faith

smallest forms.

This morning a friend sent me a link to a page of quotes. The one that had the most impact on me said this:

“What does a thought look like? Just look around you, right now… to see yours.”

I looked around and saw 3 peacefully sleeping dogs who are deeply loved and deeply in love. I saw mist rising from my humidifier, bringing to life the smell of sweet orange oil, an aroma that eases depression. I saw that I am surrounded by warmth.

Blessing on this view.
xo

I love you, Carl, in all the ways that I find my way to comfort, even in its smallest forms. You are with me everywhere.

{originally published Jan 21, 2015}

Audacious.

He would send a photo to me.
I would send one to him.
He’d say he wished I was sitting next to him.
I would send him a picture of our two photos together and say: “I am!”

Our love. It was such an audacious thing. Full of hope and faith.
From a man who spoke profoundly of these things…

“I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and…inevitable setbacks. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered. … Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future…” ~MLK

I love you, Carl, even more completely than this audacious distance.

{originally published Jan 19, 2015}

the master weaver.

THE PLAN OF THE MASTER WEAVER
My life is but a weaving
Between the Lord and me,
I may not choose the colors,
He knows what they should be;
For He can view the pattern
Upon the upper side
While I can see it only
On this, the under side

Sometimes He weaveth sorrow,
Which seemeth strange to me;
But I will trust His judgement
And work on faithfully;
‘Tis He who fills the shuttle,
And He knows what is best,
So I shall weave in earnest,
Leaving to Him the rest.

Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttle cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why-
The dark threads are needed
In the Weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.

I took this photo in Morocco over a year ago. There was the sound of rhythm happening in their work. The thrum of threads, the movement of the shuttle–a sacred sort of sound, all its own. In the dark corner of a towering and beautiful old building of a rug seller’s shop, magic was happening. I do not know the story of these girls. I do not know if they were paid enough for what their talent deserved. I do not know what kind of hardships awaited them at home, if any at all. But what I do know is that, out of emptiness, they were creating something beautiful in both color and sound.

This prayer was given in honor of my grandpa from his union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. It was tied with ribbons in a leather case containing an exquisitely beautiful bible, its pages edged in gold. I clutched it tight in my arms, holding it for my grandma, as the pall bearers carried my grandpa’s casket and placed it in the hearse. I was trying to comprehend the reality at hand, while my mind fiercely, sharply relived the same ritual of Carl’s casket being carried away from me only weeks before. The tears that rolled down my cheeks were huge with pain, my brain and body and heart only able to carry the weight of one loss at a time.

I share this photo in black and white because I have not yet made it to a place of color. I spend a large part of every day praying that the grand design of all this heartache will someday become known to me. And, if not the grand design, then at least some colorful sort of pattern that might light a fire in my belly once again.

I traveled in Morocco as part of an personal and ongoing project of photographing and painting stray dogs. Or, at least, that was my intention. When I got there I found that there were very, very, very few stray dogs. In a difficult economic climate, that didn’t make much sense. Even so, I was hopeful in the idea that perhaps the Moroccans were simply taking good care of their dogs. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that the lack of the stray dog population was due to the fact that they were being round up and shot to death. The cats, however, were another matter. There were cats everywhere. Many of them were in horrible condition. Others, a little more lucky if they found a kindhearted store owner who might put out some milk, food scraps, or even a cardboard box for them. I found myself being pulled down a very unexpected path, deep into the labyrinths of the medinas where, instead of photographing stray dogs, I began to photograph the cats. They were everywhere, at every turn. I was emotionally and mentally unprepared for this change of plans and the heartache I would feel at the end of each day. Even so, to be a witness to such suffering made me feel more alive. My entire life, I have been drawn to these difficult places. The places where others turn their head. Who am I, holding a dying kitten, to think that I might have anything to offer a situation as desperate as this?

Looking through photography files in search of this weaving image made me wish I had the ability to throw myself into travel once again. There are hundreds of more images, many of animals, haggard or in distress. But right now I realize that patience is required. I am in my own desperate place. The weaving that is being done is made up of dark, knotted and confusing threads. I wonder, at times, why my healing path in losing Carl has been so slow and full of seeming failure. And yet…I trust that each time I knock up against pain and disappointment, fears and deep, deep sadness that God is asking for me to reach for Him. To trust Him. We all have a different path to walk, a different purpose. Perhaps my purpose will lead me places that will require a stronger foundation than others might require.

I don’t know.

But what I feel is that this time is sacred. As difficult as it is and as much as I want to untangle myself from it…something is being woven. And in all these dark days and difficult nights, THIS is the thing that gives me hope.

I love you, Carl. I know with my whole heart that your life and death and my love for you is leading me someplace where most people don’t go.

{originally published Jan 17, 2015}

gifts.

