(excerpt from Elemental Desire)

God. She thought about God, remembered how she’d managed him, how she’d kept him at a safe remove. Though she had joked about religion, God was a serious subject. Religion was one thing, God another. Especially the Hebrew God. Especially Jesus. She left Jesus undefined. How he got himself christened with thorns, labeled King of the Jews and nailed to a cross was a discussion she’d always avoided. Why hadn’t he ended up in a bedtime story like Geppetto or The Wooden Soldier, The Velveteen Rabbit or the lucky Cinderella? Those stories made sense. They were the kind of miracle stories people wanted. Take Pinnochio for instance, Geppetto had the sense to credit the Blue Fairy for Pinnochio’s life. Blue fairies don’t include blood. And those donkeys? What child has not at one time or another brayed with the best of donkeys? And what donkey has not played the stubborn child? Who could blame Pinnochio for going astray? All he had for a guide was an insect crammed in a top hat and a piccolo voice. But raising the dead? Giving sight to the blind? Mobility to the crippled? Allowing his own crucifixion? Jesus is all about freedom, transformation, good winning against evil. What government would not put an end to that idea?

Love and Abstraction

It is impossible to truly love and keep the soft fragile center of oneself, that part so much like an egg, but not an egg, safe. (Of course, not an egg.) A person only begins with an egg. Once born, this beginning person is meant to be joined. Arriving in a self folded upon a self, a person is a vessel meant to be unfurled and accompanied in fly. One does not place an egg on a feather and expect it to fly. But that is often what we do in love. We stay inside our shells, content with fluff and the proximity of other shells, worry about being broken and forever cease to fly.

(An Excerpt from "The Color of Grace" by Tonia Triebwasser published by Fleming Revell/Baker Books

Foxgloves

The same heart healing medicine found in the leaves of a foxglove can also cause a heart to fail. If love maketh a heart merry and also causes it to break, a medicine for its benefit would most certainly have similar risks.
Myth says a heart needs merely to receive love to thrive. But it is in giving and in receiving that the heart grows strong. Amateurs recklessly divy it up. Exchanges are seldom equitable. Wounds are inflicted. Weaklings withdraw.
But love is a daring dance of surrender. A dance of courage. Love is a labored waltz. The speckled trumpets of the foxglove sound revelry to hearts waiting dance.