when your calling is a faint orange glow

laughter in the dark

vital abandon

voice being drawn out

aware of her windy reality.

(found poetry in my art journal)

***

A faint orange glows through the fog and gives me hope.

My life chaotic at best; at worst, a failure.

I dream big dreams of light cast into dark. Of artist-birthed life making its way into a hurting world. Of hearts healed. Of beauty and spirit-wind wrapped holy together, bringing truth that frees instead of binds.

And then I live.

Isolated, unfree myself. Wrapped wholly with the whims of beloveds and their bedlam. Unseen, unheard because I do not speak. I long to bring life, bravery. I live fearful, greedy for solitude, shamebound.

They say the area of your struggle is inseparably woven with your calling.

If I was having coffee with you and these words poured out of you, I would be so drawn to offer grace, rest. To make sure you knew you don’t have to meet anybody’s expectations (yours included). That, yes, you have this amazing calling to offer light and life and beauty and freedom and healing. But the failing is the lie.

All the trying, beating up the beauty because it’s not quite beautiful enough.

The fighting with life instead of living it.

And most of all, I’d want you to know he’s right there.

In the afternoons with a three-year-old anarchist whose heart you desperately want to guard in ways yours never was.

In the hundreds of minutes you feed and lullaby your baby, hoping for a soul that knows it’s worth rescuing.

In the confusion of intimacy.

In the tension between beauty-longings and real-life mess.

Even when you haven’t given him the time you “should”. There is no condemning coming from his heart, so if you’re sensing damnation-emotion, you gotta fight, albeit an unseen enemy.  One that pretends he’s not there so you think it’s your own voice, or even that of the life-way-truth. It’s not. He may even sound like people you love. He likes to put flesh-and-blood to his lies like that. But no matter what, it’s not true.

You are enough.

Your heart is worth fighting for, just like those little boys’.

And those women you dream freedom for.

He bled to rescue your heart, so you simply can’t give it back over to the liar. To the hater of your aliveness.

it might look like the easy way out – to wallow, to believe in your worthlessness. Because then it doesn’t matter so much that your days don’t look like your dreams. But think of the alive-in-your-purpose days. Isn’t even that handful worth the fight?

Well, isn’t it?

And I am surprised to hear my own heart answering yes. Oh, yes. 

I don't always dream about Lord of the Rings, but when I do, my husband is jealous.

//We are in a room filled floor-ceiling with figurines of heroes.

My eyes take it in and treat it as a history lesson, and also as proof of how inadequate I am, how much I will never rightfully belong in this company of brave ones.

He follows my eyes, then turns to me with a secret: "you know, in a way - all of these were actually let-er down-ers", says Gandalf the Grey [he is much more eloquent in tolkein’s work than in my dreams, apparently].

My tears rise and spill over, unbidden, and I turn in an attempt to hide.

Because if he sees, he will be kind, and that will be the end of my ability to hold up the dam. I know deep inside that I am only a poser in the midst of true heroes - artists and writers fighting for justice, slaying dragons.

One hobbit in the company of a dozen warrior-dwarves.\\

All this was my dream, after falling asleep with words rolling over on the tongue of my undulating mind:

"I ended the movie with tears and a heavy heart…”

no, that's not quite accurate.

“I ended the movie asleep, drifting off with a heavy heart as hobbits and dwarves climbed trees to keep away from orcs. And the tears came afterward in trying to discern this heaviness.”

I knew the moment I could bear it no longer (and gladly succumbed to heavy eyelids). Bilbo had just taken off the ring and rejoined the company of the dwarves, assuring them of his noble purpose of helping them find a home. But he had a trick up his sleeve, and Gandalf saw his self-deception while he was blind to it.

He would use that ring to allow him to be brave.

But then it wasn't real courage because he always had an out. Invisibility. A way of escape. Something to fall back on.

I knew I'd been identifying with Bilbo along the way as I searched plot and dialogue for secret messages and redemptive analogies. But I didn't know until we were speaking of it in the dark that I was afraid.

Afraid that I was deceiving myself, too.

Afraid that I was keeping a trick up my sleeve, even as I answered the call for bravery.

And my love said: "we all do that. Self-deception. I'm sure you are, in some ways. But you're my hero."

The tears came then. With the realization that I can fight this battle flawed. And must.

But the most important part was when I considered what the trick up my sleeve was. It is a form of safety net. Where I step out into the dark bravely, only because I think to myself, unconsciously I suppose, that I can always go back.

But now that I've seen it? I can't.

I have to take the lunging, flying leap into uncharted air-over-canyon, bow in hand, and let him find my footing. Trust. Abandon. Words that sound so nice and pretty until you actually have to do it, jump. Then they scare you spitless.

But here I am, lunging over open space into grace.