Mining the Dark

A gifted teacher, friend, and fellow Hope*writer, Mara Eller, (@mara.eller) recently posted about being willing to look into the darkness of our lives as a source for deep creativity. She closed with: 

"God invites each one of us to join in the eternal dance of transformation—of creation—and we have powerful tools at our fingertips, whether with paint or flowers or food or words. 

So the question becomes, are you brave enough to venture into the dark? 

I cannot wait to see what you create."

It is true that creatives often delve into struggle, their own and that if others, to bring the truth of both pain and redemption.

In my own journey, having finally dared to acknowledge hints of light after a relentlessly bleak season, I flipped her question and responded:

“The question used to be: am I brave enough to come out of the dark?

After flinching at relentless life for so long, it's been a struggle to dare to hope that light or joy could be trusted. To risk disappointment. To grind through to caring enough to reach for anything good. To try my voice again.

I've been willing to hold space for myself in the dark. To not look away or hurry. Right now others are calling out the new light they see in me and I'm leaning into that one day at a time—God's deep, healing, creative work on the inside—to inform new courage.

So, am I brave enough to mine what the dark taught me? To believe that it's wrought anything good? And to believe that I can paint with words in a way that speaks presence, compassion, hope, and redemption into another's darkness?”

Where are you in the journey, fellow creatives? Fellow travelers?

We can respond to hard events and seasons by running or by turning to face them—to receive them—being present to our own pain and acknowledging the need for comfort, help, and rest. For time to breathe, understand, and grow up, up, up through the crust of the crushing. Our hearts expanded in true empathy. 

We can be the ones who don’t rush in to save or paste a platitude for the sake of our own comfort. But can instead linger, unafraid to sit with another’s lament, to listen deeply, to use words sparingly . . . so sparingly. To know what will be balm, and if we don’t, to gently ask or perhaps, bravely, say nothing at all.

And if we fashion stories, poems, paintings, songs . . . ?

With broken, gentle, weathered hands, we can touch souls with prayers of color, texture and melody, with light, allegory and humor. We can remind the weary that both joy and sorrow are the way of all travelers, but the joy . . . oh, the joy!

We hold God's creative grace, a life-gift to be shared. 

Oh, that we would bravely dig deep of our sufferings, where the seeds of our redemption awaited their spring, and now testify to tenacious life and hope, scarred and beautiful.

Angie's Tree

Some events cut in many directions. This one happened a month ago. Words tumbled to the page...

It started with the chainsaws. A buzzing in the back of my head as I climbed out of bed and made my way to the kitchen. I wasn’t even curious. Just neighborhood noise. Another tree going down, as many have since several brutal windstorms. 

I wandered down to my husband’s office area to check in. 

 

“They’re taking down Angie’s tree,” he said. 

 

“Oh, wow…”

 

Looking out from our daylight basement window, up loomed a boom bucket holding chainsaw-man and, like a knife through butter, limbs fell away.  

 

I texted my daughters, receiving their sadness and surprise within minutes. 

 

“My childhood is disappearing!” said Monica. 

 

“There goes your shade,” from Jillian. 

 

“Oh gosh, I never thought of that.” 

 

All our shade. And our view changed yet again. A few years ago, another neighbor took out a diseased evergreen and opened our view to the bluff. A bit of privacy gone. Now, even more, we are exposed.

 

I liked my closed in yard with its closed in view from the west. No privacy on either side of us, but you could hunker down on the covered patio and feel a bit of sanctuary and solitude. I will miss that… just like I miss so many things. 

 

And here I am, getting choked up over a tree. 

 

But so much has changed and been torn down around us. Monica was right. Much of her childhood has disappeared. 

 

So much of all my children’s landscape is gone. Just a few blocks away, their low profile, flat-roofed, 60s era grade school was razed to make way for a neo-mid-century brick two-story. A couple miles west, the sprawling middle-aged middle school was replaced by a business-like edifice, two stories of brick and glass. 

The trees of their childhood, also gone. A Mountain Ash to a utility company chop and the need for a play area. The scraggly Hawthorne to Ice Storm 1996. A weakened Ponderosa pine got the axe over a decade ago. And lastly… our iconic double birch. Ever the landmark for directions and shade for the driveway of sidewalk chalk and basketball, it succumbed to disease and came down a year ago last fall.

 

Oh, that birch… 

Black-scored, white trunks V-ing up to tall, drapey canopy. The kids climbed her back in the day and had pictures taken in her shade. Without fail, the grands ran up the slope to hide behind her instead of getting “right in the van” for home. 

