Grace is a silver scaled fish that leaps into my life unexpectedly. Sometimes it gets caught in dream filaments; at other times it leaves its imprint in wet paint. I never feel the tug on the line. Yet suddenly I recognize that I have been visited, through some strange and wordless piece of evidence left for me to decipher until we meet again.
Meaning, by nature, escapes capturing. As I keep my mother company in her last months, my mind wants to form words to contain this juncture where the physical and spiritual linger in farewell. Yet while I pause, grace expresses through the marks in my collage, reminding me that our spirits are verbs.
We’ve never known a time uncolored by evolving.
In this painting, notice the deep-rose toned form reclining as if on flower-strewn starscape at the bottom of the picture. Even before its last breath, a second entity emerges, climbing upward in its own galaxy of blue light. Presence surrounds the observer, as if bending to whisper into her right ear.
"Life is a circle, Donna," it says. "You are divinely held in a universe where there is no loss. There is only transformation."
Grace moves my paintbrush to places where my mind stumbles. It holds the light for me in the emptied house of my childhood with its "For Sale" sign staked in the front yard. It shows me the glow of divine love that holds the world in orbit, even as it appears to be fragmenting.
Grace is my path forward. I put my foot out, trusting that meaning will rush in to provide the ground for my next step.
I am grateful for the flash of a fish’s tail that slides through my consciousness, reminding me that we are all eternal.
And so it is.
