This is for the benches and the people sitting upon them,
for the bus drivers driving a million broken hymns,
for the men who have to hold down three jobs simply to hold up their children,
for the nighttime schoolers and the midnight bike riders trying to fly.
Shake the dust.

This is for the two-year-olds who cannot be understood because they speak half-English and half-God. Shake the dust.

For the girls with the brothers who are going crazy,
for those gym class wall flowers and the twelve-year-olds afraid of taking public showers,
for the kid who’s always late to class because he forgets the combination to his lockers,
for the girl who loves somebody else.
Shake the dust.

This is for the hard men, who want to love but know that is won’t come.
For the ones the amendments do not stand up for.
For the ones who are forgotten.
For the ones who are told to speak only when you are spoken to,
and then are never spoken to.
Speak every time you stand so you do not forget yourself.
Do not let one moment go by that doesn’t remind you that your heart beats 100,000 times a day and that there are enough gallons of blood to make every one of you oceans.
Do not settle for letting these waves settle and the dust to collect in your veins.

This is for the celibate pedophile who keeps on struggling,
for the poetry teachers and for the people who go on vacations alone.
For the sweat that drips off of Mick Jaggers’ singing lips,
and for the shaking skirt on Tina Turner’s shaking hips.
For the heavens and for the hells through which Tina has lived.
This is for the tired and for the dreamers and for those families who’ll never be like the Cleavers,
with perfectly made dinners and sons like Wally and the Beaver.
This is for the biggots,
for the sexists,
for the killers.
This is for the big house, jail-sentenced cats becoming redeemers.
And for the springtime that somehow seems to show up after every single winter.
This is for you.

This is for you.
Make sure that by the time fisherman returns you are gone.
Because just like the days, I burn at both ends,
and every time I write, every time I open my eyes,
I am cutting out parts of myself, just to give them to you.
So shake the dust and take me with you when you do,
for none of this has never been for me.
All that pushes and pulls, pushes and pulls,
it pushes for you.
So grab this world by its clothes-pins and shake it out again and again and jump on top and take it for a spin.
And when you hop off,
shake it again,
for this is yours.

Make my words worth something,
make this more than just another poem that I write,
more than just another night that sits heavy above us all.
Walk into it.
Breathe it in.
Let is crash through the halls of your arms,
like the millions of years of millions of poets coursing like blood,
pumping and pushing,
making you live.
Shaking the dust.
So when the world knocks at your front door,
clutch the knob and open on up,
running forward into its widespread greeting arms with your hands infront of you,
fingertips trembling,
though they may be.

© Anis Mojgani
(Heavy & Light TWLOHA)

—–
songs of enchantment:
the little goat he knew

there in the field of laughing lilies’ array
far away from empty mirrors of them and us
away from the oiled skies–
where choked suns perish–
is a place for the barefooted to bow.

quills of grass scribble eloquence; and fold.
there are no liminal things there, all enrapture,
all but the sooted child–fresh escape–
from the sad paleblack coffins underneath
these sweet lolling tongues of green praise

bees swarm around and around solomon’s spite
they have no time for sorrow, and with proud duty serve
oh! the ash is gone, heavyaway from my lungs
but where? where is my promised father large?

all alone, all around me is the symphony
of careless birds who have no home and
echos of weep-weep-weep in my garland’d head
and I am wanting of joy–
desperately.

I love it.

There is something about the cold that makes me feel safe. Makes me feel like I know the world a little bit more, closer to the sky when it is touching my face with it’s heavy tears. It’s like the clouds are a shelter, and with the grey sky weighing down on me, I feel a little less like a burden. Which is weird, because I feel God best when the night sky is pitch black and the line between my small existence and forever seems a little blurred.

But despite the weather, I’m unhappy. It’s not like I have a reason to be particularly unhappy. I should be ecstatic. I’m studying what I say I love. I’m leaving for Africa to do missions for 3 months (a lifetime dream) in 3 months. Then my dream of living in the mountains is the next semester after that. I’m not overwhelmed with school, quite the opposite. It’s not transitory sadness, because I’ve been here for almost a month now.

