Through Stained Glass: Midweek Mirrored Resistance by Kelli Woodford

Today's reflection is by First Presbyterian Church member,
Kelli Woodford. Kelli is a child of God, daughter, mother,
writer, dreamer, coffee connoisseur, and warrior. 

The day was cloudy. One of the first of the cold that now accompanies us with more regularity. My eyes scanned shorn cornfields for the threat of deer. My fingers played with the radio. My feet worked the pedals with a life their own. And none of this was unusual. In fact, I felt a little swept up in the monotony of it all.

Pressures of work and home hitchhiked on thoughts barely conscious. Old stories I’d told myself of criticism and shame, judgment and division, replayed at a speed my vehicle wouldn’t dream of challenging. This was life, right? This was the workaday world we all succumb to and perhaps in which we unwittingly participate. A life in which we so often feel alone.

And it was the gum, I think. As my fingers brushed the inside pocket of my purse for a minty strip, something pushed back. Something solid. Something small. A rogue square placed there on another day, a hitchhiker of another kind. The act of pulling out a mirror startled me. Because to my great surprise,

There I was.

I looked back at me in the small fragment. Me, driving my father’s borrowed car while mine was in the process of being repaired. Me, of delicate blue eyes which skipped a generation to land in these sockets. Me, the one who felt so swept up in thought and analysis, in worry and regret, that she lost sight of what is perhaps more true: who she is.

And it was on the side of the road, among nameless cornfields, that an act of resistance was born. I snapped a photo of just one piece of my face reflected in that square because I needed to name the place. This is what art does, right? It names an experience, alters the perspective, reframes assumptions about reality. Art is an act of resistance. You see, in that moment I was not only the anxious imaginings of an overactive mind or the judgments inherent in what we all come to call normal, I was actually something more than that. I was present. I had substance greater than whatever my mental noise declared. Like the mirror in my hand, I was solid.

The truth of the matter is that I was in fact surrounded by so much more than vacant corn and bean fields, but by the great cloud of witnesses symbolized by my father’s steering wheel and my grandmother’s eyes. By those whose love stays with me in ways I can’t deny when physicality is viewed from another angle. Madeline L’Engle wasn’t wrong when she wrote that love is never absent, just sometimes enfolded.

There is a strength in this acknowledgment. A confidence in recognizing the love that is both within and without. Somehow that little square of mirror resistance permitted a returning to the Self most true, the one that stills the endless chatter of monotony’s lull. A life in which we are not alone.