"if a picture paints a thousand words..."

"If a picture paints 

a thousand words, 

then why can't I paint you?

the words will never show,

the you i've come to know..." 

I remember the cover to this "Best of Bread" album, as if it were the face of a loved one.  I played it over and over again.  David Gates' beautiful vocals on "If," were filled with the kind of melancholy I was feeling that year. 

I was thinking about this song, recently, after my niece took a photograph of me.  

We were at a camp social and she had just received a new instamatic camera.  She quietly snapped a photo, waited for it to come out of the slot and then walked over and placed it in my shirt pocket for processing, and said, "I took a photo of you while you weren't looking."  I was in the middle of a conversation, and completely forgot about it until later that night. 

I have never liked having my photo taken.  It's hard to explain, but every photo I have ever seen of myself feels like a picture of someone I don't know.  Even photos of me, doing what I love most, feel like I am looking at someone else - a familiar face that I don't feel connected to. 

So it was strangely beautiful - when remembered my niece's photo in the pocket of my shirt - to find the perfect portrait of "the me" that I have come to know.  It wasn't a face, or a form -- it was a color.  

The entire image was a shade of blue.  A deep, achingly beautiful shade of blue.  And I felt it.  I felt so connected to that photo that I gasped, and then I cried - just a bit.  This little instagram photograph captured how I feel about myself.  It felt accurate and perceptive. It felt as if my niece had bored into my heart and discovered something hidden.  

And for the past few weeks, it has had me thinking about identity, perception, and image.  I have long-resisted identifying with a face in the mirror, the shape that I put clothing on, or the changing features that look back at me from my driver's license -- or any profile photo on Facebook or Instagram.  

Perhaps some of us aren't capable of simply being outlined by a layer of skin punctuated with features - eyes, nose, shoulders, etc.  What if we are not "that," -- whatever that is.  And what if, instead, I am best identified as a color, and you are a sound that makes birds sing, and someone else is the scent of cedar or cinnamon -- or both.  

Just as we often think that answered prayer will come in the form of words -- and so we let the deep feelings that have no words, or the sounds that cannot be described, pass through us without noting their message, while we wait for the illusive English text to float across the mental page.  In the same way, what if our faces and body shapes and hair color, are not necessarily the way we experience ourselves as God's image and likeness - most clearly.  What if it's a shade of blue, or a minor chord, or the taste of grapefruit, or the touch of a breeze, or the silence of a prayer...

In her compilation, Miscellaneous Writings 1883 - 1896, Mary Baker Eddy refers to a "fourth dimension "when she writes:  

"Christian Science translates Mind, God, to mortals.  It is the infinite calculus defining the line, plane, space, and fourth dimension of Spirit. It absolutely refutes the amalgamation, transmigration, absorption, or annihilation of individuality."  

and elsewhere she states: 

"Comeliness and grace are independent of matter.  Being possesses its qualities before they are perceived humanly. Beauty is a thing of life, which dwells forever in the eternal Mind and reflects the charms of His goodness in expression, form, outline, and color." 

What if our sense of who we are, and how we are defined to one another, that has been limited by a collectively agreed upon expectation that we are three dimensional humans form made up of lines, shapes, and features.  Or that this is the only way of experiencing and communicating our identities - our truth and beauty.  

What if deepening our color, or perfecting the pitch of our voice, or enriching the scent that we leave upon everything we touch, were as important to being known, as the cut of our hair, or the shape of our eyes, or the tilt of our head?

These are the questions I am in tonight.  In the meantime, I am so grateful that my niece was able to capture what no photographer has ever been able to do -- a photo of "the me I've come to know."  A perfect shade of blue.

Disclaimer:  if this post seems a bit abstract or out in left field -- i completely understand.  

offered with Love, 

Cate 

  

"...a bow of promise on the cloud..."

"Little darlin'
It's been a long, cold, lonely winter.
Little darlin'
It seems like years since it's been here.
Here comes the sun,
Here comes the sun,
and I say,
It's al right...."
- George Harrison

Since there is not (at least not one that I could find) a recorded version of my first choice song for this post, "Love," by Mary Baker Eddy,  I am going to lead with this hauntingly lovely James Taylor and Yo Yo Ma version of "Here comes the Sun," written by The Beatles' brilliant George Harrison.  But the story is still the same. 

It was almost twenty years ago, but I can still feel that sudden shift, a recalibration in the weight of my mental "air," whenever I think about that Sunday morning service in Valerie Lodge.  I'd been in my cabin all night wrestling with demons...and angels. I'd gotten a phone call, in the middle of the night, that threatened to take me so far down into a chasm of depression, that I wasn't sure I'd be able continue my work at camp that summer.  My heart was in shreds, and I could barely breathe.  I'd been caught in the middle of an emotional battleground all night.  One minute the angels of Love and peace were winning...and the next minute I'd become a ricocheting crossfire of anger, hurt, and regret. 

If you were to have painted a picture of my mental sky, it would have been as grey as slate, and as black as a battalion of thunderheads creeping over the western slopes of the Collegiate Peaks, on a late summer afternoon. 

