black and white and red all over...

This weekend holy blood mingles with the last snowfall as Easter dawns and Spring pushes itself up through half-frozen soil. Crocuses, tulips, hyacinths and lillies are beginning to stretch their green arms out from beneath winter covers, yawning with subtle whites, purples and golds. Soon the spring will really be here and the birds will match their harmonies to the trickling rivers of rain flowing to the lake. I can't wait.

I've been away from my blog for a while again. This Lent is proving to be monumental, changing me in real ways, deep work is being done and it's kept me quiet and still and low. On the pebbles of the River I've been lying looking up, watching the sunlight dance on top of the water and the current sweep life past me, over me. I know more now than ever before that life is simple and in God's hands. I know more now than ever before that I know very close to nothing and have so much more to experience before I really know.

but

his I know for certain

and it will sprout from me until the day I die

and move onward, upward into real life:

there is no need for stress,

only cause for peace

because it's our Father's intention to take us each somewhere,

someway that He alone knows.

I don't have to figure it out, I don't need a ten year plan. Goals and dreams are beautiful things that get me from today to tomorrow unstrayingly on the line that I have drawn from my understanding of how my life should go, but it is God who makes the road I walk on.

i may draw lines of intention

but

it is God who makes the road I walk on

I am a gardener. I till soil, add compost, pull weeds, plant flowers and tend tend tend...I help to nurture life in dead places. Mothers help bring new life into the world too, and they tend, as well as bakers who make tasty beauty from scratch, and receptionists who form lines of contact one person to another. We're all transferring life, nurturing life, growing, tending, breathing...we're all so simple. We're all made so simply and with purposes, certain ways about us that make us good for doing this and not so good for doing that.

It must be so obvious, what we're each meant to do - just like most important things in the world. The truth is the most prominent thing because it's the surface on which we all stand, no matter how we try to marr it with our fake, ugly paints and garish nonesensicles...we take it in through our noses and digest it with the enzymes in our stomachs. Our skin reacts to it, our moods swing along with its currents.

I don't want to come to a conclusion here...really I don't have to. The conclusion actually comes to me, rather it's the thing that keeps me alive allowing me to make my hilarious attempts at complicating it or putting it into words.

GOD.

there is no question that cannot be answered by this. By Him.

He moves the river, He is the Gardener, He is the answer to even the horrible questions of pain and deep misery and undeserved things. He's got something going on. To accomplish it involved killing His own Son. That's pretty horrible.

and into the black of us

came the red from Him

who seeks to make all things white,

alive and beautiful again.

I'm not sure what this Lent is doing with me...but I feel myself becoming simpler, as if some of my contrived complications have been stripped away. And I feel like it's the beginning of a life of taking-aways. Or maybe a halfway mark in a life that's been a continual stripping of needlessly piled-on things. Oh God, lighten my load until I trust enough to go forward with only my staff, cloak and sandals. You are the road I walk on and my very walk.