A broken tulip

Leave me alone with God as much as may be.

As the tide draws the waters close in upon the shore,

Make me an island, set apart,

alone with you, God, holy to you.

Then with the turning of the tide

prepare me to carry your presence to the busy world beyond,

the world that rushes in on me

till the waters come again and fold me back to you.

St. Aidan

She is old, the grandma under the tree. Her fluffed white hair traces a halo for her head and her hands hold a large book. She sits squarely on her walker, feet in the grass. Sunlight dances through the trees to break on her shoulders, spattering light onto her book. I see her and I think, “That is rest.”

So often I have thought of rest as the cessation of activity, but it is not. It is a conscious rootedness in the love of Christ, expressed in both joyful play and trusting silence. Laughter and silence, it seems, are my sun and my moon: I need both, in continual cycles. Just laughter leaves me over-tired. Just silence shuts down my soul in a sleepish laziness.

Laughter comes by gazing into the eyes of my Joyous Lover.

“You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness;
Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You
With the oil of gladness above Your companions.”

Hebrews 1:9

We sing Jesus, Man of Sorrows, every year. But God names Him Jesus, Man of Joy above all joy. It’s a joy that fills the soul and splashes out and over the edges.

Consider the ravens, Jesus says; and I consider how they pick up anything small and shiny. These happy gifts that come each day are my shiny pieces, my moments of glory. To rest, I must pick them up and hold them to the light, watching the streams of diamonds pour off, jewels that I cannot hold and that will buy me nothing: the times I have squished mud between my toes, when I have danced in rain, the day I shared a juicy mango with a friend, digging good fairytales out of musty books, hiking for hours along the lake, dusting off my watercolour set, finding giants and lollipops in the clouds, and spotting stars between the buildings of Chicago.

As a creative, I commit to play. To play with others and to play in the creation God has made. To willingly taste and see that God is good.

“There will be silence before You, and praise in Zion, O God…O You who hear prayer.” Ps. 65:1,2

If my sun is laughter, when the beautiful night of silence comes, the flowers I adored in the day are made elegant in the moonlight and the dusk air carries a romance I never felt in the day.

For me, creating requires solitude. I seek solitude by long walks, by praying, by waking early in the morning to make tea and write. I find the wide spaces of solitude in certain music, in dance, in walking wherever my feet take me.

St. Aidan of the Celtic church has left us a prayer for the courage to ask to be left alone with God, and I echo that and I seek it: to soar like a raven far above the ground, seeing things with a new perspective; with a perspective from above.