Tag: Words

Celebrating, Cheering, Rejoicing —Life (With Words, Always)

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 3 Comments

I had lunch with a friend last week and she said something profound.  Profoundly simple.  I just live everyday like its the last.

And I want to too.  So a good place to start is with celebrating life and all that’s worth celebrating about it.  Daily.  In the ordinary.  In the mundane.  In the big and in the small. In the minutae and in the grand.  The footnote asterisk moments, and the all out worthy of champagne and caviar celebrations.  The all.  The package.  The whole entire messy and grandness of it all.

Around here today, this momma’s heart is celebrating.

So I write.  I write to celebrate and mark the worthy and the good. To describe the layers of living and life.  Tear stained keyboard marking milestones. Sweet and bitter co-mingling on the tongue-tip places. Tasting the past.  Savoring time since birthing a firstborn son into a world where he becomes the teacher, an anchor, a place to look for inspiration. A place to go for contagious exuberant passion for life and all that it grants.

Time blurs in the remembering. So I write.  And the fingers, the heart, the mind, and memories meld together and weave in and around, back and forth, and swirl up the all good.

I write and remember.  Track back and gather up. Gather up moments, milestones, time and time spent.  Ways love appeared and  the ways love was shown. Beautiful expressions of love.  Deeply handsome gestures of care, concern, love, and compassion.

I write to proclaim and give voice to the story.  A good story worth telling in bold and in all caps.  A story starting with love in love and continually marked by love.  Bookmarked with good and great and worthy of being raised up.

A story of a boy becoming a man.  Growing in manhood.  Tenderly, kindly, strongly, compassionately walking out love.  For His God.  For His family.  For his friends.  For others.

A story of gentleness and a passion for life and creation.  For the small in the world, the fragile, all that God created with feathers, and wings, and fur, and skin.

A story of caring.  Caring deeply for others, always.  A story of a heart which seeks to nurture  and love.  To protect and pour into.  Standing firm in Faith.  Standing firm in Family.  Going long, running hard after friendship.  Always digging deep into work, into love.

Happy Day of Your Birth.  Happy you have made me.  Joyful, joyful I adore you.  

Your life is a beautiful praise song to God.  You love all His creatures and you love His people in a way that touches deep in me.  You have woven your love throughout our family, always caring and searching for the needs of others.

Thank you for walking back into this home, my man-child, your passions, your joy, your love and your hopes.  Grateful for your strong tethered heart to this home and this momma.  I weep with joy, I weep with gratitude.

Happy Birthday, my son, I love you.

When we celebrate life, we celebrate Him, the Giver of all great gifts.  Thank you Father God for pouring out so richly into this life, this home, this day.

And all God’s people say “Amen.”

Amen.

How Sidewalk Chalk And Poetry Can Inspire

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 4 Comments

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” –Pablo Picasso

Walk out into wonder.  Walk out expectant.

Get lost in a sea of color, be ushered into art by Joy.

Meet hunched over concrete artists, poets bent over in an ocean of chalky words painted in child style.

Authors of brilliant color, brilliant meaning.

Wisdom written, published immediately on rocky tablet, all Old Testament.

Simple, plain, proclamations from child heart, child truth.

Lips bitten, knuckles white, pressing hard, bracing wind and the elements.

For Art’s sake.

Because the Words need a voice and a place.

Because their hearts have a story to tell.

You zig and zag around theirs as you do yours, the stories.

Take care not to step on these yellow lines with pink prose and hard written lines on rough gritty.

Like ours, theirs want to spring out into April air and be told, to dodge the rain drops and lay there sundrenched long enough to be heard.

Find Joy in the sunlight, find Joy in the telling.

Sidewalk artists for the day, delight in the hope of eyes seeing creativity at their feet.

Careful to step big and step over the masterpiece after naming it “very good”.

Where is childlike wonder in your words?

How did childlike wonder go all black and white, shackled up and bound inside the lines.

When did the palete lose its chalky choices once full of pastel poetry and prose?

When did the mundane monochromatic get to be enough. When did we settle for the uninspiring. Stop looking for the beautiful.

Sidewalk poetry inspires. Calls to come write and play and tell a bumpy concete story.

Color it joyful, color it bright, color it sideways.

Color your story on the hard path, knelling and bent down with your dusty fingers and your windblown mane.

Lay down your story all gritty and real with your colored chalk. Write it bigger than big cause you’re all outdoors and free to be big sideways and be loud big.

Write like the child you are, the child of God.

Tell it poetic, tell it all chalky and dusty, all kneeled down child’s pose.

And let the sidewalk lower school poets inspire you to freely write it down, lay it down, smack down at the entrance and exit of the middle of the everything.

Let Joy in the Art blow words of sweet beauty, sweet blessing.

And let the sweet and the simple be Art for today.

Art that inspires all the growing-up people.

Words that halt the hearts, and the steps, and the pace of the too fast people.

Words that say stop, there’s a story that wants to be heard on the concrete path on the right in front of your big growing-up feet.

Stop and read and be inspired, before the rain washes them all away.

Wrap Up A Word in A Poem, Wrap up A Word In Love

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 4 Comments

(Today’s post dedicated to my mother Maggie on this, her birthday.  She has taught me to love and hold on to Words.)

Moments like pebbles jet- skim over water, thrown out hard,  fast from child’s hand, speed along, bump, skip along. Ripple space, dent, ripple path. Fall hard.

Speedy jump all bullet shot out of angled hand to delight.   Race on. 

And words thrown out, caught in heart nets. Tossed,  captured,   pondered. We grab, wrestle with these letters all clustered up, woven in wonder.  Knitted for warmth, encouragement, teaching, healing. Put forth for comfort and hope.

 Grab hold of time, wrap it in words with love. Cherish its beauty, its singular lightening fast, quick flash, steamy quick rising temporariness. Hold hard to words telling story of moment.

Put a word on a wound.  Place a word on pain , wrap it in God-breathed, God-given hope. Send it out in a prayer built of words, fragile and sweet.

Put a word on joy, put a word on wonder.  Cinch it in silver shiny wrapping with bow of beauty.  Deliver it in Mercy, signed with signatures of Grace.

 Speak them, write them,  sing them, show them , shout them, whisper them,
sling  them– those grace-notes, love-notes, words dredged from deep heart places.

Watch it , this word chosen in care, delivered in love. Watch it skim across the hearts of one in need. Leave a little love dent, a kind ripple, and fall hard on the soft places of the inside place.

See hope take root.  And healing take place.

Words skipped all tippy toed school girl happy hopping poetic on the spaces of need. Choose them with care, toss them in love, your words, this Sabbath,  this day and every one given by Him.

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions.  It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something does it communicate the emotion at all “–C.S. Lewis, “Studies in Words