craving space

i am craving my own space.

ever since we lost the dream house, the place in which we are tucked now has seemed to slowly be closing in around me. it's begun to feel smaller than it every had before.

i find myself sitting at the kitchen table with my art, merging paint and canvas with dishes and bank statements. it is not my space, it is collective space but not in a communal artist way. it in shared in a life way, a way that doesn't ever stop but simply moves around me. and sometimes, it feels like it is slowly pushing my artistic spirit down the nearby garbage disposal.

mermaids crave the ocean, the wide and the open, the salty spray and the peace of the selah-crashing waves. i am landlocked, in more ways that one, with the nearest water being bottled and chilling in the fridge.

and maybe that is why i have grieved the loss of this house so deeply, in a way that almost seems like a part of my physical self had fled. it has been a rending, a true exploration into that word that has become far stronger than i could have ever anticipated :: release. 

art has become something powerfully present in my life in recent months, especially as my own faith journey has taken unexpected twists and turns. it's that demolition, as my husband calls it, the breaking down of all i once knew save for the foundation of the Lion to whose shimmering mane i cling. i'm relearning the sacred, finding my soft Psalmist voice again. it's release. 

:: and even in the crush, releasing myself might be part of the grand scheme of the things after all. 

because i'm past the point of being able to find a corner of my own in this tiny little place we currently and i reluctantly call home. though home is where your heart is, and my loves are here. so this is home. i am creating in the midst of our life, where the Light shares between my ink and paper pages and the aromas of home-cooked food and laundry soap.

and so i'm laying out the brushes and opening the journal, a new blank page in the middle of my worship place at the kitchen table. i light a candle and exhale the holiest of God-Light to the tune of stillness in the midst of the household busyness. i'm learning how to find my warrioress self amid the pulsing thrum of vacuums and pasta water boiling.

finding my space which i crave so desperately.
even if it means this mermaid swims {for now} in the kitchen sink.

{linking with dear emily for imperfect prose}

dive

{via pinterest}

sometimes people ask me how i intend to keep my warrior's heart alive with a baby on my hip. that it seems glorious now to speak of the sacred and of the Light, but that my time will come when infant cries and sleepless nights will overtake me and that i will flicker out from fancies into realities. 

these are the people that set my determination even deeper to swipe the paint beneath my eyes and grip the temple pillars with white-knuckled fingers. 

since when is the sacred a fancy? and when did motherhood kill the Light? 

have i missed something? 

a wise woman once told me that the weight of her son on her back bore her often to her knees. and isn't this how it should be? where children pull on skirts and guide closer and closer to the Cross, because children are warriors too. 

and i am ten weeks with this one, still silent save for the fluttering heartbeat beneath my skin. 

but this child will not blind my eyes from seeing Light or colour or Heaven's kiss along the earth. i know that it will be hard, and perhaps tears will blur or exhaustion with draw me down to my knees, but i will not be made blind.

:: He promised that i would never be blind again ::

{via pinterest}

i feel like i have toes pressed against the dock with water lapping soft beneath, and the wind whispering brave through my hair. 

maybe this dock is higher than i think, perhaps a ship's yardarm. and there is still this whisking, flowing water beneath my bare feet. 

and i could dive, or i could stay on the edge and wonder always what would have happened if i let go and simply slipped from air to aquatic. 

i think.

no, i know. 

i'm diving. deeper than i've dared before. and i refuse to act as though i am unafraid, because i have shaking fingers. but i've put down roots of brave and i will let the still, small Voice whisper in the night.

courage, dearheart. 

for I have overcome the world.

beyond

five minute fridays. we write for five, and only five, minutes. no editing, no overthinking, no backtracking. linking up with the gypsy mama.

the word

BEYOND

now GO...

i love this word. 

this idea of going beyond...

...beyond what is normal, what is accepted, and what everyone says should be.

perhaps it is the seeker in me, the little girl with TOMs and searching eyes barely hidden beyond choppy bangs that may have never grown up. 

she's still here. just six years older and a little wiser, or maybe not. 

i'm still aching for the beyond. still digging through fur coats to find the snow at the back of the wardrobe. i'm not about to stop that search, and it's about more than a magical land.

it's about the beyond. the more. the bit of unseen that i know is there, fingers out and reaching at the beams of hidden light. 

i want to go beyond this world. beyond this place of feeble and insignificant. because anything can be made beyond. because we were made for greater things.

{via pinterest}

if i find in myself desires that nothing in this world can satisfy, i can then only conclude that i was not made for here. 

i am not of here. i am of the beyond.

i am a citizen of the land of Love and Salvation and Light. 

i am a daughter of the soon. 

tired of this glass dimly, aching for the fresh eyes of Heaven-sight.

i want to catch that White Stag, find that hidden door, step past the train platform of Shadowlands and come into the brightness of this ended dream.

of this morning beyond. 

i'm ecstatic with the knowing that beyond is here. and i can touch it.

i am living in the now, living in the soon, living endlessly in the beyond. 

i don't have to come back to reality

because i'm already there. 

He promised, and i believe.

beyond is soon. 

beyond is here.