Always the first to show the season change, her leaves turned to golden stars every fall and rained down like cornflakes on the still-green grass. Sure, she left a constant barrage of stringy branches littering the yard and driveway and street, but she was so graceful with swaying branches and dappled shade. 

I don’t miss the mess of that old birch, but Lord, the sight of her… and the memories.

And now another loss. 

After years of standing impervious, several limbs broke off that stately Canadian maple during the last winter windstorm. Dangerous-sized limbs, landing on Angie’s roof and yard, thankfully, injuring no one. Angie declared then that the tree would have to go. 

Today was the day. 

I wonder if Angie will miss the shade of her maple. A lush, 60-year-old tree, it towered behind our aged arborvitae hedge for decades, home to squirrels and birds, alike. Now she’s gone and nothing will ever shade the same in our views out the window. 

Only memories of shade. Of a life spent here. Of badminton, playing catch, whiffle ball, BBQs, graduation and birthday parties in her shade. Respite from harsh summer sun, a place for our long-ago swing set, the bottom half of the slip n slide slope... 

I took a photo toward the end. A tall center branch with a few stunted arms was all that remained. A climber with claw boots cutting huge hunks that landed with a tremble and thud. I pictured giant divots in Angie’s yard. Signs of battle. Pock marks, chunks of trunk and tree flesh the only remains of her grandeur. 

The mangy arborvitaes now stand alone, long past their prime. 

Will they be next? 

 

The generations pass… 

We lost my mom-in-law a year ago, matriarch of my kids’ childhood landscape. The first of their grandparents to die. 

And in the past twelve months, hundreds of thousands gone to the scourge of a pandemic in the US alone. Many of them also beloved grandparents. 

 

Too many losses. Changes. 

Can’t everything stand forever?

 

But the maple is gone, and all that remains of the birch is a scab of dirt set to be regraded and sodded. Their absence, a void. 

And I wonder... do I see barren or clean slate? 

 

Today it feels barren. 

Perhaps we’ll get to clean slate. 

Or perhaps the next owners will plant the new landscape. 

 

But generations to come will never know the beauty of these trees. 

 

We often fail to grasp the transitory nature of life. It’s only as the decades pass, a parade of loss and change, that these days and the buzz of a saw bring tears.

Life sometimes feels as brutal and decisive as that chainsaw. 

Pieces of your heart and soul crashing to the ground leaving divots... wounds eventually filled by earth and wind, falling leaves and time. 

Signs of healing in the moment, yes, but once fully felled, will anyone remember your life at all? 

 

It all began with morning chainsaws, and I am undone.

 

The Faces of Motherhood

I stumbled upon these half-written reflections that began on Mother's Day. My life is littered with unfinished projects, so in a rare burst of determination I decided to circle back and finish this one. Some of you may find kinship here.



Sometimes the doing takes hold so hard that quiet moments drag me off to some mindless distraction. Today, the distraction dragged me back to mindfulness. Even social media can be the all things that are worked together for good. Wonder of wonders.

As I scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed, I was struck by the many faces of motherhood. Women cradling newborns, tales of sleepless nights and toddler antics, bedside hospital vigils, celebrating plays and proms. So many snapshots and shared thoughts that reminded me of my journey as Mom. So many seasons - all of them simultaneously happy, hard, wondrous, tedious, heart-wrenching, mind-stretching, and somehow good for my soul by the mystery of the unseen Hand that held me.

Soon I was nudged back to real-time by tears painting picture upon picture across my older, life-worn face. Tears that longed for the simpler, exhausting days gone by. Streaks that celebrated the joys, mourned the griefs - some yet raw. Tears that declared I've not yet found a place of peace in the so-called empty nest season...

...mostly due to the unexpected season: watching our own moms, and others, age in ways that we celebrate, but also in ways that keep me up at night once again - anxious, wringing hands grasping for elusive wisdom. Who knew the same uncertainty that gripped those long ago firsts would resurface in caring for the generation who raised us?

What I once pictured as carefree, possibility-full days of walking alongside my kids and grandkids has been fraught with cares and dreams deferred. I wrestle to lay down my vision of this season. There's no grace in how it's looked - this struggle - but much grace surrounding me in it. I am trying to find stillness in this storm, to soak up mercy, comfort, wisdom, love.

Who am I in all this? What can I hope for and work toward? Questions that took flight even as our first child married have had no space or length of time to land as I've bounced from one major life event - or crisis - to another these past several years.

Who am I? How do I fit, how does the rest of life fit, in to the new normal of caregiver in perpetuity, for that is how it often feels: never-ending. In part, this is who I am, what I do well, what I'm called to in this season. But the responsibility overwhelms at times, and I am clumsily learning to navigate, delegate, and find healthy boundaries, instead of mentally curling up and giving up.

