The vase of lilacs set upon the dining room table, like a jewel in the day’s crown, smiles upon each of us gathered round it, lords and ladies of the court feasting in its presence.
Placed as it is
upon the brow of the ruler of the hour,
it reflects back to us
the fresh favor of each face,
alive and fragrant
as the blooms
abundant on their benches.
Here together
we gather, illuminated
by the grace of gathering at all,
I would not have been a poet except that I have been in love alive in this mortal world, or an essayist except that I have been bewildered and afraid, or a storyteller had I not heard stories passing to me through the air, or a writer at all except I have been wakeful at night and words have come to me out of their deep caves, needing to be remembered. But on the days I am lucky or blessed, I am silent. I go into the one body that two make in making marriage that for all our trying, all our deaf-and-dumb of speech, has no tongue. Or I give myself to gravity, light, and air and am carried back to solitary work in fields and woods, where my hands rest upon a world unnamed, complete, unanswerable, and final as our daily bread and meat. The way of love leads all ways to life beyond words, silent and secret. To serve that triumph I have done all the rest.
(The following prayers are excerpted from an upcoming collaborative project led by Brennen Daniels and featuring words by him, Emily Steffen and myself, Wrestle Collective (vol 1 // help our unbelief). Get your copy here, and follow along on Instagram for updates!)
didymus (morning prayer) John 20:25-29
Others have seen You,
but my wound is too deep for them to mend it with their words.
I need to hold You in my arms, I need to touch the broken form of You and, physically, for myself, know the Word is wounded too.
God help my unbelief, but some of us need more.
reach into me (evening prayer) John 20:26-29
O Palpable, Present One, what consolation is this, that even (especially) in my faithlessness, You meet me?
It would be a terrible thing to stop doubting if it meant I couldn’t reach into Your side and touch Your heart.
My Lord and My God, embrace me now. Make my doubt, faith, and my faith, sight.
Why is it that I hold the spring in such suspicion? I have given up on the hope that life will lift up its tousled head and throw the covers back with a fruity yawn the size of an open grave. I am Midwestern enough to eye the sky and tut-tut about snow, to keep my coat on its hook by the door. I am wounded enough by the purloined promises of buds sewn shut to play the skeptic when they bloom.
Unbidden, then, this delight when the sun strikes my eyes, when the first great green middle finger pokes its way up through the sod. It’s been so long since last year that the first warm day smells of birthday cake, and the little things crinkle in the field like gift wrap.
And every murmur stills to silence at a single daffodilian bow crowning the package,
(for Palm Sunday, from my upcoming project WORDS FOR THE CHURCH)
“Trample our foes under metal-shod heel under ramrod doctrine and volumes of steel!” You are, too often, in our battle-blind sight, our war horse for nothing but wild-eyed fight.
But on this day
entry to the Holy City is unlike any rebellion,
heralded by children
paraded through palms.
Salvation is not by our swords, or woken by our wars,
and the power enters peacefully,
on the back of a young donkey,
as it entered years ago
on the breast of a manger.
The only blood spilt is of a servant King,
that His wakening children may ever rise and sing.
Lay your banners low at the sandal-shod feet of the Infant, the Infinite, the Shepherd, the Lamb. His Gospel is peace, and mercy toward man.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time for war, and a time for peace…” Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8b
We are feeble,
dust and droplets and germs
with face masks on guard against
all the fears populating our world.
We lash out and reach out
and sometimes both at once,
not really knowing
what we do or don’t do,
not really seeing what we need
or what harms us –
children all,
sequestered in a global sickroom
with an IV drip of articles
and campaigns and quests
to keep us well.
And I am sitting in my home,
looking out
at a world returning to the wild within,
tied to filtering screens,
and suddenly so weary –
stretched thin by all the things I must do
the responsibilities I hold heavy
as a follower, a lover,
a human.
But on sunny days,
(and more of these are dawning)
the window is open,
and the air coming in is cold and fresh,
carrying bird song on its back
and wildflowers in its wake.
And I feel then
as though the world
is a winsome place,
infected, yes, utterly plagued
by songbirds,
and though beauty may exhaust me
(as it should)
I will not stop breathing it in.
