god

brown rice and spanish horses.

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My eyes are tired. My heart aches. I’ve cried a lot these past couple days. It comes unexpectedly, in waves. It began last night with a remark about remembering a time when you heard the desperate, all-too-real sound of sorrow. I was watching a video with a group of women, half of whom I don’t even know. Oh God, please no. Not now. This hits too close to home. I brace myself against the inevitable. Carl’s sister, Christine, is sitting next to me.

I set my coffee cup down on the floor, grab a Kleenex from my purse.

I accomplish neither before I’m sent colliding into my own internal, wailing memory. The phone call. The one that has replayed itself in my head every single day since it happened. It was morning. I was out walking my dogs in the woods, at a curve in the trail, surrounded by pine trees, the ground covered in new snow. The whole world unraveled and all I hear is my own nightmare-stricken voice…NO-NO-NO-NO-NO-NO-NO…even before I hear what is needing to be said. Something inside of me already knows what I’m going to hear and I’m screaming NO, trying to stop it, undo it, make it not real. Please God, don’t let it be real. Tell me I misunderstood. I didn’t hear right. Please, stop the terrible, unthinkable wreckage that is happening inside of me, my whole world. Stop this loss of everything in my heart. Gone. Please, God, no. Let me out. Let me out of this horrible, unthinkable, impossible news. NO-NO-NO. This cannot have happened. But it did.
It did.

The sound of my own sorrow. All these months later, the memory still deafens me.

I feel Christine’s arms around me, hugging me. I think my body might crumble, but somehow we manage to create a soft net in the outreaching of our arms that holds us through. I hear someone behind us crying also. These losses, they’re all too real. And we’re all too human. Profoundly fragile, even the strongest of us.

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Revelations 21:4

Today though, the sun is out. It feels good/It makes me sad. Sunshine mixed with the warm weather of spring confuses me. My emotions come too close to the surface. I feel like Carl should somehow be a part of all this sunshine, but he’s not. At least, not in the way I expect him to be. My make-up was wiped away by tissues and tears long before I even leave the house. I go to an early morning appointment and then the studio. I drink my coffee with cream. There is something comforting about that, a little luxury, since I more often drink it black. The studio is aglow with the warmth of sunlight.  I sit on cushions on the floor. I write for awhile, but don’t paint. I feel gratitude for the canvas sitting on the easel and its willingness to wait for me until tomorrow.

These tender days, they still happen. The sun continues to shine. My heart travels entire continents of emotions. I’m peaceful, then agitated, then grateful. I get swallowed whole with sadness, then decide to give up on whatever I’m working on and instead give myself over to editing some Lusitano and PRE photos from Spain. Yes, horse medicine. Sadness gives way to the grace and strength contained in those images. I am in awe of the beauty I’ve witnessed in this world. I wonder where life without Carl will lead me. My heart has been forever altered. Surely, this could be a gift if I allow it to be?

I try to imagine what heaven feels like. I attempt to plug into this feeling as directly as possible. This feeling of Home, I turn it into a map. A conduit, a pathway for every next step. In these moments, I feel closer to God, I feel Carl’s tremendous peace and happiness. I feel some of heaven’s presence on earth. It does exists, in glimpses. Only glimpses, all along. It is all our earthly selves can handle.

I get hungry. I make brown rice. Eventually, the cabin fills with it’s warm scent. I intended to make a vegetable curry to go along with it. But the rice smells so good. I eat it straight from the steamer I cooked it in. I am satisfied in it’s simplicity. I remember that I will be ok. I will make it through. I experienced God in a hundred different ways today. Brown rice and Spanish horses. Little by little, my heart begins to mend.

the debt of time.

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Before Carl died, I had a problem. I apply the past tense to the ownership of this problem because in the landscape of grief it has, at least temporarily, been put on hold. “Have, had”…whichever way one spins it, these are both verbs and verbs are identified as actions. How appropriate considering that action is exactly the problem. Or, rather, too much action. And, in my deepest grief, too little action (at least by outside standards).

Have I confused you yet? Yes, it is confusing. It is delicate territory.

I’m having a hard time writing today. At the moment, I feel stuck in my head. I’m attempting to dive deeper into this topic of time and energy because of a question posed to me last week: “What is the importance of this social draw on my time?” The question is annoying. It doesn’t even quite make sense. It misses the mark. The question came about because of a desire to create a more purposeful, God-centered life, rather than allowing myself to be endlessly drained by the constant influx of to-do’s and over-extended obligations, specifically in managing my time and energy in relation to social commitments.

