Luther's Road

“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, 

not health, but healing, not being but becoming, 

not rest but exercise.

We are not yet what we shall be,

 but we are growing toward it,

the process is not yet finished, but it is going on,

 this is not the end, but it is the road.

 All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”

 ― Martin Luther

I've returned. 

To write again, once more.

Of all You have done for me. 

"But I trust in you, O LORD;

I say, “You are my God.”

My times are in your hand

Psalm 31

Cliff + Christen

I had the beautiful chance to shoot this fun and very much engaged couple this spring in Texas. 

The light was perfect and so were Cliff and Christen. 

I'm looking forward to seeing more of the beautiful couple soon, but for now, a preview.

Go get married, world.

Madison

Prologue 

____________

I've got 3,762 photographs in a folder from this summer alone. Moments captured and then thought about then forgot about, ideas and accidentals and 'what...was I thinking...here' pictures. And because of a small sojourner's sabbatical -a trip to the eye Doctor to get new vision- they lie in my harddrive in neat, categorized order until I can properly articulate up close, the message that I saw far off. It's both a comfort and a jar to know that I'll always have images to fall back on.

I've finally come up for air, it feels. And pleasantly so. 

I'm taking deep breaths of inspiration, feeding the cells of my imagination with the oxygen of Real things. Things that are in one sense just the same as the old things, yet at the same time they are now somehow different. Deeper, richer, truer. Lewis describes this sense of seeing things in a way that is "deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know."  

  My unlined journal is all filled up in black ink with theory's and charts and stats on the source of this story, but my heart is all filled up with the steady secret that this Story is a True one- this grand tale of Real things, A Real Man, Real Words, Real Love- it is not written about me, but I get to partake in the mystery of its unfolding. I stand, reading, singing, speaking, weeping at the beauty of the Truth.

 A business/empire/marketing-driven, self-expressionist yuppie art endeavor will not hold up underneath the weight of this glory.  Mine didn't. I stand comforted by the fact that I don't have what it takes to make a name for myself. Only One man ever did, and he yielded his right to it. He was Real. He's making me Real. 

                                                                       

                                                                                                     ...

Speaking of Real things. I went to Madison, WI this past weekend to experience the sensation of listening to REAL music: Opera. Puccini's LaBoheme was ripe and in season.

The sublime voices, wooshing out of well trained lungs could have just blown the watercolored leaves from their fragile clasps,

 even the old oaks. 

The rustling leaves kicked up by pedestrians,

synonymously sounding with the rustling ideas

clasping onto smiling conversations, 

even the old jokes.

It was lovely. 

A smattering of images from the weekend follows: 

Nathan+Allison | Engaged!

Go into all the world and get married. 

Ready: Begin.

Bed & Board

I'm home back in Minnesota for a few weeks and am finding inspiration in small ordinary house art.
Summer light comes in at different angles, making ordinary objects breathtaking at just the right moment.
The pile of laundry,
the cat on the bed,
the glass jelly jar on the kitchen counter, knife perfectly balanced, the strawberry preserves a smeared stained glass window into the ordinary.

Home. "Bed, Board, rooftree and doorway become the choice places of healing, the delimitations of our freedom. By setting boundaries, they hold us in; but they trammel the void as well. By confining, they keep track of us- they leave us free to be found, and to find ourselves." - Robert Farr Capon

Trench

"We need good liturgies, and we need natural ones; we need a life neither patternless nor over-patterned, if the city is to be built. And I think the root of it all is Caring. Not that that will turn the trick all by itself, but that we can produce nothing good without it.

True liturgies take things for what they really are, and offer them up in loving delight. . . . Culture is the liturgy of nature as it is offered up by man. But culture can come only from caring enough about things to want them really to be themselves – to want the poem to scan perfectly, the song to be genuinely melodic, the basketball actually to drop through the middle of the hoop, the edge of the board to be utterly straight, the pastry to be really flaky. Few of us have very many great things to care about, but we all have plenty of small ones; and that’s enough for the dance. It is precisely through the things we put on the table, and the liturgies we form around it, that the city is built; caring is more than half the work.” -Bed and Board: Liturgies of Home, Capon

-Laura