Strawberry Stream of Conscious

Myriads of yellow-green seeds nestled against a ruby colored backdrop; I think a strawberry is beautiful.

The inner hollow is practically glowing with minute globes, reminding me of pearls or clear glass beads. Clusters of globes form walls and hollows within hollows, like ice caves and formations you see in glaciers.

I've seen pictures in National Geographic magazine where part of a glacier has been eaten away by the sea, allowing a boat to enter its hidden inner world. I'd like to be the photographer in that boat, bending her neck upward, her eyes the first to see that other-worldly cathedral.

Every shade of blue and white ornaments the walls with swirling arabesques, bas relief as fine as lace. Arcs carved, domes scooped effortlessly, the lines of crystal pillars and beams fall away cleanly.

The photographer, a would-be princess in a palace of ice, is suddenly aware of her plainness, her grubbiness. Warm, pink skin does not belong in this frozen sterility. The glacier is too beautiful to permit human life.

Her camera attempts to capture the color known as glacial blue and the sanctuary where only whales worship and seals sing praises. She leaves sadly, her heart forever changed. Wherever she goes, regardless of what beauty surrounds her, she will long for the cathedral she cannot inhabit.

But the strawberry--I'm getting away from myself--I think it's beautiful, that's all.

Tip of the Day

If you hear what sounds like a cell phone ringing out of doors but no one is in sight, it might be a mockingbird. Really.

Quoth She

Ars longa, vita brevis

(Art is long, life is short)

Current mood: indulgent

Tip of the Day

Is 'snuck', as the past tense of 'sneak', a real word?

There is a helpful summary in The New Fowler's Modern English Usage by R.W. Burchfield (OUP 1998):

sneak (verb)
Its origins are shrouded in mystery ... From the beginning, and still in standard British English, the past tense and past participle forms are sneaked. Just as mysteriously, in a little more than a century, a new past tense form, snuck, has crept and then rushed out of dialectal use in America, first into the areas of use that lexicographers label jocular or uneducated, and more recently, has reached the point where it is a virtual rival of sneaked in many parts of the English-speaking world. But not in Britain, where it is unmistakably taken to be a jocular or non-standard form.

Bryan A. Garner calls snuck 'nonstandard' in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage (OUP 1998).

Some British dictionaries provide usage notes warning against the use of 'snuck'.

askoxford.com

Quoth she:

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

Full Blown Rose

A tightly curled rosebud holds potential beauty and fragrance inside itself. The rosebud is firm and impervious to insects, but it was not meant to remain closed.

Time and the sun's warmth convince it to loosen its grasp and the rose gradually opens to the world.

I'm beginning to think "growing in God" means changing like the rose. It means becoming more accepting, forgiving and loving.

Growing in God is a process of gradually softening, opening up and letting go until the petals drop, one by one, into His hand.

Current mood: touched

Party Like a Catholic!

Friday I partied like a Catholic. No kidding, the party was in a rectory. Someone opened a door in the hallway and I saw the inside of the chapel. Weird, but an enriching experience for several reasons.

1. Who knew there were good looking priests who wear the collars of their Abercrombie shirts flipped? Not me. I can't picture the guy reading me my last rites, but it wouldn't be a bad way to go...

2. Some party-goers fomented Protestant - Catholic tensions, and entering into the spirit of the Reformation, suggested printing a copy of the 95 Theses and nailing it to the church door.

3. I learned how to get away with taking a dog into Burger King and also that the Catholic Church never approved the idea of Limbo so it never existed. I suspect that the former bit of information will have more life application than the latter.

4. Ben from North Carolina being schooled on how to be one of the "frozen chosen" and his response to my question about Southerners and the Civil war: "You mean the war of Northern aggression?"

5. And of course, celebrating Big Ol Maahty's birthday.

Missy and Malc

Six months later they're still talking baby talk (that's the only word I can think of, but really, I don't what you'd call it) and I'm glad.

