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Yearly Archives: 2012

Time is an unfair friend

It’s insistent march bringing me all that I have and ripping everything away, piece by piece, minute by minute.

I have felt the cruelty of it’s cadence with every fiber of my being recently. It’s more than a reluctance to march in step, it’s a knowing rising up, a certainty that I was made to float free of it’s constraints. It feels like all the movies and books you have ever read of time travel, where the characters get stretched and torn almost limb from limb as they are hurled from one era to another. And then they are there, in one piece, miraculously. And that strain is weighing on my bones, because why is it any less epic that we should travel half a decade or more on this globe, constantly gaining, changing, always losing… til we end – poof – in a puff of smoke. It makes no sense and yet this is how we live. Imprisoned.

The other week I was floating so full of life I felt as if I could step right out of my skin. Eternity felt close, just on the other side of a scarf drawn thin across our eyes. I walked the sidewalk imagining the real me, stepping right out and into all we can not see, right into his arms, into the arms of all who we live apart from. But we don’t join hands between this world of time and forever stretching on. I can’t even grasp a single instant and command it to stay in this world of clocks and earth. If new days didn’t spring up I would not know my children. Yet the sun falling from it’s place over and again steals away everything I call my own. Life a constant mourning of all that goes away. The baby’s laugh as fleeting as a summer breeze. Nothing can we quite hold in our hands, it’s all just slipping through.

But who would want to live in a stale moment? The leaves fall and new winds bring seasons as they should be. A string of family photographs. memories filed away, thoughts, sensations piled up and forgotten. My heart torn to see the days fade like old film and thrilling to hope of what may come.

My baby turned two and all he wanted to do was go on a train. We hurtled through night and day. Looked out the windows and saw only ourselves and streaks of light like nymphs racing into eons. I want to hold him to my breast forever, how can I survive the day he no longer climbs upon my knee? I’m afraid to know him as a man. Who will he be? But I long for him to wrap strong arms around me and tell me he remembers our story and that it is a good one.

And deep inside I know the saying is wrong. They say you can’t take it with you. I know it’s all coming along for the ride. As we whir past train stops, I know the bad and the pain will fade away. And I will be left with the good. He has given it to me. The beautiful moments are forever mine. Nothing else will matter.

9-7-12 . canon ae / tri-x

 

As the photographer, there are very few photos of me with my children. So my sweet man is learning the camera to make images of us together. I just got back the first roll of film we shot together, on our baby’s birthday. Seeing this image was beyond words for me

This image means everything

When I am afraid there is nothing I will look at it. When I want to wish away the past I will look at it. When I fear the future I will look at it. When my face is full of wrinkles and my children stand grown I will look at it.

 

What miracle that this child was given us. What magic, my man catching in a moment all that cannot be spoken

“The little ones leaped and shouted and laughed and all the hills echoed” – William Blake

 

canon AE1 / tri-x . taken by my love as we walked to eat by the sea on Jeremiah’s second birthday . 9-7-12

 

“Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.” – J R R Tolkien in a letter to his grandson

I never dated the man I am married to. We didn’t have money for fancy dinners, movies or anything that resembled a “real” date. Instead we did life together. We worked our way through college, studied hard, worked out, made mistakes and survived a lot of drama together.   and then we got married.   and then we had kids.   all in pretty short order.

and now I have been married for ten years and we are raising three children and a son waits for us in heaven. Sometimes I wonder how all this beauty happened and sometimes I am stretched thin and all our sharp corners rub each other raw. When I walked down the aisle of that white country church I thought all our angles would fit together, the notches would interlock and we would complete each other and become a towering, shiny new creation. After jostling up against each other’s daily moments and living grief each in our own way I realized our differing shapes seem drawn to stab the other just where it will hurt. Instead of the puzzle pieces fitting easily into the slots I assumed they were made for, sometimes the holes remain open and empty.

These seem harsh and ugly words, but if you have been married more than a few seasons I doubt that you could call them untrue.

We  talk and talk of how to care for our little ones, what the next step is . . . jobs and school and homes . . . and then the other day we sat over steaming cups and gave voice to the shift that the years have brought. As the coast changes with the rhythm of waves pounding, so have we. And we gave voice to the questions, THE question . . .

