Visions

by Elanor

I want to share a new vision for myself and blogging, and that is, to share new visions. I just realized half an hour ago that the thing I like best about Christian writers is when they present a picture of the world that I would be incapable of seeing on my own. Those new pictures place in me a longing for the perfection of the future, but they also remind me of the pictures I have been given. So what I intend to do with this blog is to share the visions God has given me—not of how-the-world-should-be-but-isn’t; visions of how the world can be: Earth’s crammed with Heaven / and every common bush afire with God (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

I want to start writing poetry again. I haven’t for the longest time, because I got to the point where I was sick of how the whole process was so self-conscious. I had confused artifice with being artificial. I had to get away from doing it so I could breathe for a while without looking to see if there was a poem in the way my lungs expand and contract. Today I’ve been looking back at some of the things I’ve written, and I like them more than I expected to. I want to participate in creating beauty again.

It will take me a while, though, to get back into the habit of word-art. So for now I’ll just share something I found in my computer archives that made me really happy:

Well, little knot, I’m going to have you undone one way or another. Stop coming between me and my family. I don’t know how you got there. I do remember sitting in the car on the way home from school, maybe even as far back as elementary school. Daddy asked me how my day was, and there you were, tight in the middle of my chest, and you wouldn’t let me answer him. You change all my words, and make them come out like they’re trying to cut to pieces any person they might run into. You keep me lonely, and keep the people around me lonely, too. I’m not going to stand for it. You’re on your way out, just wait.

Sincerely,
Elanor

I wrote this last May, when I was thinking about how over the years of my childhood, I have built up bad habits in the way I relate to my family, habits that are now very difficult to break, even though I am now married. But the start of a new family makes it all the more important that I be aware of the habits of relation that I am forming with Edwin and with our future children, so that I do not allow these knots to get tied up inside of me.