula for artistic prolificacy. A relationship with a person is never so mechanic. But it’s a comfort, like a warm flame that draws me to it again and again, asking that I too may catch fire and for one small moment light up my corner of the world.

In Other Words…

Still no book or movie reviews! My new glasses should be in today (!!) so hopefully such things will pick up soon.

May your Thanksgivings find you at tables of belonging, with eyes to see the grace permeating your life. And for those for whom gratitude feels like it will break you—that’s okay. You can weep or scream or sit in silence on Thanksgiving too. The rest of us will hold gratitude for you until you can find it again. And shoutout to all you cashiers, food service and hospitality workers, and everyone for whom the holidays mean more work, more stress, and less hope for humanity. You guys are heroes.

here’s to staying awake ~

Aberdeen