a life up in smoke.

i believe in art, in any form.  i believe its power is cyclical, like this never-ending electrical surge that pulsates and pulsates and pulsates.  i believe it can impact more lives than science, politics, mathematics, reasoning; keep me from disintegration; turn your dusk into dawn; give her a substitute for substances; channel his otherwise incontrollable rage; save their marriage; break the toxic behaviors that have only broken us.  i believe god is at the tip of the pencil and the rim of the lens.  i believe his voice is on earth, in the canvases and sketchbooks and rule of thirds and lines of poetry, tuning pegs, falsettos.

so today the classroom seemed hallowed.  it seemed like every middle schooler was doing spiritual work.  and—to think!—spiritual work may mean recreating truth, describing it in a way it’s never been told before.  they recreated it by sketching skulls, cliffs, fire, falling ash.  cigarette education in images and italicized fonts.  they were telling a different story: what we put inside our bodies affects our spirits, too.  and while our bodies may live to tell the tale of ongoing toxicity, our spirits will not.