One of my dearest friends was married this past weekend. I wasn't able to be in her wedding: our baby is due within the month; but her marriage made my thoughts return again and again to my own wedding and the overwhelmingly joyful marriage we've been blessed with ever since.

This past weekend I read through my husband's letters from our dating days, when we lived a full day's drive from each other and rarely used the phone. Neither of us enjoys calling people, so our conversations took place, more often than not, on paper, or in person. I'm grateful for that. In person, conversations are easier to remember than over the phone, and letters last. I have them all now, wrapped in twine and tucked away in my desk. In our case, letters encouraged a deeper level of communication than phone conversation could have, which allowed us to enter marriage really knowing each other.  My friend's relationship has been much different - every relationship is - but I look forward to seeing it lived out as joyfully, and as full of love.

"Simplicity is completely absorbed in

listening to what it hears."

~Thomas Merton

 Recently my days have been absorbed in listening, and somehow, there is always a good deal of coffee involved in really listening to people. I'm trying to keep the listening going, while keeping the coffee to a minimum. I wonder how often, when we think we're listening, we're really only waiting for key words that can serve as an opening for our own thoughts. I've noticed this only the radio a lot recently. We have call in shows, and so often the caller has barely finished his question when the response comes - ready made, to a question that was never asked. 

I know I do this, marriage is helping me change, my husband doesn't let my deafness pass unnoticed, and country-living has helped, there is so much to really listen to! In our apartment, there were sounds to block out, the neighbors arguing, the sirens rushing by daily, the cars, and the collective noise of the place. Out on the land there are birds to hear, peeping frogs, and rustling beeches. I don't hear too much, and watching Luba, I'm learning to enjoy listening.  She loves all the sounds: chickens, owls, thunder, wind - they all make her little ears go up and bring the wrinkles out on her face. It looks like an overwhelming desire to know.  It makes me happy to see it, and happy to join her in deep listening.  

Art: a response in the discussion with Jenna St. Hilaire and Mr. Pond

"Oh tell us, Poet, what do you do? ~ I Praise.

But the dark, the deadly, the desperate ways,

How do you endure them ~ how bear them? ~

I Praise."

   ~Rainer Maria Rilke

We are discussing Art. What is art, what is non-art. Can there be a created thing that fails to be art? Can there be a thing that has so completely lost it's beauty, it's truth, it's goodness that it is in no way Art, that it crumbles and will not endure? As I understand her, Jenna is saying that there is no such thing - all our communications, banal to beautiful, blessings to curses - all are art.  I can't agree. 

I'd like to be mistaken, I'd like her to mean that all of life has the potential to call forth Art, that for the artist, the smallest thing has riches that can brought to light. I would agree. It is the way in which we fling ourselves into experience, into the light and darkness of life that makes the experience artistic, the ability to "say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing" that turns the Thing to art: absorbing, nourishing, growing, and then making the experience anew - so that it touches beauty and endures- which makes Art.

It is only for God that every communication is Art, and that is because, for Him, all of eternity is "a great recognizing, seeing-again, and being welcomed." All of life is one great intimacy, and in all His works runs the beauty of the Divine imagination. Some of His art fails, because it is living art, with a will of it's own, and runs from it's beauty, but the Artist has not failed to make art. For us it is different, our communications fail, we fail. We are not intimate enough, with ourselves and with our world to call forth it's beauty. When we are able to take an experience and make it intense, alive, and enduring, then we make art; but not all of our words are living, and none are the Word: none are Beauty incarnate, we have no certainty that what we produce is Art.

John Paul II reminds us that "not all are called to be artists," though all are called to craft their lives in imitation of Christ, there is a distinction. The artist is not only called to, but also given the gift of an ability to "respond to the demands of art, and faithfully to accept art's dictates." (Letter to Artists). That art makes demands which must be accepted by the artist, enforces the fact that art is more than a passive thing - nothing more than communication, demanding nothing: not talent, not discipline, not devotion from the artist. Communication is an essential aspect of Art, but not the only aspect. Objective beauty is also an essential aspect of art, and if beauty, the "visible form of the good" cannot be found, the work is not art, for "beauty is the vocation bestowed on [the artist] by the Creator" (LtA).

In so many ways, art is like faith, "a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world" (LtA); it opens the door to faith. Through beauty it reveals truth, and without both truth and beauty, art cannot exist. It would be wrong to assume that all communications, even those lacking both beauty and truth could be art in anyway, it does a disservice to truth, and to the human soul, which longs to be nourished on a beauty that "will save the world" (Dostoevsky).  It inserts relativism into the understanding of art, a relativism which, by refusing to distinguish between art and non-art, steals away all the value and meaning of art, by making it passive, a simple act of existence - people must communicate - instead of what it is "a battle for Life" (Rilke).

"Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."
~Rainer Maria Rilke
After the Ascension I am with the apostles, watching the sky, and waiting. Trying to avoid living in anticipation, trying to make each day new. Christ has borrowed my beads, I'll take them back again when the Spirit comes, on Pentecost and my table has a fresh image, the Trinity Icon; or when the baby comes, and I give all my saints flowers.

