Rose is a wonderful woman with thick-lensed glasses and a short practical haircut. It’s the type of haircut mothers give to wide-eyed daughters with scrapped knees, so they can better see the world.
I needed to get onto the roof of the art building yesterday. I simply needed to. With my journey coming to a close and my rock walls all but complete there was only one thing my artist’s mind could fix on—photo-documentation. I needed photographs of my shanty and the surrounding area from a high point to show the world how I toiled on my knees for the past week. I wasn’t sure if I could get permission, what with insurance policies being so tight around campus, but I was pretty confident that I could flash my patented boyish smile at a lady-janitor and I’d be just fine. Then I realized my boyish smile was framed by six days of patchy stubble and the jumpsuit I haven’t taken off in a week was starting to smell a little funky. I wasn’t exactly feeling like Mr. Charming. I figured I ‘d go for it anyway.
That’s how I met Rose. I didn’t recognize her at all. She probably doesn’t work much in the fine arts wing, but as soon as I entered the door she meet me with a grin. It was the kind of grin that pushed her thick-lensed glasses even further up her scrunched nose. A full-faced grin. She had been watching me, she said, and loved what I was doing. She didn’t ask the usual questions however, it was as if she already knew.
My piece has a lot to do with boundaries. I’m not sure how many times this past week I have said the tag-line: “so the stones have become a sort of symbol for the boundaries we construct between ourselves and others.” The sort of boundaries that impede this sense of empathy and understanding that I am trying to achieve. I usually demonstrate how people would come up to my walls, curious and interested in what I was doing, but almost always stop dead in their tracks before their feet slip past that which separates “my space” from theirs.
I am usually very polite to the custodial staff at the art building. I smile, I wave, and for the most part I do everything in my power not to make their job any more difficult than it already is. I have never really gotten to know them however. Perhaps I write them off because they push a broom; perhaps I’m just a little shy with people I perceive to be “older and wiser” than I. Perhaps a little bit of both.
Rose got to talking about her spiritual journey to me (my piece seems to strike a chord with this side of people). She told me that she was praying with a friend the other day and she had a “mind-picture” as she likes to call it. She told me she pictured a giant hand. Tied to the middle finger of this hand was a string, and on the end of that string was a yo-yo. The hand, according to Rose, was that of “God, or a higher power, or whatever you want to call it.” She told me that string would never come off even if the yo-yo on the end was flying in all different directions. And she was that yo-yo. I was that yo-yo.
You start out in the hand and it’s safe and secure. Eventually you need to go out, and you need to make mistakes. However, you can always come back to rest in that hand. All three are equally important: the journey, the mistake, and the rest.
So here I sit on my last morning of this latest journey. Sure I made some mistakes along the way but right here, right now, with a depression era quilt draped over my legs and the sun peeking through the clouds, I’m at rest.