I wasn't surprised the next morning, when I finally did leave my cabin, that it was actually overcast, and that heavy raindrops were beginning to splatter...darkening the pale, sun-bleached cedar decking that apron-ed Valerie Lodge.  I'd already missed breakfast, but I couldn't miss Sunday School. 

We gathered in the Lodge, while one of the campers played a prelude, and we moved chairs from the dining room, passed out hymnals, and got everyone settled.  The Sunday School superintendent announced that we'd be singing Mary Baker Eddy's poem, titled, "Love."  It barely registered on the landscape of my dark thoughts.  Then she read the poem, the pianist played through the melody, and then we stood to sing. 

I did not feel like singing.  I was not at peace.  I was in pain.  I hoped that I could get by with just listening to the rest of the congregation sing.  I thought that, perhaps, I could find some comfort in the sound of their voices.  And so,  while quietly wiping at my tears, and...hopefully...without notice, I stood in a cocoon of mixed sorrow and hope.  But, before long, I found myself singing along as if each word were the sacred building blocks of a prayer.   And, not surprisingly, I was finding comfort...and hope. 

But it wasn't the comfort I found in its words that shook me to my core, it was the promise, the hope that I found in this line:

'Twas Love whose finger traced aloud
a bow of promise on the cloud..."

Love wasn't going to paint a rainbow of promise on a clear, cloudless blue sky...but on a cloud.  Love was going to use my cloudy moments as a canvas for painting a promise...full of color, dimension, beauty.  I could count on it.  Without the cloud, love wouldn't have the droplets of water...my tears...to bounce and refract light off of.

My tears were going to color my life with beauty and texture.   I could count on it.

And, it wasn't just the words from the poem that gave me strength, but it was the poet herself.  Mary Baker Eddy had lived through so many days that were heavy with clouds of darkness and despair.  She had borne sorrow, rejection, disdain, and regret with grace.  She had suffered and survived, hoped and persevered, wept, worked, watched, and prayed.

If anyone knew how to navigate a personal storm, it was Mary Baker Eddy.  If anyone had the "street cred" necessary to inspire, encourage, and "call forth" the kind of inner resolve that, alone, could weather the seething sea of human crisis, it was Mary Baker Eddy. 

And I trusted her.  I trusted her honesty.  I knew that her poetry was wept with the purity of the Magdalene's tears, and written with meekness of the our Master's courage.

For almost two decades now, this simple statement:

'Twas Love whose finger traced aloud,
a bow of promise on the cloud..."

has given me a lens through which my darkest days have portended the greatest opportunity for Love's light to shine through my heart and become a multi-hued rainbow of promise. 

I did not leave camp early that summer.  Instead I discovered how beautiful life can be when love passes through the prism of our tears and paints the world with light, and color, and grace.

I hope that if you are feeling the lowering of clouds, you can find promise in Eddy's words.  Words she poured out in tears, to give each of us fresh hope.

with Love,
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

Here is the link, for those of  you who might prefer the more classic Beatles version of "Here Comes the Sun."

And for a rare performance by George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, and Phil Collins here is another version of "Here Comes the Sun." 

"Crayola doesn't make a color for your eyes..."

"...spring-green is much too yellow
sea-green is far too pale
cornflower is way too mellow
so i'll try again and fail
there's no way i can capture
the way you make me feel
one look from you is rapture
whether blue or green or teal
no color qualifies
that crayon's telling lies
crayola doesn't make a color
for your eyes...

hey look it's periwinkle
so sure i got it now
But you wink and there's a twinkle
in your eye and still somehow...

crayola doesn't make
a color for your eyes
There is no way that
i could possibly describe you
crayola doesn't make a color
to draw my love..."
- Kristin Andreassen

My friend Susie posted this video of Kristin Adreeassen's "Crayola Doesn't Make a Color for Your Eyes," today, and I immediately knew what I wanted to write about.

Eyes. 

Mary Baker Eddy, in her "Glossary" of spiritual terms found in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, defines "Eyes" as:  "spiritual discernment, not material but mental."

How then could you choose a color for your eyes?  It would be like choosing a single color for joy, or love, or home.  Can you imagine the sadness that would descend on the world if  the word "home" was defined as "blue", even the most perfect shade of blue.   Every house, in every land, blue...or green, or yellow. 

Can you imagine if there was a crayola with the word "body" on it?  As if there was only one perfect color for a person's skin.  Oh yea, they do have that don't they...it's called "flesh"...hmmm...I wonder, do they still make a crayola with the word "flesh"  printed on that narrow strip of peach paper with black stripes and bold block lettering wrapped around a crayon? Now that I think about it, it's kind of creepy actually...

Which brings me to....well, where it brings me.  The story.

I was teaching Kindergarten in a relatively small Southern California town surrounded by Los Angeles County on three sides, and the ocean on the fourth.  I loved my class of eager students.  We were a diverse group -- five of seven continents represented by 35 students and one teacher.  I loved walking onto the playground in the morning and hearing the buzz and chatter of almost twelve languages blending as parents said "goodbye" and siblings called, "see you later" to one another in the language used at home, but usually left outside the gates at school.

