God Might Say
Media: cotton fabrics, lights, my sweet mama, our backyard, the night sky.
How can we wrap ourselves in the nearness of God (or however you understand a higher spiritual power) with us, here in the dark? As my Mother’s caregiver, bearing witness to the growing darkness of memory loss, this poem is what I imagine God’s voice might say to her there, and the light cape expresses what it might look like. A Hebrew prophet named Isaiah writes, “A bruised reed God will not break, and a flickering candle God will not snuff out.” My parents, both in their 90s, are my bruised reed and flickering candle, and if I can keep that in the front of my heart and mind, it helps me return and return again to compassion as I care for them.
My mom taught me to love the night sky and to understand what I was looking at. We even had a serious telescope. I remember us waking up in the middle of the night to watch meteor showers - we’d bundle up and wrap ourselves in blankets and lean back on the lawn chairs in the backyard and ooh and aah watching the lights streak across the sky.
I wanted to create a starry night that could be wrapped around us - a visceral experience of being held in the goodness of God with us in the night. It had to be a cape. With lights in it. I made a small prototype first - a deep blue velvet scarf with 60 fairy lights. That worked, so the next step was sewing 200 fairy lights onto a big half circle of muslin fabric. The muslin was too light by itself - the background needed to disappear more. so I bought a blue velvet tablecloth to fold around the muslin like a big sandwich, but when it arrived, it was too opaque and I didn’t want to cut 200 little holes and line up all those lights. I ditched that idea and went with a dark blue cotton fabric instead. I did my camera tests with the cape wrapped around a stepladder so as not to wear out my beloved model.
Initially, I wanted the cape held snug, but while we were shooting, I asked my Mom to raise her arms and oh wow that was the shot. There was a sense of flight and freedom, and the strength of God meeting her in that moment, speaking the words in the poem.
May you be gathered into love, this night and every night.
Poem is hand lettered in my personal font.
Featured in Motif SKETCHBOOK: Voice, Issue 2, p. 14-15
WATCH: Reading at Evergreen Baptist Church, Los Angeles on 12/18/22 25:20 - 26:19 (I loved reading this in the middle of a song, to people sitting in the dark.)