Promises

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about promises. Promises made. Promises kept. Promises broken. Promises yet to be fulfilled. 

When I was a little girl, I used to make my father pinky-promise me whenever I wanted him to really seal his word. Not with a signature nor with any witnesses. For some reason the gesture of interlocking the smallest of our fingers together was to me more binding than any other sign that could be offered. 

So, I remember one sunny morning when my dad was reading the newspaper and on one of its pages an advertisement announced the opening of a new amusement park in Maryland. Without any provocation from either my sister or me, he told us with rue and nostalgia in his voice that he’d like to take us to this new park. You see, my father had not taken a day off of work in years. It had been years since we’d gone to an amusement park or done anything adventurous with him, and at that point, my sister and I were older and wouldn't necessarily jump at the suggestion of going to an amusement park. But for some reason, we wanted to go with him. So we jumped on him and made him pinky-promise that he’d take us. And so he did. He kept his promise. 

Not only did he keep his promise, but he got very sick riding the ferris wheel. Not just once but twice. Because we had asked him.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the promises we all make in our lifetimes. To family. To friends. To ourselves. To God. Bringing those promises to remembrance has caused me to pray—that God would help. Because it’s so easy to not keep our promises because it’s so easy to forget why we made them in the first place. Love. Isn’t love what compelled us to make those promises in the first place? To our spouse on our wedding day. To our kids when they were born. To our friends when they asked if we'd help them carry their burdens and pain. To God when He became more real to us that anything else we’d ever encountered in life. 

Double rainbow 

On the drive back from Indiana

The other day, I saw a rainbow on my drive back from Indiana. A double rainbow at that! It stretched from one side of the horizon to the other—a perfect semicircle. It was the brightest and most complete rainbow I had ever seen. I was reminded of God’s promises. I was reminded to press in to remember the promise that was made in the beginning. I was reminded of the One who kept his promise because love held him there. Because love held him there till the end. So I call on the only One who can keep me in that Promise, the only One who can help me to keep my promises. Because the more and more I know myself, the more and more I know that I can only rest my promises on His. Because? Because, because, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Storied DNA

sunrise is fuller
when you're next to me

          If researchers were to examine my genetic make-up, they’d find that the building blocks of my DNA are stories—books stacked on top of one another and twisted into a double helix—encoded to inform me of who I am.

          Ever since I was a child, I loved stories.  Being the fourth child in a family of five daughters, I have heard countless anecdotes, at times listening to them as the sole audience and at other times as a fly on the wall. I have heard and read numerous narratives that have made me laugh; ones that have made me gasp; and ones that have made me sigh; but the best stories have made me cry.
          How many stories do we hear in our lifetime and how many of those stories do we actually retain in our memories?  And what percentage of those accounts do we file away next to our own experiences because they tell us of who we are?  It has become apparent to me, that there are stories that have interwoven themselves into my understanding of my own experiences; and those stories function as signposts throughout my life.  I have been brought to a point where I now understand that every experience of my life produces its own dictionary—words used at a particular time, for a particular person, about a particular longing.  Therefore when others tell me their tales, I flip through the pages of my own stories to match my words with those used in theirs.  I light up when I discover a shared definition.  I sigh, “Ah yes, here we are.  I understand.  I understand your meaning.”  Then I laugh and cry, and say, “I know you, because we speak the same language.”  And I am grateful, so grateful, because my meaning is now confirmed by the other. 

dancing with my niece YJH at sunrise.
Photography by Yellahs Mik (Sept 2010)

          Therefore, as I blog bits of my life, you will find that I am only able to talk about myself through the use of stories I have grown up on, namely stories from the Bible—stories that have become my DNA.  Because my struggles, longing, and redemption are the same ones as those of Jacob, Noah, the prostitute, the Shunammite, the pearl, and all the myriad of characters in the New and Old Testaments.  Somehow their stories lend meaning to mine.  My meaning matches the language found in their stories and the gaps between my narrative and theirs are as tight as the gaps between the books on a bookshelf.  Ultimately my life is held upright by the support of the stories next to mine. Therefore, their stories are signposts that cheer me on as I seek that which has been pursued from the beginning of time—the longing for God.

          And so, it is with this longing that I look forward to hearing your stories.  I look forward to listening for your meaning as I close my eyes and feel for the shapes of your words.  Because I trust that as I tell you my stories—my hidden heart, my secret thoughts—surely, you will recognize me.  In my stories, when I laugh, when I murmur and groan, when I surrender, surely you will know me.

