I’ve been searching fierce for beauty for weeks now.
Physically, halting for poetry and photo-taking of the dogwood trees. Drinking tea in the afternoon and listening to stories, watercoloring with my budding artists and stopping, to listen: this was my search party.
My war-cry looked like words spilling out the poems that fill me up in the journals. I’ve been listening to the quiet and the breeze. I heard the loud inside my head.
I’ve been searching for beauty with intent, spiritually too. I was reading Wurmbrand and how he’d raise his anthem songs in unjust prison. I listened to Mullins, how he, with all the fullness of his lungs, would belt out for such a thing as glory. I echoed O’Donohue, how his pen sang the song I was gaping for. And David, whose heart was filled with a theme for his king.
They understood how beauty invites and heals and fills! I wanted to drink but it seemed like I just kept choking. Choking on the unknowns, maybe, but more like the nows.
Emotionally, I unwound in the arms of my beloved and rested in his heart. His heart isn’t for me to toil myself to the bone, weary. He wants me to be refreshed and whole. He provides these spaces for me and furnishes them with grace to live and breathe within. I’m so blessed!
But I couldn’t grasp it, I couldn’t get my fingers, arms, self, around the extent I found in all my searching. I found beauty. Beauty found me. Was I so parched that I couldn’t drink? So dry and needful that it ran off of me instead of in? I was so hungry, so thirsty. My need was aching, dull, tender and right. at. the. surface.
Uncomfortable and awkward is what it’s been. Difficult to explain to the children when a text arrives full of good news and those surface things spill out all over my cheeks. Those surface things speaking to me about something a whole mass more unfathomable, but what? How?
Then the older boys were in a scrap. I can be so emotional about it all. I still remember having to put myself in place when my oldest was two years old; let him be. Let him be boy, let him roughhouse.
So they are—roughhousing, in the kitchen. Then, there I am again, awkward. Pouring my entire on-empty heart out about how it isn’t about them exchanging blows or even about who’s turn it really is to do the dishes.
I’m wanting them to know it’s about what they do now, here. I want them to grow so I’m pouring water all over them; by the buckets. “Drink! Embrace! Hurry, Grab! Hold! Take and eat!”, I say. “I have beauty.” “Sell everything for THIS!”
Then there I am, recalcitrant, bucking author-ity and kind instruction. I wondered a long time ago why so-and-so wouldn’t stop doing that one thing that just kept hurting them. Why wouldn’t they just…
We are hungry, thirsty, trying, brawling in the kitchen, surface things spilling out over the deep things within…those unfathomable masses, but what? How?
I once saw a man bent over and it seemed so clear to me angels were bent over him. He was surrounded completely by love, embraced. He didn’t know.
So, I told the boys, you’re not failing. You are living. You can either live and learn from it or store it up, bitter and hard. Oh, I pray they won’t. I yearn for them to see how good they’ve got it in each other, even the painful parts. I hope they can catch glimpses of the beauty. So I gave them the grace that was there in all these weeks, all this life.
It’s OK. Beauty is, whether we see and feel it or not.
It’s OK if you are unable to drink this now or see all the angels or that ladder between heaven and earth where they all dance. But I’m gonna keep telling you the story, because it’s as real as the air around you.
We’re gonna be rehearsing and singing it here together how beauty invites and restores, and all of the sudden that’s quite a lot of beauty in my stubborn, unknowing hands. There’s a heart full of wonder and lungs full of air again, here, right here. I’m so grateful. I’ve been let — let to be. Even while scrapping and searching, buckets pour over me.
It makes me want to search all the more, right where I am. Right where you are. Angels are dancing…
Searching for beauty with you,
Raynna
Hey everybody, I’m Raynna. I sat in my room one day twenty years ago and had a vision of a woman in labor.
Two other women came alongside her, upheld her, strengthened her as she labored. I had no idea what I’d seen, but found out later there was such a thing as a doula, a servant, who does just that. I trained for this position professionally and thrived on the work.
Journeying onward since that time, I’ve labored and birthed six of my own children and now through my writing and photography I am serving in this same position, doula. I believe in the miracles birthing in your souls, I want to come alongside and support you in the labor. Subscribe HERE.