Happy Christmas People!

Dear friends, I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for gathering around the Lightbox with me this year, and I hope you have enjoyed the words and pictures over recent months.

For me, it is a real joy to post here and I would still do so even if no one was watching, but if it brings you some joy and comfort too then that's a huge bonus. I'm going to take a break for the holiday and will resume Lightbox again in due course, just in case you're wondering where I've gone. (Actually, if you really want to know where I've gone, I am under a duvet on my sofa full of cold, stuffing hot tea and Benylin into my pie-hole. Ugh! Pass me the tissues!)

Here's wishing you a rich, friendly and warm Christmas - wrap up, give each other bear hugs, and have a beautiful holiday season.

Blessings to you, until next year.

lizzie x


{Today's Soundtrack: Sufjan Stevens - Christmas Songs}

Lighthouse

What light are you shining? Is it a short-fused spark where hedonism flints against boredom, or a careful, steady flame that burns constantly through all weathers?

Consider what would happen if that light went out.

To suffer a gale against your flame is to burn vulnerably amidst the turbulent elements between you and your horizon. In this respect, suffering serves to pull focus on what you are trying—and unable—to grasp. Out of arm's reach, the lack of grip can make the desire for that vision more acute, or it pares everything back until only simple, straightforward, life-giving priorities exist.

Here is precisely the moment where your smouldering wick starts to ignite again, when you realise what you are living for and choose to stand your ground. When you do this, you not only shine in the face of your own enemy, you give light to other lost vessels whether you know it or not.

Now consider again – what must you do to make your light burn brighter?

Find your lighthouse, and take your position.

[Victor Frankl is an authoritative voice on the topic of meaning in suffering. In his current series of posts, Donald Miller offers a very accessible and sensitive introduction to Frankl's writing. Another one for the reading list!]




{Today's Sountrack: M.Ward - Hold Time}

Grains of Sand

Sand sticks. Tiny particles of ground rock and coral cling to the palm of your sweaty, salty hands. Try brushing it off but it won't leave, pressed in to your skin. Go down to the water's edge and hold your hands where a wave is about to wash up the beach, soaking your hands clean whilst more, other, numerous grains swill between your toes and get stuck there. Run backwards and fall back tripping, and now elbows are like sandpaper and grains are caught in pockets of clothing.

Lie down, head on the sand, to discover later the grains will be hidden in your scalp too, and ears, and brushed across your face. Lick salt-water off your lips; sand there also. 

Sand in every single place.

      "How precious to me are your thoughts... 

       Were I to count them, they would 

       outnumber the grains of sand."

Look up at hot sky, not hearing the sound that sand underneath you makes because it has nothing to say, except that there are thoughts about your life too many to imagine and whilst you were never meant to carry them yourself, they cannot resist you. 

No, there are many good thoughts for your life that cannot resist you.

{Today's Soundtrack: Bill Withers - Ain't No Sunshine}

Cardboard Cut-out

          My love for you is no
          cardboard cut-out,
          but I'll throw a pin-up
          at your feet so
          you don't forget me.



{Scott Matthews - Eyes Wider That Before}

Just Stand In The Cave

So, staying with this theme of magnitude, it follows that I start remembering something cute that happened on a trip to New Zealand.

Cathedral Cove with its eponymous rock is a spectacular and remote part of the world. (The people in this picture show it densely populated, by Kiwi standards.) To find the beach you have to walk 45 minutes through a conservation area, and make a long descent to sea level which is anxious-making as you know you will have to climb back up again, so it had better be worth it. It is. Perhaps it is not spectacular in the Yosemite sense (you Americans do everything so lovely and big), but faced with this beautiful piece of rock, a sense of enduring time, rough elements, and rhythmic shoreline songs does well up. As this cliff wedges out into the ocean, mineral-stained with its red and yellow war paint, it is almost impossible to be on this beach without walking through its arch.

Such an impressive story, such a confidant giant, and such a safe place to both shelter and take part, listening out for the 'still, small voice'.

Just stand in the cave.

•

Two hours later when we headed off to a teashop as reward for having climbed back up that cliff, how excellent was it to receive Cathedral rock on a plate in the sugary form of lemon-meringue pie:

Come on! Now here's the kind of Lizzie-sized detail I can really get into!  