I have to constantly remind myself of this. I have to muscle my way through the grey days, through the grasping cold snaps in February and March, through the frosts that kill the early daffodils before they can even bloom. Midwest winters can be brutal. I get glimpses that winter’s hold on us is loosening with the “false springs” we get sometimes: a warm weekend, or a day when the sun shows it’s weather-beaten face. We all collectively lift our faces to it, close our eyes, and nod in gratitude. We take a deep breath, preparing to go under again for a few more days. Winter isn’t easily beaten here.
Spring is the season of resurrection and new life. But the weeks before things really start to burst and grow are, appropriately, Lenten in their scope. We work the ground, we plant the seeds, we remember that we are dust, and we look expectantly to the life we are promised. So even in a season marked by life, we are scarred by death.
When I wrote some of the primary poems in this season for the book, I was thinking through what it means to encounter death as a resurrected person. When I met Christ, the first thing He did to me was to kill me, and He’s been putting me to death ever since. Unless I realize my death, I will never realize my life. But beyond the metaphors, I was encountering the very real sting of physical death at the time. What did this resurrection, which waits and waits and waits yet again to bring about our rising, have to do with this everyday reality? What kind of hope is this that only shows its face in glimpses and slivers?
So in some sense, writing these poems was a way to know death, to remind myself that grief is not an end in itself, but a way of life. This was my way of embracing the thing I hated, but not without the hope that was coming – however far away – relentless as the encroaching sun at the end of winter.
And with these poems came songs to sing in the night.
So friends, you who are weary of winter and ready for some light and warmth, here it is: poem by poem, song by song, the spring season of SOLACE.
(You can pick up a copy of the book at my shop or on Bookshop.org to read along)
TRACKLIST: 1. chicago in season ii / Chicago (Sufjan Stevens) 2. invocation / The Matins of St. Clare (Respighi) 3. stay with me / Monarch (Zach Winters) 4. nestling / How Can I Keep From Singing (Audrey Assad) 5. receive / Hero Over My Head (Kings Kaleidoscope) 6. spring cleaning / Freedom (Tim Fain) 7. elements: the taste of earth / Digging in the Sand (Josh Rouse) 8. elements: the smell of smoke / Golden Embers (Mandolin Orange) 9. elements: the sound of air / Sound (Sylvan Esso) 10. elements: the impact of water / The Cure for Pain (Jon Foreman) 11. a leaf, taken / Leaf (Nick Box) 12. nadia / Light a Candle (Andy Gullahorn) 13. triptych for Holy Week: absentia / Tourniquet (Breaking Benjamin) 14. triptych for Holy Week: limbo / Rattle (Penny and Sparrow) 15. triptych for Holy Week: absolutio / His Heart Beats (Andrew Peterson) 16. (soon) / The Lord Is Coming (Scott Mulvahill) 17. majestic / This House (Sara Groves) 18. blackbird / Blackbird (The Beatles)
It’s on the days it flashes by in feeds that someone else has left us; on the days we remember those woven into eternity, a tapestry of the never-forgotten; on the days we debate over who’s lives really matter; on the days we forget it all or cannot stifle the memory, so we suffocate.
The end is always present in my flesh and in my blood, like the burgeoning beginning behind each closing eye — a familiar tingle up the spine when silence falls around me —
but it’s ever-presence doesn’t make each passage any purer. No, it’s all just slowly staining me like the wine within the glass, licking up the sides until it spills.
So I grieve again, I grieve. For what is earth except to teach us how to grieve?
Josie Koznarek is a fine artist and designer based in Chicago, IL, working primarily in ink paintings. She’s also a long-time friend of mine.
Through the years we’ve crossed artistic paths here and there, often talking about further collaboration. This year we were able to do just that, with a little book of poetry you may have heard about called SOLACE. Josie not only created four original art pieces for the book, she designed and formatted the book itself, and put up with all of my questions and flights of fancy along the way.
She’s an incredible artist and an incredible person, and she recently took the time to talk with me about her creative process, inspiration, and bliss.
What was the impetus for you to start creating art?
A person’s habits are often intrinsic; you’ve more than likely had the same tendencies and been doing the same actions over and over again since before you had memories. Most adults sleep in the same position they slept in when they were babies. My mom tells stories of my creating an immense amount of art from an early age. I’ve just kept that habit going.
How have your artistic style and priorities evolved over time?
My style may change, but my voice remains the same. I would argue that it has been the same since I was little. My constant priority is to somehow manage to connect my fluctuating style to my intrinsic voice.
