it blooms

So I go out my back yard to my little patio with my little herb garden with my GIANT mutant lettuce and am stopped dead in my tracks.

My mutant lettuce has a flower on it.

A perfect periwinkle flower.

This plant that has grown to outragous proportions with branches like tentacles winding in all directions has bloomed.

A few days ago while I was sitting at my little table staring at the LETTUCE I wondered if I should finally cut it down. A Cicada had roosted on the top of it and so I figured that the lettuce could now officially be classified as a tree. It was getting more and more ungainly, sprouting big branches in confusing places like no lettuce I had ever seen before. The unearthly, threatening nature of it made me want to hack it back right then and there in the name of self preservation alone. But curiosity for whatever was to come, won out and so I left it.

And now it bears this perfect bloom, as if to say, "aren't you glad you waited"?

So many things in my life have been this way recently. The energy in nature has been weird and wonderful. Like God has been screaming at me though his creation and I am just now starting to pick up the phone. Two days ago while we were down by our pool Bryan and I were taunted by an orange butterfly. It kept landing on his head (which is a really funny picture, this little orange butterfly perched on my husband's big bald head...where is my camera when I need it). It would land on his head, and then it would land on mine. His, mine, his, mine. It landed on a chair and actually let me touch it. I sat there and marveled at the perfect tiny lines on the outside of its wings. God's art. It was gracious enough to show me the undersides too. They had a completely different design. Like looking at the back of a tapestry they were chaotic and messy but beautiful in their own way. For a long time this butterfly kept me company. Then it would lift off and take a turn around the yard, only to come back and perch in the very same spot as if to say "Did you miss me?". This went on for quite sometime while my husband brushed and cleaned the pool. Me and the butterfly.

Maybe I am learning a new way to worship. Observation. Instead of kicking the old intellect into gear and chewing up some theological question, I am learning to be still. Honestly, as an artist I thought I had that down, I guess not. Or at least I guess there is more. Mutant lettuce and friendly butterflies pull me out of what seems normal just enough to make me look again. Unlike my typical process through life of look, define, classify, move-on, I have been forced to stop and take a second look and be still.

What a gift.