I don’t know. I don’t what to do with it. It is like a tangible presence. It’s nothing like depression. It’s just being down. And I don’t know how to just be patient and be unhappy for a while. I want to fix it.

The Jars of Clay album, A Long Fall Back Down To Earth, has been my playlist of the week. It’s not a particular sad CD. In fact, it is incredibly hopeful. And I haven’t really lost hope, or anything like that. And I don’t think hope or joy has anything to do with this. It is just being unhappy, being sadden, feeling the heaviness of the blue sky and the grey clouds all the same.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood–
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks–is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is–
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

it is one who can write the depths of the soul out loud that stirs my though timid, great love.

so celebrate. celebrate the day because it is a day.
and this day will never be known again.
celebrate today as the gift it is, with gratitude and quiet smiles because the one who gave it thought of you all the days before this day.

this year, much like this day, was a blessing, a gift. I grew and continue to grow, became rooted in my God, grounded in my world. but in this process, I realized the sky. Deep and vast and beautiful. Endless. Room to grow. Room to collide. Room to have others get in my way, and room to love the ‘inconvenience’, to love the words and the stories of those around me. I never knew this would happen. I never knew I could grow again. I never knew I could grow at all.

so in two thousand ten, I don’t think I’ll be making resolutions. I have no idea what lies ahead for me to learn, and I have learned that I do not even know what I want other than to have life be lived and to hope. So all I will say is this:

1. I hope to be love, be grace, be mercy, be patience, be true to those around me.

2. I hope to read passionate words and write true ones.

3. I hope my journey to africa will not be my journey, but, as a team, our journey.

4. I hope to remember that I am not bringing God to africa, but meeting new people, new creations, new images of Him.

5. I hope to be courageous in living.

6. I hope to value the creation God made me to be by pursuing healthy habits.

7. I hope to learn something completely unexpected.

8. I hope to not be given the american dream.

9. I hope to read the book of Job with new eyes.

10. I hope to live with my hands wide open.

What lies ahead? Three month South Africa mission trip in 142 days, (hopefully) High Sierra Fall Semester in 245 days, beginninf of first full semester being an english major in 14 days.

Each one of those days hold a promise and a possibility.
I wonder what the future holds.

Beyond Parchment Skies

I was first encountered by God when I was four, wearing fuzzy purple pajamas, and counting stars while on a park path to a pond. It’s one of my very first memories: standing in the middle of a forest trail at night with adults chatting behind me and looking up at the stars. I had from my youngest days a great and incomparable love for the night sky. I believed in the stars perhaps more than I believed in the world I could touch and play with. So there I was, four years old in purple pajamas looking straight up at the dark stretching sky and wondering how the stars found their place in the vast sea of dark nothing. My young mind, wild with imagination and freedom to believe, thought that maybe they were halos that angels had misplaced, or perhaps someone decided to make an extravagant connect-the-dot puzzle in the sky for everyone to enjoy, and that if I could only draw the lines correctly, maybe I’d find out the reasons why.

At four, I had no idea who that Someone might have been, but I knew that there was something more, something even bigger than my beloved universe itself, something that placed me here and the stars there. Throughout my childhood, I pined for the universe. When other children were firefighters and doctors and actresses in play-time dress-up, I was always already in space, always the astronaut. I lost myself in dreams about spacecrafts and exploration of the edges of the universe. When I was ten I was told by my impatient 5th grade teacher that I would never be an astronaut because of my severe hearing loss. In between one recess and another, I had lost my entire identity. I only began to find myself again, a year later, within the stanzas of poems about philosophy and space and time and beauty of the inexplicable.

I had always loved reading as a child, to dive into books and live within their walls. I looked and still look to books to provide a door into a world that I can belong in, a world where I can lose my reality and perhaps even my life . I have always felt that authors had a sense of knowing beyond the regular person and quite honestly I believed many fictional tales were only called stories or myths because the writer thought no one else would understand. I longed to understand, and I believed these authors and poets might know of the something, the someone, I had been seeking since I was four and looking beyond the stars.

