Creator
Upcoming publication in Ever Eden Magazine
How He chose it, I’m not exactly sure. Maybe it looked easy to sculpt, or the richness of the color drew Him in, or He simply needed something abundant.
I imagine heavenly hands gathering the soil. They break earth’s dry surface, digging for the damp, thick stuff, the kind of dirt that’s good for growing flowers and housing worms and creating humans. Some clay sticks into the wrinkles of His curved fingers; some stubbornly crams under His fingernails. When He finds the right consistency He piles as much as He can hold into the bowl of His hands. It spills over His cupped palms, the excess settling back to the ground.
I’ve never liked dirt in any form. When my parents brought me to the beach as a baby, I squirmed and kicked the moment my feet touched the sand. When my sisters and I played outside, and they decided to search the flowerbeds for rocks or bugs, I stayed on the patio: my safe patch of concrete, the slab protecting me from earth’s grime. If I ever returned from recess with muddy tennis shoes, I’d spend the day picking the clumps from the shoes’ grooves. I didn’t want dark spots soiling the clean rubber. I rejected outdoor sports, even on manicured fields and tight-packed earth. I played two seasons of soccer at the YMCA, and gave my dad two reasons for wanting to quit. One, all the girls were bigger and more aggressive than me, and I was tired of getting pushed to the ground; and two, being outside gave me allergies anyway. We signed up for more dance classes, where walls and floors separated me from any chance of dirt, save the occasional dust bunnies stuck to my ballet shoe, and even those I hastily flicked away.
When I was ten, our parents sent my friends and me upstairs while they talked, and as usual, I suggested organizing a skit. I gathered everyone together and declared myself the director, writer, and narrator, then began choosing roles for each kid in the playgroup. I picked the more experienced actors (friends who had been part of my plays before) for larger parts. A Christmas-themed production, the plot involved a classroom, a live Nativity scene, and a carol. I had them run through their lines individually. I selected costumes, choosing a pale blue sheet for the Virgin Mary’s veil, square glasses for the teacher, coordinated scarves for the students. I set the Nativity scene to music. I would narrate the whole story, just in case things began to de-rail.
When our shining moment finally came, we invited our parents upstairs, and they watched quietly at first. I noticed their satisfied smiles, their proud nods. Then, though, I saw the Virgin Mary giggling into her veil as she and Joseph entered the stage. My trustworthy actress couldn’t articulate a single line. She bent over the manger in stitches and the whole cast began to laugh. The parents started interjecting—“Come on Mary!” “Pull it together!”—and I saw my work spilling from my grasp. Frantic, I tried narrating the action and gathering the play back together, but no one could hear me. Their laughter smeared my tidy plans, and though we sang the Christmas carol and took a bow, I went home embarrassed. I wore my stained creation to sleep.
He begins with the torso, packs the dirt tight, presses it solid. His finger sweeps the edges into a curve. The legs begin as stumpy pillars, but He brushes the excess away until they take shape. He imagines jumping and dancing, He imagines strolls through quiet forests.
The head gives Him pause. His hand suspends over the clay sphere. He ponders the face: beaming, speaking, gazing. Delicately, He disrupts the blank surface and indents caverns for eyes. A slope for the nose. Chunks of soil compacted into teeth.
And the hands, His tenderness with the hands. He looks at His own—caked with drying soil that has tightened into another layer of skin—and thinks of hands clasped into zippers of prayer, future lovers’ interlaced fingers, a child grasping a pen, the gentle touch of a first-time mother not sure how to hold a new life, and before He knows it He is also holding something new.
My first grade teacher gave a lesson on adobe houses, and she brought us outside to make clay bricks. I shaped mine deliberately; the boys next to me threw mud at each other. I found a stick and pressed my brick into a perfect rectangle. Straight edges, clean lines. I slid any visible grass out of the block’s surface, then smoothed the gaps they left behind. Dirt clumps bulged and green blades spiked from other bricks, but not mine. I scanned my classmates’ work: sloppy, at best; and as each person laid their block down in a row, mine seemed to boast, its precise edges standing in rigid contrast to others’ lumps and ridges. I wanted to carve my initials into it and claim it. When we left them to dry, I was the first to line up at the water hose, to run my hands under the cool stream, rubbing every fold in my palm clean.
A black-speckled composition book, with my name denoted in blue sharpie, accompanied me everywhere, and in it, I scribbled constant poems. They weren’t mulled-over meditations or images that haunted me. I wrote instead about Costco pizza. Fighting my sister for the passenger seat. My muscles, exhausted by dance classes. That summer, after middle school left my self-esteem fragile, I found steady rhythms and reliable rhymes. I loved the way my words sculpted everyday life. My pen pressed experiences onto paper and swept away the excess, and when I read over what I’d written, I beamed.