I just opened up a shipment of photos that I ordered the day before Carl died. Inside the box I found this. A 4″x4″ Somerset Velvet Giclee test print of my equine photography that I was daydreaming of doing something more with. It turned out beautifully. Even better than I imagined, really. Thank you for this, God. I needed it today.

I love you, Carl. Thank you for continuing to show up in the way you do.

{originally published Jan 10, 2015}

love notes.

ONE DAY YOU REALIZED

…so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened, and long ago and in the dwelling place
in which you lived before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise,
that first set you off and then drew you on, and that:
you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach.

~excerpt of poem from ‘Santiago’ by David Whyte

I’d like to tell you where I am, where you might find me these days, but it seems I am somewhere very far away. I would like to find the words to describe to you this place, but there is no language made for it. It is a place of deep wooded paths, dark watery oceans, cold moon-glow and softly falling snow. And yet…it’s not even that. It is a parallel place. Precarious in both its comforts and its pain. It’s a place of lost maps, the journey I must make. But then…there are those brief and beautiful moments when I feel truly, gently held in the hands of God. Sometimes, I have to crawl out of my skin to get there. This hopeful transformation? It still requires all of me. Perhaps from here on out it always will.

Carl. I love this photo of him. He texted it to me along with a love note from the woods outside my cabin one morning when he went out to feed the horses. I could have just as easily looked outside the window and saw him standing there, but it seems that it is in these sweet moments and tender gestures that love is built of. He already had my whole heart, but a little later, when I finally did look out the window and saw him walking back towards the cabin, I saw the gift of a man whose heart I wanted to live out my whole life with. Louie, my big goofy Chesapeake, was beside himself with his own happiness over having this newfound companionship, too. There was a lot of happiness in these woods that day and all the time surrounding it, too.

And now? All this unknowing. Where do I begin? I struggle with how to proceed. My map keeps getting blown away in the cold wind. But always, always…there is this sense of Carl’s love keeping me company, even here, now, from this short-sighted vantage point. I lean in towards this quiet space of listening and learning. Here I am. Mapless. Guided only by some great mystery.

But wait…let me ask this more clearly: “How do I proceed?” This is the question I ask God. It turns out that, as well-intentioned as I may have always been, before Carl’s death, I had it all wrong. As authentic, spiritual and honest as I was trying to be…I had it all wrong. For two months now I have been asking this question and feeling my way in the dark towards a better understanding of the answer. You see, I can feel the answer, even if I can’t yet see it or hear it or put it to words. Silly for me to think that I can have it all neatly spelled out before its time. I want clarity, knowing, a guarantee. Instead I am offered Faith and Trust. It’s like holding water in my hands. Even so, I know that water has the ability to carry me far. All that matters is whether I can look into the eyes of this Great Something and not let fear or doubt draw me away from its invitation. The most horrible thing has happened. Carl is gone, carried out of this world in a grinding collision. Is it possible for me to draw strength from even this?

Yes, I think this is what is being asked of me. I am being asked to draw strength, even from this. We planted a seed. Now it is time to let it grow.

I love you, Carl Bratlien. With you, I want to keep this song alive.

{originally published Jan 8, 2015}

empty.

“It has the dignity of the angelic
That knows you to your roots,
Always awaiting your deeper befriending
To take you beyond the threshold of want,
Where all your diverse strainings
Can come to a wholesome ease.”
~excerpted from “For the Unknown Self” :: To Bless the Space Between Us :: by John O’Donohue

This? This hollow start is where a new year begins? The big page of plans remains blank. I am empty.

Maybe empty is a good place to start. One thing I know is that my spirit wasn’t built for this much sadness. Or maybe it is. Maybe experiencing love to such extremes is exactly the point. It’s impossible to love this much without the risk of loss.

I am full of flatness and doubt this morning. I reach for God. I ask him to show me what I should do. I close my eyes and get a vision of bringing my upcoming solo exhibition to completion and then a sense of what is to follow. It’s just a glimpse, a feeling. The back of my head goes cold. The quality of light shifts behind my closed eyes. I know I’ve received my answer. Now it’s just up to me to trust it. I feel like fighting. I feel resentful today. I’ve been going through Carl’s clothes the past couple of days and the progress has been excruciating. His sweet smell fills my studio where I’ve gone to do the work. There isn’t enough room for his things in this little cabin. I progress at a snail’s pace. It takes more energy than I could have ever imagined. But I need to do this as a way of finding my way back to the easel. I feel like I’ve been hurtled backwards to that very first week of grief. I do not know how to change the glacial-like pace that this process seems to require. Logic and to-do lists do not seem to work in the precarious space I find myself in. A fragile eco-system, this current world of mine.