I don’t believe I ever actually opened a Bible before the age of thirteen. I had been to Mass with family friends and with my very Catholic, very Polish grandma a few times, but those were hours of boredom punctuated by lots of standing and monotone mumbling words I had not learned . One Sunday morning in Fresno, California, my grandma took me to her church, the church my father had been raised in. Being eight-years old, I spent a great deal of time observing and playing with what I later found out to be the kneelers, wondering why the benches weren’t padded but these miniature benches were. It was only when the Eucharist was being served that I both learned what these shrunken benches were used for and saw the crucifix for the first time. My grandma made me kneel on the slat of wood in front of us, that, for all their padding, were terribly painful and I looked up at stage for the first time.

Above a draped table where someone’s father was standing looking sad and muttering to himself over a wine glass, there was a huge terrifying man made of bronze whose body was somehow attached to two crossed pieces of metal that were supposed to look like wood. One of my friends had broken his arm earlier that year, and I saw it when they carried him off the playground. When Quinn returned to school in a cool colored cast, I decided that I wanted to break my arm someday. But this terrifying man before me looked like every bone in his body had been twisted and bent, and all I could think of was not how cool Quinn had looked with his cast, but how he had screamed when he first fell off the monkey bars. I was terrified of this man and the pain that it meant. I decided that I never wanted to break my arm, or be put on any kind of cross whether it was metal or wood. A few months later I did break my arm, the day before Christmas, and while waiting in the ER with my father I remembered this terrible man and decided in this moment of pain and frustration that I hated him.

It was in the same year that I had been told I’d never be an astronaut that I decided, one Sunday morning, to go to church. By age ten, I had been to Mass a number of times, but the incense made me choke and I always avoided the gaze of the horrible man that I hated who hung from the ceiling. My parents worshipped a god of work, mowing the lawn and washing the car and doing dishes on the one day my father had off every few weeks and had no time for things like church or social functions . So I got up and decided to walk to Messiah Lutheran church, just down the street, where I had gone to preschool many years before. I wandered through these big heavy doors that as a two-year-old I was forbidden to touch. The first Sunday I went to church there I was thankful to find them open, more so I didn’t have to touch the doors and break the rules than because I wanted to go inside.
The Lutheran church was dark with tired looking colored glass windows. It smelled like the library and was full of old people who didn’t shush me but smiled. And the pews didn’t have kneelers at all. The third Sunday I was there, an older man came and sat down next to me. As I was an outsider , I felt I was only to sit on the farthest side of the pews, so I squirmed, in my typical ten-year-old way, farther towards the edge, thinking I had accidentally taken his seat. He smiled and asked me my name. But I knew he was breaking the rules because church was a place to be very quiet. I looked up surprised and then realized that the whole of the church was staring at this man and me. I told him my name quietly and when he asked how old I was I just stuck out all my fingers. I didn’t understand why he was making a fool out of me. He then asked if I’d like to go up front to the stage, and I shook my head furiously while looking down at my scuffed up brown sandals. He asked quietly, “Why not, child?”

Later it was revealed that this old man was the pastor of the church, which was the same thing as a priest (who, I had discovered, were actually not anyone’s father). I stayed at Messiah Lutheran for a little less than a year, more for the goldfish and juice on Sunday school and beautiful music that no one expected I already knew than for any other more honorable reason, and I left because the church, my mother said, was “dying.” I remember nothing of the lessons, and only of a pastor who wanted to know my name. And I wouldn’t again return to a church until I was thirteen and desperate for a meaning and a purpose and the Someone who put the stars in the sky and hungry for more than just juice and crackers. In the meantime, I was a writer and a reader, and my praise songs were my poems and my prayers were found in pages of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Dickenson and Frost . I grew to know a God that Frost wrote of in his poem God’s Garden: “Look upward to the glitter/ Of stars in God’s clear skies/ Their ways are pure and harmless/
And will not lead astray/ Bid aid your erring footsteps/
To keep the narrow way.” Where Moltmann uses Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov to illustrate the impact of theology with a removed or denied God, I instead was gleaning my theology and my knowledge of God from the characters I read .

