Good morning…
“This has got to be it,” she texted me this Alice Neel painting after reading our post, At First I Hated It. “This title says Flowers of Mourning, but the Whitney Museum lists it as Still Life, Rose of Sharon… a biblical term from Song of Solomon – I am a rose of Sharon, a rose of the valley.”
“You found it, of course!” I texted back. “I love seeing the visual from the fishbowl perspective of Telly the fish.”
“Yes, I needed to see the yellow shade of enlightenment!” she replied.
The joyful shade of enlightenment continues to be lifted as I take in this image and this multi-faceted title. I am drawn to explore the Scripture rooted beneath both.
She
I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.
He
Like a lily among thorns is my darling among the young women.
She
Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. … (Song of Solomon 2:1-3, NIV).
Until we taste the sweet fruit growing on our divergent branches, we will remain divided by our differences. Men and women. Black and white. Fish and owner. Creator and creatures.
Heightened by fresh hunger, I return again to the first lines from the poem I first hated, Toi Derricotte’s poem Joy is an act of resistance.
For Telly the fish
Telly’s favorite artist was Alice Neel.
When he first came to my house,
I propped up her bright yellow shade with open
window and a vase of flowers (post card size)
behind his first fish bowl. I thought
it might give him something
to look at, like the center
of a house you keep coming
back to, a hearth, a root
for your eye. It was a
wondering in me that came up with that
thought, a kind of empathy
across my air and through his
water, maybe the first
word that I propped up between us
in case he could
hear. Telly would stare at the painting
for hours, hanging there with his glassy
eyes wide
open. At night he wanted the
bottom, as if it were a warm
bed, he’d lay there
sort of dreaming, his eyes
gray and dim and
thoughtless. For months he came back
to her, the way a critic or lover
can build a whole
life on the long study of one
great work.
Grazing, I gaze through the yellow shade. Inside the homey fishbowl hosting Telly’s tiny one, I notice that everything is sagging, curving down, caught up in the gravity of death’s droopy depression. Yet outside the open window, our eyes inhale sun-bathed layers of light green and the rising joy of lifted limbs. Whispering to our souls, God beacons us beyond.
Why would this passionate poet choose to prop up this particular postcard painting blessed by various names? Flowers of Mourning. Still Life. Rose of Sharon in the valley.
like the center
of a house you keep coming
back to, a hearth, a root
for your eye. It was a
wondering in me that came up with that
thought, a kind of empathy
across my air and through his
water, maybe the first
word that I propped up between us
in case he could
hear.
Flowers. Mourning. Still. Life. Valley.
We see hope inside the heart of a painter who lives inside the heart of this poet, a poet seeking to teach us about the Black experience. We see past the lifted yellow shade of enlightenment to experience God’s endless love. Regardless of our skin color, our odd “otherness,” our foreign fishbowls, the gravity of God droops us down into our common core. We each breathe breath gifted to us for a little while. From our lonesome valley, the eyes of our hearts are lifted up and we are drawn outside ourselves. Beaconed beyond our confining comfort zones, we expand into the sunlit, new green shades of God.
And patient endurance will refine our character, and proven character leads us back to hope. And this hope is not a disappointing fantasy, because we can now experience the endless love of God cascading into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who lives in us! (Romans 5:4-6, TPT).
…Sue…