Cleaning house is not really anticipation, so much as an attempt to make each day beautiful. I can't stop the dirt from creeping in, or the spiders I won't kill from making webs on the rafters. I brush down the webs and wash away the dirt, only to see them gather back again. Only the dishes are a battle, the rest is joy.

Last night I thought over all the things we're lacking still: undone cradle, unplanted tomatoes, packed away diapers and I worried. But my husband was sleeping easily, and calm is contagious. I wrapped myself in his and dreamt of happy things, waking only twice in the night to listen to coyotes and check the path of the stars.

When we have friends out again, my wheel is coming out from the shed. I can't help move it, but my husband and a friend could carry it down the road and set it on level ground. I can still throw, and I look forward to throwing again, in the sunlight. I look forward to making things grow beneath my hands.

Our back garden is a joy to see, we're eating baby spinach and radish greens. We're watching beet greens grown, and helping the peas cling to their gate. Our herbs are small and flavorful, our beans are climbing. It feels sustaining, in a small way, to have a garden growing.

Beyond Boys and Girls: continuing the discussion with Jenna St. Hilaire and Mr. Pond

"I find myself in a world where everybody has his compartment, puts you in yours, shuts the door and departs."
~Flannery O' Connor

I had a different post prepared originally, but Jenna's thoughts on male and female views in writing gave me a good deal to think about and respond to, so I'm going to run my mouth a bit instead. She makes three points which particularly require a closer look: The first, that men are uncomfortable discussing the bodily experiences of women, such as menstruation, barrenness, and childbirth; the second, that men are more likely to reject a book for flaw which women will gloss over in the pursuit of something to love in the story; and finally, that men deal with broader themes, while women deal in the intimate and personal.

I do actually agree with her on some level in the first point. Men are often uncomfortable discussing women's experiences in the bodily sense. But as Jenna points out from her own experience, so are many women. This is less of a gender issue than an issue we have as a culture with our own physicality. The world is so clean, so sanitized - our bodies and their less-than-attractive elements are kept out of sight and out of mind. We are so distant from our own bodies that it's no wonder we don't know anymore how to discuss our own bodies without discomfort. Men and women both struggle with discussing bodily experiences, there is a tendency to become either too clinical or too "silly" - hiding embarrassment behind jokes or technicalities. If women are too uncomfortable to be open about their experiences, men can't write with any understanding of those experiences - nor can women, because they've lost a communal understanding of what women experience, they are too wrapped up in a singular experience, with no way of knowing if it's in any way a shared experience.

The second point Jenna brings up is amusing to me, as a woman who violates this rule so completely in my own reading. I'm amused because while I, and most women I know would fall in as readers with the men in her assertion, a decent number of men would fall in with the women, reading and forgiving everything for the sake of a "fun" read or an attractive heroine. I suspect it's a completely personal trait, but I'm a little disturbed at the ease with which she assigns it to women. Are we really such slaves to our emotions that we can't read a book without needing to feel good about it in some way? Are we really so incapable of clear judgement? I don't think so, and I think the tendency to apply this idea to women encourages a market already full of badly written books, and designed to make women read casually, respond emotionally, and cultivate an unhealthy attitude towards reading - requiring it to produce a certain feeling in order to have value to her as an activity.

It's her third point I want to spend the most time on. She's right in some ways, in that many people do have an impression of men caring "more about the big, overarching matters of the world," while women care more about the intimate, personal details of life. There is sometimes belief that men are really writing about big issues, when they're dealing in the intimate, and women are being too personal even when addressing larger issues, but this is more an issue of projection. Because we assume women write about personal details, we can't see the bigger picture, and because we assume men are dealing with wider issues, we miss the intimacy and emotion. In good writing, as in any other art, the intimate and the universal come together, just as the masculine and feminine elements of the writer come together. A woman who writes primarily "as a woman" fails in that she puts her gender ahead of her humanity. While it's true she writes out of her experiences as a woman, they are experiences in the world, with men and women, and unless she can enter into the mind of the men in her experience, she can never create fully. In this area, I can't help but think of two short-stories by Hemingway - often considered one of the most decidedly male authors - in which he enters into the mind of his female characters in an intimate way: "Hills like White Elephants" and "Cat in the Rain" are short, intense explorations of experiences of women he interacted with, and they indicate that, for the artist, the point is to experience everything, not merely as a man or a woman, but as an artist - to move beyond limitations and become "like the seraphim, all eye."

"All who go in beauty..
will resurrect in Beauty."
~Emerson

My husband made me peacock-and-amber earring for Mother's Day. If I don't completely reject all jewelry, I will wear them during labor to keep the evil-eye away. Peacocks are an Easter bird as it was thought once their flesh would never decay. They symbolize the resurrection and eternal life even today, just by the grandness of their display.

I like to think of God, laughing in anticipation as he created them, rejoicing in the many-eyed splendor of their tails and the luck he poured into every feather. He must have known the feathers would be used to guard the fragile from curses - hung on cradles and clutched in bridal bouquets. I think He can't have minded - so much beauty should not be wasted.

We have feathers tucked behind our Icons, watching along with the Virgin and her Son all that happens in our home. The feathers turn my thoughts to Christ - opening His tomb to greet the day.