My god of literature was a beloved but tattered thing, a magical god who could not at times get out of his own way. When I heard god was to be described as a father, my frail and clumsy god became an aloof genius, a volatile god who had many faces and never came home until after dark and who loved good wine and martinis. I didn’t understand how this god was the one who made my universe, but I still believed that these writers had to have the answer to my questions.

I had stumbled into church again in the middle of my junior high years through an invitation to a youth group in a church just across the street from Messiah Lutheran. After going to the group, called Edge, I began to go to Sunday school. I’d like to say it was for my desire to be taught about the ways of this God that they prayed to, or because my heart was a parched and tired desert ready for the Word of God to come down and flood it with His love. While all those things were true, I came, solely and unwaveringly, for the chocolate glazed donuts. At my new church, High Street Community, there weren’t any signs of death; in fact there was no crucifix at all. High above the stage was a simple cross, empty and unthreatening, which I simply vowed to ignore. At High Street there were two services, one with traditional music and hymns that had always seemed to sing of the One I was looking for, and one service with music that blared and warbled and sang repetitively with a small vocabulary of adjectives. I, having only a background in Catholic processional and Lutheran melodies, chose the first service. I happened to also be the only one there under the age of fifty. My heart clamored to the hymns, one in particular that went, “the love of God is greater far, than tongue or pen can ever tell; it goes beyond the highest star, and reaches to the lowest hell.”

I knew these hymns were singing of the Somebody I had been looking for! But how was I to know this God, this Him they sang of, this Lover? I was both self-reliant and timid and I knew it was wrong to ask questions in church because you are always ‘shushed’. But I hoped I would get to know more about this God who was becoming my single passion. In church I heard stories of this amazing man Jesus and what he taught about this God. I believed Jesus was my one way to know about this God, but I rejected everything that talked about Jesus as the same man on the cross in my father’s childhood church. How could it be that a man like this be killed? I was angry, although I did not know who I was angry at, because if Jesus had been able to stay alive, he could have taught us so much more. I thought it senseless, brutal, and shameful. When I learned that this man was not just a man, but God incarnate, I grew angrier . How could we have killed God? But I still could not ask these questions aloud. When they taught us that He had to die in order to cleanse the world of the sin, my heart cried out, “Why couldn’t you have just killed one of us, killed me, instead?!” When my youth pastor spoke of how they spit on Him, ripped His back with a whip, and nailed Him to the cross and left Him to die, I remembered my childhood hatred and disgust, and I felt like somehow I had killed Him, that His blood was on my hands .

But I believed He is the Son of God, and that He died on the cross, and rose again three days later so I was baptized on Easter Sunday, my freshman year of high school, all the while believing my name should be in place of Pontius Pilate in the Nicene Creed . I had finally found the God of the universe, but He had come with so much more than an explanation of the stars . He came with love and forgiveness and grace. He had come to save us, and my mind, so apt to explore the universe, could not understand. My question had shifted from “what is this Someone who created all this?”, to “What is man, that thou art mindful of Him?” . I could not understand, and thus could not accept that “he wants in face to be man’s partner, his almighty and compassionate Saviour” or why “he determines to love him, to be his God, his Lord, his compassionate Preserver and Saviour to eternal life” . All I could accept that I was utterly unworthy and had no place approaching Jesus Christ, and my childhood absolute fear of this man, this God, still dominated my thoughts about Him.

In order to continue as a Christian, I regarded Jesus as somewhat of a side note. Like the simple empty cross hanging above the stage of my church, I could ignore him if I didn’t think about His death. I hated Good Friday, not because of my younger zealous belief at some great injustice being done in the death of God, but rather because I had to be reminded of the crucified Christ, and had to be reminded of His Love and His grace, both of which I knew I did not deserve. I thrived in the Old Testament, with the stories of a just God punishing and promising, creating and recreating, in the poetry of the Psalms that cried out to their Maker and declared their sinfulness and guilt and sorrow. I heard the Scripture that the only way to the Father was through the Son, so I was an acquaintance to the Son of God, keeping Him at a safe distance. I continued to read literature that showed me understandable Christs; characters such as Jim Casey in Grapes of Wrath and Sofya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment began to work in my heart. But my hands were still bloodied, and I begged God to know how to wash them. For three years, I heard in some deep secret place in my being, “Approach the cross and look Me in the eyes and know that you are loved and you are forgiven.” I refused. I was still the young girl looking down at her scuffed brown sandals, sitting alone in church, and I was still being asked, “Why not, child?”

