Ampersands and semicolons

The wind is cold and my swollen eyes take in the Monet-by-midnight landscape of 4 a.m. A city glows pink over the ridge. Mist has just begun to drift upward off the wet grass. I draw in a breath of the air, all crisp like an apple sour-ripe from the short summer.

Sitting here means staying. Shutting down and clinging with eyes squeezed shut. It's everything that could be disintegrating back into the stuff of dreams like sunrays being swallowed by mist. After all, you still don't know who you're running from, or what you're running toward.

Prudence demands you wait, then, stuck in a mountain of remnants of life like an incomplete sentence, a hanging semicolon, a song ending in the middle of a verse.

The whole earth is violent in her beauty, the last flame before death and ice and winter. Sap runs dry and leaves scream red-faced as they are drained of life. The green trees yet to starve of moisture as water recedes deep into the earth's skin, they are silent witnesses to the bloodbath. They speak only in whispers brushing each other in the morning breeze.

The next hour the mist returns to mute the bold display unleashed by the rays of light breaking through. Rain descends, a surrender of the clouds to the dying earth, spiraling away from light and life, shot out of the slingshot of the sun's pull, path marked out and measured before we are far enough from her again that she will begin to pull us back, her fingers drawing spring from the fleshy brown earth as she reaches through emptiness to bring us back into the embrace of the universe.

The rain rushes down like a wounded woman's weeping, surging and quelling, as if each drop is an apology for how rain will behave in the earth in the colder days coming, splitting her and heaving her upward, expanding and gnawing up out of her wrinkles and scars.

I stand up from my swing, and realize that the rushing sound in my ears is not the wind bringing the rain ever toward us over the invisible hills. It is a cascade of words about something that is nothing - now in this time of everything. Why write about nothing when there are so many things hovering unsaid in the space between us?

I suppose words have always been the blanket I pull over myself like chain-mail against the world's evils. Falling down in typewritten font from the creased vanilla of old, sturdy pages...literature and plays and poems, whole volumes ravenously devoured in a single afternoon. Stories written that plumbed the darkest sides of twisted lives and left adult readers shaking their heads and wondering how a little girl with an innocent face got that in her head. Poems unwritten rattling around in the racing mind on walks through the forest. Lyrics to songs never recorded scribbled on the backs of receipts and in notebooks and journals. Now today it is the clickety clack of typing, the orange publish button hovering, a day when every authoress can read her words in print and it seems as though we're more connected and more isolated than ever before.

I swim in the proverbial primordial soup of self-awareness and here there are puzzle pieces of my life floating about me - Indian music and pages of a Bible and the words of a prophet that have always caught the ear in their foreignness. I can't begin to decipher where this return to the beginning will take me. Like the song that's playing broken record in my mind - I don't know where this journey will end, but I know where to start...

I am afraid of encouraging anyone with false hope; I hold my heart like a poker hand closer to me. No one is going to get a chance to break it this time around.

Prompt: "Write"

Undone

Venus on the horizon at sunset

Let your boat of life be light, packed only with what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink, for thirst is a dangerous thing. (Jerome Klapka Jerome)

I have a nightmare, excruciating. I am with my husband and two of my children, the eldest and the youngest. We take a sightseeing ride over St. Anthony Main, where the Mississippi burgeons for the first time into her full glory as a major river of the United States. The river is 300 feet below us, huge boulders slicing her flow into streams. Suddenly the car we are in tips haphazardly to the side, nearly spilling us to our death over the rocks. My husband grabs my son's ankle and my daughter grips the rope. Then we huddle together in the bottom of the car, shifting all our weight to the other side, trying to keep it upright. I beg my sleepy husband to hold tight to my son's ankle or I will go mad.

I wake up sweaty, and it is time to get up and get ready for work. I put on my scrubs, my PhD(c) lab coat, my stethoscope. I head back to the ICU to pick up a patient. I face the scorn in the eyes of the coworkers. I try to find the cath lab to drop this patient off for his procedure. I am squeezing the bag that connects to oxygen and the tube through which he breathes while comatose. I can't find the lab through the maze of construction in the hospital, and I am begging, "Lord, if this is a nightmare, please let me wake up." The stress mounts, and I am undone.

I come up another level, this time really to consciousness. At least, I think so. I am drenched, weary, fearful. What if this is just the third nightmare-within-a-nightmare? I have visions of the movie Inception. It is not until 30 minutes later, pulling on my yellow jacket and heading out the door to church, that I am sure I am really awake this time.

This is PTSD. The nightmares and flashbacks bring me continually to my knees, so that I pray even in my sleep. How can I deny that God is moving through the most painful season of my life, when all the traumas of past days come crashing down and I can finally hear the sound of the walls in my heart moaning under the pressure of new stress, collapsing and clouding my mind with their dust and grit.