{Today's Soundtrack: Apparat - Walls}

Magnitude

Sometimes, the big picture is just too big. It becomes impossible to know what to do with the wealth of everything you know, dream of, or consider possible. The magnitude of the world's triumphs and challenges was never meant to live entirely in your small hands, but even so how many of us try to pick it all up at once, and then start to buckle under the weight?

It is not wrong to have dreams, but here's the secret – the best things of all probably happen without your being able to dream them. There lives the definition of 'beyond your wildest dreams'. They come up out of the blind spot and bite you!

And how may we be enticed away from the huge, unweildy things when they need to happen without our limited imagining stifling their progress? We come in close and peer at the tiny things again. Be engaged with the minute details as they unravel, or glisten like little diamonds, or—rain drops on a leaf—become tiny magnifying glasses asking you to bend down and examine this magic! Enjoy the details, because these too are hard fought and precious treasures. Don't ignore them.

Sometimes, the big things don't need our help, so long as we believe they are happening, and we are ready to act when they do appear out of nowhere.

Be alert, be engaged, and be delighted by the details of today.

(...for example, the way Tulip Tree leaves look like Top Cat.)

{Today's Soundtrack: Nina Simone}

Careful Cultivators

What are you cultivating, and where do you go to nurture it?

•

Plot 48B is my friend Russell's allotment, and a few weeks ago was the setting for a small redemption story.

For a while I had been hitting obstacles. Various projects, various feelings, various directions I thought were all mapped out, derailing, probably my own sabotage for fear of success, perversely. Let's not forget that when you go out on a limb to make a difference, life will become different! Sometimes, practically speaking, it is easier to maintain the status quo. (At least, it is if you refrain from asking your heart what it really wants.)

Asking my heart what it wanted, and dealing head on with whatever was getting in the way, R's lovely missus shoved the key in my hand, so I cycled up the hill, unlocked the hallowed allotment gate and perched in this place of earthy nourishment with my notebook, gently drawing the words back on track. Views across the city with smoke rising vertically from chimney pots, strawberries growing at my feet, and someone playing sax nearby while the leaves turned – love was in the air, and so was clarity of purpose and vision. Back in the game.

It turns out Russell knows an unusual amount about compost, taking a rather poetic interest in it as a complex story about dead, rotting matter turning into the finest nourishment. He is an Englishman, and an actor, so of course it would appeal to him in Shakespearian fashion. Beauty from ashes, that sort of thing.

Careful cultivation working wonders. 

If you see something precious, treasure it. Nurture it with patience. Tend it to life, knowing that all good things with love and space to grow will flourish and have opportunity to realise their potential. 

Sometimes, other people will be this for us, and sometimes we need to find this for ourselves. A person, a place – find, or be, a careful cultivator. 

{Today's Soundtrack: Be Yourself: A Tribute to Graham Nash's Songs For Beginners}

I'm On Fire

Once in a while, something that has always been there catches your eye as if you are seeing it for the first time. In some ways, you probably are, in the sense that everything (most things) are growing and shaping and being renewed constantly, whether of the body or of the soul. So you see everything afresh, whether you know it or not.

They say that a particularly hard winter and a wet and sunny summer cause Autumn to riot with its colours more than usual, and it certainly seems that way at the moment. To describe this autumn as a 'riot of colour' is a cliché, but the word 'riot' is accurate. It is like the dying aria of its wild life, the last jaw-dropping explosions of a firework display, before its conceding to Winter which stands quietly on the path up ahead. 

It makes me want to live every day of this life as if it were Autumn, which I suppose, in a way, it is.

I'm on fire.

•

Today, in loving memory of my Godfather Tim. Bless you, and 'travelling mercies'.

{Today's Soundtrack: Bruce Springsteen - I'm On Fire}


•

postscript, 11pm - I've just returned from Tim's funeral. He had suffered with Motor Neurone's Disease for 10 long years, but his peace and dignity shone today, and his humour too. As the pall-bearers picked up his wicker casket to leave the church, the music began — what was this familiar brass intro? He had chosen the theme from Steve McQueen's 'The Great Escape' and yes, we laughed a lot. Tim, you're still on fire. x

Shoreline Songs

It is a huge, flat stretch of sand, Bude, Cornwall. This particular day there was an onshore wind and the sizeable swell was all blown out and crashing around. There are few therapies better than to stand in front of this and yell. Guitar slung across my back, I took my leave of holiday pals for a little while.

