I still believe mainly in the opportunities afforded by acceptance.
Robert Adams
If you have ever been frustrated, trying to photograph the beauty of the moon or a sunrise, then you will know that a snapshot is a mere recreation of what the human eye sees. It can’t do justice to the beauty we behold. The same goes for you. Your beauty is in the eye of your beholder. If you see a photo of you that doesn’t look like how you feel you look, that’s exactly what is happening. Your beauty can’t quite be captured by a camera, or a filter. It’s in the energy, the magic, the light you send out. And it’s all yours. And it’s still there, regardless of what the snapshot shows. The camera lies. Or maybe it just can’t quite comprehend how much you really are.
‘I wish I knew’
Donna Ashworth
I think the hardest thing about living with chronic illness is the constant need for acceptance. I don’t mean resignation, though there is often plenty of that too. But resignation is a negative, disgruntled, ungrateful way of giving up, of conceding someone else is right, of foregoing your heart’s desire. Acceptance is an active, positive, demanding force. It requires fierce, clear, sight, courage and endless self-compassion.
Down the years, when depression has been at its most brutal, I have clung onto the revelatory knowledge that God is in the details – the details outside my back door, beneath my window sill, in that single plant pot. I do not have to arrange things a certain way, for them to be ‘beautiful enough’ for God. Barbara Kingsolver encapsulates this kind of sight brilliantly:
In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colourless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window.
Making room for acceptance in the midst of sadness or pain comes to be about seeing what ‘is’: putting aside the future and past which pull at me, in order to ‘be’ in this moment, which is all that God asks of me. ‘Isness’ is how Meister Eckhart described God, the eternal present into which I am invited. The Trappist monk Thomas Keating outlines how my ‘being’ is actually my ‘calling’:
The greatest accomplishment in life is to be what we are, which is God’s idea of what [God] wanted us to be when [God] brought us into being….Accepting that gift is accepting God’s will for us, and in its acceptance is found the path to growth and ultimate fulfilment.
Making room for who I really am, beloved in God’s sight – rather than the curated self I would rather be, the perfectionist self I strive to be, the well self I expect myself to be or the people-pleasing self I have spent so long being – is a life-long task. Attempting to put my self aside so I can be in God’s flow is something that, as a human and as a contemplative photographer is the biggest challenge I know. I have to practice it over and over, to get myself out of the way so God’s will can be done in, and around, me.
In his book Soul Talk, Revd Kirk Byron Jones says that God is ‘always and forever dreaming your joy’, and that the soul is ‘God’s everlasting laughter in you’:
Your soul is God’s Spirit in your spirit, filled to overflowing with lavish love, grace, and outrageous joy. More than anything else, your soul wants you to know how much you are madly adored by God in the mad hope that you will live from acceptance and not for acceptance. (original emphases)
The difference between making room for accepting the what ‘is’ of my circumstances, and behaving in ways that will fit in with how I think or feel I should behave so that others will accept or like or love me, is where God meets me daily: to reassure me I am loved.
This is the divine acceptance that feeds me. It is also something I find really hard to accept: the belief that I am inherently unloveable is a deep and old error message I am learning to accept is wrong, so God can correct it, can heal it in me.
This is how I am making room for acceptance from the One who truly matters, who has my true soul-health at heart. Imagine what my life might become if I learnt how to accept and live from such a place all the time…
Last May, I saw a dragonfly as long as my hand–longer than an average-sized songbird. She circled and circled, flexing her body, trying to decide if my little lake was worthy of her precious eggs. She was almost absurdly colorful, sporting a bright green thorax and blue abdomen. Eventually she lit on the tip of the horsetail plant that sends long slender spikes up out of the water. She was joined on the tips of five adjacent stalks by five other dragonflies, all different: an orange-bodied one with orange wings, a yellow one, a blue-green one, one with a red head and purple tail, and a miniature one in zippy metallic blue. A dragonfly bouquet. Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.
What to believe in, exactly, may never turn out to be half as important as the daring act of belief. A willingness to participate in sunlight, and the color red. An agreement to enter into a conspiracy with life, on behalf of both frog and snake, the predator and the prey, in order to come away changed.
Barbara Kingsolver, ‘My Desert Pond’ from ‘High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never’
patched & cracked (how I come to today). (iPhone images)
image into ikon 