This is my face today. Acknowledging the joys and sorrows, the struggles, fears, confusion, clarity. So often trying to hide the weariness, anxiety, depression. Confessing the resentment and sad state of a malnourished soul, but lifting a chin to look up, and leaning an over-weighted shoulder into my Savior once more.

This has always been the face of motherhood for me.

The Long Mourning

It had already been an emotional morning -- revisiting another grief, decades old. But isn't that the way of grief? Sneaking into ordinary days that begin the same as every other: cooling coffee to the right, discarded cereal bowl to the left, morning paper refolded, and me scrolling for news of friends, enjoying insights, perusing photos...

My husband and I were not expecting the old loss to surface, both left wondering at a hidden significance in the timing. For as we wade through this season of midlife, taking lingering second looks at those roads less traveled, we know an increasing desire to invest in things that last. Even the prodding of an old wound can be an awakening. Such was the vein of my thoughts in the aftermath: patiently unresolved, sent up in prayer, waiting raw... a familiar place.

Now, coffee fresh, I resumed scrolling posts and pics, when I found myself stilled by a new photo...
My beautiful daughter. Tucked in close to husband and friends, her sparkling soul of a smile grabbed my heart and squeezed more tears.

Seven years since she first left home, then hometown, to the south, then southwest -- my grown up girl was on her way to yet another coast, a new home, a new adventure. This snapshot a piece of that journey. Her deeply loved family will settle far from here, once again. And even as I trust the Lord's directing her path, I felt every mile as a slow gouge across my heart... I'm so wrung out with goodbyes.

Standing in the kitchen sometime later, I felt it keenly -- life is the long mourning.

I've known it most profoundly as my children moved away. Each visit too brief. Each time to go chaffing the wound of the first goodbye. At least their childhood milestones kept them within arms reach, though they whispered a misty-eyed prelude to all that is now.

I've known it in hopes deferred. Relationships broken. Friends moved on, passed away, or caught in all manner of devastation. So much upheaval added to a lifetime of transitions. Season upon season, loss and change coming steadily, often leaving no time to process. Lives and issues demanding attention. No time to feel. Just move. Do. Now.

And always... the goodbyes.

Everyone's journey with loss etches differently, but is no less real. And I'm realizing that I often diminish my own pain, sweeping it away as pale in comparison to your pain... or their pain...
or suffering of global proportions. In doing so, my grief is shamed into some dark corner with no arms to comfort, no outlet for tears, no truth to lead it back to life and hope. The weight of it, unresolved, a silent shackle diminishing today's joy. And by deciding it does not matter, I am in effect saying
I don't matter.

This revelation brings a grief all it's own.

There is much stirring in these midlife days that I both welcome and want to run from. Healing requires revisiting storms past and a closer look at new issues swirling. All that wind... messing my hair... and messing with my emotions. I don't like either messed, but the hurts have been in disarray for a while. Hair is an easy fix. Maybe that's why I like doing hair.

I'm rambling now...

...and trying to make light of things that need light. That need honesty. That need a level of brave that has me on my tippy toes, longing for solid footing. Stretching for faith. Sorting through distractions that include voices, within and without, "Hurry up already!" Voices that throw out white-washing platitudes... "Let's just plaster you over with a few positive-thinking posters. Here's one with a Bible verse! There, now! Stand up straight so we can read your posters. We feel so much better now.
Don't you?"

We're all so uncomfortable with pain. Covering over is what we do, to ourselves and others.

Sigh...

Somewhere in this jumble of frustration and fear is a woman who longs to be set free of griefs deferred. To take hold of everything for which Christ has taken hold of her. To press on.

I know that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He has redeemed me and calls me His own -- deeply loved, forgiven, accepted -- I do matter. And He's gently calling me to this heart-tending, lighting up dark corners, infinitely patient in my struggle. Amidst the storm, He will bring quiet, turning gusts to refreshing breezes as the Spirit bears truth and healing.

So, despite the desire to run away, I'll lean into Jesus, then lean into the wind, and keep on walking. Sometimes pressing on feels more like being pressed, but I know I'm safe, in Him, in the mess of
this long mourning.

Because of the LORD'S great love we are not consumed,

For His compassions never fail. They are new every morning;

great is Your faithfulness.

~Lamentations 3:22, 23

To everything there is a season,

A time for every purpose under heaven...

A time to weep,

And a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, 

And a time to dance. 

~Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4

 For all that gives rise to mourning, I am so thankful there remains a time to laugh.

  

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How about you? Is your pain cast aside or covered over?

Are you running or leaning in?

I pray you'll let Jesus tend your heart.

His compassions never fail.