I was sitting in the darkened room of Upper Turner Campus Center in the quiet after Liturgical Chapel, a soft hymn playing around me. The words, “the guilty pair, bowed down with care, God gave His Son to win; His erring child He reconciled, and pardoned from her sin” would not leave me alone. On the stage, a massive rough cross stood, and my soul trembled as my eyes were assaulted with my first memories of the crucifix: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Man , was hanging there, as real as the stars that hang in my beloved night sky and I knew He loved me and my hands were no longer the only thing drenched by His blood, but that “nothing good have I/ where-by Thy grace to claim/ I’ll wash my garments white/ in the blood of Calvary’s Lamb.” And for the first time I knew that it was true, I was loved and I was forgiven and that “could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade;
 To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.”

it is the ground
in quaking
rolling mounds of cities
and structures
all falling down

a siren, a scream, a silence
all kinds of terrors
one kind of beautiful

this is a sermon of laughter.

is my call to be the disregarded sport
who entertains Your Holy court?
no greater honor is To be, to be,
to serve You in some facility,
but please Your honor if you please
find else one You can mock and tease!

for colors and bells and whistles and rhymes
fit not my life, fit not this hell.
for who is left to make the joker laugh?

the adventure to the center of my own heart.

i am a walking story.
but within my soul is a riverbed long run dry
i am inviting You, oh Lord.
to heal me and lead me to Your dwelling place
within my marrow, within my lungs,
within my very veins: You are here.

but You have not called me to discover You persay,
You beckon me forth, so much like Dante that his words are mine
and i fear the hell that awaits no more than i fear the heaven
i fear the discovery of the true and the True
i make haste to view not the pit of questions
that stirs to the left, once muddying all waters
now swallowing up the trickles

“If the present world go astray,
the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought”

lead me through the perils of seeking myself within my beating bloody heart, oh Lord.

so tonight, if only a temporary bandage for this gaping wound, I feebly will try to express what I feel and what I want:

1. I want to write a book.
2. I want to tell a true story.
3. I want to change a life, for the better.
4. I want to shoot a gun.
5. I want to not be bored with scripture.
6. I want to serve my country.
7. I want to be married in an apple orchard.
8. I want to live in a city and deal with it.
9. I want another tattoo.
10. I want to make someone cry because of beauty.
11. I want to sob after looking at a piece of art.
12. I want to hold your hand.
13. I want to forgive you, but I’m still angry.
14. I want to work forever as a team.
15. I want to belong to a greater cause.
16. I want to love so hard my bones ache.
17. I want to run a marathon.
18. I want to teach the next generation.
19. I want to be okay with not knowing what’s ahead.
20. I want to be okay with being alone.
21. I want to have real community.
22. I want to be mature.
23. I want to be a kid again.
24. I want to know what He wants from me.
25. I want to be patient.
26. I want to travel in Europe with no agenda except to eat, see, and be.
27. I want to have a life-altering experience.
28. I want to be disciplined.
29. I want to be recognized as a valuable person.
30. I want to not care whether I’m recognized or not.
31. I want to believe in myself.
32. I want to surrender these wants and these tears and these minutes of the middle of the night.

If you know the true meaning of amen, and how truly truly what is written above is to me, you will understand why I now write:

amen.

the shelves filled with the elderly;
oh how they tell their stories well!
their crooked spines, faded paper skin
hold so many secrets folded within,
one must wonder if these tired books
somehow are more alive than I

and now we reach the heart,
tattered edges and ink stains
and cramped scrawling letters
trying to escape off the page
words like chain-gangs all in a row
the melody of their hammers
match the tune of my soul.

all the while, the black blood bleeds
these pages covered in the wounds of war
mistakes crossed out like soldiers slain
their graves where they fell face first.
the formation misses none, marches on
to cover the bleak barren expanse
to assail these heavy barricades,

peaceful dew lingers after daybreak’s kiss
gracefully dawn dances upon the horizon
and the grey fog cradles the crimson ground
the sweetly knotted hands of time
gently rocks this new born hope.
the day blooms to tell this tale–
ink is always thicker than blood.

