Perspective

It’s all a matter of perspective. In another world, I believe a me with 10% less resolve might have fallen greatly into a devastating quantity of temptation. So many times I’ve skirted the edges of failure, lack of motivation, and deceit with begrudging kindness, patience, and morality. And yet, a 10% better me might avoid countless obstacles I’ve struggled over, and pass temptations and trials I’ve so foolishly leapt into headlong.

I pray I’m learning as I go, that I might eventually be the better me.

But really everything is a matter of perspective. You can be angry, or pensive, realizing how little anger solves. You can be impatient and cruel, but kind words and love in adversity effect far more substantial good.

Even a little tweak on perspective changes a good deal. Water, for instance, is necessary for survival. It hydrates us, floats our necessary vitals along lifelines throughout our bodies, gets nourishment and resources into organs and cells and out. It keeps the temperature of the earth within reasonable averages. The advantages of water are endless. Without water’s extraordinary properties, we couldn’t exist. And yet, water is devastating. Water floods, pours down and carries vehicles and houses away, seeps through cracks in the roof and decays wood, erodes stone, pools through our apparel and chills us to the bone. Water is as devious as it is necessary, crawling into every nook and applying a natural entropy.

Oxygen is the same. Without oxygen, our cells suffocate and die. Without oxygen, most living creatures on this earth cannot exist. And yet, oxygen rusts metal, and increases the rate of entropy in a great many things. Injected straight into our bloodstreams, it’s murder.  Too much oxygen and not a reasonable balance can overwhelm our systems. Liquid oxygen is an explosion waiting to happen.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Existence is tentative. Why be angry? Why be cruel? Is not nature and the rest of humanity cruel enough? Where has that brought us? Countless innocents are dying or refugees or are abused by other humans – what have we ever gained with hate?

Listening to Christmas

Listen. The sky-sluice unleashes its floodgates and the waters rivulet over the eaves and down the drains. It's all the same as those plastic chutes, racing marbles as children do, tiny marble-droplets of rain rolling down my windowpanes, Is the world different or just the same, with off-hued glasses removed, revealing the world in plain light? The birds warble and dive between the stormy night trees and the bats weave and dart among the leaves, and the weather is just right - a bit cool, I believe.
And nothing special, nothing wise, nothing crazy outside our lives rears its groundhog head, nor casts a shadow over this pre-wintry twilight light, whose full moon hides behind scraggly clouds. It's a bat night, if ever there was, and the hazelnuts pay no mind. But Christmas time, sing the homes, covered in uncharacteristic light and humming with sounds of chords and words of snow, though none shows (not here - we've green instead of white).
It's give and go says every Christmas show, but I've a mind to share and stay, and I've already given everything anyway, so here's my soul, my heart, my life. I, too, can give like Christ, at least in my own way. Gentle, gentle, hold me now, the evening begins its sway. Let me let you let us sleep and tomorrow we'll engage the day.

Christmas Eve

I'd rather be sick at my parent's house than anywhere else, though the timing is certainly inconvenient.

My parent's backyard (what you can see if it - I'm no photographer, apologies) was beautiful in the sun rising over the hills this morning. When the sun finally crested the rolling waves of earth and pierced through the trees, it gleamed through the mercurial fog like an alchemical magic, golden strands of sunlight streaming down like heavenly tinsel.
It's Christmas (soon), ladies and gentlemen, thought not a white one, I'm afraid. Merry Christmas.

I had nightmares about art history last night, and could not sleep more than twenty minutes at a time. I woke up sweating and exhausted every twenty minutes or so until morning, whereupon I surrendered and walked outside. Rarely do I experience a surrealism when ambling down city, or small-town, streets, yet here, cupped like a dove in the palms of the mountains, the clouds crashed and made frothy the waves of the earth. Here, the earth and sky battled, and the mists lingered long before, bruised and beaten, they lifted with despair. In summer, the maple's splindly arms don't seem so defeated, condemned to bear ice and lichen until spring resurrects them again.
As I walk through the forest, hearing the distant trickling of water hidden in the shroud transports me into the fae, and every shifting form, then, might be faun or unicorn, fairy or pixie, sliding between the silvery branches with slippery grace.

When I see such a world, it captures me. Does grace redeem these trees, flowers, hills and mountains, doe and falcon, as surely as for me? I inhale beauty, and it is very good indeed. It is, I think, more than truth.

