Word Sketches

‘When will you be ready?’ he asked.

‘When I forget to put on mascara,’ she said.

And the seasons get shorter, the years quicker, nobody gets older but us, our generation. Our parents grow wrinkles, our little sisters and brothers grow breasts and beards, but really, really they’re exactly the same age as they always were. These changes are happening more and more quickly but only we are getting older. Two years ago rock concerts and giggling invisible plans flowed in our veins and now everyone’s getting married and pregnant but still five years old, eating Cheerios and listening to Raffi with crayons. What do you want to be when you grow up? An archeologist! Because I love dinosaurs and digging up bones! Land before time. Now you can drive and smoke and drink. But no, I want to swing! And then you take yourself shopping and discover with surprise that you’re actually wearing those cool clothes that you spent all those years without, thinking that you were the unluckiest person alive. You know that you really are grown-up because you don’t even care anymore. But then you see one of the cool kids and you’re right back in the cafeteria, wondering which table will let you sit with them.

‘I dreamt about you last night.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You were a lake. I swam around for hours.

Funny how that’s only minutes in awake-time, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Dude, think of all the lifetimes you’d live if you were in a coma.’

‘My uncle was in a coma for a while.’

Awkward pause.

‘Dude, what am I supposed to say to that? Sorry! Did he ever come out?’

More silence.

‘Actually, I’m just kidding.’

‘Yeah?’ He chuckled, and turned to look, really look, at her.

‘But if I did have an uncle, wherever he is out there, I think I’d know how he’d feel. Like being awake but asleep all the time, not really being able to move…’ She stopped, embarrassed, and looked away, down into the valley.

The silence rose like the golden morning sun before them, fire without the heat over the mountaintops, shedding that sheen over the trees and river, rocks and path. You could never see the world the same way again, not after a sunrise like that.

‘Lara?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I think I’m in love with you.’

She breathed out and let the minutes build, silent and grave and laughing.

‘Was I a cold lake?’

He smiled. ‘No, you were perfect.’

A Day

“How strange, how strange it is,” she said, “that I am living and yet dead.”












She cried tears of flame
They licked down her face
"Come rest your head on my heart" she said.
And what soft, sweet burning He found there,
What soft, sweet burning in that wild thing that He had come to love.

So strange! Today and yesterday I felt such incredible inner turmoil that I became nauseous. During such times I only wait for it to pass and pray because I now know that it is only a time of desolation calling me to turn toward Him in a deeper way than before.
Mass has been so very difficult lately. As if an impenetrable veil lies between me and the Eucharist which I must ignore at every moment because no matter what I feel, I cannot be denied the pleasure of partake in praising Him!
My hair has been falling out for weeks and weeks (probably because of my hypoactive thyroid).
So strange! "Strange as it seems there's been a run of crazy dreams..."

There is an ever-deepening longing and thirst within me.

The heart
It breaks
and overflows
all at once
the longing to love
to be loved
which is greater?
unknowing tugs
first one way, and then the other,
until I am pulled so completely
that the strings of my heart
aren't bouncy or loose anymore,
but taut like a bowstring
and then what sweet, beautiful notes escape!


Yes, my heart is pulled taut. And yet loose too.
The smoky fog of mystery!!! Where will life go? Where shall He take me?
Which is more frightening? To not know? Or to know?
The footloose wanderlust to seize love, to run into the arms of life, of the world!
The enticing peace of self-gift of prayer and raw beauty in the convent!
Yes, the terrifying choice of joy shall lie before me soon and very soon.

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and
danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. ~ Tolstoy

We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break out necks for home.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

ANNIE DILLARD,

HOLY THE FIRM