Resurrection 3
Remembering How to Fly. For The Mudroom.
I can’t tell you who helped me get to the University medical center or to hobble back to my dorm on crutches. I can’t recall exactly what the doctor said or much of the resulting physical therapy. But I can tell you the exact step I was trying to land when I, instead, found myself face down on the studio floor.
It was a sissone, a pretty basic ballet step that I barely gave a thought to after fifteen years of performing it. I should have effortlessly launched from two feet and landed on my right leg, my left gently gliding down to meet it. But my standing leg gave way under me dislocating my kneecap.
I remember that missed step often. When my son sits on my lap and my knee protest being kept in one position for too long—I remember. When my knee pops and my breath quickens, that flash of worry surfacing that today might be the day it decides not to hold my weight again—I remember.
I spent years being defined by my identity as a dancer. What I loved most about dance was the way I felt like I was transformed when I moved. I was still me, but stronger and freer. It was in those years of discipline, those years of devotion that I learned how to fly.
People who meet me now have no idea I studied dance through college. Mostly, I forget, too. I continued to study and perform as long as I could but I chose a different career path and after I started a family dance slowly faded out of my life.
There is little evidence of my years of study. But the pain remains years later.
The damage done in that split second of flying through the air without a thought for the consequences lingers in my joints. The dull ache is a physical reminder that tiny moments matter, that they ripple throughout our lives. It’s a reminder that years of choices matter, that they make us who we are and turning a corner doesn’t mean leaving all those old part of us behind.
I don’t believe in clean breaks. Wounds don’t just heal, leaving no evidence behind. Healing does come. But scars remain. Scars remind...
CONTINUE READING AT The mudroom
Witnesses to Our Rebirths. For the Mudroom.
Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. -1 Corinthians 13:12, NLT
I don’t recognize her anymore. Her short hair swoops across her forehead and her smile looks easy. She appears certain about her place in the world, about what lies ahead.
In the photo taken a year ago, she blends into her family. Their matching black shirts and denim say they are a unit, one. She’s like a puzzle piece that has always fit in a certain place, next to them.
When I look in the mirror now I see a different picture. My short hair was too hard to manage in the South Asian humidity so it has been growing out, now twisted in a little bun at the base of my neck. A headband has become a permanent fixture over what is too unruly. My cheeks are less full, the more natural diet I eat these days and the miles I walk around this massive city erasing some of the pounds I put on in the past few years. Any clothes I brought with me in our move stay relegated to the early morning hours before anyone might visit our house. After that I wear local clothes, a scarf draped across my chest.
I stand alone with sad eyes, a piece without a puzzle. I’m only part of a picture that once existed. I’m not her anymore. I’ve been reborn as someone else in this place.
I don’t recognize her anymore. Her eyes were hard and her mind was closed. She saw the world in white. She didn’t know a world of diversity existed out there. She saw the world in black. There was the truth and everything else, and she was to convince others of the right way.
In the photo taken twenty years ago, she stood opposed to her family (and a lot of other people). Her heart was in the right place but her methods were all wrong. She wanted to love but she didn’t know how.
When I look in the mirror now I see a different picture....
do you notice the transformatins that have taken place in you, that are taking place every day? today i am over at the mudroom looking back (and forward) at the pictures that are the witnesses to my rebirths and how necessary change is to growth. join me?
New Life Requires Death
My husband noticed it first. As we hiked in the North Georgia mountainside in early spring, he pointed out new life springing up everywhere.
We had stopped to gaze at the waterfall gurgling into a lazy stream below. He pointed to a tree that was broken off at the top, maybe struck by lightning or snapped off by the wind. It looked like it had long since died, yet there were new sprouts all over the trunk, emerging from what had once seemed dead. He said he loved the way nature had a way of renewing itself like that.
I looked at the new green on that once dormant tree and I saw a glimpse of the hope the followers of Christ must have felt the day they discovered that the stone had been rolled away.
With the resurrection in my thoughts, Easter celebrations close at hand, my mind turned to the time Jesus spent with those who loved Him in the days following His return to life. I imagine the wonder they must have felt, hearts so full and light, bursting in their chests. I wonder if they also feared though. Did they keep touching him, afraid of when he would leave again?
God has a way of bringing life from what appears to be the end.
So often new hope requires death first.
My oldest child, taking in all the wonder of the surrounding forest, asked us why so many fallen trees lay over the river. Her dad stopped by a tree that was almost completely decomposed at the base. To show her how it had broken down over time into rich soil, he scooped up the moist, black earth in his hand. A musky smell of disturbed earth filled the air as he told her it was supposed to be this way, that it was how the forest stayed alive.
What had been a life-giving tree, providing oxygen, shade, and shelter was no more. In death nature had done its work and the tree now gave life in a different way. It had fulfilled its purpose in its life and also in its death.
I love new life, the spring, the hope and feeling of renewal. Fresh starts and new beginnings are awe-inspiring.
It’s the death part, which has to come first, that doesn’t come so easily. I tend to hold onto dreams or seasons of my life, not willing to let die that which God requires me to let go of to bring new life. Continue Reading
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