------

I won super-giant boggle tonight, against the family. I remember as a little child, the parents always allowed me to use two letter words in the original boggle, and I still lost. My parents are quite talented when words come into play. But I managed to eke out victories in quiddler yesterday (up and down) and boggle today, which might be nothing but a miracle (though I think I won boggle by 30 points - so maybe I was on fire).
I'm glad I'm not a child, anymore, for the simple fact that I'll be getting sleep tonight. Santa, keep it down. If you deliver gifts, remember that not even the mice are stirring, please and thank you. I didn't sleep well last night, and I need to get better before a wedding this weekend, a drive back to oregon, and a visit to A and S in california.
Merry Christmas eve, everyone. I pray everyone has safe travels and a relaxing, peaceful time holding friends, family, and Christ close to heart.

Empty Pages

When you've sat and stared at an empty journal - or past, really - or an empty screen for long enough, you realize you are too tired for writing.

Hello, empty page, what say you?

...

Ah yes, that's kinda the point, isn't it?

...

How many stitches, how many times must the needle enter and exit before the quilt is made? Every shudder sets the thread painfully free - what freedom is that? Blind, bereft of beauty, a thread without an eye. Love is not the luffing sail, but tacking into the wind. Oh, and it's such a wind that drives dreams through the sky above the clouds of sea, into a world where setting and rising sun meet.

...

Well?

...

Almost Christmas eve, and the rain hammers the walls and windows without relief, a lullaby that settles the house into a Christmas silence, where not even the rodents dare disturb the Christ child's sleep. 

...

Good night to you, too. Isn't it all just doodles, anyway? Why this congestion of thought that stumbles forward like a sinus headache, and none of it parseable into coherent thoughts I may ink. Good night, deer, nibbling at frozen grass near the trees. I hope I enjoy this as much as you.

I think I'm going to suffer being sick at Christmas.

The sky was bruise black, today, an eeyore hide of sky, not the jaundiced bruise of impending tornado. And the rains dutifully came, washing our sighs away, and breathing new scents of pine into the mountain air. Does the night smell of lightning to you? I can see it in the doe's eyes.

It's good to be home for Christmas

1. Mother asked father what he was watching on television while my father played solitaire in the living room, and he replied: "Thor", whereupon mother acquired a rather dazed look, and said, "Thor? How do you spell that?" "T-H-O-R." "What's that," mother asked. "A movie about Thor, the norse god of thunder and lightning." "Huh." (mother has definitely seen both Thor and the Avengers)

2. Quiddler victory. I think it's a spiritual gift. Unless against Matthew.. I think his spiritual gifting is stronger.

3. Art history study under the warmest of blankets

4. World's End in front of the fire at Matthew's

5. Snow

6. Staring through the bony trees that look like the rib cages of colossal beasts, layered with lichen and moss over every available surface, pointing to north on every facet, and into the mountains and the hills, splattered with powdered-sugar snow.

7. Thick mists swallowing the low-land marshes at the base of the hill and snaking with the creek through the tall brush covered with hoarfrost so even the spiderwebs are crystallized and beautifully articulated in white

8. Quietude and rain.

9. Books: V for Vendetta, The Story of Art, ee cummings Selected Poetry, Carl Sandburg Complete Poetry, Simic The Voice at 3:00 AM

10. Chips and salsa everywhere (mother actually procured a great assortment of my favorite foods. I think she bought enough so that if I ate only chips and salsa, or only anything, she'd probably have enough of that one thing. Home is a sort of happy-trap)

11. Journaling

12. Being completely in the country, and driving along country roads. There is something about driving along country roads that empties me of pain and fills me with joy. I don't even need to know I have pains to be uplifted. It's like not knowing what a burden gravity is until you can fly.

13. The family. They are the best.

14. Cookies (I don't even eat many cookies - read #10. But knowing that they are there increases the level of Christmas by a far sum)

15. Tree, candles, tea, fireplace, wreath, lights, music, snow - it's a Christmas wonderland


I love visiting my family, though I begin missing my friends the instant I leave them. The tranquility at home, however, is unmatched.



Frost the leaves and they are diamonds,
spider's webs are stained glass prisms
trapping winter wishes
in grasses beside the road

hart and hind leave hearts behind
crossing frozen streams that hide
among the hoarfrost patches
that linger beside the road

broad the fog's grey-gloved hand
that cossets now the argent land
whose silver hair and flaxen plains
are dormant now,
sleeping, beside the road

though the aspens shiver,
the pines share not their coat
the maples, naked, ice-chimes bear
the firs are clothed,
yet ice grows in their hair -
does the wind sing eerily
when birds and bees have disappeared?
whispering beside the road
---

The moose was here,
his musk is heavy in the mists
that shrouded his steps -

can you mask such magnificence?
his cleft toes clench
the earth so gently

he brushes past
the spider-webbed grass
reverently

how can one
walk so lightly
who bears a weight so heavy

I ponder this
as his footsteps carry me
deeper into the mists