Thoughts from the Drawing Board

I am sitting in my friend's art studio. Her sketches and paint brushes are scattered on the drawing table on which I've set up my computer to--to write something. In my inability to be productive right now (not because I haven't tried, but because I've been productive for the past three hours and now the sun is starting to put on its evening clouds outside and the shadows are long and the air is breathing out spring perfume and work is no longer a possibility), I decided it would be better to still write something than nothing.

Hello, blog.

Drawings of faces and architecture on tracing paper are hung against the window in here so that the blue sky comes through them. I would like to have the blue sky come up through my face. I wonder what that would feel like--I imagine it would feel similar to taking a long drink of very cold water. The wall behind me is roughly painted purple with hints of orange pressing through it, like the high part of the sky at sunset. (This whole room right now is the sky to me.)

My friend is very good at drawing architecture. Every sketch in here looks like something I would like to have on my wall.

If I were a painter, I would go bankrupt buying paints and canvases and filling rooms with them.

Is all of this God?

Today I wrote three pages of my story. I was happy with them, and I was also happy to hear my professor say, "Well done" (good and faithful servant). But nothing has made me so happy as my cousin telling me that her experience reading the pages I showed her was the same as her experience reading our favorite book, The History of Love. I hope to write small tremors of that book every time I sit down to write; sometimes, I hope, I succeed for a moment--for a sentence or two.

If I were a painter like I am a writer, I would have only one painting and I would put it in the closet where no one could see it. I would also have lots of unfinished paintings cluttering my studio, and when I went there to work on them, I would get one stroke done in an hour.

If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore.

Sometimes God seems more present in the small fleck of sunlight shook from the leaf of that tree I keep looking up at through this third-story window. But the sun is moving down quickly, and the light has already shifted away from the tree. So where is God then?

Can I look to the purple fingers of the clouds and find God there? The darkness will hide them.

I'm learning to find God in the place it seems He would be least likely to dwell--a place more cluttered than this artist's studio and not half as lovely; a place that is not kept very clean and is full of mistakes. I know He's there, more than He is in the pieces of sunlight and the wisps of cloud, more even than He is in the cathedral in my friend's drawing pinned to the wall. I'm working on having the faith to see that He inhabits this dirty room.

Yep: me.