Here, I am at home.

 I am always and never at home. 

The rain is coming down outside. Hammering onto this parched desert soil with a force that makes windows turn waterfall and employees frantically try to block the flow of water rushing in under the double doors in front of me.

People walk in – drenched – plastic bags hastily pulled over heads. The scattered few who listened to the forecast and brought umbrellas look vaguely smug.

Us desert folks, we don’t prepare for downpours like this. We pride ourselves on the resilience it takes to grow roots in hard-packed soil. But the free flow of water? It’s a rare and wondrous thing.

It’s a long, long way to the ocean from where I sit.

I swallow the last long-since-cool dregs of my latte. A deep, long held sigh releases. My shoulders drop.

My wild heart, she is weary today.

I am swirling with thoughts of all the ways that we break. Feeling this in my bones. All hard bite and liquid surrender. How life does not give us a single blessed guarantee. How the foundation of all that we build is this wild and vast unknowing.

How, in the end, all there is for us to do is choose where to stake our faith and our trust. Not because we are promised anything or can rely on external security. But simply because we want, and that want asks us to choose.

Because want always demands choice.

Choice. To place our feet upon a path. To walk through the unknowing with all the ferocity and grace we can muster in our weary and hopeful hearts.

For the moment, the rain has let up. Even a storm needs to rest. Seeks pause while it decides what it is that it will become and where it should become that thing that it is destined to be. 

There’s a wild sort of beauty in the sky now. It’s all potential and possibility and life and destruction and elemental force. Letting its own want push it in the direction of choice.

And here on the ground? All there is to do is to wait.

To move through the world and make our best guess of where safe ground lies. To decide how to best move ourselves in that direction. Or to choose exposure. The vulnerability of staying in place, walking out under that ominously low gray sky and knowing that there are times you have to risk in order to fully receive that which brings life.

And even in that, sometimes the forecasted storm never arrives. We batten down the hatches and brace ourselves – cover the windows and pound up makeshift walls. And then, without fanfare or drama, the storm decides that destiny calls it elsewhere, or to become something other than expected.

Sometimes the battle we brace for is actually surrender. Sometimes the security we seek isn’t at all what we need. Sometimes it’s the embrace of the unknowing that delivers us to grace – however wild and untamed and raw and real that grace may be.

And sometimes the storm comes. It hits hard. And when it does, we cannot find shelter. We are swept up in its force under cracked open heavens. And there is nothing to do but let the flood waters rise and yes – sometimes things break and sometimes we break and sometimes it seems that the damage is catastrophic and that nothing will ever be the same again.

And sometimes this is true. Nothing will be the same again. It can’t be – not in the wake of a storm like that. Things are uprooted that cannot be regrown. Things come apart, are ripped from their moorings, are carried along by forces beyond their control. And even when the waters recede we return to find the landscape changed. To find nothing as it was before.

 Sometimes nothing can ever be as it was before.

To live through this is to be acutely awake of all the ways that we break.

To live at all is to be acutely aware of all the ways that we break.

The light changes now. The deep of the storm mixes with the bright edge of what is next. It’s the kind of light that holds promises, the hard and true kind. The kind of light that stirs something deep. The kind of light that only comes after.

Me and my wild and weary heart? We walk outside under that hard promise of a sky. Where everything seems sharply defined. The edge and the center. The brutal and the soft. The broken and the healed and the whole.

We spin slow, right in time with the wind that tangles hair and the cadence of beat and the pulse of light. And we make a promise. To honor all the ways that we break and all the ways that we knit back together. And we bow in reverence to the storm and her teachings. To honor the way that even this far from the sea, the water can still wash everything clean.

The way the water will always wash everything clean.

I return inside and sit with the blank page in front of me. Right now I am called to only two things. The words ready to live on the page and the memory of her hand on my lower back this morning as we walked again into the unknowing.

And I am reminded, once again – that to live at all is to break and to break is to make space for becoming. And in that becoming, all of the rest is made purposeful and good and true.

In the weary and grace and the storm and the raw and promises and the redemption and the light that illuminates this wild and vast unknowing. Without fail. Every single time.

Blessed be.

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I know you.

I know you wear your heart on your sleeve.  I know that heart is pieced together from soft driftwood and tattered suitcases and old skeleton keys and the shards of pottery you’ve tucked in your pockets from all the things you’ve seen break along your journey.

I know your soul glitters with the fragments of love affairs and fiery passion and endless nights of candlelight and whispers against bare skin.  I know you hear the echoes of long gone trains and feel the pulse of memory reminding you of things you’ve not encountered in this lifetime. I know that sometimes, the way sunlight filters through trees can bring you to your knees in breathless gratitude.

I know the path has taken you to unexpected worlds and that you’ve seen beauty beyond measure and experienced the sort of kindness that cracks you wide open.  I know it has also been hard and your edges have been made rough and sharp and then worn down, again and again.  I know that you’ve been told that you feel too much and that you can’t quite shake the fear that you’ll never truly be enough.

And I know you are tired, love. I know the ache lodged in your bones. I know it has been a long road and you yearn for rest and comfort and home. But I’ve also seen you twirling, barefoot in the grass by moonlight. And that moon? She is dancing with the sun and this wild spinning earth, coaxing the ocean to crash on the shore, over and over again, just for you. And I know there are stars traveling unfathomable distances and burning to dust when they enter our atmosphere so that you can breathe a little bit of light into your soul when you need it the most.

And then there is you. Throwing open the doors, ushering the spirit inside and keeping your rebel heart pulsing strong. You. Keeper of wonder. The child of every revolution this world has ever seen. What power you hold. What tremendous mystery and magic live in your center. How blessed this world is to know the mystical, untamable brilliance that is you.

Just look around you. At the beauty and the bliss. At the terror and the teardown. At the utter certainty and every last unknown. It is all a part of your story. Part of how you were made. Embers of grace and grit. Ashes of breakdown and breakthrough.   Born of fire.  Made of light.  Badass with a side of sacred wisdom.  Exploding like fireworks across the night sky.

You. Thank you for sharing this earth with me.

Blessed be.

Jeanette

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Why are you so determined to keep your wild silently inside you?   Let it breathe. Give it a voice.  Let it roll out of you on the wide open waves.  Set it free.

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I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art”.

Bella looked at my quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world.

“Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real”

And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student.

Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be.

~~~~~~

{art is always real. all of it.  even the stuff you don’t understand.  even the stuff you don’t like.  even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend}

that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder?    still art.

the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critqued to death?  it’s art.

the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world?  definitely art.

the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows?  art. art. art.

the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light.

the dress you want to sew. the song you want to sing.

the clay you’ve not yet molded.

everything you have made

or will one day make

{it’s all real, every last bit.   because there is no such thing as art that is not real. bella said so}

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