Summer 2006 Ramblings

May 2, 2006:  "Beauty and Words and Meaning and Rambling and Randomness"

Yesterday I wrote about all the words I've never said and how they will fall like gems from my lips and pile up in a Pharaoh's tomb...useless and tainted by the dust of the ages until one day, hundreds of years from now, my words are discovered, restored, deemed worthy and sent all over the world to be placed in glass cases in museums. Cases that are bulletproof and smudged with fingerprints. Maybe then you'll listen to me. Maybe then they'll touch your heart.

The image of words falling like gems stuck. A fairy tale from years ago. Does anyone remember "Diamonds and Toads"? Somewhere deep, deep inside of me, from the time I was three or four or seven or ten, I stored within me the image idea of flowers and diamonds and words all falling freely from the mouth of a beautiful princess. A blessed girl with an unlikely beginning and a penchant for attracting handsome princes who take all your worries away.

May 4, 2006

It's funny how hope fluctuates. I feel like over the last year, my hope in a certain relationship has been like ocean waves. I just learned about them in Oceanography... about how they are formed by the sun and the moon, about how they lap and crash and break on sandy shores. Each month and week and day of the last two years has been a ride on a wave... the slow creeping of hope back onto my skin, the crash of it in a single, breathtaking, amazing moment, and ultimately, it's recession.

No matter how many times my hope-waves hit the shore, the ocean always pulls them back and reclaims them. I think now my hope is a rip-tide. Rushing in a narrow line back to deep water. And I know someday it will inevitably make its way back to me, but I'm thinking that things will be different when that day comes. Maybe my hope will be for a different person or maybe I will be a different person -- one who is more capable of navigating through unpredictable waters.

May 22, 2006:  "The World Broke"

 I want to believe that life is more beautiful than any of the ways the world paints it. I want to be different in the way that I don't just accept things as they seem but reach beyond, and more importantly, above. I want to live a life that is passionate. I want to live a life that means something.

You can't read as many books and think as many thoughts as I do and not find yourself here. Where is here? I'm not sure. It's some place between Heaven and Earth. Between knowing and not having the strength to act. And even though you wish you could do something, you're so thrilled and amazed that the possibility even exists. You could die happy just knowing that it's possible to be who you always wanted to be. Or I could, anyway. 

Last night, I reread The Alchemist for the tenth time and it made me glow. And on the drive home from work all the words of "Fix You" were from God to me. 

Maybe all the beatings a heart takes in a lifetime just serve to make it a more beautiful color. A rainbow of blue and purple bruises. Pretty.

And maybe, if alchemy is true, a heart of iron just needs time to become a heart of gold.

May 28, 2006: "Tonight"

By eight o'clock I felt completely useless. Lonely, with no life to speak of. My answer to all of life's woes? Barnes & Noble bookstore. Otherwise known as my fortress of unwanted solitude. It's lovely, but too cold, and I get depressed when I can't find a book that draws me in. How can it be that none of the thousands of voices written on the billions of pages are speaking to me?

When I finally left the sky was plum-colored and the moon a crescent, a small smile.

At home again, I sat in front of my mirror and looked at my face. Wondered why I bothered with the outfit and the mascara. I wondered at the thoughts going on behind my expressionless face. I tried thinking "GOD," and then, "the devil," to see if anything changed. Nothing. 

Someone once told me, when she found out I believe, that she should've known - she could see it in my face. Does she still see it? Or have all the ways I've screwed up made my face like every other one in the crowd?

My ambition is to be ethereal. To be nothing really, except light and air. But I think all I'm ever going to be is a solid, tangible, ugly-gray stone.

I need out. 

June 21, 2006:

We see through sea-eyes and black lashes.

We like to let the sun warm our skin.

We battle the waves.

We dance on the shore.

And we crouch down to talk to anemones

(we know magic is real).

We stand as tall as the four palm trees.

The sky is our canvas,

the sun our palette

(and when it gets later we spread it's fire across the sky).

August 29, 2006:

If I were a vandal I would write poems on primly painted business walls. I wouldn't waste the fear of being caught, the pounding of my heart, by scrawling a single word or pseudonym. 

If I were a vandal I would paint a landscape, a kiss. I would write out prophecies, hopes, wishes and fears.

If I had the guts to risk getting caught, I would say something important to the world. I would challenge their thoughts or inspire them to be better. I would educate them. I would make a treasure map and send them on a journey.