Every Time I Blink

There was something so odd about walking the beach in November. The shore is empty, save for occasional little clumps of fishermen, their legs covered in rubber waders and their hands full of beer. Without the sounds of the summer beachgoers the ocean was free to be as soothing or as surly as it liked. The first day I walked along an ocean calm, the water the color of oxygenated avocado, the sky a crayola blue. The waves rolled and bounced shells toward shore, the broken bits sounding like shards of glass laughing. I'd never heard that sound.

The second day the ocean looked furious. As far out as I could see was white foam and water the color gray one use to describe old love gone old. The wind whipped everything it could, the sky built gray atop gray, like painting with only two colors. Tumbleweeds of seafoam skipped and rolled down the shore. The fishermen were gone. There was no one. The seashells kept coming but didn't laugh like the day before.

Not surprisingly, I thought of an Ani DiFranco song:

“The sky is gray, the sand is gray, and the ocean is gray
And I feel right at home in this stunning monochrome
Alone in my way
I smoke and I drink and every time I blink I have a tiny dream
And as bad as I am, I'm proud of the fact that I'm worse than I seem.”

I didn't get to write at the beach. I let every sort of distraction get the best of me.

Of Light and Color

Last year I changed my religious views on Facebook to say “kaleidoscopic”. I’ve only been asked about this twice and thought I’d explain it, because as I’ve let it sit and simmer, it’s made more sense.

Sir David Brewster, the inventor of the kaleidoscope, called it “the observer of beautiful forms”. The word kaleidoscope comes from the Greek kalos, meaning “beautiful” and eidos, meaning “shapes”. A kaleidoscope is made up of three essential parts: a tube, a few mirrors and small colored beads or objects.

These three things, when left alone, aren’t much. And put together they aren’t much, until light is presented. Then the whole becomes beautiful.

I think of my heart, in terms of spiritual/relational views, like this. God is my light. Without him, the pieces are boring, lifeless and useless. Love is the mirrors. The mirrors turn an arbitrary and banal strewing of pieces into a beautifully symmetric wonderment. They turn what is a mess into loving art. No matter how those pieces fall and swirl and change, those mirrors keep them beautiful, that light keeps it worth anything. It is only when I see my life with the mirrors of love and an eye toward God that I see beauty in my pieces. I don’t see my changes and falls as setbacks but as changes in my understanding of God, of light. I am my pieces, but with God I am new every morning, every moment.

Those patterns of light and color take me to a place of reverence. I think of stained glass and church walls; seeing the falling of dust through the cascade of colors that stream through the windows. When I had the opportunity to sit in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, I was blown away how that place rendered my heart. The north window contains a rosette that is as if one is looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. It was then I knew.

(I do not own the above image)