Nuts and bolts

People often ask, "What do you write?" I've long struggled with a concise, satisfactory reply. How to describe the concept of beautiful rubbish in something tangible? I settled on "redemptive stories" for awhile, but even that didn't suffice. Sounds fluffy with no substance, but I knew there was substance, just couldn't lasso words around it and pull it down to the everyday, practical stuff of life.

Until this daily practice of looking for the graces in life, to count them and say thanks for them. This daily, moment-by-moment learning to see, period. This is the nuts and bolts of beautiful rubbish. This is what puts flesh and flower and dirt and texture on the seemingly ethereal concept of seeing the beauty in the rubbish, of turning around and living that in the daily story. This is the redemptive story, in words that will turn into sentences that will grow into paragraphs that will develop, over time, into a book. A living book.

It keeps returning to my eyesight. This mysterious transformation of taking eyes that can see but have been blind and opening them wider.

The everyday art of learning to see, this is what I write.

I see to write and I write to see; I see to live and I live to see. Life - glorious, messy, beautiful, uncensored, fresh.

My daily work is this: To trust, and then, to see. And as I see, to trust deeper. A whole life of this, one day at a time.