There are conversations that you have where you get to see a glimpse of your soul. A part of your soul, that you didn’t know existed because it manifested itself at a time when you had no idea that your soul would be effected. I got a chance to see that today.
I feel most alive when I am challenged, and most days being challenged means moving forward, and doing something to change the future for myself. But today, as I sat on the itchy wool L-shaped couch of Q cafe I was challenged to sit, and be quiet. I was challenged to confront the stillness and stirrings of my worthlessness. My past – it challenges my NOW. And for so long, I’ve wanted to just keep my past in my past and I realize that this is my “fix-it” mode, to do more, fix more, and build my shaky little bridge to the other side to my future and what I think will be safe. My guide through this is my pastor: DeAnza Spaulding. She’s a powerhouse packaged in a petite and fashionable figure. Yes, she is pretty much awesome.
When life becomes a struggle – a wrestling match with yourself and with God, is when life is real. But often, when I’m really honest with myself, I want to “tap out” of my wrestling with God and that is scary because P. DeAnza showed me that this is really when we lose our lust for life. Scary.
So when I came home today hopeful not to shy away from the stillness. I found myself going through my papers, and cleaning up a bit, and I found a poem by a good friend of mine from Westmont. Hannah Notess is someone who doesn’t shy away from the stillness and I want to just share a poem she wrote.
How can we know who we are today from who we were in our past? How would our lives have changed, if we know what we know now? Would we be kinder to ourselves, to others at that moment, that we didn’t know existed – that propitious moment that we didn’t know was so urgent because it appeared so “normal”?
(Warning: I might take this poem down if Hannah doesn’t want to share it… fyi- don’t get attached)
To the Former Self in Art Class
You didn’t know the boy who sat next to you
in Watercolor 101 was going to shut himself
in his car, stop breathing, break the heart
of his father and the whole college.
Let’s be honest. His cones and cylinders
were as lopsided, as badly shaded
as everyone else’s cones and cylinders.
When you hear the news two years later,
you search your own tatty portfolio
for clues, sigh if only I had known—
but I want to shake you and say, You didn’t.
and anyway that phrase is a knife duller
even than Ockham’s old razor. If you went back,
with your with your grey lens of knowledge,
to that minute, you’d still be painting.
the same burn-out cathedral under burnt-orange
blood dripping from the sky, collaged with quotations
from The West Land. You thought it meant
You were losing your faith; but look, there you are
sitting in Church, five years in the future,
and wondering (like a good Protestant) why
you want so much to pray for the souls of the dead.
In fact, you could go back and forth enough
times to wear a rut in the floor of time,
but your awkward brushstrokes would still paint
a cathedral that lists to the left. You’d still
stay up all night worrying about the alchemical
substance of the soul. Your grand attempts
at pthalo yellow sunrises would still turn murky,
while the same boy sat silent beside you,
washing the globe of an apple with quinacridone
gold, shading it with Payne’s grey,
the same damp worm asleep on his heart.
~ Hannah Faith Notess
This poem is in the Summer 2007 issue of Rattle
2 Comments
July 15, 2007 at 1:31 am
The past is what it is.
July 15, 2007 at 6:19 am
yes… dealing with it. I’m sitting inbetween what it is to let it be what it was and to deal with it. Where’s th eline to walk? Is this gray?