Photos were taken by my younger sister who woke me and two of our nieces at 4am in order to drive out to Moses Beach, Long Island to catch the sunrise on one brisk late September morning in 2010.  My younger sister has always ushered me into every adventure I've had thus far in life. 

          

           

Before a Name: Inside My Mother's Womb

Inside the center of every flower is my mother's face

          I suppose my story really started before I was given a name, because even before I was born, there were stories told about me by my parents.  Ever since I was a child, here and there, my parents dropped details about the months leading up to my birth.  By their accounts, when my mother was pregnant with me, she had symptoms of dizziness and stomach pain.  It wasn’t until she found tapeworms in her stool that she began to worry.  She went to a clinic where she was told they could do nothing for her, because she was already five months pregnant.  For months, until the day I was born, she hosted not only a fetus but also intestinal parasites that robbed her of nutrients and peace of mind.  Only after she gave birth to me, did she ingest pills to chemically exterminate the parasites.  All the while during her pregnancy she had worried about me—that in some way, shape, or form I would come out disadvantaged due to being malnourished.

Photo courtesy of Maggie C. who
carries and will birth her joy in 2012

           My parents were relieved to see that I was formed without any abnormalities and that all my organs functioned properly.  However, according to my father, as an infant I could hardly keep down my food; I kept throwing up after each feeding.  Even as a toddler, I hardly ate and often times would vomit when overly excited.  Older women would take my wrist in their hands and say, “What is this? It looks as though it’ll snap like a twig?”  Whenever my father told me stories of how any small amount of food used to induce me into gagging, my mother’s eyes would glaze over with shame.  I don't know if there's any correlation between a fetus' development and having tapeworms, but my mother seemed to have thought so and somehow this always gave her a twinge of guilt.  As for me, as a child, the story left me chagrined and apologetic toward my mother because I felt that I too was a freeloader, like the tapeworms in her belly, who robbed her of food and peace during a very trying time in her life.  It wasn’t until I became a teenager that I started to appreciate the story; I became enamored by the idea of vying for nutrients in my mother’s womb.  I thought if I could overcome tough conditions as a fetus, then surely I was prepared to overcome obstacles in life.  I told myself I was created to be a survivor.

I asked my mother to pose for a picture with this tree.
This is what she gave.  Always more than expected :)
(July 2009)

          And so, the stories, which I had heard as a child about myself inside my mother’s belly, became the seeds that would later sprout up into my life-long inquiries up to Heaven.  And on those occasions as a child—and well into my teenage years and eventual adulthood—when in Sunday school, when the scriptural reference every so often would pop up to be: You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139: 12-13a), I wondered in awe.  I couldn’t help but to ask: “God, did you really know me when I was inside my mother’s womb?  Did you know me before I even had a name?"

      

"Look! Look! I Did It!"

My nephew

          I’ve worked or interacted with kids for the bulk of my adult life.  So most of my thinking—how I organize my thoughts in metaphors, pictures, symbols, stories—are set in images involving children.  I suppose I think that if a truth can be pared down—completely shaved down to its bare bones so that a child can understand it—then that is a Truth worth keeping.

          Today, I spent the morning with my nephew E, who is now twenty months old.  He likes to take his toy cars and balance them on the edges of chairs so that they're on the verge of teetering but do not fall off.  He then runs to me and grabs me by the legs and says, “Look!  Look!”  He shines his eyes up at me with his aren't-you-proud-of-me-smile, which involves every muscle of his face.  My natural response to him is a burst of unbridled cheers!  At that point, I pick him up and kiss him all over.  I just want to eat him!

          Today, I realized that when all is said and done, this is how I would like to come to my Heavenly Father.  I don’t want to cry and have Him pick me up.  I don’t want to whine and say, “I can’t do this (life), it’s just too hard.”  I don’t want to pout and say, “Give me this, give me that.”  I don’t want to complain and say, “But that person doesn’t know how to share or play nicely, so I don’t want to either.”  Mostly, I don't want to live my life without wanting to share my moments of joy with Him.  I want to grab His attention because I am happy.  I want to run to Him to tell Him, “Look!  Look!  I know how to balance things on precarious edges and I've found pleasure in doing so!”  I want to run to God and say, “Aren’t you proud of me!  I did it!”  I want my Father to look on my face and beam with cheers.  I want Him to say, “Well done, good and faithful daughter! Woohoo!  Come into my arms.  Let’s celebrate together!”
          

Juno, My Muse?

So why have I started to blog?

