Time is on your side.
I’ve fixed my laptop keyboard; my fingers can fly. The universe is before me, and everything that it means. I live immersed in story. Everything I touch is story. The words my fingers could pen are endless, as endless as time itself --
And yet this age is coming to a close.
Time is on your side, baby, you keep saying, as I slow my breaths. The ticking clock shouldn’t set the tempo of my heartbeat. We are reclaiming, together, the art of writing with.
It’s been months. You drew me away, once again, into a season of touching the story without reiterating it. I visited Kremmling every month. I met a man with words on his hands. I stepped into the river, surrendered, deeper and farther each time. I do believe I’ve found the reaches of my humanity, or the measure of it that you want to show me thus far. I’ve not shrunk back.
I’ve edited little. I’ve written little. I’ve filmed much, with and without my camera.
I’ve immersed myself in Maranatha. My breaths are short. I’m part of building tabernacles, some of the largest that this age has seen. My breaths are short.
Complications abound. How is a woman supposed to rest against your bosom while in labor, when the baby might not make it? Drenched in pain, fear, and diagnoses -- yet there must be a pure light -- somehow visible, if one can only find the right angle --
Robbie sent me a photo of us swimming in green. July 10th, 2023. We were shoulder-high in mountain growth - him, Brayden, Brooke, and I - on the side of Mount Elim. One year ago today, Robbie said.
I felt the overlap on the day I started filming After Eden Talent. It was exactly a year after I started filming Beloved. Last year we strode into Twin Lakes and set up camp; this year we strode into stage lights and set up tripods. A year of story has come to pass. Now, everywhere I look, I see blood and violence - and bricks for building Eden.
I have a commute now and I see them all. Towers upon towers of bricks, while the streets are filled with protesters. I ask myself daily whether I am ready to write a treatise of what I’ve learned in the last year, a statement of what Beloved really is, the breadth it has encompassed. I ask myself daily whether Eden can really be built of bricks.
I ask myself daily whether I believe in a God who didn’t need to create, but desired to.
“The God who made the world and everything that is in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made by hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things. . . .”
Bricks. Bricks in the hot sun. Compressed, uniform units of processed earth. And if you don’t meet your daily quota, your wife and children will be taken, perhaps sacrificed to pagan gods in front of you.
And I understand; they’re cutting souls and bodies to pieces all around me. Children on my street are growing up in torment while their parents choose numbness; my best friend is in the Golan Heights, a land waiting to be obliterated by the antichrist. What happens if I step out of the race now? Can I really slow my breaths?
I stare at the photo with Robbie. We are swallowed by wild.
I heard Mako Fujimura say that art is essentially useless. After one has stared at art, what does one have to show for it? And yet he crafts fragile paintings with painstaking intricacy, layering mineral ink sixty coats deep. The uselessness, he said, is the point.
Do I or do I not believe in a God who created out of desire, rather than need? Is this story essentially a creative imagination from the playful heart of God, or is it the solving of a problem in order to restore a machine’s function? Is he dancing or proving a point?
And how dare I ask that question in the face of blood, fire, and pillars of smoke?
I went to the ocean with you. We built a sandcastle. It was slow. It was patient. I knew it would pass away when the tide rose.
I attracted others’ eyes. I was a grown woman acting like a child. I encircled the castle with a trench that led to the ocean, and I kept hearing you say, It will be rebuilt, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. Over and over. I found myself mouthing the words as I shelved sand with my bare hands. I felt your pleasure.
I get the bricks, I really do. I get the stability, the covering, the apparent long-enduring. Why would we use anything else? Why would we slow down? He wants a meeting place, right? Let’s build tabernacles, we said - and let’s build them with bricks, and hope they turn out looking like Eden.
But I feel the sharp edges and suddenly feel like Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration. I realize, in a moment of horror, that bricks are slaves’ tools. This kind of building might be for some people, but it’s not for me.
Mako called art useless. Yet he gives his life to it. Not as a contradiction, but as a declaration that perhaps it’s uselessness that is at the core of the story.
The CIA classified films as a weapon of psychological warfare. Films are two-dimensional and literally render the viewer completely static. Yet there is undeniable, seismic power in something so useless. What, within us, does it magnetize? What does this reveal about our design - a design born of your uninfluenced desire?
You had your people make tabernacles from branches. You loved the impermanence, the wild shelter, the dependency. Can I build something like that with you, something that may make no visible imprint on this age, but rather forges an eternal intimacy with you in its building?
Or, as Robbie said, can the process really be the essence?
I think you really are that intimate. That’s my secret. I think you are.
It’s so haunting - that uselessness may be the point because you are a God at rest. You always have been. It’s so haunting that I want to stop everything and stare at it. It’s so haunting that I want to ensure Beloved never reaches wide distribution.
Shake me free of the doctrine of metrics. What we are building here, with palm fronds, is something beyond. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly - and eternal life is to know you. Perhaps this knowing can be found filtering in through the leaves we stitch together. Perhaps it can be found on a screen, between frames of laughter and high-fives in a softball dugout. Wherever it may be found, I will be satisfied simply to find it with you. It needs not be measured according to outward appearance.
For it will carry on, past the collapsing of time as we know it, and into the ushering in of a new kind of dawn. I see how dimly these mirrors yearn for more. The more just beneath every surface, under every hand. It goes beyond.
I am not falling behind. I have no need of compelling others toward this same aim. Yet it is the aim that I will seek for myself, all my days. No matter how measurable things grow around me, and no matter whether or not I can articulate my position. No matter whether the enemy calls it folly and tells me I’ll grow out of it.
Growing up isn’t the problem. Forgetting is.