A TREE BY THE SEA

A sunflower is wilting in a vase on the table. The yellow petals are curled in and dropping into the hazy brown water that is molding the slimy stalk. The woman sits writing on the lined paper of an open journal. Tick, tick, tick. Seconds are marked by the soft clicking of a clock that collects dust on the mantel. Her pen is flying over the pages in short quick strokes. Her brow is furrowed in thought, but not toward punctuation or spelling, she  is remembering a dream that crept into her sleeping mind. She is writing details so she won’t forget. It seems so important in this moment to remember not just images but this feeling of dread that has clung to her since waking. There is a sludge in her spirit like the cloudy water in the vase in front of her.

She glances at the dead flower and  is reminded of the heaviness inside her. She was dead. Her skin was cracked and bruised. She had been bleeding. She remembers standing over her body and watching it disintegrate into the dusty earth.

She gets up from the table and picks up the vase. An odor of decayed vegetation and stagnant water swirls up to her nose when the rotting centerpiece is disturbed. She empties the murky water into her sink and places the flower in the trash. It’s dry leaves crumble into powdery bits as she presses it further against the other waste.

She sets the vase on her uncluttered counter and studies the discolored ring of film that marks the previous line of water. She feels like this vase emptied of its lifeless contents but unclean, still hanging onto the remnants of death. She is not sure how her dreams should be balanced with her life. Should she blink them away and go into her day letting herself forget? Should she allow the reality of the concrete world to push aside the obscurity of floating images and feelings unrooted in the ground of her fully awake life? Does this dream affect her in any way? If she were dead how could she see and feel? She can shake the image but the feeling is taking time.

She stands at the sink and runs warm water into the vase. With a small dab of soap on her fingertips she wipes the interior clean feeling the slippery fragments of decay dissolving under her touch. She dries her hands on the thin towel hanging from her oven door and leaves the vase to dry on the counter top.

Out her window she sees the last of the sunflowers in her garden. They are a mixed gathering of the young and old. Some are browned and bereft of petals, bent by a drying sun. Others are moist with dew, their thick green stalks and wide leaves embracing yellow petals that are plump with life. The sun shines on the small patch. It feeds that plants that are full of life and burns the dead. She thinks of the flower resting in her trash, dead from the moment it’s stalk was cut, yet clinging artificially to the life in the vase’s water and the sunlit windows.

She thinks of her own life and wonders which plant does she resemble. Is she dead in the garden or lying in the trash? Is she growing full of life? She knows that she is all three. Each of the flowers is birthed from a seed placed in the ground some summer before. Flowers come up each spring and spread further out every year until the fall withers them back into a dry patch of skeletal remains.

She cuts them to adorn her table. They cheer her with their bold bright color and give her home a touch of beauty. She thinks of the body from her dream being swallowed in the dirt. She feels dread once again until her attention is drawn to her clean empty vase. A pair of scissors are collected and carried out to the patch of flowers. She cuts the most beautiful of the group. The brightest and undamaged are plucked from the bunch and brought inside. They are placed in the vase with clean fresh water and set in the center of her table.

She sits down again and reads over her dream. Death. Decayed. Life. Breath. She begins to write then soon her words become a poem.

The sun shines on a life. It’s heat brings hope and a chance to survive, yet when death comes the same sun sucks the life and dries the flesh. It withers the plant and leaves the rest as bones scattered in an open field with no shadow to shield it from the heat of the sun. Each night it departs but each morning it comes bearing down on the remnants of life, disintegrating those that didn’t survive. Pressing it down back into the ground. Muting once vivid colors to dirty shades of brown. Dirt and dust. Mud and soil. Life is in the earth though the flesh is spoiled. Seeds are growing from the mess of death. Life is overflowing giving newness. Even those bones that are bleached white in sun cry out for deliverance. They want redemption. Because life comes and goes. Dust to dust is the prose, but there is hope in the dirt to which the bones returned. There is life in the death that living has earned.

A broken body bruised and torn. A bloody shred of a garment worn. Men are jesting and laughing immune to dying cries. They are throwing the dice for a robe without seams while the owner’s blood flows down in sticky dark streams. It pools in the earth that is dry and cracked. It slips like time that won’t be turned back from jagged wounds that stripe His back. The blood that drips from the flesh of this Man is ground into the grit and pressed into the sand. It dries under the sun’s blistering rays. It is lifted on the winds whispering waves of currents that cross the skies.

The fragments of liquid life are scattered in micro sized specs of dust. Deliver us, cry the bones white in the field. Sins wages are death and an enemy steals from the living the gift of life, but you say everything dies. How can life be stolen when the end is defined by an inevitable fate designed to hold the living in the realm of time? To request deliverance from death, to hope for a returning of breath is futility to an extreme unless the living dare to believe that life doesn’t end when the body dies. When the flesh is withered and the mourners cry.

There is a pulse in the arteries of a dying Man. His heart is pumping his blood out over a parched land. What if eternity stepped into time? What if blood spilled from the veins of God and echoed in this rhyme? Would it alter the dirt? Would it change the outcome of a death deserved? Would this new dust create a new earth delivered from the binds with which time fetters each man to his own end? Could we have been sent one who revokes the curse of death? Who gives an option to those who say yes. Who decide that though life is a fleeting breath, an inhale at birth and an exhale at death. That though shackled by time, the rhythm of their own heartbeat, and a body confined to the dirt, from dust to dust could mean a new birth. By acknowledging the blood in the ground to which a body returns and by noting the consequences that choices deserve. Could the bones that lie lifeless and parched in the sun accepting the decay that sin begun hope that life will come?

Spirit. Body. Soul. Which of these is in control? Though the body will always be steeped in time what happens when the body dies? Has the spirit been able to see? Has the soul been allowed to believe in the blood that released it from death for eternity?

The girl looks up  again at the flower that clings to life, dead yet beautiful. She looks down at her hands and knows that though she lives she is dead apart from the hope that she clings to. She believes in Jesus.