One of my favorite projects each fall was to unroll large sheets of butcher paper onto the floor of our classroom and have each child (and teacher) stretch out on top of their sheet, so that another child could trace the outline of the his/her body.  Then each one would fill in the outline with a "self portrait" of how we saw ourselves.

Pencils, crayons, scraps of fabric and glue, buttons, strips of lace, and shoe laces would contribute to a fully fleshed out version of how each of us thought we looked.

It was a fun beginning-of-the school-year project and did a lot to help classmates get to know one another through the other's eyes.  After we'd finished our large paper doll selves, we'd hang them on the walls...after introducing them to the class in a series of presentations.  "Hi, this is Amy.  She is five years old.  She lives with her Nonie and Pop Pop while her mom goes to school.  Her dad is away on business for a few years...."  And later in October we would dress our paper doll selves in Halloween costumes. 

At the end of the year we would do the same project over again and see how our concept of  "self" had changed.  It was always most apparent  when we'd introduce this new self (who was now graduating from Kindergarten and was ready for first grade) to the same children we hadn't really known in September, but who were now as familiar to us as our siblings.  "Hi, I would like you to meet Arturo, as you know, he loves to read and do math.  His favorite song is "Thriller" and he can moonwalk.  He has new baby brother that he thinks is too noisy, but he is helping his mom by not telling her to take him back to the hospital."

I loved this project.  Sometimes the introductions were sweet and funny, and sometimes they were sad and full of despair.  Either way we were  going to be a class, a family and we would be there for one another.  We were all in it for the long haul.  We would learn and we would grow.  And it would be fun most of the time, and hard some of the time.

This particular year, I had a little girl in my class named Marguerite.  Her family had recently relocated from San Salvador and she was the only one who  spoke any English...at all.  She was a fragile and shy as a small fawn caught in the middle of an urban park and I could feel her heart beating wildly as I gently placed my hand on her shoulder that first morning.  In that moment, I knew that she would be my tracing partner for our whole-man self portraits that afternoon. 

Over the next few days I got to know Maggie (as she asked to be called) and we laughed about how much more tracing she had to do than anyone else (since I was the biggest kid in class), how funny her braids looked after being traced, and the odd shape of our feet.  

Soon it was time to fill in the blanks.  We drew in fingers, eyes, nose, mouth...and for some freckles, long (mostly just wished for) fingernails, and pierced ears.  It was a fun, noisy time of day...and we thoroughly enjoyed watching one another come to life as our flatter selves took on personalities.

When it was time to color in our selves, however, the mood changed (as it usually would each year).  Choosing the right color for hair, skin, hands, lips made everyone a bit tense.  I watched as Hispanic children wrestled with the right shade of brown, tan, or beige.  African-American children struggled with why they were called "black" and what did it mean that they wanted to use the same shade of brown as their Hispanic classmates.  Asian children wondered why someone had suggested yellow as a skin color and no one wanted to be "white"...except those who just didn't want to do any coloring at all.  We spent hours talking about colors and how they didn't define us accurately.  I remember "Maggie" being the last to choose her skin color.  She chose "rose,"  a soft strong pink, because she thought it was the most beautiful...and she wanted to be seen as beautiful and sweet like a flower. 

But it was the shift that came with the choosing of eye colors that astounded me that year.  Our joy returned.  Everyone felt that they could mix and match colors for their eyes.  We spent one afternoon moving from person to person, just looking deeply into eachother's eyes, trying to describe the colors we saw, to one another.  There were stripey blue-green eyes with spots of gray, deep brown eyes that sparkled with golden glitter, and gray eyes streaked with purple.  There were eyes like shards of pottery, and eyes that looked like the ocean on a summer's day, eyes as dark as a midnight sky and eyes as pale as the blue snow of the arctic. 

I will never forget, however, the color of Maggie's eyes. Once we'd finished our describing exercise, and were sent off to color in our own eyes..supplementing those one-on-one shared descriptions with visits to the long mirror in the back of the room...we were alone with our flatter selves.  I came up behind Maggie kneeling tenderly over her paper doll self in the far corner, and almost gasped.  She had painted rainbows in each of her eyes and sprinkled the paint with glitter.  Then she had drawn a big eye on her chest where her heart would have been and painted it in with a glowing, glittering sun...again, spirinkled with glitter. 

I kneeled down next to her and watched her work, her forehead crinkled in concentration until she sat back on her bottom and heaved a big sigh.  I asked her if she would tell me about her eyes...especially the one in her chest.  She said that the eye in her heart was the one that was like the sun.  It made everything she saw turn into rainbows even when it was gray and cloudy in her mind. 

I've never forgotten it.   I ask you, "who was really the teacher that day?"

What color would your eyes be?

Thanks Maggie...who introduced her end-of the-year self portrait to us as Marguerite with confidence and joy...I love the color of your eyes...

Kate
Kate Robertson, CS