Start with a girl
given to wondering:
add one mirror,
a sigh, her What if
as she teeters
upon the mantel,
and then . . .
I feel invisible, young Alice thinks, having tumbled through the Looking Glass. “It’s so very lonely here!”
O how the individual world upends when least expected. Say our loved one dies. The morning mirror throws back a reflection we scarcely recognize. Our equilibrium stutters.
Who will ever stop wishing for one more day with the beloved? We wander terrain made strange by their absence.
September has been strange.
A dear friend is in mourning. I listen to her stories and bow my head. What an honor to be a safe place for her sorrow. Wait. Did I almost recognize the name of her mentor?
But no, having so recently bade farewell to my own, empathy is uppermost.
Still, something niggles — an elusive, quivering thread I can’t quite place. (I’m also mostly steamrolled by COVID-19, so I give up; the noggin’s too full to process anything else.)
A week later, a longtime friend tells me her cherished brother-in-law passed. Over four decades I’ve often prayed for his wife and for him, at her request. Some prayers feel fiber optic: a flexible tendril of caring stretches forth on behalf of someone we’ve never met. Little pulses of light traveling through a line.
Yet I am increasingly mystified.
Each friend’s loss encompasses a faithful, richly loving and wise influence, lavished on them by a fabulous human being for nearly half a century. Again, like my own experience.
Far as I know, they’ve have not met. Except. One day, a conversational aside grabs my attention. So I ask each woman separately for the deceased’s surname.
And lo, the mentor and brother-in-law are one and the same person.
My raveled breathing smooths for a moment, an uncoiling of awe.
How tender yet tensile the weave of history among those who love God. Strand by strand, seen and unseen, myriad joinings surround, enfold, and uphold us. They glint like spider silk across air we thought was empty — and with such substance. Stronger than steel, we’ve been taught.
Now, research shows spider silk is surpassed in strength by the composite fibers within the teeth of sea snails! Turns out they are thousands of times tougher (and tinier) than our super, man-made nanofibers. Ten percent stronger than one dewy line of a spider web.
The small counts for more than we dare dream.
Start with a girl. A spider. A snail.
Or start with three friends. One God. Felicitous grace.
The connections are there, born of the eternal. Glimpsing them, don’t we feel less alone, less invisible?
Lord of Life, peel back a gauzy corner of the mesh, slender yet hardy as roots, diaphanous as your Northern Lights.
Friends, tell me something you know about sinewy delicacy . . . or mirrors . . .
Read about spiders and sea snails here.
Read about my mentor here.
Watch Alice step through the mirror here.
“There’s no use trying,” Alice wails. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
Her Royal (Peevish) Majesty sighs. “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I practiced half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Photo by Elisa Photography on Unsplash
Thank you for your words of wonderment.
I’ve only discovered your writing recently, and i just fill with joy and wonder to read your posts. ( I have known your beautiful song for many years and, in fact, woke up from a dream a few weeks ago having been singing that song in the dream! How amazing is that?)
Grateful for all your wonderful ponderings …
Dear Vanessa,
To read your words on this cold and rainy Sunday morning is a delightful and unexpected gift. I am so grateful to think of the song echoing within and across your heart and life, and now . . . a dream, as well! Yes, it is amazing.
Blessings on you today, and thank you for waking me, a-fresh, to the wonder of God’s touch on our lives.
To view a dead man I only have to look in the mirror. Nine years ago my heart stopped for eight minutes and twenty seconds while being prepped for knee surgery. My wife sat eating breakfast in the hospital cafeteria. She heard the Code Blue, Operating Room One, but assumed it was someone other than her husband. Somehow I was brought back from the dead. I consider the last nine years an exquisite gift I don’t deserve but years that are welcome none the less. When I do die I hope those that I leave behind make new connections that get them down the bumpy road of life.
Smokey, what a stunning reminder of sinewy yet delicate, miraculous life reasserting itself. An exquisite gift, indeed. May your hope come true in a legacy that enlivens many, my friend. Thank for living the way you do, embodying gratitude in an incomparable way.
I have had a life with twists and turns both within and outside my control. Overall it’s been better than I deserve and I am so grateful.
Your worldview inspires, friend. Thank you for sharing it with me (again). Lots of snow overnight and now, rather than gripe about the season’s first summons to shovel I am resolved to clear the way BUT also snag a few snowflakes on my tongue . . .
Such beautiful writing here, Laurie. Your posts offer such wisdom, shared with creative, poetic grace. Today you have me thinking: Even in grief we smile at the discovery of connection, as you surely did upon realizing the mentor and BIL were one in the same person. Such connection-discoveries help bolster our strength, I think, as God affirms how tightly we’re woven together by his love at work within us. Indeed, we feel less alone and less invisible in our holy connectedeness.
Dear Nancy, you put that so well I feel strengthened anew, just reading your words. Thank you, friend!
Blessings on you and your husband and the lifetime’s worth of connections integral to your dear selves and your work in this world.
This is simply wonderful.
Honestly, I had to read it a few times over the course of a few days.
My own life was becoming too big at the time.
“How tender yet tensile the weave of history among those who love God.”
“The small counts for more than we dare dream.”
“Felicitous grace.”
“Lord of Life, peel back a gauzy corner of the mesh, slender yet hardy as roots, diaphanous as your Northern Lights.”