At some point during the most difficult days of my grief-stricken hiatus from work, I attempted to be extremely strategic about my time and energy. I was semi-successful in creating a new work schedule for myself. I would begin by working in the studio 5 days a week for 5 hours a day. I would bring my own lunch and be at the studio by 10am, or 11 at the latest. Other work could happen, either inside or out of the studio. The point was that I at least show up. This was serious progress.  For the first three months after Carl’s death, I did not work. I was paralyzed by anxiety and sorrow. Not working only made it worse and yet, every cell in my body needed to simply be still. Despite the pressure of client commitments and financial obligations saddled against horrendous heartbreak, I knew with my whole being that things should not and could not be rushed. I was experiencing sacredness. I could work, always…but in the midst of my deepest mourning, I might never again be able to receive its greatest gifts: such profound closeness with God.

It has now been 4 1/2 months since Carl’s passing. It is a surreal and drawn out blink of an eye. And yet, soon, it will be five months and then six. I dread the continued passing of time. My heart aches at the thought of it. But I can’t stay here, I know that. As much as I’d like to, time is spitting me out into the whateverafter.

And with the movement of time comes all its accompanying challenges. The world and all of its demands come flooding back in. I go to the studio on a regular basis. It feels good. Peaceful. I am grateful for my clients and the work ahead of me. I’ve allowed painting to become a time of prayer. My original schedule has been unashamedly modified, but still bears tangible potential worth orbiting.  Expectations for myself are both healthy and dangerous. After all, there has always been a lot more to my life than simply painting. Before I know it, I am once again traveling back and forth to Minneapolis. I am responding to emails, texts, facebook messages and phone calls. I’m packaging and shipping orders. I’m doing photoshoots and editing. I’m catching up with bookkeeping, applying for events, ordering supplies. I’m delivering artwork and scheduling meetings, coffee dates and dinners. I’m tending to life’s details in full force and it doesn’t take me long before I’m flung far into oblivion. As though someone grabbed me by the ankles and hurled me across frozen fields, disoriented, I come undone.

Literally. Undone.

Back I go, to a place that looks an awful lot like those first three months. I cry. Things get ugly. I crawl under the covers. I shut down. I retreat back into much needed solitude.

But here’s the thing…
It’s been a gift. All of it.
An unexpected,
beautiful
gift.

God calls me back and–in my brokenness, in my inability to function–I go to Him.

You see, my life is not meant to be what it once was. It can’t be. What would be the point? I am being led somewhere new and, in order to get there, I need to be able to tune into that still, small voice.

Life is constantly clamoring for me. It clamored so loudly that, 3 years ago, I left the city on a self-appointed “Northerly Painting Retreat.” I still have not returned. But there is that old adage: “wherever you go, there you are.” Yep. Eventually, even in the deepest of woods, my busy-ness caught up with me all over again. Even in grief, it tries hard to sneak its way back into my life. The only difference these days is that my spirit doesn’t allow it. I’ve become allergic to busyness; my body simply won’t support it.

And I want it to stay that way.

Love
Connection
Depth

These are the things I value most. I value God, creativity, inspiration and adventure. In my refusal to go back to the over-obligated trappings of my old life, I find myself needing, wanting to start from scratch. Since the birth of Stray Dog Arts, I have been booked out with commissioned work for 1-2 years or more. Things snowballed early on. It was exciting. I could have easily been booked out another year or two with travel and special projects. It was a “good problem to have.” These successes: I am grateful for every inch of it, even for the lessons that I learned along the way. And yet…I was also miserable, over-worked and burned out. Before starting my business, I was obsessively working on a graduate degree and teaching college classes. I never took even one day off in between. All along, I was single-minded, motivated, stubbornly unstoppable. I was also a workaholic.

Yay me? No. Looking back, I see the banality of it. I was generously well-intentioned, but what was it all for?

The gift of shattering is this:
I can start anew.

There is a high price to pay for busyness and it is a debt I no longer want to have. It no longer offers me the sense of importance I once gave it. This issue of time and energy is not about being more efficient. Rather, it is an issue of the heart. It is an issue of my relationship with God. God is love and love takes time.

Time is something hurried people do not have.

“The decisions you make create the schedule you keep. The schedule you keep determines the life you live. And how you live your life determines how you spend your soul” ~Lysa Terkeurst

A part of me wants to retreat even further. I go online and Google “distant mountains.” I’m drawn to desert-like places, the landscape that exists inside of me. There is incredible beauty, even in its barreness. I imagine a simple shelter somewhere far away, surrounded by mountains, sky and dust and not much else. I imagine languages that I do not understand. A place where the sunrises and sunsets are made of pure God. It is not a fantasy of escaping, but rather of entering in. And maybe someday I will find myself there. But for now, I know that God wants me here. He wants me to sit still. More still than I’ve ever known. He wants me to know this rejuvinating stillness even in my movements, even in my work, even in my time with others.

I am constantly subtracting. And, in doing so, I find the gap–between my debt of time and the holy present–finally begin to lessen. He refuses to let me rush ahead. In that still, small voice He guides. And in the quietness of my own heart, I hear Him perfectly.

I once again find my North Star. And, yes, it changes everything, to be quieted by love.

