Category: Theology

Poetry & Words, Theology

1997-2004 :: On Grief and the Golden Thread

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

Oaxacaborn - Gabriel B. - On Grief and the Golden Thread
Gabriel B. - On Grief and the Golden Thread
Oaxacaborn blog - Gabriel B. - On Grief and the Golden Thread

God, who are we
to moan and weep
when it is not he
but we
who sleep?

GABRIEL B., NOVEMBER 12, 1997 – JULY 10, 2004

I remember where I was sitting when I heard it was coming, and how I got up out of my chair and ran down the hallway, blind from hot tears, not knowing where I was going, and I remember how the sun burned down when I stood there on the porch, and I looked up, and knew in an instant he was gone. It felt wrong for the sun to be so bright, it felt wrong to be breathing; and later, it felt wrong for berries to be so vividly blue, it felt wrong to taste their broken sweetness, twisted as they were into the batter of the pancakes we ate out back, under the deep-rooted oak.

But color doesn’t fade when grief comes; it is only blurred for a moment because our vision trembles. But it doesn’t fade; it doesn’t rust and it doesn’t crumble, because “we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed”.* It shines, and it is brilliant in color, and it is love, and “Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”**

My vision trembles from time to time, again, even now over the years; I see the blur in a memory, in notes of a song, or in the way sun shoots down through the woolen clouds even when it’s most dark. I see the blur, and I know it is well with my soul.

Today is different than that day because I’ve learned it’s not wrong for the sun to be so bright, it’s not wrong to revel in the taste of the blueberry or the way the daffodil splits the earth in the spring.

“The living can’t quit living…They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.”**

*Hebrews 10:39
**Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

Inspiration, Life in Photos, Poetry & Words, Theology

You Have A Voice. Use It.

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

Since I was a little girl and first began to know of wrongs, I have been burdened. I look around me, I listen, I see, and I am weighted down.

There is so much need, so much injustice, so many faces that stare back at me from across the world, so much I cannot do.

But then I hear a voice, speaking to me, saying:

You have a voice.

Use it.

Else you are like a camera which does not see…

You have a voice. Use it.

…a strap which does not carry…

1000 px - 4 - You have a voice. Use it

…instruments which do not write…

You have a voice. Use it.

…stars which do not shine light.

You have a voice. Use it.

Speak up for those who are voiceless, those who cannot tell their story.

They have a story waiting to be told.

Tell it.

Speak.

Do not always remain silent.

“Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow. “-Isaiah 1:17

“For if you remain silent at this time … you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?”-Esther 4:14

How will you use your voice today?

Life in Photos, Poetry & Words, Theology

Maybe I’ll Write

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

White Ceramics and Lucky Bamboo

Eiffel Tower and Washi Tape

Grey Dotted Paper Lantern

Pablo Neruda

Blue Toile Pillowcase

“Wonder Aveline the Super Dog” has finally gone to sleep, Josiah is at a Sigur Rós concert, and I am here in a quiet house with a lovely plate of food and silence.

Maybe I’ll watch a movie, maybe I’ll write a bit more — not here, mind you, but elsewhere, and just for me.

Sometimes I think that’s the only way I’ll ever write a book is if I tell myself all the words are only just for me. Sometimes when I’m writing for you, I let you get in the way. Sometimes you scare me, and I let that fear change how much of the story I tell.

I’ll never write a book if I write it for you.

So maybe tonight I’ll write for me. Maybe I’ll finally open up that lonely document called Chapter One, and maybe I’ll begin it like this:

“I lived in the South the year I turned thirty. At least, I thought it was the south. It was well below the Mason-Dixon line. It dangled into the ocean, for crying out loud; wedged between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. But people said it wasn’t the real South. The real deep South, they told me, was further north. …”

Poetry & Words, Theology

Let the words fall again

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

Technology as a hindrance to overcoming writers block

Mason Jennings has a new album, due out November 12 (11.12.13). I haven’t really listened to any of the sneak peeks yet. But I am struck by the way he wrote this album.

“After nearly a year of writer’s block, Jennings holed himself up in a cabin with only a handful of tools at his disposal: a guitar, electric piano, bookshelf, notebook, tape recorder and one 90-minute cassette.

…’I was overwhelmed by all the technology,’ Jennings says, ‘and it was getting in the way of the true core, the mystery of songwriting.'” [via this article.]

I love that.

Maybe when the writing stops coming, maybe it’s because I’m letting things chase the words away. Maybe I need to chase everything else away, and the words will return.

I want the words to fall again, like delicate leaves, slightly broken, let loose from an autumn tree. I want them to fall again, to gather around my feet, to follow the path they were meant to flow in the middle of the silent forest.

Maybe I need to chase away the howling wind.

Poetry & Words, Theology

Rivers of Light

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

August 2013 - Aveline's tangled hair looking out window in morning lightThere’s something so pure about the morning light. It falls through the sky in a way it does no other time of the day, it falls and dances and pulls the air around it into gossamer waves. The early hours pull and push and twist the light into an opaque filter that infuses the morning in possibility. Awash in new mercies, morning light stands up  strong against uncertainty and tugs my eyes and heart upward, to the Light, to the Giver of light, to the Hope of all living things.

Jobs, plans, circumstances — these offer no promise of constancy, but Jesus does. When the future looks as temporary as words etched into sand at high tide, when faced with uncertainty, there is a Rock. There is an Anchor.

