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Emerge from the Beige

“Here I am between my flock and my treasure,” the boy thought.

He had to choose between something he had become accustomed to and something he wanted to have.

—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

The word brazen swam up from my soul and out of my mouth, intuitively, a few years ago. We were living in the desert of the Middle East, stationed there for my husband Steve’s job in the Navy. At that time in my life, my interior landscape matched the Middle Eastern landscape: beige. The sky was beige. The sand was beige. The buildings were beige. This is how I felt on the inside too. A million miles away from home, taking care of babies in a foreign and volatile world, slightly traumatized and definitely hypervigilant from a massive move and the—hardly worth mentioning—civil infighting going on around us.

You have likely been through a season like this. Not the beige of the Middle East, of course, but a beige all your own—a season of infighting, a season of trauma, a season of displacement and disorientation. The light has become flat. A dimension seems to be missing. Breathing is about as much as can be accomplished in a day.

During those beige days, I saw something that woke me for a second, in a subversive way. I was stopped on a dirt road near our villa. My eyes wandered out the window. Gutter water ran beside my car, and riding high on the tide were the most striking hot pink bougainvillea petals dancing along. I whispered audibly, like a murmur from beyond, “Brazen.”

The word brazen isn’t necessarily part of my everyday lexicon. In fact, I don’t remember ever saying it out loud before that moment. So it kind of surprised me when it spilled out of my mouth. It also delighted me, because I agree with what C. S. Lewis wrote in his novel Till We Have Faces: “To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”1 And I nailed it.

The dictionary definition of brazen is this perfect phrase: without shame. And it goes on from there: unrestrained by convention or propriety. Nervy. Bold-faced. Audacious. Shameless. Brazen has traditionally been forced into the arms of the word hussy—as in, “Wow, she’s a brazen hussy”—which is, as you might imagine, less than complimentary. Brazen needs to be rescued from the clutches of hussy and delivered into the hands of holy, because it’s a word worth using, a word worth living, without hussy following it around.

In that dull sludge water, I saw my own longing reflected back to me, my longing to feel that beautiful pink instead of all the beige, all the sludgy gutter water. I wanted the color back. I wanted to feel freedom to do and be and dance and play. Freedom to roam and risk and create and work. Freedom to love and rest and taste and see. Freedom to make and believe and dream and fight. Freedom to speak up and speak out and to know what it is I want to say. But instead, the beige sky and the brown gutter water so entirely overwhelmed any pink that wanted to emerge.

I have a jumpy, busy mind and a nervous, buzzy body that walk around with me every day. I spend a lot of time taking care of this body and this mind. Some days are good days and I feel like I’m on top of my game. Some days, the Hard days, I’m so tired of standing up to them, babying them, working with them, working around them.

Some days I feel like my issues and my identity are one and the same. I believe I am fatally flawed, and I will never be free. The weight of this lie all but buries me. It makes me angry, rage-y, because I am so entirely tired of being tired. I want peace.

Recently I sat with a trusted guide and told her how angry I was that I couldn’t just take a pill or make an appointment and solve my issues once and for all. “I do both those things,” I tell her, “and they don’t seem to be fixing me. I work really hard to take care of myself, to take care of all the buzzing and busy, but I’m not making any progress.”

She looked at me and said, “Leeana, you must believe me when I tell you that you are not where you were. You have learned to take care of yourself, love yourself through the Hard days, turn toward help, let God in. You are not where you were.”

I was talking with the most stunning twentysomething the other day. She told me about the ongoing sexual abuse she experienced in her home. She told me about how she fled, and how she fears that no matter what she does, she will always be defined by the abuse.

When I look at her and listen to her, I see this extraordinary soul—someone who is getting herself the help she needs, investing in her own healing and recovery, taking herself out into nature to ingest beauty, putting on mascara.

Her insides feel raw and traumatized and overwhelmed. But what I see when I look at her and hear her story is pure, unmitigated resilience. She is doing it. She is showing up. She is living. The waters of her life have been as dirty and disgusting as one could imagine. Undoubtedly, life would feel so much simpler to just give in to the beige constantly looming all around her. And yet there she is, as hot pink as she could be, even in the midst of all that sludge. She still feels buried, like the power of it all will never lift, but I want to say to her with conviction, “You are not where you were. You are moving through this. Slowly, painfully, indirectly. You have to believe, you are not where you were.”

I am so often waiting for all the Hard to dissipate before I believe I can really live. But perhaps the solution isn’t the absence of the Hard, it’s what we do when we’re in the midst of it. Will we succumb to colorless, motionless, woefulness, martyrdom? Or will we persevere, look for the hope?

