On longing...

 I miss the seasons, especially spring, teasing reentry with crocuses and with twigs weighted with buds so full of potential you can imagine them popping like kernels corn. Does the tree weary of their weight? In a few short weeks they will be its glory.

I happened upon forsythia branches at Trader Joe's, my new favorite place. Forsythia is on my 'points off Florida list' along with lilacs, chipmunks, chickadees, robins, tulips, daffodils, jonquils, red squirrels, red leaves, apple picking, and the crunch of snow beneath my boot. Do we have a personal geography that makes us feel like we don't belong, or are we, as Frederick Beuchner contends, always longing for home?

Longing is a theme that drives my art, especially as expressed in reaching. Trees reach for the sky and waves reach for the moon, creating an electric tension on the horizon that I call joy.

When our daughter Danielle was an infant, she would calm when she looked at the moon. I feel the same way about the horizon with its mystical tension of extremes, like magnetic poles resisting. Is the gap in-between full of tension or promise?  Pain and beauty, suffering and grace, earth and and sky and sea.

Here are two things in which I found comfort recently: Forsythia in a vase, its daring branches reaching impossibly into midair, and painting a horizon, imagining the crunch of white pebble paths beneath my feet and my french godmother gathering greens for dinner's salad.

“The word longing comes from the same root as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us. The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is of course homesickness,”
― Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home: Reflections at Midlife