Geneva Swamp

I drove through the swamp recently on my travels. Because I’d been so gradual with my earlier tasks, I didn’t take the opportunity to stop to really look at, and ponder what I was seeing. It was the first snow of the year that day. It was coming down surprisingly heavy here inland from Lake Erie and from what I hear in the higher elevations, but there wasn’t much sticking in the swamp - the low lands. It was sleeting however, and was just way too cold, too quickly and too soon after I spent a day in bed whirling with some unearthly virus to allow myself to get out in it. So I stayed in the warm and toasty car and sped toward home. Poor me.

But this amazing swamp offered yet again, even through weather’s worst and a rain smeared windshield, an array of phenomenal colors. Quite often this enormous swamp offers colors that I usually only see in dreams. This day there was this silver. It doesn’t photograph well and I can’t mix my paint palette to match. It changes so quickly in perception from tan-silver, then blue-silver, over to pure white-gray and all around the spectrum, and I suspect beyond.

I looked up the definition for quicksilver when I got home. It is an Old English term meaning "living silver" and having a “changeable behavior”. Hmmm. That is dream-like – people and places switch around and always just out of reach of reason. When I try to explain a dream and it usually slips away before the telling is done. Just like that dog-like deer who spoke in J.F.K’s voice and said something life-changing from underneath my neighbors forsythia bush. My neighbor has no forsythia bush and I have no inkling what the deer said, … or was that an opossum in a dresser drawer? I think quicksilver’s origin must be found in a foggy, sleety and peaty British swamp.

Designing and imaging the concepts for paintings can work the same way. If I don’t get them down quickly, indicating the colors, line and placement - they fade rather quickly. Same with some/most of what God shows me in His Word. Our memories sometimes need indicators for us to remember accurately. (No matter WHAT age you are). Don’t you just hate it when you come home from shopping having left the “list” on the kitchen table?  And yep, you forgot the sour cream, lettuce and toilet paper. Well, same thing with visual or Holy concepts; they are usually like quicksilver if we don’t quickly put verbal markers down to get back to them down the road. As for painting, I refer to the “layout” continually as I work it out. As for Godliness, I keep God’s Word and notes on His insight at hand as I work out Holiness in this earthly realm.