And then, one day, I fell out of habit. I’d written at least a poem a day, and when I reopened the journal weeks later, those empty pages reproached me. I tried starting again, writing a new date and another poem, but my hand suspended over the blank space, the neat lines. It’d be so silly, I thought, to disrupt the pattern I’d established. I closed the speckled cover. The composition book found a home in my closet.
I haven’t seen it since.
In fifth grade, we got to try out for track and field events, so we spent a few days rotating through discus and hurdling, relay races and triple jump, trying to uncover any hidden talents. I maintained hope throughout the week that I’d find my event, and I did, when we were asked to spring off the spongy track and jump as far out as we could into a pit of sand. Two attempts, and I heard the coach’s voice: “Courtney, come with me.” I grinned and followed him.
The coach told me, “You’re a natural, but you’re leaping like a ballerina. We need to work on that long jump form.”
“But if it’s working well, why can’t I just keep doing it?”
“You’ll go even farther with the right technique.”
He explained that I was landing too delicately. My dance reflexes made me pull back as my feet touched the ground so I avoided kicking up too much sand. He grabbed a jump rope and brought along a classmate, then led me to a grassy area next to the track. He told me, “We’re going to hold this rope about a foot off the ground. Try to jump high and land heavy.”
I pumped my legs and urged my body forward. I leapt, but the tip of my white tennis shoe caught the rope. My body tilted over; all my momentum drove me skidding face-first across the grass. Dirt swirled in my mouth and stung my eyes, and when my coach helped me up, I found the ground’s handprint streaking my shirt. Pink and white flowers rubbed brown. My classmate gaped at me. My coach apologized, but I did not look in his eyes. I stared down. My shoes were dirt-scuffed, too. For the rest of the day, I had to wear the earth emblazoned across my chest, marked as someone capable of falling.
Our high school summer camp leader was Mark Hart, who wrote my favorite books and spoke at all the major Catholic youth conferences. During meals and activities, the campers swarmed him, asking questions, requesting autographs, taking pictures—our own local celebrity. When I finally got to talk to him, I told him that I also wanted to write books and asked how he keeps growing as a creator. He nodded and closed his eyes, scrunched his brows, then pulled out his phone and showed me a prayer.
The Litany of Humility asks God’s deliverance from desires of esteem, success, and praise, and from fears of failure, ridicule, and being forgotten. Humility, he told me, is a freeing virtue; he created without the pressure of pleasing others or the anxiety that accompanies mistakes, because his identity was separate from what he produced. I left the conversation confused, wondering how someone so admired could hold his own performance so loosely.
Years later, I learned the Latin root of the word humble: humus, which translates to “from the earth.” It holds soil in its syllables, admits its lowly origin. Spoken, the word “humble” begins as a breath, a passing sigh that blows through soft grouped consonants and avoids the attention of anything too brash. It exists surely but without fanfare. To be humble is to know how we were formed—chosen from dirt, a weak and messy thing shaped by heavenly hands.
He sighs, and the figure inhales. For a brief moment everything suspends: all of creation, stopped in wonder, watching this handiwork chosen to receive His breath. Even the animals, with their filled lungs and pulsing hearts, know that this is different.
The dirt coalesces into flesh. His breath moves from her chest and into her arms, winding down her legs, coursing into her fingers. She opens her eyes, now bright, suddenly aware: from the earth, but no longer simply that.
On summer mornings in elementary school I woke early and dragged my blanket to the plush green couch in the living room, where I cocooned with a book until the house began to stir. The square of sun from the window slanted across me. One morning, I rustled the blanket as I shifted positions, and watched a cloud of dust particles swell in the rays of light. They hung in the air, small and glinting. At first, I was disgusted. I thought my home was clean, but then, the light exposed dust that sat on me constantly, undetected. I wove the particles away, and noticed how they kept whirling in the wake of my hand’s movement. The illuminated specks began to intrigue me.
I pursed my lips and blew into the cloud, which sent the particles swirling away like loose fall leaves. I nudged my blanket again and re-filled the space with particles, and again, exhaled a stream through the dust, watched it dart and lilt through the sun-streaked living room. I repeated this—move and breathe—until the dust’s suspense and spin became a choreographed routine. My breath, like music, a force behind the motion. At some point, I sank down and lied flat underneath the dancing particle constellations, watching them slow, then vanish.
I would one day learn that dust is made of soil tracked in from outside, from human hair, from dead skin cells that were itched or rubbed or brushed off our bodies. For a moment, then, my breathing made a lifeless thing move again.
No matter who sits at my kitchen table or what I serve, I always hold my breath before they take the first bite. When I made chorizo and egg breakfast tacos, I worried that the meat wasn’t cooked and that I’d give my sorority sisters food poisoning. My coworkers came over and ate my homemade pesto while I studied their faces to see if they ate too large a basil leaf sliver. Even when my roommate ate my leftover stew, I warned her that the rosemary might not be fully chopped. At some point, though, they gave me a satisfied smile. I exhaled and ate, and my creation nourished us all.
