Symbel-wynn Reflections

(Bandersnatcher Picture Prompt #1)

Darkened, muted colors comfort the eye and offer a picture of somber loveliness. Beneath the swaying movement of trees in windy skies—skies which are dim with the suggestion of coming rain or twilight—a quiet cottage sits. We long to step inside, into the simplicity and quaintness of cottage life.

We notice a single light in the window, perhaps a candle beside an elderly woman lying on a bed. Perhaps she is dying. We are looking from the outside. We see quaintness because we aren’t offered the feeling of draft in the chinks or limiting dimness of candlelight. We don’t hear the rustle of wind in the thatching above or groans of a dying woman lying before a work hardened daughter-in-law who has just entered their meager abode. We watch one enter at the door but can not see the two struggling together in their need. We cannot witness their relationship of necessity which has become the only remaining family tie in poverty and loss. They must struggle on. To cease to struggle is to cease to live. 

We don’t understand the struggle for survival. So many little sorrows and hardships are assuaged. We follow the woman in the painting to the river to scrub our laundry or to the mill to grind out flour. We don’t worry with her, in our ignorance, over catching our death of “a chill”. Our great struggle is waiting to fulfill our wishlist. We won’t struggle long. We will become slaves of credit for an entertainment device. We fill our lives with financed convenience. Convenience will create space, room for new demands. We will not rest in our borrowed time. We must fill it with more—more work, play, anxiety, guilt, grief. We hold in our hands a convenient path to each of these at the tap of a screen. We find it’s easy to fill the chinks with work and anxiety. In our exhaustion, we scroll through endless videos to divert and amuse. We peer into our devices like crystal balls that reveal worldwide sorrows and atrocities on a grand, important scale. We find that there is much to grieve. These constant, detached sorrows demand our sympathy and anxiety. How much grief can one soul bear? We are anxious, tired, guilty slaves desperate for diversion. Is it possible to bear a world of grief within one heart? We look to the woman in the painting. Her life is not pierced with blue light urging her to look, feel, detach, divert. She must live fully in her single life of hardship that broadens only to that of her nearby community. Her life will only be lit by sunshine and firelight.

Do I dare compare my sorrows to one who gives of her own meager supper to prolong the miserable life of a dying woman? Do I dare compare her struggle with my own? Do I dare look with longing at her life of simplicity? I would be a simpleton. 

Why, then, do I find myself feeling this way when I witness this painting and squint back at simpler days? There must be another way. What if another story whispers from the cottage. What if that woman was living in a simple way on purpose. What if the thatch roof were her pride and joy and her call back to live life within her own small world. What if the call to “make disciples of all nations” were not always a call to feel the whole world’s sorrows, but to mourn and rejoice with our neighbors and even the inhabitants of our own homes? In our current age that demands we have knowledge of everything but miss truly knowing the world inside and outside our door, I beg a third option. In spite of my disdain for escapism, I am watching for a doorway to truly escape, like a freed prisoner, into the world that once was—not in useless nostalgia for the good ol’ days, nor the outsider’s view of assumed quaintness, but the realized reality we are looking for when we long for cottage life. There is a whisper of the New Creation in this longing. A longing for Eden. I am tired of partaking of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and blue light. I don’t want to know it all anymore. I cast my care on the One who made me to be finite and accept a lighter burden. I want to tend my garden and my people in full knowledge that Divine purpose is in the work of my hands.

I lift my eyes and see at my own home. It is not a painting. I look at my people, my community. They are not the world at large. But my home and my people are enough. Here, I find enough work for my hands. Here, I find enough knowledge for my mind. Here, I find enough grief to fill my soul. Here, my God meets me with peace in the darkened, muted coloring of the already but not yet. And, here, at end of day, I shall rest in quiet and simplicity.