grief

Footprints of the Unseen

When fire flings its last defiant spark and torrents of leaves crackle with laughter, I wonder if you are dancing on this flaming air? Here, on this hillside of memories, where dreams are laid to rest like carpets of gleaming leaves draped over stones. I am untethered, adrift, lured to the last place you touched. You were…Read more Footprints of the Unseen

Let It Be Me – Response to Terrorism in Kenya

Horror still clutches my heart like an apparition from beyond the grave. “It is over,” Kenyan President Kenyatta assured the world on Tuesday. Some of the perpetrators are dead. Hopefully the rest are amongst eleven people detained in a sweep of Kenya’s exit points. And yet the echoes of their evil acts reverberate long after they…Read more Let It Be Me – Response to Terrorism in Kenya

Lament for Colorado

Today is an anxious day. The largest air rescue since Hurricane Katrina thrashes air currents over Colorado skies. Searches for hundreds of missing people continue, even as gray clouds smother us in fear of what we cannot control. It seems utterly inconceivable that a state surrendering its ashes to scathing hot, cloudless blue only months…Read more Lament for Colorado

Summer Will Come

Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m enamored with a single dying weed. So far, it has inspired five paintings in as many months! Click the following links to view the paintings in their original blog entries: (left to right) Songs in the Valley, Reach, Always, Loving You Still. There’s something about it – the pathos as it…Read more Summer Will Come

Moment between death… and life

On the night he almost died, eternity brushed my cheek. Ephemeral, yet solid. I knew on that night, more than ever before, that forever is. He knew it, too. He would later talk about that passage when a massive stroke shook him like a rag doll in the mouth of a vicious dog. He would…Read more Moment between death… and life

Always – lament for a father taken too soon

On a balmy October afternoon, we gathered on a green slope saturated with sinking-sun amber light. Sentinel trees swayed in a swan dance of brilliant-hued Autumn. We clustered amidst names engraved in stone, contemplating the eternal promise of Scripture, swelling with tears to the last lingering notes of Amazing Grace. Each of us clutched a…Read more Always – lament for a father taken too soon

Songs in the Valley

“It doesn’t look as bad as it did yesterday,” my ever-honest 12 year old tried to encourage me. I asked my husband, “Is it really bad?” “I like some of your other pieces better,” he conceded. I gave it one last look, and shredded it. Every piece of artwork, for me, seems to pass through…Read more Songs in the Valley

Smell of fear

You left me alone in the smell of fear. Thick haze smothers scorched earth; I can't see. The next scathing breath catches in my lungs. A child's swing lists lazily on this barren hilltop, beside a crumbling brick archway, framing blackened nothing.

My beloved friend

Sept 30, 2011 I always thought of my Dad as the North Star, pointing me to what really matters in life. I could believe in a God who loved me unconditionally, tenderly, with joy, a God who delighted in me, because my Dad loved me that way. When I met David, I recognized him as…Read more My beloved friend

Yearning

Like pungent fields of rich crumbling fertility, naked to the noon day sun, aching to be steadied by clinging roots, we all of us live, move, search. I see these fields of upturned faces, groaning for miles and miles. And all the while the air is pulsing with something more real than hungry bellies, frigid…Read more Yearning