Not sure how to even sum it up. I’ve learned so much about myself, about who I am, what is important to me, where I’m going, who loves me and who I love and why. I learned a lot about teamwork and perfectionism and anger and endurance and follow-through and junior high youth ministry. I learned a lot of being on my own, and what it will take to pay the bills and live with roommates I don’t know and don’t necessarily like. I worked through extremes of loneliness and extremes of uncertainty. I processed through doubting and vilifying God and me and everything else in my life. I walked through heart break and a lost of a very close friendship and struggled through calling and discernment. I shouldn’t that in past tense. I continue to progress through calling and discernment. Thoughts about honesty, and hope, and hanging onto to God because He’s the only thing left to hold on to.

I was called. I followed. I learned a lot. It was not easy. I think that’s a general theme I’ve learned. This following thing is not suppose to be easy. But that the statement that the will of God will never take you where the grace of God will not protect you is true. I think I needed to be taken away from the temptation of complacency that is always present at home.

The choices between surrender and self-sufficiency, between freedom and free-will (a difficult distinction), between perfectionism and processing, between convenience and change have defined this summer. I have no idea what lies ahead, in the next 3 weeks at home, in the next 3 months, and especially not in the next 3 years. But what I do know is that God is good all the time and all the time God is good. That He has plans to prosper me and not to harm me, to give me hope and a future. And that in all things He works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to his purpose.

So as this summertime closes in on its final chapters, I must say it was an awfully good book. The story goes on as He writes His promises and His peace upon the tablets of my heart and soul. We are the broken, and we are the hopeful.

dark

spin, spin, spin on axis
always imperfect
by a inherent degree
and travel by stumbles
and farther falls.

light

what kind of world
is this, allowing life
to be lived asleep?
no greater mystery
is that of a grey sky
and a greyer heart.

Is it our iconic heroes of late, swinging through dangers with a highly accurate whip, or scampering through dense and rugged terrain in search of treasure? Is it possible for a modern day young American to have an adventure in this day and age?

Adventure is defined as an exciting or extraordinary event or series of events, or the participation or willingness to participate in things that involve uncertainty and risk.

Adventure doesn’t have a ‘purpose’, it doesn’t go well on resumes, it isn’t the fast track to a career. Adventure is saying that life is worth risking living for. Adventure cannot be strategize, cannot be programmed, or made to fit into a five, ten, or twenty year plan. It is the act of saying that nothing is certain except today. It means putting living in higher regard for the “life I always wanted”.

I cannot say this is something I dreamed of doing since I was a little girl. In fact, I cannot say it was something I’ve wanted to do for very much time at all. Taking a year off of school screws up my five-year plan. Doing something entirely not academic is totally outside of my comfort zone. Becoming a ‘mom’ to two delightful children sounds good… but when I’m 19? Living in Europe, dealing with culture shock everywhere I turn, experiencing four true seasons (which as a California girl, I’ve never really dealt with). Learning a new language (or three). Leaving the new home I’ve made for myself. Leaving all my friends, all my family, my entire support system, all my mentors, my church, my junior highers. Supporting myself, living on my own, letting go of my childhood.

Yet. There is a yet. In the middle of all my fears, there is still a yet. And that yet breeds an amazing amount of excitement. I’m still very much praying through this, wondering where God is whispering. I know that I can make a lot of noise, a lot of colors, and big flamboyant flourishes. But when the wind dies, and the earth stops shaking, and the fire burns itself out, God is the only one with the gentle whisper left. So I’m trying to still my heart and stop making my world the way I want it to be, but listen to the truth, the direction, and the peace that He speaks. I cannot will Him to do anything. I must stop striving to be perfect so He will follow my will. Rather, I must accept and be open to His will and in that process of being open, He will continue to enter my heart and change me.