Sometimes, for a season, all we can expect from ourselves is to sit on the floor and breathe. And that’s plenty. But then, after a week or a month or a year or three, after we have caught our breath, we must do the work of remembering that our issues are not the same thing as our identity. We must emerge.

Walking into living color is vulnerable. So very vulnerable. It’s like coming out from a dark room and you have to squint to tolerate the light. But at some point we have to consider the truth Eep Crood already told us when she said, “Dad, not dying isn’t the same thing as living.”2 We let our eyes open again. We let our hearts and souls wake up instead of believing that life and faith and healing and recovery are one big trick.

We do the brazen work of going after the “you” and the “me” that’s been hiding, buried, muted, lost, abandoned. We invest in our own healing. We do it as a debt of honor to ourselves and as our most profound worship to God, our Creator. We will not live in the dark, even if that means we have to walk around squinting for a time. We will let ourselves be seen. We will let ourselves be free. We will emerge.

There is no perfect time to be courageous. Our emergence doesn’t happen when we are at our most brave. It often happens when we are at our most bruised. We choose to lean into the tears and the fears and the dreams and the wild and we decide we will not hide. Even though hiding feels like so much less work.

What if you and I are stronger than we think, are more intuitive than we assume, possess greater competence than we’ll admit, have more of a voice than we believe? When you and I question our strength, our tenacity, our perseverance, our butt-kicking potential, let’s remember one seriously outrageous fact:

God himself gave us dominion. He entrusted us with influence, responsibility, and authority. He gave us charge. He put us on this planet and said, “Here you go. Enjoy. Work your magic.” He literally gave us a world and gave us the right and privilege of naming everything in it. He gave us creative work. He also gave us the capacity to delight in what we see, hear, smell, taste. He did that because he knew, better than we did, about the Created Center within us. The shameless center that is Other.

I want to explore with all the license of a poet. I want to experience with all the authority of a child. I want to express with all the abandon of one who has been given an endless palate to play with. My wanderlusting soul longs for this walkabout through creation. And he says, “It is yours. Go. Dabble. Remember who you are.”

You are not abuse. You are not anxiety. You are not depression. You are not infertility. You are not divorce. You are not abortion. You are not addiction. You are not failure. You are not your body. You are not the beige. You are the beloved, precious soul. The brazen, beautiful beloved.

So many of us have lived with any number of things that have gnawed into the longed-for freedom. Mind plagues. Pesky habits with the forbidden. The worst kind of worry. A tendency to shrink. A timid tongue. Harsh accusers. Mean people. A total lack of confidence in a bathing suit. And so on. We begin to believe that the power of these issues exceeds the power of our identity. We lose track of our own resilience, the creative strength God himself put within us.

And then we take one look into the eyes of the most fragile victim and see a junkyard dog within her who is gloriously fighting for herself. Imperfectly. Irreverently. Impossibly. Fighting. Emerging, one just-perceptible step at a time, eyes still adjusting to the light, in all her brazen glory.

Hot pink riding high on gutter water. The kind of in-your-face pink that reminds me of the Holi celebration in India. I’m kind of obsessed with Holi, the ancient Hindu festival of color. Participants usher in the end of winter and the arrival of spring with a “celebration of colors,” chasing each other through the streets with spray bottles and homemade powders until every inch of every person is covered in the most impossibly vibrant colors. No one is too young or too old. No one is off limits. The effect, captured in extraordinary images, will take your breath away. The festival is said to be a celebration signifying the victory of good over evil. When I look at pictures of the Holi festival, I cannot help but feel the exuberance, the vibrancy, the saturation, and it calls to my Unashamed Center, awakening the very best parts of me to life in living color.

Reflection & Expression

The etymology of brazen tells us the word comes from the same word meaning brass. But, to me, the color of brazen is the hot pink of those bougainvillea petals.

If you were to close your eyes and think of something brazen, what color would it be? The color does not have to be your favorite one, necessarily, though it might be. What matters most is that the color stirs something sacred in you. If you’re still not sure, here are a few other questions to ask yourself:

What is the color of your soul, your Created Center?

What is the color you associate with freedom?

What is the color you think of when you think of the word alive?

Begin collecting images and items in that color. Stockpile everything you can in your color. Let yourself be drawn to it. Spend some time writing about your color, even if it’s just a few minutes. Keep your pen moving. Answer the prompt: Why am I drawn to this color? What does it mean to me?

For Your Brazen Board

Choose some of the images you’ve curated in your color. You could also splash some paint onto your board or paint your hand and make a handprint in your color. Choose a pen in your color and write a word or two on your board, perhaps taking those words from the writing you did above. Whatever you decide to include, let your intuition guide you as you select words and images, beginning a dialogue with your soul voice.