The bi-annual mulching is a Kiolbassa family tradition. My father—gentle and generally clean—loves to work outside, and for one weekend every other spring he becomes a rugged landscaper. A truck dumps a pile of fertile dirt on our bright concrete driveway, and my dad distributes it throughout the front and back yards. His hands reek of pine and manure. He teases my mom, threatening to give her a sweaty, dirt-dusted kiss. When my sisters and I were little, we asked to help, and moved only two shovelfuls before we were back inside, begging for showers. One year, the neighborhood boys played king of the hill. They pushed each other off the pile and tumbled around in the soil. Another spring, it rained, and the mulch ran down our driveway in murky tributaries.
But every year, without fail, the yard begins to bloom. Around our home, little signs of life. The flowerbeds overflow with dark loam; the grass defies the dawning heat and urges upward, even greener; flowers flash their new colors at neighbors as they walk by. For a few weeks, the driveway holds a film of leftover mulch, but none of us seem to mind much. We’re too preoccupied with the new growth.
Audience members stood against the brick wall pockmarked with crumbling holes and sat in aged iron chairs. Under me, a squeaky wooden stage, and my shaking feet. It was open mic night at the bar, and I was called up first to read a poem. My hardback journal quivered, though I tried to hold it still, and I adjusted the microphone. As I started reading, people lifted their heads. Tired eyes scanned me: blank faces, waiting. I read a sentence I was proud of—I learned I had keys in my throat—and a satisfied sigh from the audience settled over the nighttime air. I kept going, and some snaps studded the space between my lines. My words began to gallop, and the audience came along, voicing their support. The quiet room grew louder and the still crowd shifted with excitement. Nearing the end, I stumbled over a line, but no one gave it much notice. I finished to swelling applause. I sat back down, and a few friends told me how much they enjoyed my work, how it brought them to life.
Underneath the pride in my chest, that missed line pricked me. I replayed it, mouthing the syllables, wondering why I stuttered. But every time I returned to that bar to read poetry again, I learned to reconcile this: my words, even with their messiness, could cover a crowd and make them spring up anew.
On the seventh day, He rests, which means He watches this life move atop the ground from which she came. She stretches the legs He molded, the fingers he formed. She falls sometimes, getting dirt on that packed-dirt body; she walks often, letting the wind sweep over her and His breath course through her.
One day, she tries to hide from His bright gaze, and He must let her know the difficult, lovely truth: she was made from the soil and will return there. When that time does come, He helps her body yield to its source, slowly dissolving earth into earth, and her breath slips back to the air, and is carried beyond her, carried up.
Ash Wednesday. My mom decided we would attend the 6a.m. Mass. Her announcement prompted dinner table grumbling when my sister pointed out that going to the noon service would mean we could skip school, and we’d probably pay more attention at that one anyway. My mom insisted: didn’t we want to wear our ashes all day?
My sister wasn’t wrong, though. During the Bible readings, I dipped in and out of sleep and fought my head’s weight while it bobbed forward, but I was no match for my own tiredness.
At some point, the person next to me stood and startled me awake. I popped to my feet. An old woman plunked away on the piano, and the congregation blurred into view. We filed in neat lines to the front of the sanctuary, where someone awaited us with bowl of ashes and a grimy thumb, ready to rub black streaks across each forehead. I had to be careful not to sleep-stumble into my mother while I waited for my turn. When it did come, a man smudged ashes above my drooping eyes, and the excess flecks dotted my cheeks and nose. You are dust, and to dust you shall return. He muttered these words while his thumb made a cross on my head, a reminder of origin, of disintegration.
I wore the ashes all day, as my mom had insisted. The black smears stared at my classmates. Every once in a while, I’d touch my forehead accidentally, blotting that memento mori onto my fingers. With those same hands I wrote essays and finished math problems, made dinner and hugged my parents, then turned on the shower, washed the dust from my face, and resigned again in sleep to my weary body.
In my little devotional book, a small reflection from a spiritual writer accompanies each Scripture passage. Most reflections are pulled from published works, but sometimes, the devotional denotes that it came from a writer’s letters or journal.
The first time I began journaling my prayer, I thought of these writers. Every line I wrote, I reread immediately, imagining my scrawled words typed and bound into little devotional books. My vocabulary rattled with old-timey words, inverted sentence structures, and saintly phrases: great are You, O God, and worthy of all praise.
Even now, as my prayerful words become more frank and less anachronistic, I cannot help but think about my pen marks enduring beyond my body. If I see a misspelling from an earlier entry, I correct it. I add commas every once in a while.
I will disintegrate, and these hardbound pages may be left standing. My pencil sometimes drags under the weight of my words lasting longer than me, existing outside of me; and even thinking about my creations in the hands of another gives me pause. I write letters to the man I love and fear that he will see the cracks. For my mom’s birthday, I gave her a poem, and worried about the imperfections showing.
And yet, some bright gaze urges my crumbling words and crumbling bones forward. What a great and fragile gift: these dissolving hands, creating still.