When Simple Things Speak

It has always been this way for me. The simplest things speak. Last night, tidying up the living room, I saw this Off button my littlest daughter made, for one of her animation projects.

Standing by the coffee table, I stopped moving and stared. Struck, yes, that's how I felt. You'd think I had been visited by an angel.

But I was not afraid.

Just very still.

And the simple red Off button has been speaking to me ever since.

Sabbath Greetings After Texas

I take my last bite of vanilla yogurt, sprinkled with ground, golden flax seed. The final contrast of smooth and gritty goes down. In the same moment I turn to the trinity of tiny windows that let too little light into my dining room (Tudors can be like that... designed to mute the sunny possibilities I've always loved).

Glancing through the winter-wearied glass, I see the little woods is lit up green. It was not so just four days ago, when I flew off to Texas for an artist's retreat. Did I consider how this place would blossom in my absence? Did I know?

I think of something one of the speakers said at the retreat. Something that disturbed me. I know he was telling the reticent artist to get up and get going, embrace ambition and stop waiting around for something to happen, as if things will just do that. It's a message for a certain kind of season. But I wondered if ambition could always be the answer. This is, if you will, my continuing thoughts on Sabbath come to life.

Which is grit? Ambition or waiting? Which is smooth? I swallow the two together, not knowing the answer. I swallow and marvel at the green parade outside my windows, yellow trumpets of forsythia already making way for lines of pink bleeding hearts. Sabbath thoughts. Smooth and gritty, marching on, going down.

Sabbath, Gifts and Virility

Piecing together thoughts for my next chapter, on Sabbath. As always, so many thoughts. Too many thoughts. And my direction amorphous.

It helps to think out loud.

Today, trying to synthesize ideas from Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Creativity. That's one aspect of human activity that, according to Jewish thinkers, Sabbath puts aside. Not in the pleasure sense (playing my cello), but in the sense of trying to create something new that might solve a problem, meet a need (I know, is not pleasure a need?)

This word that I'd been thinking of in relation to Sabbath comes up in Hyde too: virility. I've been thinking Sabbath asks us to put aside virility (virility is related to creation too, and the possibility of healing). On the Sabbath, we agree to stop being virile. We agree to a cycle that includes not only advance but retreat. I think suddenly that it is fitting Jesus chose to heal on the Sabbath... He being virile for us while we rest in the gift of it.

Gifts, Hyde seems to suggest, also move in cycles. The giver at some point becomes the receiver. If the cycle is broken, the power of the gift diminishes. In a sense, we die. (And now too I think of the terrible Old Testament punishment for breaking Sabbath: death.)

So many thoughts. I think out loud, place them before You (and my friends here). Wait for a shakedown.