Category: faith

say the word

in the dark times, singing

Three weeks ago, I met a daughter, just out of rehab, tattoos on her face.

You don’t get tattoos on your face so young and so beautiful unless. You don’t get those without knowing what it means to be taken from all knowing and collapsed into container for taking the pain as it comes from the strangers who come from a place from which memory has long been erased and every effort made to replace its former volume with desperate force. It doesn’t take so much imagination to understand what happens to girls in desperate places.

She was gentle and frightened and I sat with her in solemn awe, I see you, daughter, and now––here. I could offer only space and calm (no, I didn’t have the wifi code, none of us did) and said what I could about the possibility of story, to take the stuff of before and bring it before the fire of pen on page, fingertips on keyboard, voice taking stage before the formerly silent self, to sing brokenness back into being. “I like this,” she said, “I need more of this.”

It was days between losing and marking the loss to a system of regulations in the name of keeping safe and I nodded my acceptance when they told me as I imagine she may have, eventually, after they took her away––even through boiling rage against another senseless day in the wake of so long breaking–––meaning to maintain devotion to the hope for an ordering hand, coming where waiting feels like a looping prayer, Say the Word.

May she find that word, or it find her.

Cymatics

Aural imagery

I saw a sound. It rattled the bones of the last days of a time. That time of frayed signposts. Or times. The time was current. The time moved past futures. The time was possible, and all of us at stake. Now I watch for it everywhere, in hope of hearing. It is everywhere, but my eyes are not so good, having been too thoroughly trained by all that would erase her appearance.

Soundings

and wave

What is the opposite of the way we floated in that space, where it held us in that singing silence, drifting to and from? I don’t want to say it. Only that when we approached near enough, we gave names to one another. It was a way to hold and pass between us, all that reflection and depth. Later came a noise to shatter that silence, and we stopped passing names. I may forget my own, soon. Or the one that held me floating, more than mine. I make this feeble note, unsure if I can sound it anymore. It is the scrap of a decimated raft. I hold it, something between here and that endless down.

Not Within

But without

It appears that it has become fashionable to do what some practicioners call “focus on gratitude.” Which is, of course, a universal good. And yet, so often there is something knee-jerk about the reaction, a compulsion that makes the effect smell like Febreze™ sprayed into a filthy room.  Or, at the risk of mixing metaphors, putting a bad paint job on a wreck. Maybe this is because of the well-meaning speaker’s insistence: I have––, I have––, I have–. In the face of any loss or disappointment, this can certainly help. But it is something else entirely to admit to having nothing. And then, from the position of that hopeless wasteland of wrecked person, to meet some other peace.

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