I think this means we're friends :)

Current mood: quite non-Catholic

Current Mood: independent of fossil fuels for my commute

Tip of the Day

If you try to eat breakfast, talk on the phone and drive at the same time, you might drop your cell phone in your bowl of cereal.

Also, your spoon might roll out of the bowl and disappear into the inner workings of your automobile.

The rogue spoon might lodge itself behind your car's gearshift in such a way that the gearshift will continue to move, but your ignition will get the message that the car is not in park. If this happens, your car will start only sporadically, according to how the errant spoon is shifted.

It could happen.

Endo, Exo

I was watching a ladybug this morning; or rather my eyes were fixed disinterestedly on it as my mind was occupied elsewhere, when it did something that caught my attention. The ladybug opened its spotted wing covers (called elytra), extended its wings, flexed them a bit, then drew them back under the elytra.

What struck me is the way the ladybug is designed, with a brittle exoskeleton covering its fragile wings. What a good idea, I thought, to protect what is probably the most important part of the bug's body.

I suppose the rib cage performs a similar task in human anatomy by protecting the heart, but I'd like more than a few thin bones over that most vital of organs. Watching the ladybug, I wished I had an exoskeleton.

Why do we have bones covered by mushy skin, anyway? I know, there are lots of reasons. The human body is a system designed to work a certain way. But wouldn't it be better not to have to worry about and care for this skin? Wrinkling, burning, washing, bleeding, bandaging. Skin is permeable. Skin is vulnerable.

Vulnerability, there's the rub. The idea of an exoskeleton appealed to me not as much physically as emotionally. The heart is so easily damaged, I'd like to shield mine under a hard shell. I could uncover it when I wanted to, and then draw it in to keep it safe.

It didn't take me long to realize it's a good thing I don't have elytra or an exoskeleton. Given the option, I'd never expose my heart.

I'm pretty sure one reason we have this permeable skin covering is we are supposed to let others in. We were designed to want and need people, and if this makes us vulnerable to pain, God must have intended pain to draw us to Himself.

A ladybug's protection is on the outside of its body. Skin is a poor defense against the onslaught of love, loneliness, wonder and disappointment that life wages; but my strength, like my bones, is inside. The Designer of insects, humans, and both varieties of skeletons lives in me.

Blue Feather

I found this feather. It's small and indigo blue. I want to stick it in my hair like a Comanche, but my dad impressed on me at a young age that birds are dirty, just like the saying. Birds have mites, he said. You don't want mites living in your hair, do you? Go wash your hands.

My feather has a speck, a tiny white thing. I suspect mites are invisible to the naked eye but I squint at it warily.

The feather is shaped like an oar, dyed from continually dipping in waves of blue. The bird it belonged to sailed the sky. Maybe that's why I see an oar and a mast, its sails partly furled.

If I were a mite--no, if I were as small as a mite I'd cling to this feather and let the wind carry my vessel away. If it blew west I would ride over plains, over new wheat billowing wave after wave; if east, straight to the sea.

I'd find a shell with a hole in which to place the feather, and with a bit of sea glass for a rudder, I'd push off for the blue unknown, that distant indigo line, the boundary of the world.

I'm not mite-sized, the feather can't transport me anywhere; I can't even wear it in my hair. I should wash my hands, but instead I stand rolling the feather between my forefinger and thumb, watching it flash electrically blue as light collects on its razor fine edge.

This feather doesn't belong to the brown and green earth. It is a piece of sky, a knife used to cut the air.

I hold the feather high then sweep it in a downward arc. Space whistles over and around its perfect symmetry. It cuts through the haze, that blur obscuring my sight and I see a clean line curling down like paper, exposing a sliver of brilliant light behind the sky.

I ease through the opening and step onto a plateau where I stand with my toes touching the edge of the world, my head thrown back toward the sun's Sun. The softest wind that ever blew rifles the feather in my hand.