Pinioned Hope

(With the following single line, I embrace all of the surging eccentricity welling up in me – for which my littlest sister, the angel of the family, acquiesced to the fundamental logic of my career as an English teacher – whether for three years or thirty – because it is a profession which, in her eyes, necessitates that same characteristic eccentricity.)

I am husbanded by Word.

Our love affair began rather slyly. So slyly, in fact, that I would liken it to Hmong tradition. My capture was entirely unforeseen; I was kidnapped in a blind tangle of dusty smelling sack-cloth . . . betrothed. And, like the Hmong brides, I never screamed for freedom. Rather, I blushed with pride and exultation. Me?! . . .

Sometimes, when I make life space, Words come leaping out of me in the mornings like hunted animals – an eruption of pheasants flinging themselves bodily out of the bush. Or Words well up and overflow, spilling out of me like a cow’s milk – my pen, the farmer’s hand. They fall onto the page frothy, warm, urgent, and raw. And when I don’t make space for them, Words dry up and crack inside of me like old, sun-chipped car paint. Then, the spindly webs banistering my insides burn like chapped lips with no salve but wildness and ink.

The urgency is real – so much so that I keep a journal and lamp within a breath of my pillow. I am driven by a fear that if I move my legs in the morning before writing, Words will skitter off like pigeons in a fluster of feather and lost voice, like Doig’s dreams in the half-light before waking. The loss is painful, because it whispers of a beauty almost had and never retrieved, Plath’s “Stillborn.”

Sometimes I feel hunted by Words. Other times I claim the bow and become the hunter. Always, we seek one another.

I run to the mountains to find the stillness that breaks open silence like a cracked egg, and there I find the hidden symbols of speech and light. I hide myself in river clefts until the waters forget I’m there and start to laugh again. I listen to their speech and mix the wetness of my salt-stained cheeks with the whelming joy of trillions of thundering droplets.

Sometimes I go to the street markets to pilfer Words like bread. I’m a thief and a hunter – one who ransacks, without pay, Words that fall from every table, lip, eye – Words that rise from every color, scent, texture. I vividly remember the first time I walked in the market and SAW Words – and was appalled that I’d never seen them before, surely like Elisha’s servant must have been.

It was a blustery day and the wind was blowing rinds of fruit, paper cups, cigarette buts – and Words. They were skipping beneath car wheels, wrestling in the gutter, laughing over the cobblestone and hiding between wooden slats of molding crates. And suddenly the sight seemed so natural I was stunned that the masses were blind to this explosion of Words.

I longed to catch the Words that fell down all around me and make them into a sort of mural, an image stuck in space of the motley conglomeration of street people all about – skin-clad Words. And for the first time, I wondered if that’s why Woolf’s heroine Lily paints: to pin the Words down, hide them from the wind.

My eyes welled up out of love – for the people, or their Words? For the people who are Words – and I imagined myself a laughing toddler swathed in fuzzy memory-stains – flitting about to catch flying bubbles before they sunk to the pavement, unredeemable smatters of soapy water. Lost Words.

Maybe that’s why John’s image of Christ as Word is so powerful to me. Christ as skin-clad Divine Utterance . . . blood vessels and hair follicles reaching out to cover over and make tangible the rich Letters of God’s mouth, the reality of holy love (when I don’t even deserve the wretched kind).

Maybe that’s why I fall down in humble awe at the image in my mind – God abandoned the Law that dwelt with him in the beginning, before he invented skin, to hang dressed in shame, blood, spit, and vinegar on a wooden rod – for his pottery to mock. And there he remained, still perfect and unbroken but exposed and vulnerable – like the pulp of an orange when its cover has been shorn away.

When I stay my eye on that cross, I often catch my mind retreating to a distant place. I wonder, had I been there, if I would not have preferred to be at the temple in that hour. The temple – where the curtain was torn. I’m a Gentile. And a woman. I had no hope – couldn’t come anywhere NEAR, or I’d be killed by the justice of God. Now I enter in every day –
The Word was made flesh. He made his dwelling among us.

To think that he is so passionate – so irrational – so just and merciful! A proclamation resonates in my spirit, “I choose shame and mockery because I MUST HAVE YOU!”
And, somehow, I chew up and swallow those words – and my body is nourished by the cryptic message that the ALMIGHTY rescued me –

That he loves me, and that he is not ashamed to call me his own.

Dickinson owns a lark in her soul named Hope. This is my Hope offering -- my song of hope over a people that I’m struggling to hope for right now. I can feel the words beating . . . bleeding . . . soaking hope, hope, HOPE. Famous Chilean poet Neruda’s, “Word born in the blood, it grew in the dark body, pulsing . . .”

Christ in us – the hope of glory. The hope of GLORY. wow

Drivdahl says most articles are published not because of right information, but because of good writing. I submit myself to the rallying ground between fact and style – I play a song that joins the hands of charisma and truth in a dance of hope. Hope.

Seen or unseen, read or unread – I’ve snatched the Words and pinioned them. I harnessed, only to borrow, their power – and I woo from this source of Words a hope that whispers of my Lord.