Lunacy

Is it lunacy to believe

that a single man would give his life for me?

Roses

So she cultivated roses there and graffitied on the walls, and

 paint got on the plants but people pretended not to notice. 

But Soft

but soft, what joy

through empty days is wrought

for me

Like an Adult in Pain

"I do not remember where I went, or who I saw there, or what I did on the visits. I only remember the way the mist curled around the buildings while I watched twilight colors get drunk on guitars and concrete and neoned reflections. I do not remember the trip, but the destination is too great to re-imagine into words for you. 

For city lights and hurting people are a grander picture than any artist can capture with camera or pen or paint. A street musician's wild and animalistic smile is more joyful than a Christmas gift-opener's; and life is not confined to those living it well."

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a resolution to live my life like a child, to gape and be amazed by all the things I see, to ask never-ending questions about the things that fascinate me.

Now I feel I must comment on the other side of the way I want to live.

Have you ever seen a movie (or read a book) that was so vivid, so truthful about pain and sin that you suddenly felt inundated with it? As if you were the refugee, the tortured soul, the betrayed victim of war? I've seen (and read) many. Braveheart, Forrest Gump, The Screwtape Letters.

Even some more innocent stories have given me tears over the depth and subtlety of the agony lying beneath the surface. The Princess Bride, The Chronicles of Narnia, and even The Blues Brothers (a comedy) have all shown me something that sobers and hurts me. They've shown me things that have grown me up.

Pain involves a great deal of clarity. Pain is always intent, always exact. Pain does not allow compromise or unpunctuality. Part of being an adult is knowing pain beyond scraped knees and disappointment. It is honesty, perception, and undulled feeling. It is great and wild and chaotic.

For some reason I find myself wanting it. Not the pain itself, necessarily, but the growth, the experience. I want the knowledge, the power, the memory of triumph and failure standing side by side.

I want to be like an adult in pain, knowing that I have seen much and can see more, and unafraid of the crescendo creeping nearer and nearer. I want to gasp at the asphalt and smoggy skies and hold in my arms a hopeless medical case and sing loud into a lonely, lonely canyon. I want to walk straight into a world and not sidestep the beggars lining the streets or step over the litter blocking the pathways.

I want to be a woman unafraid of the pain she's in, holding instead to the suddenly clearer image of her Reason To Live.

(And this is another odd resolution, to be an adult, with more strength and gentle forbearance than I currently have.)

Like a Child in Love

Remember the wide-eyed wonder and simple exclamations? The wows and the pleeeeeaaases and the mouth opened wide and round? Remember when you--a teenager or college student or single mother or creaky grandfather--were a child shopping with your mother, begging her to buy a soda or look at the train a little bit longer?

How long has it been since you gaped in awe at a butterfly fluttering near you or laughed like the bubbly schoolkid you were at some extremely dumb and cliche joke? It's been a long time for me. 

It's strange, really. I see these things, and I love them. I think butterflies are beautiful, and I love puns, even when they get cheesy. But I don't feel them the same way I used to. I want to be struck dumb when I see the wonders instead of taking a picture and exclaiming over the perfection. 

I want to watch, and remember, and tell about it in a hushed, reverent voice that still can't believe the beauty. I want to live this world like a child in love, a child that holds in cupped hands something it is afraid of shattering. I want to be awkwardly awe-ful, and blessedly full of cheeky smiles at such simple, common pleasures as ice cream and leaves blowing down in a shower. 

I want to be like a child wandering through her life, finding beauty in earthworms and the great expanse of sky and city and empty space that surrounds us.

(And this is my odd resolution for now. To be a child, more of a child than I already am.) 

Hallelujah

and even though it all went wrong

I stand before the Lord of Song

with nothing on my tongue

but hallelujah

Pieces Of Today, Nov. 19 2015

1. Hide your wives, hide your kids. The annual ladybug invasion has begun.

2. That perfect feeling of tingling in my hand when I mute my guitar.

3. Droplets of dew and the taste of sunshine running along my tongue.

4. These itchy but beautiful things:

5. Straggled fencelines and lumbering cows. 

6. Violin music and a deep voice mispronouncing Stalingrad.  

7. The bleep, bleep, bleep of the tree-cutters truck down the road. 

8. I'm forever keeping my angel close. (What are words if you really don't mean them when you say them?) 

9. That glorious pain that shoots up my legs when I jump and land wrong. 

10. I look to the sea...reflections in the waves spark my memory. Some happy, some sad...I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had. 

On Crunched Grass and Puddle-Jumping

When I was younger, my mother told me (as all mothers do) that the older I got, the faster time would fly. I, of course, in seven-year-old ignorance, disregarded it with the assumption that ten minutes would always be ten minutes and an hour would always be an hour.