Yet I realize: it is only my own thinking that flattens the world around me. If Carl were here, he’d say, “You can do it; I know you can. I love you, baby.” Simple as that. A simple recipe of optimism and love. This was the basic premise of all our conversations. Constantly, we were lifting each other up, making space for hope, carving out possibilities. I stop to remind myself this. I do my best to recreate his voice in my head and heart.

Admittedly, I create an elaborate map each year. They are impressive. They are filled with goals, broken down into action steps, led by over-arching core emotional desires. It is colorful and organized, complete with images of the things I’m reaching for. This yearly habit has traveled me around the world several times. It’s built my business and strengthened my spirit. It brought horses and depth and love into my life. In other words, it has worked. Exquisitely.

But let’s be real. I wasn’t expecting anything elaborate from myself this year. Just something. Something to keep my eyes on the road ahead and my heart above water.

And so…on all this blank paper I would like to put three images and three words. I tried last night. I really, really did. But with all that trying, I found myself caught in a wave of exhaustion, in bed and asleep by 7:30pm on New Year’s Eve.

In the two hours that it’s taken me to sift words out of this inability to embrace a new year, a blue sky has begun to loosen itself from the clouds. I like the clouds. They seem safer. And yet…

I know this blank page is asking more of me than the safety of cloud cover. There is a mountain inside me. It’s been there for a long, long time. It should not surprise me that, all along, it was something only I could navigate. I’ve trekked the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas and know from old experience that, at certain airless heights, there is only one way and that is simply, the surrendered rhythm of one foot in front of the other….
one
holy
step
at
a
time.

I love you, Carl. You, who have brought me to this most meaningful, important and profound mountain.

{originally published Jan 1, 2015}

through.

Some days are worse than others. These days, it seems that all days land on the scale of worse. But I continue to reach for a habit of gratitude and so, in this moment, I am grateful for…

purring horses munching on hay that warms their bodies on this cold, cold winter day.
the pull of my journal and conversations with God while snuggled in a semi-circle of sleeping dogs.
plans to go sit in a hot tub this afternoon with a good friend to relax my body and mind while in good company.

This is enough. For now, it will get me through. And, in truth, that is always all we ever need.

I love you, Carl. You will always be enough. Even being gone, you have given me enough love to last a lifetime.

{originally published Dec 30, 2014}

Returning home after.

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

The floor boards of this little cabin are cold. The door latch is frozen, requiring me to use the dead bolt to keep it closed. The whole world has shifted into a creak, popping into sharp rearrangement. It is Monday. As though that means something, I enter the day like a new stage of grief. I’ll call this stage “Returning Home After.” It is another day of navigating life without Carl. It is after Christmas. After my grandpa’s funeral. After spending the better part of a week with my grandma, not just as her granddaughter, but also as two women who have lost the men we’ve given our hearts and lives to. There are not enough tears in the entire universe for this. I’m still dogged by the edges of this migraine that seems to have become my constant companion. A toothache has angled its way in, too. I’m chilled all the way to my center, not from sickness, but from the lack of warmth that crawls from my slippered feet and into my bones. My eyeballs feel like they’ve shrunk, become smaller from too many weeks of crying and trying to see what I’m supposed to do next. My grief habit of rubbing my brow has shifted to rubbing my eyes. The structure of mortality has taken on a physicality that I’m not entirely comfortable with. I am made up of tendons, skin and two eyeballs. Somewhere inside, yet beyond my precarious placement of bones and breathing is my spirit. My spirit gets curious, feels hope, gets out of bed to let out the dogs and feed the horses. I am acutely aware of the way my body is put together and, even in all its weakness, I feel like I will live to be a very, very old woman. This thought does not bring me comfort. However, in suspended moments, I see a glimpse of my future self. The woman I see is much older than me now. She is a bit timeless, grey-haired, her body and face have taken on new contours. Mostly, what I notice is her smile–a sense of contentment and satisfaction–that illuminates from the inside out. It’s a smile held in her eyes and her whole body. Anchoring her being is a vast aquifer–her life experiences–the depth and breadth of an entire ocean. It is as though she could hold out her arms and embrace a whole life of love, care, and meaning. There are a lot of young people in this image…as though her strong arms might gather in a whole world of children whom I love.

This image comes to me at random times. It’s always brief. Just a glimpse. Last night she visited me as I read a book in the bathtub. Another time when I was driving. Once, while in the tea aisle at the grocery store. She has been weaving herself into me all along, but I notice her more lately. She’s cute and I like her. She knows I need her. She makes me smile even when I don’t think I want to. She pokes my ribs and is equally willing to wrap her arms around me. I know I’ll meet her someday, because I’ll be her. I already am her, partially. I just don’t recognize myself yet.

I am rubbed raw from missing Carl. Saying I miss him doesn’t convey the actual experience. He hasn’t truly left me. Like today. Today I feel him near. Even so, it is not always easy wearing one’s spirit so close to the skin.

