Tag Archives: love

A Powerful Vision of What Love is

Posted on by under Life, Writing

“Your love should never be offered…”

by Hafez

Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.

Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a stranger,
Only to someone who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.

Stay close to any sounds that make you glad you are alive.

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in the darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.

There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.

Even after all this time the sun never says to the Earth, “You owe me”

There is no pleasure without a tincture of bitterness.

ballou - towardessential - two nautillus

***

Thanks go to Catherine Armbrust for bringing this to my attention, and Paulo Coelho for posting it here.

Making My Work Mean So Much More

Posted on by under Art, Life, news

My wife, Alison, and I are beginning the process for an international adoption. It’s something we’ve thought about for a long time and something we’re excited about.

Above: me and my daughter drawing. 

There are a lot of reasons we’re interested in this and there are a lot of logistics and options to consider. There’s tens of thousands of dollars to raise, most of which we don’t have just laying around. My wife is much more skilled than I am at holding all of these different issues in mind. She’s able to plan and strategize at a level that I can’t really even understand. So in the midst of this process I really just want to be able to DO something, to add something to it, to help make it happen. 

As I think about this huge thing we’re getting into, I really just want to make sure that one of the other huge things in my life – my art-making – plays some role. I want to make my work mean more than perhaps it would on its own, more than it would do just hanging on a wall. I want my work to actually do something about the nearly 150 million orphans in the world. If, by some miracle, my artworks could help us bring one or two kids to a life of love and intentional care, then I want to do whatever I can to cause that to happen.

Above: Seven Mandalas for the Murky History of Beginnings and Endings, #5. One of the pieces for sale to help fund our adoption. My daughter Miranda helped me make this one.

So I’ve opened up a little etsy shop that features about 50 different artworks, with more to come. My hope is that I can have these works – images that I love and worked very hard to craft – become part of the means by which Alison and I do a different kind of work in the world… something that can make all the difference to a child who needs a mom and dad. 

If you resonate with this sort of thing, I hope you’ll consider going to my etsy shop and purchasing a work. If you don’t see anything there you’re interested in, please check out my flickr and my main website as some of those works are still available as well; I’d be happy to hear from anyone who’s interested in any of the works.

Thirteen Years

Posted on by under Life

I met my future wife on August 20th, 1998 in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was 16 years old. 13 years later she’s been the most important human being – other than my mother – I’ve ever known. Everything I am I owe to the grace of God she’s been to me. Everything I do – all the different hats I have to wear, every competency I have or try to have, every correct comma – I owe to her. She’s 29 today. And still freaking awesome. I love you, Alison.

Here we are in Assisi, Italy in 2005, just a few weeks before our 2nd anniversary.

Here we are in McCormick Creek State Park (near Spencer, Indiana) on our 5th anniversary.

I Keep Your Picture Close to Me

Posted on by under Life

Let’s keep going, ok? These pictures have been in my wallet for about eight years. I take them out to show to students and friends. And I frequently look at them myself – so thankful and appreciative for who you are. I want to see how these pictures look in another eight years, and another eight after that, and after that. I love you, Alison.

*see little Miranda Grace Ballou’s first bow there? I keep that in there, too:)

And here’s the link to last year’s remembrance…

Seven Years

Posted on by under Life

220,924,800 seconds; 3,682,080 minutes; 61,368 hours; 2557 days; 365 weeks; 7 years.

What a life. So far we’ve…

..gone through that sweet but pretty geeky early stage: meeting, falling in love, and making a start at life…

…did each others’ hair…

…and got building on the future.

We had fun, partying with tutus around my neck…

…or building forts together in the living room…

…then hanging with kids (like Roman here), teaching them about (among other things)…

…like art…

…and bratwurst…

We also had adventures…

…high atop the Duomo in Florence…

…and on the Via Michelangelo (with Barry).

Then we had Miranda.

Yes, what a life, what a love. I am so grateful, so full… and looking forward to the future.

Thank you for being my bride and my friend, Alison.

My Moms

Posted on by under Life

On Mother’s Day, 2010

One of the most precious things to me is the gentle, loving, intimate voice of a mother in communication with her child. This voice is sometimes audible, sometimes unheard by anyone else, sometimes not even heard by the child. Sometimes it’s a voice of words, sometimes one of deeds. It is a form of communication that speaks as much to the mother as it does to the child. It is a mysterious speech, a multilayered kind of intonation that expresses love and hope and encouragement.