In Deuteronomy 31, God sings through Moses' mouth these words to Israel:

I would have said, "I will cut them to pieces. I will wipe them from human memory," had I not feared provocation by the enemy, lest their adversaries misunderstand, lest they should say, "Our hand is triumphant, it was not the Lord who did all this." See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no god beside me: I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver you out of My hand. For I lift up my hand to heaven and swear, "As I live forever, if I sharpen my flashing sword, and my hand takes hold on judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and will repay those who hate me." Rejoice with me, O heavens, bow down to Him, all gods, for He avenges the blood of His children...and cleanses His people's land. (Deuteronomy 31: 26-27; 38-41; 43)

He wants me undone. He wants me struck open like an overripe melon, spilling my guts and hollowing out a place for Him. He wounds me so that He may bind me, so that I might see the awesome power of His hand in my life. While I am hurting, I sit in the palm of His hand, in His grip. When I am whole, it is He who makes me so. He empties out my life, so that I might simply live. He sweeps away distractions and leaves only that which matters most, so that I might notice the simple joy and the all-consuming love that surrounds, instead of all the cobwebs I've stored up in my spiritual house. It is as if the furniture has been removed, and standing in the echoing room are my husband and children, my family and friends, just people - nothing else. The sun streams in the windows and hits the whitewashed walls, and I am undone again, this time by the incredible beauty of His creation instead of the cardboard crowns I have constructed life long. I can say, this day, that I care nothing for appearances, abandoning them for the absolute, pure glory of God.

Glory to God, the beginning and the end, Who was, and is, and is to come. (Revelation 1:8)

Longing for home

The silver of moonlight's dawn shivers over the last stubble of hay in the field. Headlights glow their yellow incandescent as they snake along sleepy down the country road. I hear the rattle of the oak leaves percussive against the bare arms of their mother's trees, feel the vibration in the frozen ground as the wind rushes like wave of thunder through the pine stand.

I am alone on the hill in the darkness, watching stars appear like pinpricks in the night sky. It is a day of brokenness, the emptiness of my hollowed out heart palpable in the church surrounded by strangers and the echo of a pastor's tears unfamiliar in my ears. It grows pregnant in my chest as I drive aimless through the countryside, alone with Jesus and my tears. Music flows in fragments through the ache, sister carries her loneliness in a hidden hollow in her chest, and sometimes all she wants is an end to the long, long night...her bow is on the strings, and the tune resonates in the open space, to show us how emptiness sings.*

I plead with Jesus, feel Him in this space with me, beg Him to please take me home. End the long long night. Bring me peace. Tears flow like raindrops down windows, beat on the soul like ground too parched to soak up this sorrow. Sometimes in the middle of a party I just want to go

Home.

Yesterday the heartache of friendships lost last year swirled up in the drain like so many tidbits of uneaten food in the sink, ten years gone in the blink of an eye with not a shadow of the relationships left to warm cold hearts. I hear it again, those friends fall around me like pearls from an open string, the necklace of life broken, torn and losing it's beauty in one wild rush out of the hollow of my heart. My scream is the dustpan scraping the floor, my wail the swish of broom and the quick descent of all that wild love into the trashbin.

The cat sits sentinel against my leg and I am a field stone on the hill. The silver of the moonlight dances at my feet. I am so still and quiet a deer glides like a ghost out of the treeline, tawny sleek in moonshine, almost close enough to touch. But I am riveted in the dark shadows, and she is quickly gone. The dog senses the sorrow friable in the winter night air and her moan gives voice to the pain as I beg again.

Just take me home.

Take me home.

A tractor roars to life rusty on the valley's edge. I am sliding like the wheels in the muck. I watch it crawl down the arched back of the far hill, the next farm over alive with corn dryers and cows lowing and fertility. I sit on our dry ground, just a witness to this busyness.

The headlights slide golden down the road's curves and the children echo laughter from the porch steps. Husband slides warm next to me, but there are no words for this pain and the explanation is just a whisper.

I want to go home.

I can't live like this, a stranger in my own skin. I live anyway, I make my mind busy at work, I surround the silent echo in my heart with the crash and slip of a hockey game, my dad's voice a familiar rumble next to me on a day of strangeness.

And all day, I beg. And all day, Jesus says no.

Nothing swallows me in the black night and I reemerge lost and with no answer. The family whirls with laughter and tears and piano notes and wolf-pup game howls. I am drowning in a sea of life when all I want is heaven.

I choose life, over and over again, but it is a compulsion, a duty, something I give like an unbirthed baby cold in the grave, a gift of a frozen heart to a Savior who sweats blood and begs too, not to drink this cup. I choose life where the guardrail ends at the river's edge, I choose life with a credit card burning a hole in my pocket and guns and ammo for sale just down the street. I choose life when I stand stock still at the edge of the treestand twenty feet in the air above the sweet death hidden in the bracken. I choose life when I could just lie down on this cold hill and never wake up, turn into a field stone and sink into winter's earth, cover myself with the first blanket of snow.

For He drank anyway, the thunderous wrath, the stones split in two, the world flooded with darkness as He breathes last on the Cross. And so I follow. Bitter draught of life.

Oh, to be eighty instead of thirty-two.

Oh, to be close to the release, the relief, the Love. 

*lyrics from Christa Wells' How Emptiness Sings