17 December 2002

transgress.
i love clouds. they are such interesting things--beings, almost. today the valley was cloudy. not one solid mass of grey but many different shades, different bodies of clouds piled upon one another, the light seeping through at moments. i love it when the clouds are low. celestial bodies roiling, stretching towards their terrestial counterpart, the lake. transgressive, something that should not happen, cloud touch earth, melding with the very source of its existence. when the clouds are so low, so distinct from one another, three dimensional rather than the flat background they generally appear to be, they seem almost alive. i walked through a cloud once--down a mountain. the air visible, swirling around me. such a strange sensation.

10 December 2002

lamentation.
on sunday i walked out of church. i've never done that before. i could feel myself becoming frustrated and anxious and decided that simply sitting through it wasn't worth the anger i would feel afterwards. so i left. very simply, out the side door which was right next to my seat. the speaker was talking about his mission, which covered the north side of the traditional Bible belt. how mormonism destroys other churches' false doctrines and revisions of the scriptures. always circling back around to the language of battle and destruction and conquering. that bothers me immensely, to speak of another religious tradition as a mistaken, misshapen thing to be banished and smashed by the all-powerful weapon of the truth. i do not agree. i believe there is truth and beauty to be found in almost every religious tradition (the qualifier only because I do not know every religious tradition). and while there are differences and while i may even point to some of the differences and call them mistakes, i am much more interested in hearing people out, in finding out how they think about things, than in shutting them down. constructing walls and barriers, creating distance, declaring a triumph--that can only end in lamentation.

i returned to church when the speaker was done. i like church. it has immense power to make me happy. i wish i could see the statements such as those made in that talk as only the outward manifestation of imperfection that they are. but i can't. i expect more. and when i see such backwardness i cringe and do not want to be a part of it. someday i need to overcome that. for now, i need to find a way to manage the anxiety that invariably arises because of it.

06 December 2002

grace.
i love watching snow fall. so weightless, drifting unpredictably towards earth and sometimes back upwards again. i walk in the snowfall, watching as the world is covered in grace. how odd that this light, almost bodiless substance can become the weight of destruction. branches cracking and breaking; bodies falling; roofs caving in. and if it is spring, if the beauty of rebirth has begun, the devastation is that much more heartrending--limbs loaded with blossoms bearing the weight of the heavens with no relief until they snap and plunge. i wonder about this strange relationship. i do see snow as grace--as a beautiful covering for the death of the world. unasked for, freely giving, offering the water of life. but simultaneously devastating. is this the nature of grace?

02 December 2002

realize.
yesterday i watched a fly die. it was strange. he crawled up in front of me on my desk and tipped over. he stayed there, off kilter, one wing in the air the other under his side until i flicked him off the back edge of my desk. he seemed so big, sitting there dead on my desk. much larger than the pesky nuisance i would have considered him had he been alive, buzzing around my head. somehow his death made me realize how real his life was in a way i never could have had he been his normal buggy self.

sometimes i have moments like that--realizations of how incredible the world and life are. strangely, many of those moments involve insects. lying on my back on the grass, looking up at the trees thinking that this must be what a beetle sees. standing in the dark face to face with a hovering fire fly the summer I first discovered them. finding two beautiful fuzzy, black & white, striped and spotted caterpillars crawling their crazy crawl along a fence post. i don't care about the science of insects, about how their lives work biologically. but the facts of their lives amaze me.

21 November 2002

medium.
strange. i've been thinking about this medium for a month now, fascinated with the idea of writing to everyone and no one at the same time. and here i am with my very own. didn't know that was possible without being capable of creating it myself. should have known better--you can do anything with the web. here's a link to what set me off on this whole blog thing. it's my friend john's site. i suppose i can call him my friend, though technically i don't know him that well. anyway, his site is mindonfire.com i love it. enough for now. i want to see if this actually worked.