I am sure somebody said it again last week, and it practically got a standing ovation. It always does.
“No pastor should ever ask you to be more dedicated to the church than to your family.”
The room exhaled. People nodded. A few mamas teared up a little. And listen to me, I’m not here to argue the point.
It’s true.
It’s also roughly as courageous as preaching against the flu.
I have a shelf in my studio that holds the most beautiful things I own.
Not the most expensive. Not the most impressive. The most beautiful, which, in my world, is a different category entirely.
On that shelf, inside a few glass boxes, sit books I made by hand. Leather spines. Painted covers of deep blue with copper florals, forest green with gold. Frayed silk ribbon for a bookmark. Every one of them contains, page by page, in my own handwriting, lines that were doing the slow work of making me into someone.
There is a peony on my studio table right now that has no business being this beautiful.
It is the last one of the whole year. The peonies are finished, every other bloom has come and gone, done its work, dropped its petals. But this one held on. And this week, I cut it and put it in an old amber bottle, the kind meant for something else entirely, something utilitarian and unremarkable, and set it in the middle of my art table, among the paint-stained surfaces and scattered supplies and the paper with its half-finished botanical sketch.
And I keep stopping to look at it. Not because it's the most perfect peony I've ever grown. It's actually a little ragged at the edges now, as last things often are. But there is something about the last bloom of the season, the one that arrives after you've stopped expecting anymore, that stops me in a way the first ones never quite do.