i don’t have the patience for knitting and i’m not big on playing. but give me a wound and i’ll kiss it better, and give me a canvas and i’ll paint you a picture. and so i give aiden what i know, this tender vision which arts the world. this need to create. and i’ll do this each week, share a bit of me with him and then share us with you… it won’t be anything big. but it’s the small steps which climb the mountain.
some weeks we may smell flowers-really smell them, pollen on our noses-and other weeks we may bake cookies in the shapes of stars and circles and squares but today, we finger painted. aiden in an old t-shirt of trent’s so long it became a dress and me in black tights. we sat in the grass with dollar-store canvas and we splattered paint and we laughed like children. we laughed in shock at the brightness of color, then we felt it wet between our fingers and smeared it fast against the white.
and the colors bled and our clothes became canvas too. and i looked in my son’s eyes and i saw the way the art had made him humble. the way it had stolen his attention, the way it had asked of him and the way he had surrendered. we made hand-prints and footprints, leaving bits of our body in the color.
the painting was nothing really, in the end, just a tie-dyed piece of canvas, but even as we scrubbed off in sink and changed stained clothes for clean my son’s eyes shone, for he’d touched God with a painted finger. and this, what i can give him…
linking today with laura, l.l.barkat, and jen.