As a child and as an adult artist, you find people and projects whose style resonates with your voice. You look up to them, and often imitate them, in ways as formal as robustly studying art history to simply drawing fanart for an anime you like. You let your practice and influences guide you, continually playing a game of Marco Polo with yourself until you (hopefully) find the connections through which your voice can flow freely, however that may look.
Can you walk us through a typical (or atypical) process of creating a piece? What’s your favorite part of the process?
Sometimes I just take 15-20 minutes out of my day to let the brush move as it will and it’s as simple as that. A recent painting of an orchid I made happened that way, and it looks great.
With more complex work, however, I’ll usually take a few more steps to ensure that it turns out the way I want it to. Since my work is usually based on flowing, bold strokes of ink, if I mess up and the piece looks bad, I have to start over. There’s no covering up a misplaced line without ruining the texture of the paper. For pieces such as the ones I created for SOLACE, I start by refining a thumbnail of the piece to test various compositions. When I find one I like, I’ll practice that composition on smaller pieces of paper so I know where the brush is going to go. This usually takes a couple of hours.
Once I’m happy with how the tests went, I’ll dip my brush into ink and place each major line exactly where they need to go, allowing smaller lines such as textures and shadows to manifest as I work. The pieces I made for Solace took about 6 hours each using this process.
My favorite part of the process is falling into the process. If I enter a flow state, I can work and have no idea how long I’m working for and it is bliss. This does not always happen, however, which can be quite gruesome to witness. My husband once came home to find me painting and angry-crying over a watercolor painting of lily pads that was taking too long. It was not a good time. The painting turned out great, though.
You created four original art pieces for the book. What inspired this particular character that we’re encountering in each season?
The artsy-fartsy answer, and the one that’s more true to how it actually happened, is that the character felt like they belonged there, so I put them there.
If I were to reflect on that decision to try and rationalize exactly why I put that character there, I would say that physical embodiments of emotional/spiritual realities permeate my work. An early series of mine called “Cool Girl” reflected on societal acceptance through various portrayals of “cool” women. Large twin pieces I recently completed portray the sun and the moon as sisters sharing two different natural reactions to pain.
This particular character I painted here, in my mind, is both the reader and someone else entirely. The character is the reader in the way they interact with the seasons; a little mournfully, and simultaneously drowning in and clinging to the flow of things. The character is also the spirit of these woods, as the character not only repeats but the location does as well. The four paintings take place in the same forest over the course of the four seasons. Weather and temperature change drastically, and the forest is very remote and lonely, but this is the way of things. There is beauty in it and a groundedness to it that make the forest spirit almost seem to glide from season to season with an effortlessness that only emerges through centuries of knowledge. Knowledge that we humans can find in the art and the poetry we have been creating and preserving and sharing with one another since the beginning of time.
You’ve done a number of live art pieces, and that just blows my mind. What does it take for you to execute those in real time?
I am a fundamentally lazy artist; the quicker I can get a piece done, the happier I am. Plus, it might not seem like it reading these very serious descriptions of my own work, but in real life I am very much a ham, and hamming it up is something I’m very comfortable doing. My two character flaws of laziness and attention-whoring interplay with each other in just the right way to make my work-flow perfectly adaptable to live art. This means that I can stand in front of a crowd painting long, dynamic, impressive ink lines and end up with a beautiful completed piece in less than 2 hours. It’s not something most people can do, but for some reason I’m accidentally naturally suited to that environment.
What’s the most difficult thing about being an artist?
Being your own business. Making art isn’t just making art (although it would be great if it was). There are emails to send, galleries to attend, phone calls to make, invoices to write, checkbooks to balance, and entire websites to update. This would be less difficult if there was a manager above me telling me what to do and when to do it, but that’s on me too. Naturally it’s difficult to be perfect at all of that. So there’s a lot of guilt there, too, even though wearing all of those hats is a superhuman ordeal that no one should have to put themselves through. And yet here I am torturing myself!
What’s your favorite thing about being an artist?
As of last year, I’m finally making artwork that I’m fully satisfied with. In the past, I couldn’t bear to hang my own work in my house, because I’d always look at it and see the ways I could grow or improve. I still have that eye, and you need that eye in order to be a good artist, but now I actually like the art I make. It feels like a literal lifetime of working and pushing and refining is finally coming to fruition, and it makes me so happy.
Another more simple answer to this question is that just making things is bliss. The beauty of the process and the satisfaction of completion spreads to a lot more in my life than just art, but it certainly manifests itself the most in my personal practice.