For breakfast: coffee steam and candles.

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I’ve been obsessed these past two days with getting this blog up and running. Everything published before this post was originally written and shared on Facebook. I’ve gathered those posts here for the sake of congruity and perhaps even for safer keeping. I’m grateful for the space and connection Facebook originally provided, but at some point, it became difficult and inappropriate to share my heart on such a haphazard platform. I had entered a desert. The lowlands. It stretched out in front of and behind me, in seeming infinity. It was a place of dirt and dry earth. There were mountains, but they were in the distance and only served to contain me in that low spot. I needed to walk alone for awhile, in that deep valley of sadness. And, in doing so, my faith walk got deeper, too.

As I write this, it dawns on me that Jesus also spent 40 days and nights in the desert. This was about the same amount of time that I spent in my own dusty barrenness. I’m not saying that I am like Jesus, but it should not surprise me that there is something to be said for the sacredness in this time of desert walking and wordlessness.

It has been 4 1/2 months since Carl died. It seems like an agonizingly long time and yet, as the days and months and years will continue to pass between us, I know that someday I will look back on this day and realize that the distance between now and then was miniscule. But time stretches. It shrinks and expands and then doubles back on itself.

For over a week I have found myself, for the first time, suspended in a place of happiness, inspiration, hope, even giddiness. I have felt energized by some strange and unexplainable joy. It felt like God. It was God. It is God. It felt impossible to feel so much joy in the face of so much loss. I don’t fit the mold of what I imagine grieving “widows” of unexpected tragedy to look like.  Yet I also know that is what Carl loved about me. That is, he loved my optimism and passion for life. And that is what I loved most about him. Of course, God knows that even the unspeakable loss of the man I loved with my whole heart could not stop this life force within me, even tho, at first, I so badly wanted it to. I am both devastated and satisfied in a way that I’ve never before experienced. I cry as I write this. I feel like a conundrum, an oxymoron, an absurd paradox. All last week I was on the verge of breaking out of my skin with a renewed sense of euphoria and hope. Today I simply feel like I’ve made it to the edge of the valley where I will sit and rest for a moment before continuing my walk into the foothills and, eventually, someday, maybe even the mountains.

I created this blog so that I might have a space that I can more openly write about my journey through grief. I’ve been a wanderer my whole life, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would travel through a landscape like this. All I know is that, like Jesus after his 40 days and nights in the desert, I am hungry. But it is a strange hunger. Not for food, but for more of God.

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” ~Matthew 4:1-4

As I write this, I once again notice how Carl’s bible smells like him. Somehow, in drawing close to God, I feel closer to Carl, too. I draw close, not for Carl, but because of him. I draw close because this is what was meant for me all along.

“I am a bow on your hands, Lord.
Draw me, lest I rot.
Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break.
Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break?” ~Nikos Kazantzakis

For those of you who have found me here and are reading these words, thank you for journeying with me. I pray that, even in breaking, grace might be found.

with love and honesty,
Jessie

Ragamuffin.

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“Abba, I abandon myself in your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you. I am ready for all: I accept all. Let your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my spirit. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and I give myself, surrender myself into your hands without reserve, with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.” ~Charles Foucauld

{originally published March 11, 2015}

In the still quiet place we meet.

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Unearthing myself. Found things. A stash of gorgeous fine art papers, an extra special journal, and an old self-portrait. Sundays are for surrender.

I love you, Carl. And I miss you every day. But there can be beauty, yes, even in this. Today I sit still, quietly, in this space that you brought me to: with God.

Blank paper. An invitation.

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{originally published March 8, 2015}

the always peaceful voice of God.

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“Over time I have come to believe that brave does not mean what we think it does. It does not mean “being afraid and doing it anyway.” Nope. Brave means listening to the still small voice inside and DOING AS IT SAYS. Regardless of what the rest of the world is saying. Brave implies WISDOM. Brave people are not simply those who JUMP every time. They do not necessarily “do it anyway.” Brave people block out all the yelling voices and listen to the deepest voice inside the quietest, stillest place in their heart. If that voice says JUMP, they jump. And if that voice says TURN AROUND — they turn around, and they hold their head high. Often the one who turns around shows GREAT BRAVERY, because she has been true to herself even in the face of pressure to ignore her still, small voice and perform for the crowd.” Glennon Doyle Melton

These days, I don’t want to be brave. I only want to be quiet. But guess what. It takes great amounts of bravery to allow oneself such stillness. I abandon the world. I hush the white noise and instead trust the always peaceful voice of God. I am in sacred territory now. It has come at a great expense and there is not one bone in my body that is willing to let these gifts of great loss pass by without notice.

The way & the truth & the life. I am unraveling. Rebelling. Renewing. Undoing. I surrender.

And, in doing so…
I am whole.

I love you, Carl. Infinitely.

{originally published March 2, 2015}