Wrestling with Images

This morning, the flooding rains have disrupted my walk/run through the neighborhood this morning. Nothing to do but make the house smell autumnal--pumpkin bread is baking in the oven!

I've been having a good writing morning, in a way.  I've been wrestling with images.  First I started off with poems.  I wanted to write in the voice of the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden.  I had a vision for what I wanted to write, but the words didn't come.  I researched that idea that trees are actually more communal than we think, that they develop an intriguing root/fungi system that helps them thrive instead of competing for scarce resources--the myth we usually tell ourselves about the trees.

I flipped the page and tried a technique that Jericho Brown talked about in this piece of writing:  "One such subversion that I had thought through for about 10 years—while washing dishes and cleaning the tub and grading papers and falling asleep next to one form of earthly beauty or another—was a sonnet crown that only included the repeated lines of the sonnet. Yes, I’m so angry I spent years thinking of ways to gut the sonnet."  He talks about this idea more fully in this interview.

Of course, I didn't do exactly what he did, but I had fun.  And then I tried to write a poem about wildfires and trees and could only write in cliches and bits I had already seen on Twitter.

As they often do, my thoughts turned to spiritual connections.  This morning, I got to the last page of my sketchbook, so I flipped back through the pages.  I'm always struck by how many of my images look like tongues of flame, even when I think I'm sketching something else, like a descending dove.

I'm writing in a time of flooding rains, which made me think of a different set of traditional images.  How do we see baptism in an age where we'll be fighting off the hungry seas that want to wash us away?

This week I started a new sketch not sure of where it would go--I was surprised when a hen emerged from my random swooshes.

But why should I be surprised?  Granted, I'm part of a religious tradition that has emphasized descending doves, not nesting hens.  But in my quest for more feminine images of God, so rare in the Bible, I have come back to that one over and over.

Times of societal shift often bring an interesting shift in imagery of all kinds.  One hundred years from now, what imagery will we emphasize?