Comforts of Home

Outside, black sky evidences the tornado watch with threats of high winds and quarter-size hail.
Inside, the comforts of home glow: three paintings by a loved folk artist; lipstick-red walls; rag rug in a coat-of-many-colors palette; tin-punched Mexican lamp; bookbags, coats, tripod, camera bag; honeyed pine table I designed and my father made in the basement of the house where I grew up. 

Welcome, the room says.  Welcome home.

What Sticks

Teachers don't always know what will spark a student's thinking and grow, becoming -- like pine needles in moss -- inseparable from the stuff of personhood.  I re-learned this lesson today when a Chinese student whom I tutor told me about his in-class essay assignment for religion. 

"How do I answer this question?" he asked.  "Does or does not Christianity work for me?  I can't answer that."

"Why?"

He explained that he doesn't believe.

I reminded him that the question is a personal one.  "You can answer it 'no' if that's how you feel," I said.

Slowly then, hesitantly, he talked about St. Augustine.  "He shows that you are never too old to become a better person in your . . . is it . . . soul?"

"Yes," I said. 

"He did bad things when he was young, but he did good when he was old," my student added.  "And I think all people the same.  All people face hard things and all can learn from them.  All people the same.  All should be treated good."

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"So, you see?  You can answer that question!  You don't have to say you believe in God or the divinity of Jesus.  You can write about the values of Christianity you believe in."

"Oh.  Yes," he said, and smiled.

When I asked if he talks like this with the priest who is his teacher, he laughed and said no.  I so wish he would, and I told him that.  I think his teacher would see him differently and know that despite the language difference, he is learning in the way that matters most.

What my student has difficulty expressing in his writing he made clear to me today: he is a serious thinker for whom one course has opened his mind -- and heart.

Complements

Some years ago, I saw paintings by Darrell Loy Scott at a friend's now-defunct gallery in New Orleans.  Already a collector of folk art, much of it by African American painters, I asked about the artist.  "Oh, he's white," my friend said.  "A carpenter who paints.  He says he paints characters with black skin because he likes the way the color looks."  I liked the way the color looked, too, and after some thinking and much ogling over weeks, I finally bought one for myself: The Dollmaker.

 Saturday, I saw a show by Jonathan Green at Sewanee's new archives building.  Green is a well known and highly respected African American artist from South Carolina, raised in the Gullah community.  His wildly colorful images are so blindingly hypnotic that they seem to dance and sing a call-and-response.  These are lithographs I cannot afford, but ones I wish I could.

How, I wonder, did two men -- one white and one black, one a native Californian and one a South Carolinian, one a decade older than the other -- come to make such complementary pictures?  Coincidence?  I don't know.

I know only that the Green paintings I saw Saturday and the Scott painting hanging behind me now both make me wanna jump and shout.

Somebody Loves Us All

The filling station in Elizabeth Bishop's poem is a bit more traditional than this homemade one hanging near Lake Cheston's metal bridge, but it's living proof of her poem's last line: "somebody loves us all."



Oh, the kindness of strangers!

Light as a Feather

The wind.  Everyone talked about the wind yesterday and again today.  A mighty wind, whipping and whining, bending trees and tumbling garbage cans, and knifing through clothes and flesh.  A cold and bitter wind.

Yet this downy feather clung somehow in needles, and when the wind lifted and turned it in a green embrace, the sun spun it silver.

And The Sky Finally Opened

Up there on bare
branches of wintering trees
turkey buzzards
alight at close of day,
spread their wings
toward last sun.
Wheeling in, some miss,
blown aslant mid-turn
by gusting wind.
Buzzards and clouds
part a shuttered sky,
revealing a brilliant
blue scrim flown
in, ending Act III.

Some Will Say It's Not Art

The metal mantid faces All Saints' up the hill, a joke I bet some Sewanee residents find inappropriate, but not the folks who bought the creature from a folk artist down in the Crow Creek Valley and set it out in their front yard.

Inside the Chapel, sacred art breaks light up into prismatic color that snakes across the walls as the sun moves.  In this yard, profane art lights me up every time I drive by.

Who's to say which has more value?