Dear readers,
Thankful, grateful, blessed. For each of you! I am thankful, grateful, blessed. You continue to join me bi-weekly, and some of you have spoiled me even more by sharing what you read, thereby inviting others to be connected together, all of us designing blueprints for a hope-filled life.
Thank YOU for being YOU!
You won’t be surprised at what you read next when I express that I love Nature! (Smile, grin). Not only being outside immersed in it. Not only for the take your breath away beauty it holds. I love how Nature is always speaking messages. Miracle communications for the design of our best blueprints!
Like the blue line of sky visible just above the trees, slicing through the clouds on the morning of November 6th. “Silver lining” Mother Nature whispered. Through the grayness of the morning start among the trees now bare of their Autumn multicolored jackets, the clouds and blue sky partnered together to communicate hope, faith, love. And the greatest of all three
Is our choice in how we choose to hear and see.
A few weeks ago, I was blessed to travel to Sicily, visiting many historical sites originating hundreds of years ago in their destiny to be what we look back on to learn from. As I stood listening about volcanoes, earthquakes, and empires at war that destroyed foundational structures, I watched the passersby in vehicles and on sidewalks demonstrating the continuation of life. A bus ride and a sky tram ride up a volcanic mountain allowed me to observe how Nature was flourishing through the abundant green grasses and trees at the base of this once spewing forth hot lava mountainside.
A silver lining in the clouds doesn’t shine through without the gray overcast sky.
The need for blueprint designs does not occur without someone wishing to alter what is or build something new.
This thought just struck me as I talk with all of you. My dad was a builder. He designed structures and gathered the materials to build what he designed. He not only built from scratch at places once empty space. He remodeled. He took what was no longer working and improved it while ensuring the important foundational parts of the structure were not demolished.
I used to focus on the clouds and bare trees. Translation, how I wasn’t talented in carpentry like him.
Now, as I see and see again, I see the blue streak parting the clouds.
I may not be gifted with a hammer and nails or relish climbing ladders carrying 2×4’s, but Dad taught me how to view what is for the possibilities to make better and how to create what isn’t yet there but is wished for or needed. Dad didn’t come up to a building site and see the hard work that it would take to create what he envisioned in the blueprints.
He didn’t see the bare trees and clouds.
He saw the blue streaks of silver and then he got to work.
Now I think it’s time for me to go find his tool belt.
Namaste’
-Christine
THE CREASES NOW SPEAK
JOSHUA
Joshua, or “J” as his Aunt Laura likes to call him, was twelve when his aunt moved to London. Four years before he began living with his Grandpa Edward and Grandma Patricia. Four years before he became an orphan.
Or at least that was the truth in Joshua’s mind, for he never knew his biological father. For all Joshua knew, his father could be dead. Or be his next-door neighbor. Joshua didn’t know what his father looked like. His mother never shared a picture. But he always felt that he would know as soon as he looked into a stranger’s eyes and saw a mirror reflection of himself looking back.
His grandma used to tell him that he looked like his mother. Joshua always felt it was either because she was trying to help ease the aloneness Joshua felt after his mother died or she was trying to ease her own profound grief choosing to see that her oldest daughter was still alive thru him.
Kaylen didn’t think Joshua looked like his mom. He remembers showing her a picture of his mom, his Aunt Laura, and himself – a picture taken when his aunt was getting ready to leave for London. Kaylen commented on two things. The anger she saw in Aunt Laura’s eyes. And how he and his mom had the same smile but that was the only feature Kaylen saw as resemblance. Joshua remembers the feeling that stirred in him when Kaylen said that. His mom had always told him that he smiled like his father. If he didn’t have his dad’s smile, what of his dad was him?
When Joshua’s mom died, he vowed he would be like his Aunt Laura. Single. No children. Working and living abroad. He would come back to Chicago more frequently than his Aunt Laura did. Joshua has only seen her twice since she moved away eighteen years ago. Once when his mom was passing away, nine years ago. The second time when Laura came to say goodbye to his grandma before she died. Joshua used to think his aunt’s lack of visits was because she was living glamorously sought by many or was a starving journalist who couldn’t afford frequent airfare.
Until Kaylen responded to his question asking what she meant when she commented on his aunt’s fiery eyes. “She is filled with anger. She has been judged as an outcast. She is determined to prove she is not less than.” When Joshua lightheartedly chuckled and joked with Kaylen if that was the intuitive doctor coming through in how she reads her patients, Kaylen gently rubbed her index finger across the photo, pausing on the image of Aunt Laura. “No,” Kaylen said as she shook her head. “She has the eyes of someone discriminated against.” It was moments like that when Joshua wanted nothing more than to shelter Kaylen from having anyone else ever judge her again.
His aunt didn’t know about Kaylen. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t told her yet. He had always felt nothing but unconditional love from Aunt Laura. She always writes “my favorite nephew” in every email response back to him, just as she had always said that to him the first twelve years of his life when she lived in Chicago.
Joshua updated his aunt via email every week on how his grandpa – her father – was doing. More than once, he thought of asking her if grandpa was the reason for the fire in her eyes. If he is the reason she doesn’t visit more frequently. If maybe she is actually married. Perhaps to someone of color. He feels a kindred connection to her that is more than an aunt – nephew bond. That she would understand his love for Kaylen and why he can’t bring himself to tell his grandpa about her.
More than once Joshua also thought of asking his aunt to help him find his father. Certainly, her journalism skills could find some clues. But every time he thought of asking her, Joshua would repeat the narrative he had been telling himself since he was a little boy. His father didn’t want a child.
If he had wanted to be a father, he would have made sure he was involved in Joshua’s upbringing. He would have been there to teach Joshua how to skip rocks, to sit in the bleachers cheering on Joshua at every home and away basketball game, to believe in and encourage him to attend college. To assure him he was not going to be alone when his mother died.
Which is why Joshua didn’t want children. Given that his genes were also those of his father’s, he didn’t want to run the risk he’d abandon his child. Joshua already feared he wasn’t going to grow old with Kaylen. Cancer was destined to be his future too, Joshua was convinced. He didn’t want to risk leaving Kaylen a single mom, like his own had been.
Joshua and Kaylen had talked about starting a family. Before they got married, they talked in terms of “one day” but their lifestyle scurrying between careers and friendships didn’t lend to it being “one-day” anytime soon. He was good with that. The more he witnessed Kaylen’s happiness as a doctor and heard her laughter when they were out with friends, the more he knew Kaylen didn’t want to start a family.
The night Joshua got home after helping his grandpa translate the letter from someone named Mỹ, as he hit send on his email to his aunt, he found himself thinking, if aunt Laura can find this person for Grandpa, I will ask her to help me find my father. Maybe by now, he wants a son.