beautiful death

(Photo by Tony Stone)

The leaves are changing. The season is changing. And fuck! It’s beautiful.

For those that don’t know me well enough, I love the color green. It makes me fall in love with God. The multiple colors of green in a single leaf amidst millions on a tree make me feel loved the way a little girl does when her father treats her as a princess. I feel like a royal heir to a kingdom too beautiful for words. Sometimes in a Seattle spring and summer I will simply stand and stare with so much awe that it is too much for mind to handle – I have to distract myself from the beauty so that I can remain living.

Now, all of that is dying, exiting my world. And the thing that is infuriating is that it is beautiful. When I see the death of my green gifts, and begin to delight in it, I sigh so deeply that even the sigh hurts and just want to shout, FUCK! DEATH IS BEAUTIFUL!

So, I can see the beauty in the death of beauty in my life.

The question that dawns on me, as I am feeling that I am living in a stage of the death of so much beauty: In the exiting of beautiful people, whose thoughts and way of seeking strike deep awe and longing in my heart, from my life. In the realization that, while amazing, Mars Hill is not the communal wonderland I had hoped. In the perpetual death and deeper death of my church. In the deepening realization that my keen intellect gets me less than nothing. In entering into practicum and feeling intensely that I am failing there and not receiving the transformation I so longed for and now shy away from.

In all this death, can I see beauty?

If I do, can I respond by saying anything other than FUCK!

Am I willing to see and receive seasons as a part of the story and to stop fighting the necessary death of transition and the loss that makes life life?

Can I thank God for and even see God in your rejection of me – in my rejection of me?

Is God there even? Or is it just one of those fallen fucked up things that is too dark even God cannot be present? Is death life or is it Hell?