Just Like Heaven

When I post to this blog, I hope to share perspective. Mine is rather limited, but with some humor and humility as vehicles for exposing my humanity (as in, humanness), I offer ways for us to broaden our perspectives. 

And the more I let the humanity in myself show, the more others may share their humanity. I like to think that within each of our human self-portraits is a stroke here or there of the divine, and sorting through our humanity gives us a chance to discover that stroke of divinity. Or to accidentally discard it with the rubbish like that tiny gift made of folded paper your daughter painstakingly made you for Christmas.

Found It!

Anyway, this concert pianist has some fairly broad strokes of something beyond human in her musical abilities. When I looked up the sheet music and listened to her play, I couldn't scroll fast enough to keep up with her! I wonder just how and when she discovered this stroke of divinity within herself.

And now I am sorting through my humanity as I am learning to play that very song (Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1). But I don't plan to amaze audiences with a blur of fingers sweeping over the keyboard as fast as my kids sweep over their dinners and declare they aren't hungry for "that." 

This pumpkin cranberry soup topped the five worst dishes I've ever made.

Instead, I am going the "simplified" route. In other words, with a well-trained ear, my version of this divine concerto will sound vaguely like the original.

Since last summer, I have been forging a new love for the piano by taking lessons again. By September, I had one simplified classic ready so I could show off my humanity. (You can go to the one-minute mark if you'd like to skip my teacher's glowing introduction and my disturbing display of the three-fingered-piano-playing wonder.) 

Since all my little analogies lately seem to come back to motherhood, that's where we'll land. I had glowing images of what it would be to bring children into the world and raise them as only an angelic mother can. I imagined we would look like this:

But when Daddy comes home, our family looks more like this:

This game is called "Tackle Daddy."

I no longer yearn for my children to look at me and our home and see the divine. But I hope that when they do find divinity within themselves and beyond, that they find it familiar because it sounds like the simplified version their mother used to play.