At first, the plan was to find a quiet rock pool somewhere and hum ballads to diminutive sealife. Striding across the beach toward those frothy waves, there seemed to be many more people around than I had banked on—any people would be too many—and consequently, no quiet seclusion to claim. Really, apart from going home, there was nothing else I could do.

Because of the rhythm of crashing waves, because the seagulls get too excited on the gusts, because the rock strata in cliffs look like a musical score, because the elements were making so much noise and no one would hear me, and because I was wearing shades so no one would recognise me, I threw my bag down in an expanse of empty space, struck a chord, and started singing. I hurled my voice out there. Dogs kept bounding up, trying to bite the neck of my guitar and dropping tennis balls at my feet, so I hurled those aswell.

Standing with toes at the edge of the water singing the old Welsh hymn, 'Here is Love Vast as the Ocean' I nearly lost it, but everything else was singing so much better than me anyway, so here it is – I realise how everything in creation does this every moment without us, and if we just agree and go with it, it takes our songs and brings us in to a much, much bigger order of things. This is a primal sense of belonging.

That is, of course, until the embarrassment of turning around and realising an audience has gathered thinking I am busking U2 songs...


{Todays' Soundtrack: Cornish Fishermen's Sea Shanties}

Little Mirrors

What—or who—are your mirrors?

If your sense of identity relies too much on reflections from other people, it is possible you will be controlled by fear of their judgement. Friends, this is no good.

We are all mirrors to each other. It is good and right that we bear each other up and be generous with ourselves as we provide helpful reflections. But sometimes if we become slightly tinted, or steamed up, the subjectivity of our reflections may stop us being so generous and cause us to reflect back with criticism (which is wrong) and judgement (which is not ours to pronounce).

Let's not believe the lie that we do not know who we are, and instead take true reflections from the little mirrors that are intent on shining clear for us.

Who are your mirrors?


{Today's Soundtrack: Nigel Kennedy & Kroke again}

Not Being, But Becoming

This life is therefore not righteousness,

but growth in righteousness;

not health, but healing;

not being, but becoming;

not rest, but exercise.

We are not yet what we shall be,

but we are growing toward it;

the process is not yet finished

but it is going on;

this is not the end,

but it is the road.

All does not yet gleam in glory,

but all is being purified.

                               - Martin Luther, 1521




{Today's Soundtrack: East Meets East - Nigel Kennedy & Kroke}

Angel Esther

Today, Esther and I decided to have a portrait session. The last time she and I did this, she was modelling as an Angel for the benefit of a certain public art project, and for a couple of years now has been standing on the walls of our city, in a praying pose. We walked down to see the mosaics together soon after they were installed, and I asked her how she felt seeing herself on the wall. 

"It's such a privilege, praying for the city," she said.

In January, Esther was diagnosed with cancer. For six months, she had to sit through many gruesome rounds of chemotherapy, but she didn't stop praying, and neither did all the people around her. After the first two treatments, her hair started falling out, she began losing weight, and would be asleep for days at a time on heavy duty anti-sickness pills because the chemo drugs made her feel so foul. She kept praying, even when she shivered her way through summer having no hair or body fat left. After she first received the diagnosis, she wanted it announced at church so people knew, but wouldn't ask too many questions when her appearance started changing. While friends went over and said some prayers, I had to lead the congregation singing songs with my guitar. I watched Esther sit quietly, being prayed for, tears falling out of her eyes. It was about all any of us could do to hold it together and keep singing.

And then a few weeks ago, Esther was given the all clear – no remission, nothing, just clear. She's completely healed of cancer in 6 months flat. And because her hair is growing back ridiculously fast, we fixed a date as quickly as we could for these pictures, because we want to mark this.

This is a remarkably strong, generous, faith-filled woman. She knows what it means to shelter under the heavenly wing. She really knows, and looking at these images, something has changed. A new serenity has settled in. Just being around her, you feel it.

This is the day we chose to make pictures which say 'thanks' that our Angel Esther is healed. 

"Thanks."

{Another Soundtrack for Today: The Delays - Find A Home}