I lie on grass under maple skirts. He laughs and sun catches in his iris and something inside of me combusts. A child swings over us into blue. And I press myself into the earth's crust and ask: Why isn't there just nothing?
Why is there something at all? The orb spins and my lungs exhale and child sways back to this part of the solar system and he takes my hand and why is there all this something instead of nothing?
Once I read these words from Romans and dropped the Bible:
"... the God who gives life to the dead and who creates something out of nothing" (Ro. 4:17 NCV).
Who dares hold Words that can do that?
Word that speaks bark and pith into being and make eyes like his and a child with pounding heart who can fly and return.
Word that makes something out of nothing.
Spirit-Word takes nothing, the dead and the void, and breathes something into the black cavities... the life and the color.
The Letter of the Law germinates the Letter of the Life.
Life that is supposed to throb through my veins, fire the synapses, erupt the passions, letters to arc with my spine, curve with my lips, stretch with my hands.
That's why I leave the Bible on the shelf too often.
I am scared to resurrect.
Terrified that me, in all my tattered nothingness, might be made into something. It's the case of the Emperor's new clothes, us with a terrible inkling we're wearing nothing but too proud to call it a sham. We parade about like we're something, but we know, we know.
It's safer to play the walking dead. Safer to drop the Book -- never pick it up -- the Nothings playing Somethings, than let the Word make our nothing into something.
Somedays I get so bone weary of the nothing, I get brave enough to call it what it is, wail the truth: I have nothing on.
I am nothing. And He's ready -- if I'll take it -- He's ready to tilt back a day that's a fat zero, a life that's a bland emptiness, a purpose that's a hollow blank, and breathe Living Letters into the larynx, flood the bronchi with oxygen.
I look around at the world. Why is there something instead of nothing?
Am I ready to be something from nothing?
Word of God, speak.
Photos: my grandmother's Living Letter
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