Beauty in Friends

Hello there. I didn't realize it had been so long since I posted until a friend of mine asked me to start up again. (Thanks, Melissa!) It wasn't an intentional omission. My focus has been on the CS Lewis Fellows program (www.cslewisinstitute.org) and other areas of writing and, well, living.

I have another friend who is very ill right now. She, like Melissa and I, adores beauty. All winter long, Nancy deals with bitter cold and snow and long, dark days. She looks forward to spring and to the first hint of lilacs blooming. When she emails that she saw and smelled her first lilac blossom of the season, I can hear the joy and relief in her words.

Inside her cozy home, she creates beautiful art books with intricate folds, gorgeous papers, a well-chosen word here, a little detail there. When she's done, she sometimes gives these beauties of heart and hand to friends who treasure them as well as the person who made them.

When she felt better, she wrote thoughtful, reflective posts for her blog. Her writing required her readers to think about the deeper things of life.

Last June, I met some friends from my writers' group at a fellow member's home in Alaska. Even though Nancy was ill then, she was able to enjoy the trip to the fullest. Like the rest of us, she drank in the beauty of that wild land and took countless photos of the landscape. I remember one time on a cold, drizzly day, she stood looking at the water below and the mountains behind it while the rest of us huddled inside the car. Later that afternoon, she and I stood together under my umbrella and marvelled at a glacier on the side of the road. Another friend took a photo of us, me looking at the glacier, Nancy smiling at the camera.

Earlier last year, she and I went to a famous art museum in her city. We meandered through many of the galleries, lingering with the Impressionists. We chose our favorite paintings and discussed why we liked them so much. At lunch in the noisy, crowded cafe, we talked about art and beauty and writing. It was a short visit, but one I'm glad I made.

Now that she's so sick, she's not able to keep in touch by email or even talk on the phone much. I miss her. I miss her love for beauty and creativity, her emails, and her smile. I wish we could sit around the table with our other friends and share our stories, our writing, our lives. And of course our chocolate. She's never far from my thoughts and prayers. Even though I can't be, I know that the God of beauty--our Lord and Savior--is with her, comforting her and reminding her how very much she is loved.

God bless you, my dear friend.

Shakespeare

On Saturday, we went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream with some friends. What a delight! It's been years since I studied Shakespeare, but it doesn't matter. The actors make the lines understandable by tone of voice and body language so even if you don't catch specifics, you understand the gist of what they're saying. The costumes and props at Georgia Shakespeare Company are always clever and the clown characters are hilarious. We laughed and laughed through the final scenes and have been repeating favorite lines to each other ever since.

At dinner afterward, my friend talked about the beauty of language, the gorgeous flow of Shakespeare's poetry over the audience. It made me think about what I've been reading in Luci Shaw's book about language and poetry and about the meditation on scripture that I've been doing. I want to fill the well, a term used by creativity book author Vinita Hampton Wright, with images from scripture so that when I write, the beauty of language, which God Himself created, flows over my audience as well.

Do you have favorite passages from a book, a poem, or scripture that flow over you? Please share it in a comment.

The Beauty of the Cross

On a grassy hill approaching a nearby mountain town is a message of faith to all who pass by. Since springtime, the owner of the land has consistently cut the grass in the shape of a cross. Every time I visit this town, the grass inside the cross has grown taller and therefore more visible. It's a huge cross, but if you're in a hurry or not paying attention, you could still miss it.

When I drove by last week, I glanced up to look at it and almost drove off the road. Not only was the grassy cross there but it was filled with dwarf sunflowers--hundreds of them. The cheery yellow flowers and the deep green grass made the cross a stunning roadside show. It made me think of creativity (this time, with a lawn mower and some seeds), summer beauty, new life, resurrection, and a dear friend who loves sunflowers best of all.