One thing we’ve often talked about together is the difficulty of making art or writing (or any art form, really) into a financially-viable vocation. How do you care for your sanity in the midst of that reality? Asking for a friend…
A key concept/mantra I repeat over and over to myself is sort of similar to what I was talking about earlier; that when you go to an office job, they hire janitors to come in literally every day to make sure your space is clean and nice so you can keep working well. When you work from home, you literally have to be your own janitor. Which by itself is a full-time job that companies pay full-time wages for. And that’s far from the only role you have to fill for yourself… you’re your own secretary, web designer, social media manager, content creator, and financial advisor, all of which in most places are full-time jobs with full-time wages and vacation days and sick days and benefits.
All that to say, be gentle with yourself. Log your work hours, and keep the boundary of 8 hours of work a day with an extremely strong hand. Take a lunch break every day. You always need it. When you have to work overtime, balance that out with an equal amount of rest and recovery. Rome was not built in a day, and Rome was also not built by working 10 hour days to the point where you can’t even work anymore because of extreme burnout. I say this from experience.
What’s a common misconception about your work?
I think the number one question that I get is, “How long did this take you?” It always feels like a trap, because I know the answer they’re expecting from me is, “OHHH my gosh this took me eleven-hundred HOURS you don’t even KNOW the work I put into this.” But the reality of my work is that most of my more popular pieces, from concept to completion, didn’t even take a half hour.
Fast work is just as impressive as work that took 20+ hours. The amount of practice and refinement that I’ve had to put in in order to place such sure, deliberate brush strokes took years to perfect. In certain ways fast work is much harder than slow work, like oil painting or sculpting. If you mess up an oil painting, you can cover up the problem area or slowly work it into your composition. Unless something goes horribly wrong, you can always even out a mistake in a clay, wire, or stone sculpture. But with minimal ink painting, the line is the line and that’s it. There’s no going back or erasing or pushing it around to make it work. If you mess up, you have to start over on a new piece of paper or discard the idea altogether. The time spent on my pieces does not equal skill, it’s the thousands of hours of practice behind the scenes that make my skill what it is.
What advice would you give to creators?
Go and have fun.
Who were you as a 5 year old? Do you remember? It might not feel like it, but that’s still who you are. Go out and play. Write what you want. Sing what you want. Draw what you want. Maturity is not the rejection of that person. It’s placing that person on your shoulders, embracing that person, and speaking as that person with a new, strong foundation that can only come through time and experience.
the wind knew me
then,
a brittle leaf shrinking into a needle,
and in its ancient knowing
searched my insides like a compass point,
and brought me
there
in tears.
For I am full of things I have not known
and will never release.
I clutch to my chest
that which I do not understand,
and in holding on
I am held.
manna
I carried my daughter in my arms
out to watch
another Indiana sunset,
and as we staked our boots in the cold,
a flock of geese traversed the sky,
black ships navigating indigo seas,
between narrow burning isles,
and my daughter squeaked back at them
as they flew overhead.
We watched the clouds crocheting themselves into scarves,
in both of our eyes swimming
the sunset, ah! The glory
of that which fades,
and in its fading
fills us with further glories,
until we cease
to wonder what it is
and feast.
bread
The meadow grass gathers itself up
like shocks of wheat,
and the shocks gather together
flank to flank, heaving
out foggy breaths
over a bed of precious things.
And the precious things
gleam in the glancing
light until they melt away,
dew made daylight
in a winter dawn.
I look along the beam.
wine
I know again the winter trees
as structures
outlining a full-formed architecture,
as foundations of another world
intersecting, today, with my own.
And in them, through them, I know
again the winter sky
as a canvas spread flat
against which color may hold existence
and hold court with nature
and hold hands with truth,
a semblance of new sense
born of old sense
and held by senses here.
And by the sky, against the sky,
I know again the winter ground
on which I stand,
the potential of it,
the fullness of it, as great with Child,
a longing known in waiting,
a fullness felt by peace.
And of the ground, beneath the sky,
within the winter trees
I know again
myself,
a pair of feet wandering
over crypt and under tower,
beside the bones
of other beings: spread like stained glass,
speaking like saints,
lifting eyes like worshippers.
Unknown prayers bleed out of me,
released, it would seem,
by winter. Undone, it must be,
by the swelling belly
of a greater glory
pressing against
the groaning world,
longing to escape.
