On the light that is not yet

Every artist has a signature. Every painter signs their name with their brushwork. Maybe it’s geometric subject matter, a palette knife, a penchant for cobalt blue. The examples are as numerous as the artists.

I didn’t realize my own signature until a friend pointed it out to me: I sign my name in sunlight. Often hopeful, at times piercing, rarely hard to find. Probably because I don’t try to hide it (or tame it, for that matter).

I have no explanation better than to cede the stage to Christian Wiman’s 2047 Grace Street –

“But the world is more often refuge than evidence, comfort and covert for the flinching will, rather than the sharp particulate instants through which God’s being burns into ours. I say God and mean more than the bright abyss that opens in that word. I say world and mean less than the abstract oblivion of atoms out of which every intact thing finally goes. I do not know how to come closer to God except by standing where a world is ending for one man. It is still dark, and for an hour I have listened to the breathing of the woman I love beyond my ability to love. Praise to the pain scalding us toward each other, the grief beyond which, please God, she will live and thrive. And praise to the light that is not yet, the dawn in which one bird believes, crying not as if there had been no night but as if there were no night in which it had not been.”

Here’s to signing each painting with the light that is not yet.