I took out some pictures from my parents photo album I didn’t do it in secret but I didn’t ask for permission. I wonder if my mother has asked about them or if my dad has looked. I wonder if they ever talk about stuff like old pictures or if they gaze into each others eyes after all these years and know that they don’t need pictures, because they see all things and endure all things and accept all things and believe all things. But I don’t know what they talk about. I have incongruent memories and pictures seemingly stolen from them, now harbored in my little home and scanned over forensically for information about who I was and where I might be from. Because to talk to them might be too painful or too frustrating or too………….
I came across one of these clandestine photos recently.
It’s of my sister and I riding bikes with training wheels.
I am poised elegantly in total control of my bike waiting for the right moment to take off into the night and I am looking at my sister who is struggling pushing heaving the bike forward with her head and body awkwardly bent over the handle bars
rushing into the scene
into the photographic light
bursting and burning us
upon the film
on the bitumen
all those years ago.
I don’t remember my bike or the clothes I was wearing but my mother probably does. Or maybe she doesn’t. I don’t know what that means or why I say that now. Or maybe I do….. Maybe it means that I understand that she has me (or a part of me) and I am afraid that she will never give me that part back.
And these pictures…. these stolen pictures…. as much as I try to read the thousand words that are captured in that moment of life that fleeting breath of time those hands those eyes those lips that were mine, they are not mine, they never will be mine, and they were never mine. They were for my mother and my father. And they will never give them back to me. But maybe that’s ok. Maybe that’s what supposed to happen…… Your parents think that they are the ones that are giving and giving and giving but it’s actually you, the child, that gives the most. Or if not the most then at least the most easily, the most generously, the most trustingly, the most tenderly, the most intimately, the most willingly, the most innocently.
Yes those words must be sharp to the ears of parents. How could I a mere child (who appears to know nothing) love more generously then my mother? Did she not bear my body into this word from hers? What greater generosity can there be? What could be more intimate? What could take more trust? What clearer picture of willingness could there be? What could possibly be more innocent then a women holding her newly born child while feeding him from her breast? And yet can she truly believe that my love, that of a child, is less then her own, because of it’s newness? Is this tree more of a tree then that one because it’s weathered more winters? Was it not because of Isaac that Abraham became a man of great faith? It was the Son who gave up his life. The Father merely gave up a dream.
And yet which is greater, our precious lives or our noble dreams? What would one be without the other? Where would the rain fall if not on the earth? And where would the birds fly if not to the sky? But Love neither falls nor rises, it is permanent, it is infinite, it is the light which pierces through our clouded dreams and our life’s marrow.
But where is the light, where is this love? Is it in my parents’ eyes and hands and lips? I have those here already here with me, the hands of my father and the lips of my mother need neither touch me gently nor whisper sweetly into my ear ever again for when I reach out and when I speak they are there. Love then is also there. Like the river which springs from the mountain fresh and light and soft and flows down cutting through all things down into the ocean, into depths unimaginable and full and frightening; and yet they are one.
And if you were to drink of this river, this weighted water, you would be and you would cease to be for Love has no time nor place nor size nor shape, it has no beginning or end it is the beginning and the before and it will be the always and the after.