Timely.
Thank you.
Be Loved.
Dear Rick, you are so welcome.
Thank you for noting the lines that spoke to you. I’m grateful they met you in a timely way.
I’m reminded of times when the seeming proportions of things have weighed on me, leaving me prone (even resigned) to accepting distortions. I really want to perceive the pilot lights scattered along the way.
In whatever is coming your way, may the tender intimacy of God’s care continue to suffuse those needs and events that have loomed large this past week.
I love that verse that thanks God for setting our feet in a spacious place.
Thank you, Laurie. I’m truly blessed by your writing. In regard to sinewy delicacy, I would like to share a recent experience as hospice chaplain. I was sitting in a memory care unit, speaking with a client with dementia. I shared with her the children’s book, “If You Find a Leaf,” by Aimee Sicuro. I then handed “June” a red leaf I had just picked outside her facility. She touched it and turned it over immediately, more enthralled with the back side of the leaf, the delicate (yet strong) red lines webbing through the leaf. She smelled the leaf, touching the side of her face with it. I said, “it could be a corsage!” and “June” held it to her chest. I reminded her that God sees her like that leaf: beautiful, fragile, strong. She slept on and off through the visit but kept moving the leaf up to her chest, a silent testament. “June,” who like Alice, may feel invisible, connected to God and to His bountiful nature in a precious way.
Dear Sheri, your testament describing “June” and the leaf will long stay with me. Tenderness and simplicity. I love that the leaf immediately engaged several of June’s senses. And what profound connections were made in those shared moments — between the two of you, and the Creator; between memory meeting the moment; and between one small evanescent yet eloquent underside of creation, held to the breastbone. You’ve given us a great gift in sharing these holy moments with us. Thank you!
Spider silk stronger than steel. Sea snails teeth stronger still. You have no idea – but Holy Spirit does – what those two references mean to my husband and me. Thank you for writing as you do, which is the outcome of listening to your heart and His as you do. I add my condolences and awe in equal portions to all you scribed, Laurie. Tendril-ly, Nanc
Oh my, your response is so tantalizing, Nancy. Not that it’s any of my business, but gosh, I’m glad the post spoke to you and your husband in a meaningful way. You make my heart well with gratitude, to you, and to the wholly inspiring Spirit of idea and image. Where would we writers be without the Breath . . .
And thank you so much for expressing your condolences.
And the delightful sign-off!
As usual, Laurie, your lyrical imagination and connectivity insights soars. I start reading, and never know where your tendril of thought will lead. That’s one reason I love your writing and another, your mind.
I’m so sorry you have lost beloved mentors. I’m so sorry you’ve been slammed with COVID. My sister lost her husband just over a year ago as COVID raged, and as his cancer, undetected, raged too . . . until it was too late. Her unexpected bereavement knows no bounds as she tries to tie back together the raveled edges of her life, ravished by loss. Death is never truly expected, but sometimes, perhaps, more shocking than others.
My life feels like someone has pulled several threads as my health unravels with illness. It’s then that I must realize that God is the true and only Master Weaver of my life, and just like those Renaissance tapestries, upended on the wrong side, once the weaving is done (maybe even in heaven) will I see (and understand) His colorful and beautiful design.
As for mirrors: First, I’d not heard of this movie. The cinematography is lovely. Would you recommend it? Second, I think of the painting, “Girl at Mirror,” by American icon Norman Rockwell. And third, I think far too many have their eyes glued to their OWN reflections in their mirrors. The world is becoming increasingly selfish. Would that we would turn our glance and gaze both upward and outward: Up to God, out to our fellow man. Frankly, I think a lot of our mirrors are cracked.
Thanks for a beautiful post. I rambled, not really answering your questions, but I always gain from your insights.
Love
Lynn
https://www.wikiart.org/en/norman-rockwell/girl-at-mirror-1954
Dear Lynn, I am so deeply sorry to hear of your sister’s bereavement. How wrenching to companion her in her grief (and your personal loss of your brother-in-law) while wrestling with the outrageous slings and arrows of unraveling health! Your faith in the Weaver ever shines through what you write, my friend.
And thank you for your warm empathy concerning my mentor. I was able to watch the video of her memorial service today, which meant, among other things, watching myself speak and share a poem she asked me to read at her funeral almost forty years ago, when I was first her student. And I did and I am still am, because her voice is in my head and heart and she worked with me up until this past January. What a richly ongoing gift from God. I cannot thank him enough for sending her into my life.
I’ll have to google the Rockwell painting. As to the movie, I’ve not seen it but know the story by Lewis Carroll is unsettling, absurd in places, probably non-definitive in terms of outcome other than watching Alice try to make sense of the backward world behind the looking glass. See “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” instead!!! Bet you already have. I LOVED that movie.
May peace keep you, body, spirit, and soul in these coming days, and may your continue to find the health resources you need as you need them.
Much love to you!
Fiber optic prayer. Oh yes. YES.
And faith like a vast net connecting us. Oh yes. YES.
A marvel. Marvelous.
Thank you for confirming the fiber optic comparison to prayers of some types. I really appreciate that amen, hearing it resonates. It felt fresh when it rolled through my thoughts and after such a full noggin, I was grateful for a new-to-me thought. : > )