Right now I’m sitting 20 feet away from my wife, Alison, and our first child, Miranda. Her birth just 10 days ago was amazingly wonderful. Yet perhaps it was not the most amazing transmutation that occurred. You see, many times before giving birth, Alison would write to Miranda, speak to her, sing to her, hum to her. In these things Alison was experiencing a transformation into mom-ness. The state of being motherly, of extending unconditional love, of earnest, joyful support for that child, was becoming manifest in her character and nature. Yes, she was always wonderful with children; now she was becoming a mom.

I remember a few weeks early on in her pregnancy when Alison started to really inhabit her mom-ness. What happened was that for several weeks, during the early morning hours between 4 and 5 am, Alison – totally asleep – would sing to her unborn child. Well, sing isn’t really the right word. It was sing-humming, a kind of spontaneous melody of pure joy. It was involuntary – she was not conscious of it when I told her about it later. Yet there she was, serenading her child weeks before she would feel her, months before she could hold her. She was becoming a mom, then and there. It was beautiful. I think it was a powerfully important thing as well: a song for growing, for knitting, for becoming. Miranda needed it, and Alison could sing it. As the only conscious witness to that sweet concert, I hope I never forget that sound.

Alison and Miranda sleeping

Thinking about this reminds me of the other mothers close to me in my life – my own mom and Alison’s mom. They’ve got their own mother powers, too.

When I was a child I was desperate for my mom’s touch before sleep. Once put down, if I awoke I would cry and cry… less from fears or needs, but rather in order to bring her to me, to have her put her hand on my back again. I wanted to have that hand lull me back to sleep with its warm, rhythmic, safe motion. My understanding is that this specific mode of soothing was a constant desire of mine; sometimes my mom would resort to placing a warm water bottle on me in place of her hand just so she could get something done in the evenings. But I love that she came again and again, sitting next to me and bringing that touch that only a mom knows how to do. This was just one of the many, many ways my mom exhibited her mom-ness toward me, built me up, gave me what only she could give.

My mom as a young woman – about my age now, I think…

My mom-in-law, Kathy, also does something only a mom can do. Well, others can do it and are supposed to, but moms do it best: selflessness. When her children are in the midst of their work, projects, fears, triumphs, and lives in general, there she’ll be, selflessly being supportive, giving of her time and energy with no thought of return. On countless occasions over the years that I’ve known her and seen her with her kids, I’ve witnessed her aid come to them. That aid took on many forms, from helping with studying or editing lengthy papers to nursing them through sickness or helping them move, these kids knew they could count on her. In a world where so many people are out for themselves, she’s rejected all selfishness, seeing her support for and encouragement of her kids as vital and necessary. And it’s totally appropriate that she exhibits that giving character so fully – there’s no support, no love, no aid like what comes from a mom.

Mom Schwei with Miranda

So today I think of all of this, and am overjoyed. I thank God for it… and there again is Alison in the other room, speaking to Miranda with a mother nature uniquely her own. I am so thankful for this goddess-voice in my wife, for the goddess-touch in my mom’s warm hand resting on my back all those times, and for the goddess-sensitivity my mother-in-law’s selflessness and constancy. Thanks Mom Bourgeois, Mom Schwei, and new Mom Ballou – I love each of you.

Miranda Grace Ballou

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Miranda

Your hands and feet… your eyes and brain… they are all more than fresh; they are still being knit together.

As I sit here, there you are across the room in your mother, your heart striking a tattoo of potential to future joys and woes. When I think about all that I am, all that your mom is, all that our people are, all that our world is, I am caught short of breath… not really overwhelmed, but overawed.

Overawed because I know that, in major ways (foreseen and unforeseen), I will be part of the way you access all that has been. This great world, this great universe of experience and time and sensation and being – each facet part of your inheritance as a human being – is going to be presented to you by my faltering, limited, frail hands and voice.

And I am moved by all of this, partly because I know that being alive is hard and I don’t want you to hurt. But I am more moved by it because I know how much the miracle of being conscious has inundated me, made me, transformed me. The glories and wonders of the things you’ll know and see and touch and hear and be flood me; I, too, know them, and know that you’ll know them so much differently than I have. But we’ll have that knowing to share.

Part of that knowing is a realization that the dignity of what you are is because of a Story that transcends space, time, personality, individuality, and being itself. That’s the place I want to start, even as we explore everything else, because everything else is embedded in that Story. You are in that Story.

You are the precious thoughts of the Author of that Story. You are the manifestation of the articulated structures of Story rippling through all things. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!