And there is morning light, a tiny glimpse of light eternal, to spring up each day and remind us all that He is constant, He is never-changing, He is rivers of light.

“You’re in a cosmos
star-flung with constellations by God,
A world God wakes up each morning
and puts to bed each night.
God dips water from the ocean
and gives the land a drink.
God, God-revealed, does all this.”
-Amos 5:8, The Message translation

Poetry & Words, Theology, Travel/Moving

When Home Can’t Be Pinned Down

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

When Home Can't Be Pinned Down - Gina Munsey on OaxacabornWhen I was little, I knew my grandparents through letters and home-recorded cassette tapes. I used to dream of hugging them, of spending long days beside them, of just looking at them and listening to the sound of their voice.

And one day, a long time ago, we showed up from another continent, from across the ocean, and “by the time we were at the bottom of the hill and had parked beside the house, my grandmother, my grandfather, and Aunt Margaret were all outside, looking exactly the way they had in the calendar picture. I ran right into my grandmother’s arms as if I’d been doing this every day.

‘Welcome home! Oh, welcome home!’ my grandmother cried.

I hadn’t known it, but this was exactly what I’d wanted her to say. I needed to hear it said out loud. I was home.” -Jean Fritz, Homesick pg. 138

All those memories came flooding back to me, this month, when I set Aveline down on the airport floor and watched her run at top speed into my dad’s arms. She latched onto him, she threw her arms around his neck, she pressed her cheek to his shoulder, and I felt it again. I felt I was a girl with one foot here, one foot there. A girl to whom home was a many-splendored thing, altogether here and there.

And in between the here-ness and there-ness is a place that can’t be pinned, a place that can’t be caught or ordered around, a place that can’t be pushed into a map’s tight little squiggly lines. It’s a place I can’t visit whenever I want to, but only when the road we’re on lets us go there, and maybe that’s the beauty of it.

Grandma never stopped smiling and Grandpa buckled her into her very own seat in his truck, and we all piled in. Looking at this scene, I didn’t know if it was 1991 or 2013. I didn’t know if she was being buckled into the seat or if it was me. Here and there passed each other so closely they became one, the one thing that can’t be held down.

Home.

“I paid no attention to the road. I just kept looking out the window until all at once there on my right was a white picket fence and a meadow, fresh and green as if it had just this minute been created…the whole scene. The perfect greenness. The washed-clean look. The peacefulness. Oh, now! I thought. Now I was in America. Every last inch of me.” -Jean Fritz, Homesick pg. 133

Every last inch.

Thoughts on Grandparents, or, When Home Can't Be Pinned Down - Gina Munsey on Oaxacaborn

Life in Photos, Poetry & Words, Theology

Spelling out hope in all kinds of ways

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

June 2013 - Aveline waking up near window
June 2013 - Aveline looking out window

We wake up slowly this morning, the hum of the air conditioner and the dehumidifier a constant reminder of the tropical climate. They are the new silent, the steady noise which blends into the background and becomes a part of these walls and this life.

Outside, the landscapers’ lawn mowers rattle across the sidewalks and through the landscaping mulch, sending a spray of pebbles and bark across the bottom third of the front door. I cringe a little, thinking of the helpless, newly-transplanted moss rose and marigolds in terracotta pots on the front stoop.  The new pinwheel, whirring happily to the blast of mower exhaust, doesn’t mind. It just spins and blends the colors into a sphere anyway.

Aveline wants to see it all, and settles in by the second-story window to watch. It’s a Monday-morning routine, at least when the rain stays away long enough for the landscapers to trim and edge and cut and sweep.

Maybe later, we’ll spread out a towel on the narrow strip of sidewalk in front of the door, and sit side-by-side in the sun to “make ABCs” on the concrete, until our fingers and knees are covered in dusty blue and pink and yellow.

She wants to “make ABCs” with her pens and crayons and chalk, this one, not houses or trees or little boys and girls. She flips book pages and pretends to read, and screeches “TWO A’s!” whenever she spots a word which has, indeed, two letter A’s. She can’t pronounce her own name, but she can make a letter “T” from pretzel sticks, and she turns her felt number 2 upside-down to “make Z”.

I don’t know where she gets these crazy ideas. I know how it feels to love letters, though.

I love letters. I love the words you can make from them. I love that 26 characters can be scrambled and pushed into thousands and thousands of different orders to spell out love, or fear, or hope, or happiness.

May she grow up to spell out lots and lots and lots of hope.

Poetry & Words, Theology

There are no rules in poetry except

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

 

Poetry has no rules, it has been said.
I say, rules exist. They lie
in how poetry should be read.

For instance, one cannot
read Octavio Paz
without first pausing
to sink into a faded velvet chair
of some bookstore
now out of mode and forgotten

And when
one reads the words of Billy
Collins it can only be
at a kitchen table
after dark
by the light of a single flame.

Shakespeare’s for the school halls, read
by one who thinks he knows
and Dickinson’s for the garden
with a single yellow rose.

Frenzied prose is for the birds,
scattered in the mist of ancient cobblestone
a panicked pandemonium set off
by the toss of a head
or sleight of hand.

But the poem, in all its outdated ink
remains unruffled
and to think

you nearly passed it by.