The song Hanging Around by Counting Crows plays in the background and says this to me: “Well you know I gotta get out, but I’m stuck so tight, weighed by the chains that keep me… hanging around. I’ve been hanging around this town on a corner, I’ve been bummin’ around this old town for way too long”. But honestly, I don’t feel it is my time to leave, not yet. I think I need to go to school for the fall semester. I need to continue to be still before I go. I need to ground myself in the Lord, and not be running away. I’ve run away so many times in my life. I’ve invested, and then not had the follow-through. This is something that needs to change. I’m becoming an adult, and that means that there are going to be a lot of things I don’t want to do, and there are things that are going to be hard and not instant gratification. I think the wisest thing my mom has said to me in the last few days is that “grown up things progress. Childhood is all about now, but not anymore, not for you anymore. Now is the time to wait”.

So I am waiting for a whisper. I’m waiting for an adventure to disrupt my life and turn me on my head. I am waiting, wishing, and wondering what He has in store for me.

I hear a song. Science can explain how the strings on the violin or guitar or cello vibrate in certain ways to produce certain frequencies, and science can explain how my ears can process and translate the sound waves into electrical impulses that travel into my brain and are further translated there. Science cannot explain why that certain song brings tears to my eyes or rhythm to my feet. Science cannot explain why it makes me remember a certain someone or evokes some kind of sense that everything will work out.

When it comes to scientifically explaining emotions, aesthetics, ethics, or the ever-enigmatic experience of love, science is a dumb dog that can barely be blamed for wetting itself in the face of these ominous foes. Science can yap about pheromones or brain centers or memory association or endorphin release, but in all reality, it cannot understand, cannot measure, quantify, evidentially support or disagree with these concepts anymore than a dog can understand its master interaction with its master’s wife.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

This statement has never been more real, more true, and more frightening than it is tonight. Truly truly I ask you: What is our purpose? To take up space, to breath dirty air, to sing empty songs, to write inconsequential nothings that blather and blithe?

Is any pain worth the trouble that it causes? Do we have a single reason to stay alive? Or, as another Shakespearean masterpiece demonstrates, poor pitiful fools left in the rain to realize their humanity and desire death? Is all tragedy true? Do we so seek to find joy and fulfillment that we create some paltry fire to battle off the crushing solitude of the empty night?

Sigh. What more can I ask from an empty sheet of paper but this? What am I?

my heart pounds against my chest
my throat closes with the rest
of my self just wanting to hear
wishing, wanting, waiting to be near

i cannot wish forever more
i cannot wish what you wish for
i cannot be who you want me as
i cannot be who I wish I was

a wish wrapped quietly in a bright
balloon
drifts off into the engulfing night
sky
hands holding many taut strings tight
balloons
to let go into your endless night
skies

i wish i was a paradox
or a timid creature of the sea
but most of all, right now,
i wish i wasn’t me.

i wish i wish i wish to be
anything, something other
than me.

for you are the you
that I’m in love with
i wish it wasn’t so.
for you are the you
i’m saying goodbye to
i wish it wasn’t so.

sigh.

my screen flickers pictures of forget-me-nots
wild bunches of memories in vivid clots;
that tie up my hands, & silence my tumbling speech
but no more! I am free: to write, to love, to sing, to teach

you spoke to me in candor with cadence in your eyes.
you spoke to me in brilliance with boldness in your eyes.
you spoke to me the truest true with triumph in your eyes.
you spoke to me, you spoke to me, you spoke to me no lies.

That was not really supposed to be deep or anything, just stating the observed. However, I think that when we say “I made the observation that…” or “Observe this…” or “Observing the …”, unless it is said in the context of some dreary science laboratory, our observations are more towards the side of perspectives, opinions, biases, and embellishments. How can one truly observe anything, even within a scientific and sterile settling, objectively? And what does that word even mean? Objectively? We can all agree on syntax, until we can’t. We can all agree on an adjective, until we can’t. The object is a red cup. The observation is that it is round, or holds water, or is the color red (whatever that means, especially if you know anything about light waves and visible spectrum). Our observations are all true (or let us presuppose for the sake of demonstrating a dilemma that they are true), but what is the objective Truth (or is there such a thing)? Is it the compilation of these sorts of observations, mixed as they are? Or is there something more, something else that sums up the object-ness of the object in question, something that captures it so wholly, lacking no aspect, that if able to be stated in understandable language would be classified as not only a truth, but the Truth about the red cup (significant specimen, I know).

