Streams cut the once patchy lawn into canals running red from southern clay. They flowed like veins red, pulsing down the incline. I watched single drops ban together to cut deeper and deeper into the yard.
Mamma ducks stood with babies as if this was how it was meant to be, as if water pouring uncontrollable from dark sky, cutting rock hard earth was nothing to worry about.
Hadn't she told me this?
Hadn't she told me that the pouring of thoughts creates cutting of paths.
Sitting in her side sun room, I stretched ankles out on thick tan carpet as we listened and chatted and laughed and she told me about the creating of canals in our minds.
Every thought we think creates a path in our mind, some paths are walked again and again and are deepened each time we walk down them.
Others are forgotten and over grown because of under travel.
"Every thought"
She said
"Creates a chemical reaction"
Encouraged to create new trenches, I left her.
That night I lay in bed thinking of the image I had seen, and the fear it crept into the tossing and I turned the other way only to meet face to face with anxiety and I tried sipping water and gulping for air and kicking off sheets and curling up toes.
Drop by drop thoughts fell and cut deeper the passage way, years old, in my brain, over and over in my head, filling the channel, deepening it.
I could feel the failure the fearing the water logging happening laying in darkness.
"Yes"
I breath out a breath that seems to have been held all day.
"Papa, Anna eyes, please."
Eyes like the woman, the one who had stood in the temple she saw him.The Messiah.
Not the Christ like we see him, not the God man that healed the diseased, freed the demon oppressed,
stumped the teachers, stretched, staying on a tree to give his spirit up to we could be given his spirit.
No, this woman, this Anna, she saw a boy. A Jewish boy with parents and siblings, brown eyes, sun
kissed skin, boy hands and a poor man's sacrifice.
And how many people passed this Jewish boy that day?
How many pushed passed him, the lamb of God, to bring their lambs to God.
But Anna.
She saw.
And I saw red words on white paper- the praying to Papa,
"do it without a heart to be seen.And he,the seeing father, sees and knows."
"do it without a heart to be seen.And he,the seeing father, sees and knows."
The treasuring-
"Look" at the birds
"See" the lilies
"Seek" the kingdom
And this is where I ask for Anna eyes- sitting watching veins cut red into the earth.
"Where ever you are be all there."
How many nights had, have, do I lay in darkness replaying the moments; the hurting ones, the failing
ones, the wasted ones, replaying, replaying, reliving, deepening.
How many times I miss seeing what is in the moment for fear of wasting or messing up or regretting.
How often I'm too tired to see what is in the now because the next is always being thought of, chewed
over, thought through.
And I sit feeling it will always be this way, watching the water deepen the earth, always channeling
into the channels that already were, never creating new ones.
Repetion winning each drop.
Repetion winning each drop.
I watch the water and think it "No path deepened by repetition is deeper or more powerful than love
proven by resurrection."
And freedom.
Truth.
I see that path and I take Papa's hand and we walk it.
One particularly agitated duckling waddles as fast as his orange webbed feet would go to the edge of
the grass. Out loud I say it
"You know who that is don't you?"
I smile, smile embarrassingly silly. Thinking of him the infinite, knowing, interacting with the finite.
"And you are the one who dresses that oak tree."
And there's this looking that starts happening.
"You're the one who dressed the wheat that's baking in my oven, and you're the one who came up
with the idea of rain factories in the sky. "
with the idea of rain factories in the sky. "
I chuckle
"Storing water in the sky, oh man that was a good one."
And there's this giddiness that comes out as I look and speak and think and deepen the living in this
moment.
"But dad, what about seeing the hard things?'
Walking inside to take sticky cinnamon rolls out of the oven thinking this one thing, stops me and I can
feel the pull down stream to merge with the already existing river of thought.
But, he reminds me- no tragedy creates a trench he has not already been in. No moment creates a
problem outside of his providence. There is no tear washed face he is not near to. For his children no
shame, no sin carried that his body has not felt the weight of.
The glass mason jar filled to it's brim sits on the railing and I think of the Spirit that's filling me. The
spirit that brought life, and hope and full filled promises, raised the Messiah to life, strengthened him to
die.
He is in me.
The water of life is creating new mind rivers.
Setting tin pan to hot pad I watch thick white icing melt into each crevice and canal and think of it all
and this moment and the time it will take to choose new brain paths. And starting here. Now. And that I
will only ever have to choose the now to do this seeing, thinking, canal carving thing.
Breathing out, I smile and breath out again and again and again thinking of the one who gives each breath.
Choosing how many we have.
Breathing out, I smile and breath out again and again and again thinking of the one who gives each breath.
Choosing how many we have.
