golden

The last several months have been a blur of color and emotion, hard to distinguish, harder to articulate. It's helped to think about them as if they were some kind of art piece, like a painting or a photograph, each experience a brush stroke or bundle of pixels. I've hung the months' unfinished Life Art on my mind's wall where I can see it more clearly as I come and go, and over the last few days I've spent some deliberate time staring at it, trying to understand what it is I'm looking at.

The first impression of the piece is quite pleasant. There are broad, warm strokes filled with school, seaweed, sweet moments with family and friends, and time outside: feet on trails, hands on rocks. These moments feel like drinking warm tea, or sitting in the sunshine. As I run my fingers over the canvas, the texture of the paint is ridged, but predictable, the texture of the paint following the curve of the stroke. My hand running over the canvas makes a small shushing sound, and I feel proud and satisfied.  

Up close, though, other colors and marks become discernible beneath the sunshine layer. These are dark, sharp, and strange. The paint is cracked and brittle; I feel sad and a little afraid. They're not as abundant as the warm, peaceful parts of the painting, but they're very strong: a loved one's suicide attempt and subsequent hospital visit, an old and cumbersome life history I'm only just now unraveling, some big decisions that I'm not yet sure I've made well. The contrast and saturation are a little too intense creating an uncomfortable chromatic aberration, the colors fizzing where they meet; I want to look away. 

Uncomfortable, I step away, though I try not look away. As I do, another effect becomes visible. The high-contrast colors are diluted and diffused, normalizing the once-painful hues. Lines scritch-scratch over form, obscuring certainty, like questions I can almost answer. Questions about God, about myself, about my relationships with others. I can almost tell what I'm looking at, but not quite.

Retreating to the far side of my mind room, I look back at the image, which has become beautiful and peaceful again. The old metaphor of life being a tapestry comes to mind, and I feel annoyed by the cliche. I think of the song, She's Becoming Gold, by Marc Cohn, and I smile, pleased with the company of strangers, whose experiences are enough like my own to gift me a song for one hand, and cliche metaphor for the other. I don't quite know what to do with either one, but I have pockets enough to keep them a while.

Just now, as I've been sitting and staring at this Life Art, Paul's words to the Corinthians have come to mind, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am also known." Those words tell me a different story than they once did. This one is both both more and less about God. I may be looking through a dark glass now, but even as I do I am seeing my own face reflected back and I am coming to know myself and my own story-- a story I already know, because I am the author of it, a painting I've already seen because I am the painter of it. 

Y'know, I think there are going to be quite a lot of golden days ahead.