i always had trouble with sketching in art class.  I was obsessed with lines.  lines connected things and outlined them and told me exactly where the boundaries of each and every thing was.  organization, separation, individuality.  this is how the world worked, right?  so, if this was how things were, why did my pictures look so dead?  i gave up on sketching.  i turned van gogh on my art-skill’s bum.  that is to say–i couldn’t quite get why my sketching of what i saw was so not what i saw, and so i stopped trying to see.

i tried again last week, i tried to sketch.  i remembered to really try to see just what was there.  only what met my eyes.  after a long, long year of patience and pain and growth, i was ready to sketch again–the only thing i saw was light.  more light, less light, brighter and darker and light-parts crossing dark-parts–i realized when i was sitting in the park yesterday that everything we see is all about light.  remember in biology class how we learned about those “cones” in your retina?  how they sensed color by the specific frequency of the light waves?  or something like that…  the point, of course, is that what we see is completely dependent on varying frequencies and amounts of light.

and then it dawned on me that God is described as “light” in certain places–or at least is described as the source of all light and the ultimate light.  So everything in the world depends on God for its existence, for us to see it (not to say that only those things which we see are in existence).