Now, You Know

I wrote.

Thinking for what felt like years, he said, "I don't get it."

"Ah," I agreed. "Now, you know how I feel."

Driftwood

i never met a
driftwood poem
i haven't seen.

how can you
straight brow numb clasp not break, just a little
when fibers float your eyes along

way, this way drift, tepid,
toward riverbank scenes moon drippings
crackling wilderness
moss mapped trails...
exhilarating risk, faint nature
hunting you in lonesome
scamper

cold
firelight, ash, quiet. smoke,
in a wet night.

one light log on a long river.

reflecting,

luring, places you've never been
through you
a million uncrawled poems

yet a word
is all you dream.

What Art Is

Art is knowing that there is more than what is there in front of you. A basic element, it is not an ability but a subtlety; not a course rope capturing the bull, but kicking ordinary dust in a morning parking lot and knowing that in a time and place you almost were, something was captured beneath you. You dig with art to find out what it is. And almost always, if you plunge deep enough, there is a hidden limb below. Whether it reaches for you or you reach for it - it is you who has been captured. And somehow, the person kicking away the afternoon dust is not the same person who kicked it that morning.

Art is the risk of self-immersion into dimensions of form, thought, light, and expression. Art is our inner shadow, that, no matter how still or forgotten, has light cast upon it from our deepest places. We breathe art even if its hem does not unravel until we are too old or it is too late to throw it on to canvas or clay or stage or photograph or paper. But if we are breathing, art is too. Art is never too late.

Art is the moment when we risk feeling stupid, when we dip even the smallest cup past our cool surface and bring scalding water to our lips, or our hands, or our bellies, and then describe in some outward way how it makes us feel. Art does not heal, it exposes, and the rest of life mends what is left broken or breaks what once was fixed. Pouring salt or sugar or bandages or just letting God's air mix with our blood to close what we cannot by ourselves heal - that is the rest of this life.

Art is not the miracle, it is our attempt to explain how it happened, or why it happened, or how a cup of coffee and a conversation can mean nothing one day and then everything the next.

Art is the broken megaphone whispering "I am not perfect" and inside its echo is you.

Art is not explained well. Not to us as adults, or when we were kids, or to our kids, or even to the elderly now who graph memories like Picasso as they talk to themselves and are never told, "That is art." That we can kick dust for those who cannot kick dust themselves yet find both them and us below - that is art. The lesser of art is telling them what you found; the greater of art is them discovering what you have said.

Art is the silence of looking out the window and noticing the world, then rising up to experience it.

Art is for the sideways, for the back of the school theater room or the kids who wear elementary splattered smocks and whose clay teacup always turned out so much better than mine. We learn fast and we learn early: "Art is not for me." So we go a long and different route. But at some point in our lives we turn enough sideways and highways and back alleyways ourselves that we notice a different kind of shadow following us, an inner kind that casts opposite from the laws we know, yet subtly we know - it is there. So we pick up a pen or a camera or an instrument, a thought or a chisel or a phone, and then try to explain what we mean.

From the Victim to the Viewers

Driving, I write lyrics into the air, steer beats into my wheels. Thinking about the hundreds of thousands of socially displaced pre-teens and teenagers who suffer silent punishment against the brutal peer and cultural measurement of what is acceptably normal, my heart breaks. Some are shunned at home, some are loved at home, but what has been tragically proven is that bullying can kill, and at the very least, torment.

While I was driving last Tuesday, railroad tracks chased after me in parallel desperation, waiting for me to CRASH into this mental intersection, this common crossroad where invisible kids everywhere, in every school, walk the same gravel steel train lines alone. And for many years, in many different ways, they ask us to help them. They ask us to save them, not just watch them, as they slowly, then suddenly, disappear.


take a grass blade
and slice straight down my spine
any way you cut me up I don't fit right, anywhere

walking gravel rusted steel train lines
walking gravel rusted steel train life

stone throw miles and thread bare broken wings
can't see a thing but two buried hands
that have forgotten how to reach you
with your back to me

don't know how to ask or beg you back my life
mute memory tells me lie and knife fight for my peace
to not die, in silence

bet you didn't know you're on my mind
bet you didn't know i'd need you to survive

could you spare a drink of your time, I'm burnt completely dry
deliver me Sunday mercy, here's your chance to save a life
or does your cross not cross mine

won't you get on the train
won't you get on the train
i'll forgive you all of your hate
if you'll forgive me mine
teach me how to ask, just this time

I know how far I am
I know how far I am from where you are
I'm closer than you think, I'm not too far, gone

walking gravel rusted steel train lines
I'm walking gravel rusted steel train life

Ode #2 to Jack Johnson: Weather Girl

Ain't nothing else for me to do but wait
Salty stormy pale moon rain ain't going away
Least not any time soon
Forecast calls gloom

Thousand beautiful spoons til one fork came along
Who went so right, who went so wrong
It's not all there, but it's not all gone

Remember those two turtles by the sea
You said they were just like you and me
You said, "Come live with me and be my shell
We'll live life full and live it well
Play by the sea, just you and me
I'll be your weather girl
Cause if we're together
No matter what falls from the sky I'll call for sun"

Ain't nothing else for me to do but wait
For you to call in a different fate
Forecast sun instead of rain
Bright noon love instead of pain

Let's change what could have been to what still could be
Change dry land back to our dreams
Won't you come out of your shell
I'll love you full and love you well

Come back and be
My weather girl
Play by the sea, just you and me

Life Observation #4

I observed life and it observed me back. strangely,
neither of us could discern the act from the audience,
or if what we saw was the finger of our own hypocrisy
pointing back at me.

