Clouds over the pacific...

On the way from the Blue Mountains...shades of memories of longings surround my spirit...a moment of honesty without guard...

Where is karen? The karen with 30 years of tears and quiet joys...of a heart molded over time around the Shepherd...with nail-prints in her hands and heart and eyes and laughter and pauses...

No rage, no loud-fire (only quiet-fire), no "western civ" push, only sweet siren wordless pulls...the gentleness than comes from being carried in the arms of the Man of Sorrows for decades of fear and pilgrimage...of hearing His heartbeat that comes from cheek-on-chest closeness...

I've looked into a thousand faces for her and into a dozen deep-hearts of grace and beauty and fire-flow...and although her smile is everywhere (making me wonder if I confuse her with the dancing and swirling and laughing Holy Spirit), I have yet to hear her quietness, in the sounding of those hearts...

I would love to see her, maybe just once--one glance--to know I'm not crazy and that heart-dreams are not always merciless thorns...but rather vistas of grace.

And hopefully, she wouldn't even notice me, only Him...

May she honor you, Lord...

A sunrise after the Pacific...

I found her! I have seen her! I have spoken with her! And I have learned and learned...

I found karen at my church...married to a heir of the King, with children true and with laughter in every deep-eyed look...with a life so thick with beauty and grace and warmth and serving, it seemed to have its own pull of gravity and its own orbiting hearts...

With the freedom that only comes from years and decades of living with grace and learning from Him...such humbling beauty, such en-quieting spirit...

Ah, the lesson! Her fellow heir was a son of heart, and a man of strength and motion and action and doing...a fellow laugher, a man of dancing eyes too, a man of time-forged commitment, devotion, and of the purest love...how they look at one another! Such a gift to even see from afar...such promise of the world of the New Future...and it was so clear to me, the brooder, the walker, the slow-wolf, that my heart-path was so very, very different and my calling so far from hers...and I worshipped in thankfulness that she was one with another...and that His love had keep us apart...

A midnight in winter...

And now the lesson returns, and evokes my brooding...where are the other lone wolves? Where are the others that walk quietly alone with you? Where are the me-types that can sit in silence for hours? One that weeps at ballet and piano and lilac and lakes and babies? One that dances inside at every mention of Your Name, Your loyalty, Your companionship? That rejects the flash of melodrama, that loves the quiet of grey-hair, that seeks no passion or romance or 'fun', but only deep-life and shared-spirit itself...

Slow, silent dancer, in the dark...with tears that grow from depth of closeness and from the awareness of another Jesus-life in an embrace or conversation...

I once thought I was dead, compared to others I loved and watched...but I know better now, I know what His life tastes like now, I know the fragrance of His Spirit...and I become more alive every day, in that life that I am being fashioned for...and that I long for...and that I delight to see in others...

The brooder walks on, and celebrates his walk and his Companion and his calling...but one never knows what forms His grace may arrive in...

[Dec/2000]