Through and Through Life: Fresh Breath for My Very Soul

For me poetry and faith are interdependent. Each affects the other as they embrace and interpenetrate. Faith informs art, and art enhances faith. They both, for each other are breath for the bones. ~Luci Shaw in Breath for the Bones.

It’s more than breath for my dry bones, this.

It’s breath for my very soul, this writer’s droughted spirit.

My eyes are open once again,
and my heart does somersaults from neck to navel.

A rollercoaster rush.

Images explode, and I must find words and colors for this shaping deep,
this flame within.

I must capture them before they fade.

I pant like the goldfinch before it gulps from the bath.

 

 

Bring me then the plant that points to those bright Lucidites swirling up from the earth, And life itself exhaling that central breath! Bring me the sunflower crazed with the love of light! ~Eugenio Montale

Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. ~Matthew 6:22 (Message)

. . . both artist and believer must occupy themselves with seeing what is virtually unseeable, what the earthbound miss . . . By alertness to clues and causes, by listening with inner ears, by opening the eyes of the heart to perceive what surges beneath, within, beyond, they begin to draw the ineffable into the realm of experienced reality. ~Luci Shaw

I’m crazed by the sensations swirling within.

I’m wonder filled.

I’m seeing deep again.

I’m carried light like dandelion fluff.

Anything may make us look: a breaking wave, a train whistle, a plummeting gull, an amorous couple. But art and the vision of faith allow us to see. ~Luci Shaw

And today petaled butter melts me.

 

 

A dragonfly smiles and winks.

 

I catch the blur of a hummingbird’s wing.

 

 

A gaggle of geese swims in the soybeans.

 

 

I notice flowers field wide and wild waving in the hot wind.

 

 

Red peeks through green.

Bitty globes of hope.

 

 

And I forget the heavy heat as my eyes track a distracted butterfly.

 

 

I’m engulfed in the oven-baked goodness of Him.

And my heart is strangely warmed.

I’m joining the book club at The High Calling as we discuss Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination and Spirit: A Reflection on Creativity and Faith
by Luci Shaw.

Life is holy. And as we look at the foundations of the creative process as Luci Shaw describes them in part one of the book, we realize that as image-bearers of God, we create because He does. When we join with God in the creative process we are in a thin place—God draws near and the boundary between our earthly lives and the Divine becomes gauze; a diaphanous veil. ~Laura Boggess

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Go here to see how others are drawn into that holy and thin place.

Also linking with Bonnie Gray today in community as she asks the question,
“How is God challenging you to keep faith fresh?”

It’s through the slowing down and and the seeing. And the sharing.

 

And spilling these crumbs with sweet Emily.