          Well . . .  One of my most laconic friends emailed me, and predictably his email was short.  "Do you blog?  If so, can you send me a link?  If not, will you start blogging?"  That was all he wrote. 
          I, of course, saw this as a sign from God to blog ;)  Let me explain.  This friend hardly speaks.  Really.  We belong to the same book club, where he rarely offers any of his opinions though he is full of them.  He's a word miser.  A stingy non-verbalizer.  Oh, and there's that time when he was struck dumb by the Holy Spirit and couldn't speak for months.  Therefore, you can understand why when he sent that email, I thought hard and long over his suggestion.  I had to decide whether his handful of words were the crumbs of a bored mind or the manifestation of a "spirited" soul.  Granted, that though more often than not, this friend's ramblings would fall in the former category, I had to decide that his words to me were the kind of pearls spoken by a spirit-filled-Balaam's donkey ;)

          A few days later, when I saw him at a wedding, I asked him what inspired him to send that email.  He said, he was bored and wanted to read something, anything, even trash.  So, there you have it, my suspicions confirmed.  

I Love Trees!

          When I recorded this video, I had been working on this illustration for hours and had extemporaneously decided to record my progress.  I had not planned to do anything of the kind, and hence my utterance was spoken on the spur of the moment and is therefore unscripted and embarrassingly honest. 

           I ended up sharing the clip with a few friends who offered varying responses.  One friend chuckled so hard that she snorted right out loud.  My plain words embarrassed her, I think.  Or perhaps my need to make sense of my life made her feel embarrassed for me.  I don't know.  But then, there was another friend who sent me a text message, which I have kept till this day.  She wrote: “tears started trickling down my face.  I am now a big mess at work, but was worth it.  You touched something in my soul . . . and it was beautiful.”

           I suppose, I am hoping, that for every chuckle there will its counterpart—a sigh—from someone who feels less alone because of my simple-mindedness.

           So here’s to you, "Ms. AQ", your text has made me feel less alone too.

"Please . . . Tame Me!"

"Please . . . tame me!"
showpiece made of pastillage, marzipan, sugarpaste, and fondant (2007) 

            When I was sixteen, if someone had told me what my life would be like now, I would have laughed in disbelief, then snapped back in anger.  For one, at sixteen, I thought I’d be married by the age of twenty-two. Twenty-two seemed like eons away, plenty of time to mature and develop, I thought. I had wild dreams and concocted various scenarios of how I would meet my future husband. For instance, I thought perhaps I’d meet him while making a geometrically puzzling origami butterfly out of a torn page from a magazine in the waiting room of my dentist. This man, who was also scheduled for a routine cleaning, would walk through the door and immediately be smitten by me. He would lose all his inhibitions, because he too would be an origami aficionado, and therefore he would boldly ask if I would join him that night to gaze into the night sky. I would agree, giving one condition: that he first climb a tree with me. He’d agree and we’d climb a big saucer magnolia and just sit on one of its outstretched arms, watching the day sky saturate itself into a night-night blue. Of course on that particular night, the sky would be cloudless and clear, exposing all of heaven’s favor upon our meeting. The stars would gaze down upon us, as my truelove would trace all the constellations in the night sky with the tip of his finger.  Quite naturally, we’d fall irrevocably in love, get married and move into a lighthouse. The lighthouse—obviously situated on a precipice—would house our love. The thrashing waves would add to the soundtrack of our daily chores as keepers of the lighthouse (and our lovemaking, of course). In my teenage journal I had dreamed of “folding into him each night, as the smell of his neck would ease me into sleep.” And all of it would make perfect sense: our vigil of light would bring hope and rescue to those lost and tossed at sea.

            Such were my dreams at sixteen. My friends called me a “hopeless romantic” and older people advised that I put away such “childish notions.” I would correct them and say I was a hopeful romantic and that my notions were childlike not childish, and that there was a world of difference between the two.  To be honest I used to feel sorry for them because I believed they had lost hope in the alchemy of  childhood dreams.  You see, at sixteen, facts had no bearing on me. The facts—that lighthouses were no longer in use to safeguard seafarers to shore, that most of them were abandoned and dilapidated or turned into tourist attractions—did not daunt my dream in any way at all. If anything, it fueled my passion to revive the lost art of lighthouse-keeping. I even joined The Lighthouse Preservation Society in hopes that my yearly contribution of $30 and my awareness of their demise would somehow bring about a lighthouse renaissance. 

