madison zuñiga – Sculpting words

On a Turning – senior year, and who I am becoming.

I crouch upon the edge of the bluff that looks over the sprawl of clean streets and quiet homes. The ground below—all ants and pillbugs and prickly oak leaves—crinkles and sighs beneath me. Above, the clouds bluster comfortably, yawning into the blue bowl of space, across to the folded hills and even to the frosted mountains. I’ve spent half a decade staring at the sky, watching meteorological phenomena with desperation, as Heaven became real and real and more than real.

And yet on that bluff I face a turning, an upside-down spinning, a dizzying tilt-a-whirl as the ground becomes sky and those clouds become my foundation. Over the past five years, Heaven had settled into my heart and bones and blood, and now an inevitable truth shouts in silence like the wind in my face—a pressure, a pushing. Face the earth, enter the world, scrabble at the ground until your hands are scraped raw and clean.

I hesitate, though my rationality knows that it is utterly normal to have anxiety about the end of undergraduate, anxiety as we all endure the questioning: “what will you do? what will you do?” like a mourning dove cooing outside our window. It’s a question steeped with poignance and with the weight of knowing that childhood has shed like downy feathers. I’ve gazed out into the sky for many years, seeing and hoping and dreaming, and now at the turning my feet grip the earth and I’m becoming and grieving and trusting.

This year the Lord has worked within me so that very much growth has occurred in not-so-very much time. I couldn’t know more gratitude for what He has done.

The word that I find encompasses my final year at Concordia Irvine is apocalypse, but I ask that it be stripped of all its drama and grandeur. The etymology is straightforward, deriving from the Greek apokalyptein: apo (off, away from) and kalyptein (to cover, to conceal). The eschatological associations are granted by St. John’s Apokalypsis of Jesus Christ. Though I admit that the end-of-all-things and the remaking of the world are always echoing in my head, I resonate with the word this year for its simple meaning of unveiling, uncovering, revealing.

This year, as with any maturation period or turning point, many layers of thought, practice, and mindsets began to fall away. My various responsibilities became weighted with future purpose, and also lightened on account of their inevitable end. I would not be an undergraduate student forever (thank the Lord), and all that I did this year could be in service to my upcoming prospects. My work in the Writing Studio, for the Concordia Courier, for the Eagles4Life club, in my Bible studies, with my internships, and in my senior seminars obviously would not be terminal. Rather, I realized that to move forward and succeed, I must intentionally array my accomplishments as I sought and scrabbled for my life post-graduation.

Professional development opportunities, such as creating this website and developing a professional art show, were my scaffolding as I confronted the work I had done. I embraced its relative meaninglessness in the broader world, and envisioned my plans to transform it all into something long-lasting and significant.

Throughout all of this, I clung to people. The Lord revealed to me that even as an independent, assertive person, I needed others to guide the way. No matter how keen my instincts, or how capable my hands, I was but a twenty-year-old girl, still learning, scales falling from her eyes. I needed others to help me see, to instruct me in how to navigate graduate school and the working art world.

I’d been untethered for a long while, though I’d convinced myself I was not. I never lost faith, but I was treading water without feet on solid ground. I’d known a liminal, disassociative detachment, even as I poured myself into tangible practices like community service and clay sculpture. To move forward, I needed true humility: the human become communion become a Spirit-filled real human again. C.S. Lewis describes this process well in his essay, “Membership”, which I read back in September of 2024:

Personality is eternal and in-violable. But then, personality is not a datum from which we start. The individualism in which we all begin is only a parody or shad- ow of it. True personality lies ahead ― how far ahead, for most of us, I dare not say. And the key to it does not lie in ourselves. It will not be attained by development from within outwards. It will come to us when we occupy those places in the structure of the eternal cosmos for which we were designed or invented. 

C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

Upon a bluff, upon a turning, I wonder. What will I do? I will abide in the Lord, and move faithfully along the paths He presents. I will work in community, a member of the mystical Body of Christ. The ground is firm, and rich. Who am I becoming? I stand on the clouds, on the mountains, in the garden, on the shore. All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. I am becoming a real person, in a real world.

― Madison Zuñiga, March 2025