Unmanipulated Images

I do not understand grace in the religious sense, the concept of a divine virtue bestowed by God.
I don't find it problematic because I don't believe but because the words are decontextualized. The language is ethereal and my efforts to understand grace in a religious sense result in sentences lacking rigor, lacking meaning. What is grace? What is virtue in this sense? I don't know how to use the word in speech properly.

Grace is a word that people use at the end of a long complicated often subjective description. "That is grace" or "And that is something approaching grace." So it is an ultimate to be attained, or reached, or recognized, but what is it? I hear it religiously and it sounds like something wonderful. Anne Lamott writes about Grace. Did she write a book called "Grace, Eventually"? Or "Grace (Eventually)"? Grace? Eventually!

Sometimes people say something like, "I felt a sense of grace," and I well up but I don't know why. Talking intimately about grace creates vulnerability.

I think of grace in terms of ballet dancers, which is a really literal way to know a word. Simple elegance. Easy. Appropriate.

I have been avoiding social media. I'm always a wallflower at the cocktail mingle of Facebook, but I was a casual peruser and lazy contributor to Instagram. Now the manipulated images feel like fake art to me. I find them precious, processed, phony. The contained creativity within boundaries excites me but the accrual of artistic currency based on machinery and shortcuts seems inelegant. Graceless.

Last weekend Lynn came over for dinner. I made my mother's meat loaf recipe. I bought some ranunculus from Union Market. I never stop marveling at them. Last summer I tried to grow them from bulbs. I ordered the bulbs online from Sears of all places. They look like little tiny brown bunches of bananas.

You don't plant ranuculus bulbs in summer. They got shoots but never bloomed.

I bought some ranunculus. I always buy them when I see them. They don't live long usually but I find them so breathtaking I don't care. Every time I looked at them that evening over dinner I felt so ridiculously proud. Moved, even! By flowers in a vase! I felt like my apartment was so lovely with these flowers in it.

They've lived for a while. They're still alive and it's Wednesday, I bought them on Saturday. This is a long time for ranunculus. They're losing their petals and getting bigger and more cabbagey and still beautiful.

I'm not a great photographer. People say it's impossible to take a bad photo with the iPhone. I don't think my photos are bad, I think they're the pictures I've always taken: snapshots. Instagram filters don't really do much for them, which means they're really very ordinary. I think these flowers in their simple elegance, snapped without pretension with both the iPhone and even the iPad on different days are the closest thing to grace in my life this week.

Closely conspiring,
M.