Playing with Plastic

Yesterday, Joey's plastic train officially chugged itself out of life. Today, Addy's plastic talking dollhouse - drained. "It doesn't work, Mommy," Joey affirms, holding up a tiny vacuum cleaner that, for seven short days, plugged into its dollhouse outlet to make a four second whirring sound. The same one Joey makes on rainy afternoons when an airplane whizzes across his imagination.

I gave the house six new triple A tries last week. Today, all six officially failed the test of even mediocre sale price quality. On the other hand, Joey's Duracell's have charged and chugged for almost a year. What to do with these lifeless plastic patients scattered in my basement? Instinct nearly jumped me up, running to grab my surgical screwdriver and a fistful of those powercharged tubes from the closet stockpile, then race back downstairs and, with confident craftsmanship - unscrew, remove, replace, and rescrew talking, moving life back into my children's toy universe.

Instead, I felt a peculiar pause. Next, a draw towards my phone (our computer is with Danny in Chicago), and a blip of inspiration to write.

When Joey wants to play with his train set, we dump out over fifty various sized track, train, and accessory pieces. Between the three of us and Dude, we each entrust, more or less, the same unimpressive engineering capability. The only reason I wind up as architect is because my fingers have 30 years of dexterity built into them. Joey - two. Addy - nearly four. One day, at the vertex of generations, we will interchange abilities, and both of them will race ahead as I run, maybe speed walk in tears, behind. We can't catch those moving, transparent years of change, fastidious as we may try, when life suddenly glimmers in a place your memory doesn't remember. One day they won't remember needing me because they won't. At least, not to assemble a train track.

So after a tense twenty minute experiment of confused construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, I typically wind up searching desperately for just one more of those curvy pieces to connect that small, I-almost-got-it gap (usually found upstairs under the couch, shirking its duties with an assortment of other temporarily misplaced items).

Once I extract the final puzzle piece from its hiding place and snap it into the maze - whala! Joey can get at it. He will proceed to place the train on the track then will pick up a plastic lever that he can push or pull an inch either way, appointing himself pleasant dictator of the train's directional fate. Other than a few rearrangements of accessories (trees, railroad crossing signs, etc.), Joey remains idle, observing from the side as battery lungs puff Chinese plastic up and around and through - over, and over, and over again. The train moves. He sits. Writing now, I realize how strange it is to watch a child watch plastic play for him.

Addy is sitting on her knees, low to the ground, perfecting her tiny, colorful plastic dollhouse people. "They are having an outdoor party," she informs me quietly without looking up. I hadn't asked her a question. But she could feel me thinking behind her, mesmerized by her long attention and focus. Maybe she wanted to reassure me by her unprompted response that she was just fine, mom. That batteries whirring four seconds of sound would not affect her in the least. She was letting me know that I can fix something that feels "off" just by writing. She has an amazing gift of intuition, something she is teaching me to attune; the faint low sound of our mind creating thought only when we listen. So I do, writing what I know I should.

Our house is full of plastic. I know we will buy and continue, with true gratitude, to receive battery operated plastic toys. Big and small. Inexpensive to wildly exorbitant. I don't feel a tugging judgment of disdain against these toys or a need to replace them with sticks and rocks and various sized pasta. In fact, I find them almost comforting these days, visual reminders after we put the kids to bed, all four of us exhausted, that, yes indeed, we do have kids. Here's the mess to prove it. But what inspired me to write versus replacing all those dead batteries today is that I know how much life churns and bursts and stirs inside my children, inside of me. We have hands to move, legs to run and jump, voices to create boisterous sounds of chugging trains and whirring vacuums and every other noisy jarbled undecipherable expression of our imaginations that swings us from jungle vines and throws outdoor parties indoors. God gave us these gifts - our children, of course, and all that life sizzling within them, within ourselves. And while some days I feel drained and ready to flip my switch to off, it is God's blessings, namely, my love for my kids, their love for me, that teaches me just how irreplaceable they are, how irreplaceable today is.

Joey returns to me after wandering around in aimless agenda, still holding the tiny plastic vacuum. "Mommy, it doesn't work," he reminds me again. I ask him to hand it to me. I crouch down on the ground with him like a magician about to reveal her trick. Addy leaves her outdoor party, curious.

"Watch this kids."

Then, charging my own inner battery, the one I sometimes think is too tired to work, I start to make a loud funny whirring sound, creating fast moving little vacuum lines in the basement carpet. Laughing, I see their eyes light up. That sparkling little light of joy inside of them that flashes excitedly when they are reminded that they, too, have magical powers that can animate toys to life, fly planes with their imaginations, and make plastic vacuums come alive the very moment they do.

Then I know. Here Jesus is - our spiritual charger - inside my basement, inside my words - His grace recharging me, recharging us all with the one irreplaceable, unending, unfailing power source - His love. It is what moves us, lifts us, charges us, and provides us with all that we are and all that we have. And in unexpected and sometimes funny ways, by His love He performs everyday miracles, great and small.

Today's miracle? He stopped me to play, paused me to write, then used lifeless plastic toys to move me.