Whimsy at My Feet

Did I tell you about my purple toe nails?

I painted them dark pearly purple.

When I kick off my slippers at night, I swing my feet at the edge of the bed. And I look at my whimsical purple nails.

Cameron says that when we go through The Artist's Way, we'll see changes in ourselves. We might clean out our closets (hey, I did that already! How did she know?) Still, she forgot to tell me about the nail polish. I am SO not a nail polish kind of girl. But this seemed right. A private indulgence. An odd beauty, like keeping irises in the closet and not caring that no one can see them.

Is this why God made iridescent sea creatures that creep around the ocean floor, making the dark beautiful to no one in particular? If God were a girl like me, sitting at the edge of the bed, would God choose a lick of purple polish too?


Candles at 56 Irving Place photo by L.L. Barkat.

Coin

Trying to write today, about the relationship of grief and joy (like two sides of a coin), about true celebration. I find this quote and realize I won't have room to include it. But I want to draw it out from the piles and piles of notes, keep it, meditate on it, ask You about it...

The experience of joy is so incredibly rare…because it entails a constant giving up in order to even recognize the territory. We prefer to return to those states of seminumbness with which we are more familiar…. The rare appearance of joy… is so painfully exquisite that we may actually experience joy as a moment of terror. It opens to us all our possibilities and yet casts a shadow of comparison across all our other moments. Joy brings an intimation of death and mortality. This joy will pass as all others have before them. Laughter catches in our throat because we refuse to accept the corollary of joy, the soul-enriching poignancy of loss.

I think I understand now why joy has so often eluded me. Ah, that You would give me courage to face the griefs, that I might embrace more fully the joys.