If we met each other today, would we marry?

If we knew then what we do now, would we do it differently?

Grasp all we want and time travel in our minds, there is no answer to be had. Our souls are mated and we walk this life together.

Like rocks on the beach we are smoothed by the waves of each season and each other. The stones silken and rounded by years of cleansing, crashing down on them, They chatter and sing, dancing over each other, laying out a firm carpet before the sea. They are a seat before forever stretching on to beauty, a floor made of pebbles worn raw against each other. Upon these time worn treasures, fires are lit to guard against the dark, to give comfort while the harsh winds blow.

I know no other to live life with than the man I married, as the waves turn us round and round, caressing each other into flowing lines of eternity

 

(and now we are trying to go on more dates, which is lovely for our souls. these images were taken one Friday when we got a babysitter for the kids, ate at the foodtrucks and went to an art opening and music show at a new gallery in town. it was a good good night)

9-29-12 . 28mm . last light-street lights

We finally made a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree. We left this world and entered another – that I think knows of the barren beauty of missing our Joshua.

How fitting it was that we found a wee baby Joshua Tree. According to the park brochure, it is a miracle of nature that these trees come into being and exist at all. And in that surreal place that steps outside of all we are accustomed to, we seemed to voyage through time and space and I felt so very close to my Joshua.

The photos of me were taken by my mister. I have been showing him around the camera and I love the images he takes. Below are some of my favorites taken by him and me, several of which weren’t in the slideshow…

Grief is a sacred journey

and I feel my soul too ugly to travel it well.

and I wonder how is a mother allowed to mourn a child lost when she has too little of herself to give to those she still holds?

I don’t know how to do justice to my love for him or them. Some days I feel I don’t know anything.

But always redemption blooms and I see all the mistakes, the pain and loss of our lives in this world – it was all to break open the seed of this story

and we run free under a sky piled high with clouds and climb monuments to eternity.

We love you Joshua Dash

 

One day we will all be together and all will be made right

“And everyone moved with ease, and everyone moved with ease . . . and we all said Hallelujah” – The Helios Sequence

 

9-9-12 . 28mm . Joshua Tree

The sea tastes of our sweat and our tears.

A deep, salty taste reaching down to all we are and can not be.                                                                                                                                      Step into the edge of the sea and the waves overpower, the water tasting of sacrifice and suffering.

Honestly, I have always had a hard time seeing Christ’s death as sacrifice.

If He is God, He must have known He would rise again. And how can we call it sacrificing His son, if He knew His child would return so soon – beyond death – unbeaten?

And how is it suffering to face pain in a human body if you know you are beyond that body, if your soul is perfect? If you are God then shouldn’t that be easy for you?

These are the things I think when they pass around the squares of bread that taste like paper and plastic cups that are too afraid to be full of wine. And then I wonder if I am sacrilege, if my thoughts are flying heretical around my mind . . .

But then I sink into the sea and the waves rise up to greet me, to pound over and through me and wash all else away.

The waves a million holy cups and I taste my sweat, my tears in them. Then I know He must know more of work and pain than I – to fill this vast depth with the flavor of endless tears and our bodies striving in this angry world.

Maybe I am not meant to weigh his sacrifice or pain against my own.

Maybe I am meant only to know that He knows.

Maybe it is more than enough that He has tread our path and spilled His blood out into this earth. That He has breathed easy next to us and shared a plate. Broken bread, warm and nourishing and drunk wine with friends round a table candlelit. That He has sought our hearts lovestruck and felt the sting of rejection. That He formed beauty, gifts everywhere for us to see and still must watch His beloved suffer and fight amidst a world that is not as He had hoped.

Maybe His sacrifice is living with us through this dark and broken mess to write the most beautiful story, a story that can be written no other way . . . and knowing us well enough to spill our tears into the sea.

Maybe the sacrifice wasn’t really that moment crucified for all to see, maybe the sacrifice is being forever joined to our deep dark selves . . . the cross a picture of His heart bleeding out to heal our souls

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