Monday, October 24, 2011

On Sunrises at 47

DiDi took me to watch the sun come up over the ocean today. It was a present; my birthday is later this week, but the weather is predicted to turn.

The experience reminds me of motherhood.

You wait as the sky begins at black, flat stomach busy only with consumption.

And then the sky tinges gently at the edges, softening, roundness forming from a place you can't see.

The bulge grows larger, a gradual magic that happens before your eyes, apparently without motion.

Your view of the universe changes as you watch. The sky so stable and predictably blue or steel striates suddenly into pink and orange and violet. The world is changed as you watch; everything is colored by this miracle unfolding.

Finally it crowns. Gloriously unique, magnetically miraculous, filling your heart with the wonder of creation and the joy of possibilities.

You watch as it continues to rise, distance increasing. The colors fade as it progresses, as if newness and color are one, both of them worn away by time.

Throughout the day you check on it, this creation you remember as wonderful. You watch it and set your clock by it and live your life by it and are grateful for it. Every hour.

Inevitably, bittersweet, you watch it go away again. A burst of color if conditions are right. A cloudy withdrawal if they are not.

And you stand in the dark, serenaded by stars that sing or drenched by their weeping.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Carol and David's Bathsheba

I found this beautiful painting titled "Bathsheba" on my friend Carol Douglas' website:

I love the way this picture makes her look like she is lying at the bottom of a pool, as if light and shadows flicker across her body through the water. I love the slight smile on her relaxed face, comfortably naked. Comfortable in her soft beauty.

It differs from the vision of beauty we imagine when reading 2 Samuel 11.

But I love this vision of Bathsheba, resting in her moment of fecundity, unaware of what was about to happen.

I love what this picture says about David; lover, dancer, poet king, sinner, man after God's own heart.

No wonder a child like Solomon would be produced from such a union.