A Blaze of Silence

Ripe from Image of the Maker, the words flowed fresh and cool and the images framed themselves and I was ready and there to catch every drop, every spill of light, and serve them up here.

But then as quickly as the inspiration came, it fled. In its place a quiet descended, a quilted cloak of boys’ busyness from early until late, baskets and baskets of laundry and meals to plan, cook, eat, clean up from, repeat. This summer’s trademark pursuit of trying new recipes for homemade ice cream, playing word games, and origami. Darker patches of extended family worries, a sad but honorable journey we’re anticipating, and the days speeding relentlessly it seems to me toward the start of school and an end to lazy mornings and long read aloud afternoons.

I’ve been trying to hold up that frame, to see the art. But there’s been a creeping sadness to it and the words would not come.

I’ve learned to ride out such seasons, that the eye and the fingertips on clicking keys will come back. So lately I’ve been letting my other senses take over, for art tasted and felt and heard and not necessarily made by me. A kind of rest.

• A first taste of Honey Vanilla Ice Cream– all sweet on the front with a complex, pleasant bitterness on the back end.
• Percy singing “Wade in the Water” on Sunday. Mercy indeed.
• Boys’ bristly heads fresh from haircuts, boys’ smooth cheeks to kiss at bedtime.
• An amazing art exhibition that left me filled to the brim with wonder.
• The new-spine creak from a library book I got first dibs on.
• Galloping through Peterson’s latest installment of the Wingfeather adventure, a rush of wonder through the last chapters.
• Ten years old, but new to me, McCracken’s Gypsy Flat Road. Oh. My. Goodness.

“What was incurable, desperate blindness 
has been bound up from all sides with lovingkindness 
comfort for sorrow, 
rivers for dryness 
come and drink you who have no money

And it rained all day
With the bounty of new wine.”

In these quiet weeks, art still happened. My making has been more like supper and less like poetry, and the art has yet come spilling, from a sister’s voice on the phone, from the speakers, from the children with their nimble fingers and colored paper, from the front of an over-warm sanctuary and the side of a blueberry hill. There’s a good humility that comes clearer when my hands are cupped rather than creating, that it is all gift, that we are just bearing witness, to His Image on us, in other voices, other faces, other hands.

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