            But I was a sentimental sixteen-year-old who had filled her cup with books, music, movies, and art. I was steeply influenced by my favorite books The Little Prince and The Catcher in the Rye; my favorite movie Out of Africa; and my favorite miniseries The Thornbirds. My preference in music stretched across eclectic genres from classical to top ten Billboard hits. The only requirement was that whatever music I gave myself to would wrench my heart out to bleed. True to my love of story, the story of the composer or the performing artist had an integral part in my appreciation of the work. Chopin, for instance, had power over me because I thought I could hear the melancholy of his unrequited heart in his earlier work.  In other pieces I would imagine his slight body hovering over the piano like a phantom composer composed of water, his fingers bidding time—each elongated note that borrowed count from the next measure—rendered my heart sick with love for his singular passion for a singular instrument, the piano.           

            If at sixteen, Chopin was my classical composer of choice, then as no surprise, the impressionist and Van Gogh were my painters of choice at that age. I remember spending my lunch period at the school library. I’d lug huge volumes of art books back home and spend hours staring into the large prints of impressionist paintings. Easily obsessed at that age, I fell deeply inside the images. Renoir’s colors would dance into a kaleidoscope of changing hues of shifting light. Inside his paintings, I was able to feel an autumnal chill or hear a summer garden. Van Gogh would lull me into a momentary state of physical paralysis, while my brain would go into a frenzy of grooves and shadows caught in the textures of his strokes. 

            I would take Metro to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and spend hours there as though it were my home. And as strange as it sounds, I felt so near to God whenever I gazed into a painting, or floated on the notes of a song, or felt the pulse of a character in a book.

A womb of books and light
pencil drawing (2006)

             I had a particularly keen love for books.  I loved the feel of books in my hands, the way they smelled, and the way the pages gently chafed against each other whenever a page was turned—like a billowing sigh that escapes between sheets. I loved how the black print appeared on white paper, and how the congregation of all those symbols on what was once a blank page created the miracle of language, the wonder of a story. 

            But these things I kept to myself, because sometimes out of excitement, if I shared my love of a book or a painting with others, their eyes would glaze over with disinterest. So I learned to keep most of my interests and fascinations to myself. So much so, I was most content when alone in my room with my books and journals.

            I tell you all this, because at the age of sixteen, life was full of possibilities that only my imagination could cap. I could dream and my dreams were not encumbered by disappointments. I had a plan. I would become a writer and marry the man of my dreams and live happily ever after. I didn’t think I was asking for anything out of the ordinary. It seemed simple enough. It all sounded typical: a career and a family.  
            Ever since my teens, my pursuits were fueled by my desire to feel everything. I wanted to devote all my senses to the things that made me sigh endlessly. I couldn’t quite articulate at that age exactly how to qualify those things which made me want to shout, jump, close my eyes and relish the experience; all I knew was when I came upon it, I knew it, just as I know my own mother and my own name, as though I had been predisposed to recognize it; and my enjoyment of such things was as tactile as crashing into a human being. Bam! As I got older, I realized that those things which repeatedly aroused me, and which I couldn’t easily explain, were simply moments of pure Joy experienced when confronted by Beauty.  Moments such as riding my bike in October through my neighborhood would fill me with impish glee.  The fiery autumn trees that lined the streets as I swooshed down the hills of my neighborhood would blaze like notes of a chromatic scale in my peripheral vision. My heart would ache with pleasure. The crisp breeze against my face, the rustling leaves beneath my wheels, the candied colors all around me, the dry sting in my throat, the exhilaration in my chest—all of it—would stab me with such marvel and astonishment. And without me even knowing, my eyes would fill with joy and my lips would audibly speak, “God, why is everything so beautiful.”

            At sixteen, why did the curl of a baby’s fingers when fast asleep wound me with tears? Why did waking up to the smell of cookies baking in the oven make me want to weep? And why did my mother’s massaging hands, whenever I was ill, make me cry? Ahh, but how else could I have responded to moments of such pure Joy? How else was I to react to utter Beauty? Why do we cry when astonished by things so beautiful?

            Hence, now, I’ve come to realize that my hardest mission in life has been not to lose the childlike awe I was created to keep till the day I see my Creator face to face. It is too easy to become jaded and no longer capable of hoping, as when I was sixteen. And often, life has been such a struggle. But I’ll tell you this: there are “things” worth struggling for, and for me, every day I will will myself back up again in order to recognize the Beauty in all of life. I will not give up on all my dreams. So, despite how bad circumstances may seem at times, I don’t ever want to look at a baby’s curled fingers and say, “I’ve seen plenty of those.” I don’t ever want to smell cookies baking in the oven and get tired of their sweetness. I don’t ever want to expect my mother to massage me when I’m sick and feel as though I had somehow earned it. I don’t ever want to look upon the Cross and not cry.