It's not difficult.
Anyway it's necessary.
Wait till morning, and you'll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.
Fumble for the light, and you'll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.
You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen - ballpoints don't always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There's nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are your tools.
Never mind about crossing your t's, dotting your i's -
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.
Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices.
or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:
words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.
‘Writing in the dark’
Denise Levertov
Every time I write a blog post I pray for God’s speech to flow through me; I pray I might hear the sound of that voice that does indeed ‘have the power/ to make the sun rise again’. Most of the time I feel I am ‘fumbling’ for what is out of reach in the darkness: the darkness within me and within the world, the darkness of a mind clouded by medication, the darkness of a mind so overset by depression she is unable to see the hope that is set before her.
Yet as in writing poetry, Levertov infers that in life, too, it might take practice to keep the lines clear enough to see where I might be going, and where God might be arriving. And as we all know, practice takes time. Levertov encourages me to be patient while I keep practicing the attention it takes to hear the voice of God. I need to be disciplined enough to keep ‘the tools of my trade’ by my side at all times, because God might speak through them - at any time.
And so I keep writing, painting, printing and making photographs, and trying to play with all the other creative outlets I delight in, in the hope that God will use whatever I produce, somehow, someday. Levertov says such obedience to keep doing what God puts before me to do whilst waiting for further revelation to come, is surely obvious; ‘it’s not difficult’ to keep practising so that I might be ready, Spirit willing, to hear God speak out of the darkness to me those words that might be spoken ‘only once in a lifetime’.
What He sees
is Christ
in each of us …
What He sees
is …
our oh so imperfect attempts
at sacred art, whose attempt
is sacred.
He reads it as sacred: holy writ.
What He see is Christ the work
of art, the masterpiece.
What He sees
is what any parent sees
in the refrigerator art of the beloved child:
perfection.
We are perfected in His eyes.
It only takes His eyes.
from ‘What He sees’
Mia Anderson
practice will reveal. Canon 7D. f2.8. 1/100. ISO 100.
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