May memory restore again and again the smallest color of the smallest day.~Delmore Schwartz

Earlier this week I glanced up while driving.  I spotted tissue-thin pink blooms curling up dark tree limbs.  I hadn't realized my tightened chest.  Yet when the image of that tree entered my mind, I felt the knot loosen, felt my body relax.  I wanted my life to be encapsulated in that robust pinkness.  I didn't want the memory to evaporate.  I didn't want that emotional stillness to end.  Let me stay here.  Let me string this moment into a chain of days.  I wanted that calm to decimate chaos, comparison, competition, climate change and the tyranny of the urgent.  Just let me off for a time.  Let me off this spinning wheel. 

Was this a prayer of supplication?  Was this lament?  

What am I to learn when I feel this way?  How do I see things?  How does God see things?

I stood at the Shell station filling my car.  Up popped "the word for the day" on the tiny screen that people watch while pumping gas.  Usually the screen is filled with mind-numbing ads or clips of political parody from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  I'd never seen the "word of the day" before.  "Wanderlust-- an innate and strong impulse to wander."  I thought to myself, "Oh, that's what I'd do--wander right out of my life."  It was the end of the day.  My mind felt riddled with anxiety--so many things to figure out at work.  Things I didn't have energy to figure out.  I'd gotten a ticket for running a red light that morning on the way to work--distracted, not having slept well.  The time change messes with me for about a week.  The cop yelled at me.  Harsh.  Unfeeling.  I guess cops have to be that way.  The first traffic violation I've had in over thirty years.  Doesn't matter.  I broke the law.  

I couldn't stop berating myself for being so careless.  I remembered something I'd heard on a podcast a few days before.  The speaker said that in his experience as a pastor, the one message that he believed people needed not only to hear repeatedly, but also to experience, is God's love for them.  He said that he woud never tire of promoting the concept that God loves unconditionally.  No shame.  No condemnation.  I didn't necessarily think of God when I listened to the podcast, but rather my husband.  He is a person who I've never doubted loves me.  A few years ago, a patient commented that I had crooked front teeth.  (And my two front teeth are slightly off kilter).   I felt self-conscious about the remark and told the story to my husband.  He said, "You have beautiful teeth.  Plus your teeth make you, you.  I love every part of you."  

Yesterday I took out all my old dinnerware from the cabinet and replaced it.  The experience resembled finding new words to replace over-used words in a manuscript.

What was it about the dishes that brought me unease, that compelled me to purge them?  They were not ugly. Swirls of lime green, pink, yellow, salmon, blue and strokes of black, edged the plates in a pattern named Fantasia.  I wanted to hang onto them, in a way.  I'd been ambivalent about replacing them for more than ten years.  Could it be that long?  I'd had them for twenty years.  I'd find myself perusing tableware at Wayfair, but could never settle on something I liked.  Last week, I'd browsed online and a set of ceramic plates, bowls and cups caught my eye, each piece a deep shade of blue, edged in white.  They weren't expensive.  On impulse, I ordered the set.  In a matter of days, the box of dishes sat on my front porch.

For you've been a safe place for me, a good place to hide.~Psalm 59:16

I sit in the jade-colored chair in the corner of my room.  The chair is positioned beneath a window where sun can spill over me, like skeins of silk.  The week has been long, and I tilt toward fatigue.  I can hide here in this sunlit space for a while.  Writing in longhand.  I make a list of all the locations God provides me to hide, to breathe deeply.  To rest.

~Wavering flames of candles--the clean smell of white tea and aloe creates a refuge with its scent.

~My Funny Valentine.  Why do I like this song so much?  But don't change a hair for me, not if you care for me...It is okay to be imperfect here in this place where I hide.  Stay little Valentine stay...each day is Valentine's day.

~White birds. They are like a gathering of angels, curved necks bowed to drink from green-blue tidal waters...lacerating me with their beauty.  Do they see me?  Let me stand here just a bit longer.  Just a few moments more.

Perhaps, if I'd known what the day held, I'd have tightly gripped my blanket and drawn it up over my face and declared, "No, not today.  I can't do that. No, not today, not ever."  

His six-foot plus height was almost too much for my orange pleather office chair.  He slouched to accommodate the inadequate dimensions--his chin slanted toward his chest.  I could see the whorl of hair at his crown, light brown curls spilling over his head.  He raised his gaze to meet mine, and I noted his eyes glinted topaz.  He squinted in anger.  "I don't trust you.  You're inept at your job.  I came here to get help.  Do you want me to go out and shoot up heroin?  Do you?"  I could feel indignation rising in my throat.  Taste sourness.  I wanted to throw this person out of my office.  I wanted to scream at him, "Don't you realize that I'm attempting to go through the channels to get you support?"  Of course, he had no idea.  And it was then that things changed in my mind.  Where transformation occurs.  When I was willing to walk and think in an opposite spirit.