Coffee & L'Engle

(jottings in this book are not my own--I bought it 2nd hand)

Tired.  Jumbled.  Lacking the proper words to explain the profoundness of what I feel...what is going on inside of me.  This is a picture of today.

I have been wondering for a few days what my voice is doing here.  What I have to say...who I am and why I'm here.  Questions I usually forget to ask until after I have opened my mouth to speak.  Or opened my computer to write, whatever.  Questions which, like all good questions, come to me in the strangest forms.  Words from a contestant on Project Runway (expressing the idea that there may be a lot of talented creators in the room, but most of them still haven't figured out what they're trying to say), a silly little blog that still doesn't know what it's supposed to be, the Psalm that I read this morning (Psalm 39), and a new old book that I decided to take down from my shelf and read today for the first time (Walking on Water, Reflections on Faith & Art by Madeleine L'Engle). 

This morning I felt like a threadbare patchwork quilt.  The physical, the spiritual, the creative and the practical me's tidily segmented and barely stitched together.  But tonight, I feel like...a pot of stew.  One that maybe hasn't been stirred for a while, but is beginning to be stirred again.  I don't want to be a pieced together life;  I want to be a seamless life.  I want who I am and what I say and wear and do and love to be a walking mystery that only God could create, not a sloppy assemblage of all the various things I am trying to be at any given moment in time.  I want all the meager little creations that find life through my feeble expression to be an extension of all of the above.  A tiny, tiny extension of the vast mystery of God.*

Now in the end, as always seems to be the case, my metaphors break both legs and cease to run.  Because, yes if I had to choose an inanimate object to be...I'd probably much rather be a quilt than a pot of stew.  But bear with me just until the point is made.  Afterall, I told you I lacked the words.

So, did I mention that this book I've started is amazing?  It's exactly what I need to be reading right now.  And did I mention that this cup of extreme coffee-like beverage was so rough that it left me feeling sick all day...so much so that I could do nothing but lay down in bed and read more of this amazing book?  I don't think I did.

*A fragrant, nourishing, tasty bite of stew, if you will...and I dearly hope you will (forgive me my sometimes runaway, sometimes crippled up metaphors).