WHAT COMES OUT
This is the image my heart draws when my doubting mind asks what is it that I have done with my life.
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This week the photos came. Loved ones gathered. A wedding. A sip of my matcha and this eager scrolling through long-awaited images that memorialize a ritual of romance that will linger far after I’m gone.
Across from me sits a man at another table, one with just enough sunshine to bathe his artist’s pencil in the softest rays of morning light.
I can’t decide if it’s the way his hand floats confidently across the paper or whether it’s his slow corresponding grin that takes hierarchy within my heart.
I look away from him, from my digital family, and then within myself
to ask the kind of questions that indicts my own approach to life—
Is what comes out of me something that makes me this beamingly proud?
Is there some creation of my own invention that has the ability to captivate and edify for hours?
His delight with something drawn, from something first-residing in his head, has altered my state of soul awareness, altered how I value the things that I myself have birthed.
There is no ordinary accomplishment. No mere act of day in and day out. Who we are on the inside, it seems, is compelled to find its way out.
All the little unrecognized moments—gardening, writing, holding the ones I love—are not simply fillers of the empty spaces between one ‘wow’ and then the next, but in-and-of themselves something important and rare.
Lines drawn on paper. Stick figures, perhaps, at first.
Then shading and color are added. An image of exquisite composition is birthed.
“Can you not see the gift within you,” I frantically inquire…
“haunting, coaxing, begging to be recognized?”
What is exquisite, masterful even, materializes in the quiet, unseen places intended not for the ‘others’ but for the audience of one.
It seems, to experience the abundance of appreciation that we crave, we must first begin with appreciating, even marveling in the rarity of ourselves.
I have become adept at distracting myself…from myself. Perhaps it is for fear of finding some displeasure, that I fail to examine what lies within. Still, it is here that I likely will discover something undervalued, diminished, glossed over that is meant for my singular delight—
the way my body moves to the music,
the way I love holding babies more than I knew,
the way particular words or phrases jump into my head,
the way I am able in my darkest moments to calm and self-soothe.
After his hand fills the paper—after pausing, considering, beginning again—
He lets out this satisfied laugh.
As if the secret to life’s deepest questions have been answered.
From my view across the cafe, they have.
NOTES:
If anything, I am an observer. And I am watching you. I see your posts, sharing some seemingly small accomplishment, on some seemingly ordinary day. Do you know how much you inspire me, how I delight in the things that delight you?
The way to transform the entire world is to be captivated with every tiny thing that comes out of you.
The “collective we” are watching for signs of humanity bathed in the promise of self-satisfaction with who we are—
In our daily comings and goings,
In our refusing to give up,
In our labor and in our leisure,
In all things hopeful, productive, creative that come from every one of us.
What lies within? Nurture, covet, share that.
There is no mystery, not some great purpose we are missing along the way.
The great mystery is us.
Four of them—Kyle, Cameron, Kelli, Quinn. Of all the things that I have nurtured—creative, beautiful, complex—these are the ones that stand above the rest.
Image: Taken at Cameron’s and Mia’s wedding last February in Brainerd, Minnesota…@byamylynn