And now, in my fifteen-year-old ignorance, I ask nobody in particular where all my time went. Why don't I have time to just lie on the couch and listen to music anymore? Since when did I become so inundated with school and work and random things that I don't need to do but do anyway?

This summer passed before I really realized it was here. I barely noticed the heat-crunched grass, because I was too busy reading to walk barefoot in the field. I missed the yearly swallow-nesting on the porch, all because I'd rather spend my free moments typing up an essay than watch the sunrise from the steps. I went outside yesterday and the field-grass was wet and soft beneath my feet, something that wasn't supposed to come for another couple of months, or so I thought.

So in a sudden realization that this wouldn't last forever, I danced in the rain.

I was jumping, leaping, laughing, singing and slipping through the mini-lakes and puddles, with blackberry briars sticking in my feet and shivers running down my soaked spine. I rejoiced in the beautiful, cold, sharp rain that made my hair go curly as I shook out the drops.

I found joy yesterday. Pure, unadulterated, un-adulted joy. I could honestly bless my Creator with dance and song as I sloshed through mud and fogged my glasses with heavy breath.

Yes, I missed the summer, to my great regret. But today I'm resolving to live in the autumn, and rejoice in it as God calls me to do.

(There also you and your households shall eat before the LORD your God, and rejoice in all your undertakings in which the LORD your God has blessed you.) Deuteronomy 12:7

New Eyes

Always explore the world with new eyes, dream of places you've never imagined and discover a love so perfect it was almost never meant to be. 

-(R.M. Drake) 

On Screwtape, Giving Trees, and Pouring Out

This week, I spent a whole day reading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. The book is a set of letters coming from the senior demon, Screwtape, to his just-out-of-college nephew, Wormwood. Screwtape has persuaded many to join the ranks of the Devil, whom they refer to as Our Father Below. The letters consist of his advice and admonitions towards Wormwood, who has just received his first 'patient' and is eager to please. 

   
I was very convicted by these letters, and some of the advice old Screwtape gave his nephew chilled me with its accuracy.

Screwtape is a master at pinning down the problem and telling exactly what's to be done about it. Yet he grows angered and wild as he writes about it, because there is one thing he can't pin down: the Enemy Himself. 

He doesn't understand this love that the so-called 'Enemy' professes for the humans. He insists that there must be some other reason to fight for them, some hidden plot that makes them important somehow. Yet he cannot come up with a plausible excuse. This frustrates him to no end. 

Another book I read lately is The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. It's a children's book, but I found it haunting and poignant all the same. In it, a tree is loved by a little boy, and it loves the little boy back with all its heart. It gives him fruit and leaves and a firm base to climb on. 

But the little boy grows up. He begins to search for what he calls happiness; money and jobs and a fine house with a wife. He leaves the tree to find these things, coming back only once in a while. Whenever he does come back, the tree gives him something to help him in his quest for happiness--apples to sell, branches for a house, and her trunk for a boat. She never thinks twice about the cost her giving will bring upon herself, she only thinks of the boy she loves. 

I think that God wants to be a sort of Giving Tree to us. He pours out love and blessings on us, and the cost is canceled out by the enormous love he gives as well. 

So while I'm often a Screwtape, jabbing at God with accusations and questions, I also realize that He calls me to follow His example and be a Giving Tree in His image, handing out myself and my gifts to His people as He does. 

As Paul says in 2 Timothy 4:6, "For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come." 

I, for one, am going to pour myself out before Him, that He may make me new.

Pieces of Today, Nov. 2 2015

1. A bit of nostalgia as James Taylor plays on the radio.

2. So, so you think you can tell...heaven from hell...(otherwise known as rockin' out with a bum-bum-da-dum-duhmmm)

3. Culture and history studies and the odd facts they bring about. (Did you know that Norway has the highest gas prices in the world despite being one of the top oil producers? Approx. $9.95 a gallon in USD.)

4. Currently wanting to go on an adventure...preferably back to Robbers Cave to see what it's like in fall as opposed to the spring version I saw:

5. This is a song for you...far away, so far away from me.

6. Anticipation of great things coming up. 

7. A bit of beauty in dark times: 

Poetry by Lewis Carrol (c)

8. I'll be okay, so please don't cry. / But do not leave me here to die. 

9. The feel of carpet imprinting itself into my ankle and rubbing roughly against my jeans. 

10. BLUE BELL IS BACK! Oh, the joy of ice cream running over my tongue! Oh, the delicious coolness of the bowl cradled in my lap! Oh, the strangers in Walmart who saw it in the cart and exclaimed their joy at its return! 

Pluviophile

Pluviophile: (n) A lover of rain: one who finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days.