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| A new dayThe sun beat through my windows as I woke up much earlier than my alarm to some text messages. I stumbled my way out of bed, and into the shower, which always offers some level of sanity to my mostly insane days. The beautiful thing about a shower is that it is exactly like the day before, but also marks the newness of each new day. Hot water runs over your body, washing away the events of the past day and night, and when you step out, a new day is offered. Often I overlook this, and only see it as another piece of my daily routine, but today I knew held something which I could only hope for.
When good days come to you there is a gentle balance between pushing them to be the best day ever, and letting them slip by you as you float through the possiblities. I gathered myself after a rather interesting night before and headed across the street to guide my friends around this great state of Oregon. It is strange how you can life in a place which you think is so wonderful, but you rarely take advantage of how wonderful it is until someone comes who you need to convince. Today was one of those days. One of those beautiful days where everything comes together and fits like puzzle pieces.
The bright afternoon sun led me into my apartment parking lot where I stood in wonder at the strange glowing orb that decided to grace this rain soaked state with its presence. Spring in Oregon is a strange beast, one that will often show its teeth with rain that will last weeks at a time, but then once you have lost all hope, the clouds open, and light fills the streets. Crowds who have been yearning for sun all come out in force, riding their bikes, drinking their coffee, playing their flutes, and frolicking around, as if it were the first time they saw snow, or tasted chocolate, or listened to The Beatles.
We hopped in my car, and started our adventure. These excursions usually start with a plan, but ours did not. The beauty of today was that none of us knew where we were going, and didn't care. Our lack of desire for a destination only fueled our fire to explore, and take advantage of the day, a day which none of us had expected. First we aquired coffee, and talked about life. Desires, and loves spewed from us like frat boys after a long night of drinking. We talked of things which mattered, and distroyed the golden calves of our society, and felt like giants. We were full of potential, full of something new, something that the world would never see again, and by mentioning it we were distroying all that we were working toward.
The drive took us through the city, into the suburbs, past the bustle and confusion of the city, and into the simple beauty of vineyards, and hazelnut trees. Eventually we ended in McMinnville, where we rode rickety elevator to the top, taking seats in a rooftop bar and talked about how much money we have accumulated to get a so called education, and about how beautiful our parents are, and the glory of the incarnation. We left full, not just in appite, but in soul.
Before leaving, I sat on a rain-worn bench, and realized that today had become something of my dreams. I loved this day, I loved the people around me, the city of McMinnville, my 300D, the cloudless sky, and the wind through my hair. Nothing could distroy this day, the forces of hell were nothing compared to the glory that was presented this day. All of my worries and cares dissolved into the air, then fell like a single drop of rain into an endless river, to be carried away into the ocean.
Good music, and good company ended the night, and as I write this I feel as if I am betraying my experience. There are no words for days that could fill books; volume upon volume could never capture a single picture, emotion, or conversation from today. I realize that today was a common miracle, something that happens to us so often that we never have the ability to capture the grandeur of these small pieces of grace. Each moment today was God touched, the final brush of glaze on a common piece of pottery.
I live for these days, I hope to die for these days. Everything in between is life, I guess.
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| Malnourished, under slept, and over thunkSo I will challenge myself to summarize the past year in a sentence. . .
Carly and I are still together, she in New York, I in Portland; summer was drunken, fall was stressful, winter was depressing, and the times, they are a changing.
So here I sit on my couch, thinking over my life, (you know, like we all do. . . don't shake your head, you do it too, I bet you are doing it right now, sitting on your couch in your underwear, thinking about your life) and recently I have done a bit of house cleaning.
I returned to update my myspace page after months of not even checking it, and at least a year without even updating it, and what did I find? I found a great number of blogs, all of which contained quotes like "I think too much" or "I am so burdened by thinking" or "I would sleep, if only I didn't have this thinking problem".
Jesus! Listen to me! I can't believe anyone ACTUALLY read those, and commented on them. I don't know who to be more ashamed of, myself, or my friends for supporting my narcissistic addiction. So what did I do? I gutted it, tore it limb from limb, and rebuilt it.
This is much less a blog talking about how awesome I am, or how smart I am, or how much I think, this is all going to be about what I see, and what I think about it, and I know that that still sounds pretty narcissistic, but what the hell, I am going to do it anyway.
I am sick and tired of all of this depressed, woe is me, shit coming from my writing. If I want to become a better writer, I should just write, dammit! I need to stop making weak ass excuses, trying to trick people in to not believing in me so that if I disappoint them they won't be surprised (I will get to that later). So much of this internet persona is trying to portray something that you yourself would like to see in yourself. Sometimes it borders on metacognition, where you create this being that exists as a model of what you want to be and then juxtapose that with who you think of yourself as being. These two conflicting goals usually end up with the usual myspace/facebook/blog where we make our best attempts at putting on a happy face, and at the same time, bear enough of our soul that people are bated in to seeing who we really are (or at least who we want them to think we really are).
Now I am counting myself as a chief offender in this crime. I have forged too many sentences, and paragraphs with these goals in mind, though they are often not seen at the time of writing. So in a sense, this is a restart.
I am realizing that if I want to blog, I want to blog, and when I will write it will be about what I desire to write about, not what I think people will want to hear. I won't write about how much I am a terrible person, because I write that so that people will say, "Look at how he thinks about himself, oh he is so _______."
I am sick and tired of that, I am a human, and I am full of desires, ambitions, goals, loves, hates, failures, etc.
Lets see where this goes!
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