I looked out the window this morning, watching the horses walk through the woods. Colorado comes to the fence first. I am mesmerized by how much I’ve loved that horse all along. I told Carl that I’d always want Colorado to be a little bit more “my” horse, even if he is the bigger, more skittish, less trained of the two. I wanted Carl to ride Dakota, despite him being twice my size and her being the smaller of the two horses. With more brazenness than I actually possessed, I announced that I would ride Colorado even tho the truth is that I was too scared to (and still am). Carl said he’d be happy no matter which horse he rode. I loved that about him because he meant it. He just loved the horses. And he loved me. My silly ideas were nonsense all along. It’s taken me a long time to truly bond with Dakota, but shortly before Carl died, I realized that it was happening. The deepening began to occur. It is still occurring. She has soft, worrisome eyes. And, lately, I find myself worrying about her, too. My heart is drawn to her. My heart is drawn to both of them. We are all like snowflakes. Even the horses.

Today, this cold makes me feel cleaved open. Smooth, like frozen stone, old parts of who I was have completely worn away. There’s somehow room in this for something new. I move the milk house heater closer to my feet. I wrap Carl’s raggedy old quilt around me. I cry. I write myself back to life.

I feed the horses at sunrise, their eyelashes and muzzles covered in frost. Dakota lifts her front hoof up high in gratitude (her daily habit of thanks). Colorado eats up his sweet feed, tosses some hay around and then attempts to stick his big nose into my cup of coffee. I laugh at him and let him smell the warm brew, telling him “yeah…you’re my horse.” Colorado in front of me, Dakota behind me, Carl all around me. Slowly, I warm to the possibility of things I do not yet know.

I love you, Carl. I love you for showing me the woman I want to grow to be.

{originally published Dec 29, 2014}

first christmas.

I love you, Carl. There is never a day you’re not with me. I’ve always loved Christmas, but my appreciation for it has shifted into something of a watershed, a place where all the love, like water, has come to gather. There is so much I wish I could write about this morning…but it will have to wait. I’m leaving for Brainerd so that I can finally wrap my arms around my grandma and tell her how much I love her. Just a few days before my grandpa died, my grandma sent me a handwritten card. She wrote about how very hard it must be for me to have lost Carl and that, when you love someone that much, you are one…like her and my grandpa after 67 years of marriage. She wished she could wave her magic wand and make all the pain go away, but that life is simply not that easy. She ended the card by saying that, always, grandpa and grandma are there for me.

I end this year in unexpected ways, but one thing I know for sure is that it is filled with love. Carl, I miss you today. I missed you last night. I’ll miss you tomorrow and the next day and the next all the way into forever. But more than anything, I am grateful. In this life, I have been blessed.

Merry Christmas friends and family. I love you all very, very much!

{originally published Dec 25, 2014}

calling all angels.

My grandpa passed away this morning. Peace be with all of us. Peace and more peace and God’s love.

I loved my grandpa. Dearly. We all did. I loved his phone calls. I loved our playful jokes and the way he cared and could fix anything. He’s never been anything less than constant in my life.

This is, quite honestly, my worst nightmare…that he would pass away so soon after Carl’s death. He went into the hospital 5 days ago when he dislocated his shoulder after a fall. When my mom finally got ahold of me that day, I nearly had a panic attack. His situation wasn’t life or death, but I got scared. I got swallowed by that wave.

This morning, with my grandma and mom at his side, his heart gave out and he slipped from this world into the next. I am shedding a whole new ocean of tears. I also feel blanketed by a surprising amount of peace. Yes, I feel peace. I feel his peace. Wholly. I feel Carl near me. Wholly. I feel his hand on my shoulder, his reassuring presence, telling me that it’s all going to be ok.

It is Monday. I was going to try my best to ease back into life. To begin tending to the things that need tending. And now? Here I am. Tending to the most precious thing life contains. I am tending to love.

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, don’t leave me alone
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We’re trying, we’re hoping, but we’re not sure how
Oh, and every day you gaze upon the sunset
With such love and intensity
Why, it’s ah, it’s almost as if you crack the code
You’d finally understand what this all means
Oh, but if you could, do you think you would
Trade it all, all the pain and suffering?
Oh, but then you would’ve missed the beauty of
The light upon this earth and the sweetness of the leaving
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, don’t leave me alone
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We’re trying, we’re hoping, but we’re not sure why
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, walk me through this one
Don’t leave me alone
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We’re trying, we’re hoping, we’re hurting, we’re loving
We’re crying, we’re calling
‘Cause we’re not sure how this goes
~excerpted from Calling All Angels by The Wailin Jenny’s

I love you, Grandpa Nelson.

{originally published Dec 22, 2014}