If a red cup is this question provoking, I dare say my head may split if to actually, for even only a moment, consider man. The gravity of these questions about a drink-holding object is enough to, at least, make the thinker consider their balance. But these questions when applied, about the objectivity of man, the reality of man, the wholeness of man, the man-ness of man, and the humanity of man (two very different things I assure you), makes (or should make) the thinker fall over less than gracefully on his/her buttocks.

I do not suggest considering these possibilities for too long. After little thought, the night sky alone becomes a crushing and unwelcome burden, the thought of the vastness like a quick, yet excruciating blow to the head. Buechner writes about the experience of Today (which from his other writings you can deduce is also our experience with the Really Real), saying, “If you were aware of how precious it is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.” You must be aware.

But to be aware, to recognize the deeply painful gift of each moment, means doing more than just observing. One might ask, can’t you observe the world and live in it too? The one who asks that question most likely would be my friend. I, too, seemingly can’t help but want to both participate and capture the moment. I want both the picture and the memory. But it is very rare that when trying to get both that you get much of anything at all, which is one of those sad true ironies of living: one simply cannot have their cake and eat it too.

In the end, I very much enjoy the taste of cake. It is lovely to look at, for sure, but what use is it? What life does it give if it sits there and looks pretty? What use does a picture have if it captures the moment that the photographer cannot never truly grasp because he/she was behind the lens? What is the purpose of knowing the whole lot, and never casting a ballot?

Being aware means making the choice to partake and not peruse. Being aware of the weight of today is living away from the line, which blurs the battle. The war is that very cliché (except it cannot be cliché in this case, as this is the beginnings of such literary thematic as good vs. evil, light vs. dark), in which night usurps day, but after a good few hours of conquest is forced once again to surrender under the white flag of dawn. To be aware is not observe, and perhaps to not even just exist, but to pick a side. To avoid the gray. Being aware means making the choice to be aware even when it hurts like hell (or really is).

But I must admit: I am often paralyzed by being a spectator and speculator to top it off. I crave time to sit and watch and think, in short observe, rather than be. And while I do not believe that there should be no time made for this wonderful (albeit addictive for some) activity, I just think I do it, or at least desire to do it far too much for my own good. You see, part of me wishes nothing more than to just be able to survive off of reading and thinking alone; to be able to supply myself with the basic necessities for life by absorbing literature and thinking about by some sort of odd power. But I do not have the power to do this anymore than I have to turn my favorite stories into realities (but that is another discussion).

And when I think about it, I do not truly want it. It would mean making the choice to remove myself even from the role of onlooker. Yet I am greedy for knowledge, to know the whys and hows and of whats. But I am not disciplined enough, so I attempt to satiate that greed with either scraps and pieces or the whole pie (old family saying… it means basically that hunger (for food, or any other thing) isn’t an all or nothing endeavor, but a process in which discipline must play a large role in the continuous portioning of food in a consistent manner).

Sigh. It’s all this talk about the future that is driving me mad, I’m sure of it. I am obsessed with the nature of future (being it in my nature to not only (or especially not) observe the present). I am so oriented around this observing disease that I cannot help but never ever be satisfied with what I see my future to hold. I am already disappointed for what comes next (what gay (the old old old meaning) and frolicsome disposition I have!). I am already disappointed because I expect that what I observe is what is True, that there could be nothing more real than the real I perceive.

I am already disappointed because the ‘real’ that I see is quite frankly quite ‘blah’: a beige and off-white pathway, lined only with milestones that mark not miles but the moments I became more practical or more efficient or more stoic, or some such nonsense as that. I see normalcy, when all I want to observe is adventure (and furthermore, I want to partake in adventure). I believe I fear mediocrity more than the unknown. I think I fear mediocrity more than death. In fact, I know I do. I fear beige. I fear white noise, more than explosions or silence. I fear this line that is fuzzy and sweeps over the world without courtship kisses or bitter goodbyes. It is no man’s land, yet everybody is here. And that is a fearsome thought indeed.