wordpress.

anyone want to learn me on how to switch over to wordpress? it is time.

the fire escape on the old schoolbuilding.

I sit towards the left, backhand corner of the large classroom at the end of the hall, generally. The room is blue and white, flaking with age, Victorian colors. In the afternoon, I scratch a tree in the faux wood desk, Do you know you are not real maple? Do you know? I smudge the branches out by three o'clock, so I can leave nonchalantly.

There is a fire escape, too, out the window, which I watch with careful eyes. The casing on the frame always makes me think of the crude ivory elephants from India. The staircase itself is of a hidden meaning, green and blistering iron, otherworldly. It's thirty-foot skeleton sways somehow, sways with suggestion, to keep them alive and me involved. The steps themselves rasp beside the brick wall, branching this year to the other century and its deep water, with a movement that is, I would assume, strangely familiar. But the stairs still scare me like ghosts when I see them shifting up and down in the wind.

The wrought metal seems to be for thinner scholars, those lettered intellectuals with blue monogrammed sweaters, and narrow ties. There is also a solid crank, several decaying leaves musty and feral, and a severe unrest, disabled and forgotten and blank, a severe unrest that I must go stand outside underneath and see.

Four hours ago, the getaway swelled and wrinkled, what was left of it: a reedy expression of railing and lattice, and a hard shell of uncertainty by which I've always seen it move. Tomorrow, if the other buildings turn and notice, the palisade will melt to the wall. The frayed establishments bordering the iron are impish and well informed of skies, a belt of calculated systems.

When the undergrads pack up and leave slowly, like tourists or troubadours, I mostly close the curtain, and after I go the fire gate never is fully there.

crows & locusts.

The fields are bleeding.
It's been seven years, they say.
The foxes ran through and set the wheat on fire
after the ruling and
the tribes melted into their armor.
I drop this pottery in the dust
by my feet, and it breaks and scatters
before I can gather the blue-hewn chips into
neat, small piles with my hands. The
burnt powder on my forearms
was always red and dark, ready
for hotter deserts or a more sacred
harvest, so I will stand under this tree
even if this tree doesn't want me.
          The women are still there with their baskets.
You told me my hair was like rain
or looked like I had stolen something
in the afternoon light, and I vended
the rocks you left just so you'd tell me
to stop. Even so, you unhitched
the smoke-dried knots and pulled
down the fastened arches between the mounts.
Everything was flooded then.
Now, we walk on brittle land
and crack whips without thinking.

The fire is coming down.



"I could have stretched forth My hand and stricken you...
and you would have been effaced from this earth.
Nevertheless I have spared you for this purpose in order
to show you My power..."
          Exodus 9:15-16

lit for the sum.

In an effort to remember the books that I keep putting on my to-read-in-the-summer list in my head, here is a listing of what I am reading and what I fully intend to go through as soon as I'm done with Studies in European Lit. I would love more recommendations though.
My list includes:

1. A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
2. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
3. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers - currently reading
4. The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
5. Bleak House by Charles Dickens - currently reading
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

the weight.

Somewhere inside of me is a place that hopes that heaven isn't like the pictures on my grandfather's wall in the old, mustard-colored den. The room was a restful place, with a mahogany davenport, books, and a small black and white television. But I will never be able to fully separate the wispy light and the transparent garments of the youthful angels on the wall from that spot. Baby sheep, a twinkling staircase, and a Jesus with a halo disc around the back of his head were smattered over different size paintings on several different walls.

I would sit on the burnt orange shag carpet and wonder, Is heaven really all pastels? Will everything just glare, too clean to touch? I don't think I want to stay for all of eternity in a chalky temple that looks hard, lonely, and like an ancient Greece emptied of all its people. I'd feel guilty as a child, as heaven was supposed to be the place where there was no suffering or tears, but everything there seemed very singular and lonely to me. In my heart, I'd secretly decide that I would stay on earth where there were warm rooms with roaring fires and family and comfortable, cushy chairs thank you very much. Hopefully God would change something up with heaven by the time I got there. 

As of late, these pictures in my mind of celestial beings and glory have been challenged, and I am now understanding that heaven (a word that has consistently had a gold glow around it in my head) is not simply a place with white bunnies and a pale yellow sky. The word "glory" in the ancient languages actually meant "weight" or "substantial." In glory is where the actual weight is. What is on earth is the see-through, and everything in this eternal place will be so much more potent. God is not some wispy, metaphysical thing...He is more substantial than anything in this world and quite different from the Renaissance art found in most museums. In a place where that kind of Being eternally dwells, food and fragrance and color will be so contrasting, so intense and thick.

I take comfort in these images that the Lord has started to reveal to me. I don't very much understand it yet, but it is so reassuring to know that heaven isn't simply up above the ceiling and sky but beyond. Which means that it could be in a pocket of air that I can't quite see in the corner of my room or somewhere else that I can't quite interpret (a wardrobe?). Makes me think of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time. I remember being in about the fourth grade and trying to understand the complexities of Meg's "tessering."

There are so many impressions of God in this world: the different realms of art and beauty and music and emotion are brilliantly wrapped up and entangled in everything. I see this in the way C.S. Lewis describes creation in The Magician's Nephew and Dicken's illustration of wine and twilight on the window seat in Bleak House. I'm seeing now that the devil has sought to flip our view of heaven upside down - he is clever that way, and in response, the church has cheerfully charged into acceptance of these theologically incorrect and simplistic paintings of the eternal.

David Wells has suitably captured this issue in culture today: "It is a condition we have assigned Him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life. . . . Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality.”

hearth.

I am home, sitting by the fireplace upstairs. The brown afghan on the couch is warm but not too warm, and Mom just made lemon tea and went downstairs. I have my Bible and Bleak House on the pillow, and Addie's staring out the window at the big field and the pine trees next door. The rest of the family is downstairs, about to start a movie, something with Claire Danes I think.

I feel so peaceful, and so full of thinking. I've been writing on the backs of napkins and Mapquest directions for the last couple of weeks, and Els gave me the idea to write unplanned thoughts on note cards (carried in my bag of course) like Anne Lamott talks about in Bird by Bird. I try to write in a little notebook, but it always gets left behind on my desk or in the living room. I think I'm going to need to sort for awhile.

Today we went out to western MN to visit Alex, and when we got there, we drank hot chocolate made with Dutch cocoa from some Mennonite farmers, and then we went antiquing. I fell asleep on the way back because the sun was hot on my cheek and my arm, and Els has always been a good driver.

Also, last night I dreamt about an ocean that was rushing into the sky, and we were singing to the Lord and it was echoing everywhere. I think I know what it means but I'm not sure...I'm open to discussion if you have a special knack towards dream interpretation and want the details.


As soon as I got home, Dad mentioned that we might take an impromptu trip up north to stay in a cabin on the north shore. We might just sit and watch the boats in the frozen wharf or hike in the woods (snowshoeing?). What I'm wondering is if it's possible to stay in a lighthouse...If you have any special information or know of any peaceful places near Duluth or Ely, let me know.

Trying to slow down the time, learning to love solitude.