Letter From Judith
2.20.2008
Oh birthday letters from some of the most wonderful-est people I am so lucky to encounter. Thank you all for such marvelous thoughts and wishes. Found in a carefully crafted and put together envelope from St Paul:
Dear Jenny,
Happy Birthday!
It was great to see you. Enclosed is
-my journal statement on the wall of my show that you asked for
-a quote from Fra Giovanni that was a great support in my darkest days.
"Life is so generous a giver but we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you.
"Everything we call a trial or a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it, that is all." -Fra Giovanni
And an excerpt from her own journals
"I think of the whole point is yearning toward
that's what the pulling, the caught movement is
the embrace in giottos arena chapel
hooking
just barely making the turn- almost against some resistance
that's the pulling, the yearning" -Judith Roode
How perfectly that jives with my last entry.
And they were out there again on the frontage road (the local high school boy's cross country team in one raw, massive, and living clump of beauty) , their breath visible inches before them. And somehow I was back on Eagle Street on the North side of Ogden. Breathless.