Sunday, August 29, 2010

fly away




"I always wonder why birds choose
to stay in the same place,
when they can fly anywhere on earth.

Then I ask myself the same question."


Where do you dream of traveling my loves? 
Now, how will you make it happen?

Saturday, August 28, 2010

i love people




I want to meet the world.
I think everybody is just so incredibly beautiful.
I can't help but love everybody. I can't help but see the good in them. 
And I think everybody can see that good.
But there are people who walk their entire lives without knowing the good inside them.
There are people who walk their entire lives unloved
because nobody's told them otherwise.
Tell them. Speak up.
There are people out there that need to hear your voice.
They need to hear what you already know.
That they are beautiful.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

brave new world

 "But I don't want comfort.
I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness.
I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly,
"I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
-Brave New World


 I had to read this book for summer reading, and I loved it. Those were my favorite lines.
Because honestly, what good is comfort if you never get to feel freely?
 I think everything is beautiful.
The rush is beautiful...and the fall. Because when we fall, we get to stumble up again.
We get to take the hands of the people who love us.
We get to realize how strong we are.

 

Look around you.
Life happens because of feelings.
The true actions are done because of how a person feels.


It's what makes us incredibly, grotesquely, miraculously human.



 We can pretend that our uncontrollable feelings are our faults, our downfall. We can try to lose ourselves in the silicone labrynth of technology, drown ourselves in paperwork and dollar bills. We can take medication until we forget who we are. We can diagnose and catalogue and graph and map and disect and try to find the heart strings to pull so we never have to cry. We can kill so we don't have to think.
Or we can take ourselves as messy and imperfect.



We can take ourselves as feel-ers, as life live-ers, as truth-ers.

"All good things are wild and free"
-Thoreau

Friday, August 20, 2010

change



The lights vibrated, pulsated, floated through the air like independent particles with their own mind.  The girl opened her mouth and let her ribcage fly out, felt her muscles twist and shake and tremble with a feeling beyond rage. The feeling of edge. The state of existance just beyond an emotion.


The microphone in her hand, she was armed. Words flew like diamonds, shattering on the ground, slicing into people's faces and legs, cutting them raw.
This is your wake up! She shouted.
This is it! Now what will you do?  Tell me, what do you want to do!


"Everybody here lives in fear. I want you to open up beyond that! Yes, it's uncomfortable,
Yes it hurts, so feel it! Feel that!"



Her voice lowered to a trembling whisper, a sound that crawled through the dingy basement, brushing against the people inside.
"Can you break yourself?" She asked.
"Can you break yourself so that you can put yourself back together in a new way?
Will you? Will you try it?
Because that's the only way to change, really,
that's the only way to change."

freedom




Wednesday, August 18, 2010

courage


I used to think that "fearless" was the best motto.
But then I heard the quote

"Courage is not the absense of fear,
but the knowledge that
something else is more important than fear"

I think that makes the action more meaningful.
Knowing that you are scared, knowing that you have fear
but still moving forward.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

i see you in my dreams


Do you remember when you promised me we'd catch fireflies? You said we'd put them in glass jars, and hang them from the branches above our heads, so they'd illuminate the shadows, and we could breathe in the light.  Then you said we'd set them free, because all creatures should be free, and we'd breathe in the shadows, and watch for shooting stars.



Do you remember when you promised me we'd stargaze on that hill?  And when they tried to make us come in, when they tried to make us leave just after the sun had tipped off the edge of the horizon and the sky was still blue, you took my hand and pointed it up. "There's a star," you said. And you looked at me, and I knew you meant that you would always keep your promises.



Sometimes I see you in my dreams. You are walking by on the sidewalk, fast. You are the waiter in a restaurant. I never recognize your face until after I wake up. Then I cry because I have so many things to say to you, but you're gone.


Last night was different. I saw you and I handed you a letter. I had written everything our silence said to me, and when I handed it to you I told you I was afraid. You read the letter without opening the envelope, and I knew you were more upset by my fear than my words. You held me, and in your breath I felt the apology I would never hear, in your breath I felt resolution beat into my heart.


When you walked away, lenseless glasses were suddenly on your face.  I laughed because you looked funny with glasses, but you didn't hear me. The girl next to me whispered, "You made that boy cry?" I looked closer, and realized they were fogging up.

When I woke up my fingers were woven in the blanket, my hand curled like it had been in yours.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

not enough time


There was just never the right amount of time, she decided. Time to say hello, time to hug, time to apologize, time to promise, time to say goodbye.  It was all whizzing by her like the colors on a groteque merry go round. Round and round and round.


Whenever she'd walk by old trees she would always wonder what the branches had been wittness to. And if the people underneath them had even noticed their existence. When she was under young trees she thought about returning in forty years to see them grown, to see how the time had passed in that unmoving life. To bear witness to the change in herself.


People kept leaving her. She felt as though her insides were a lake, a murky pool of water that sat in the middle of her stomach.  She would punch a hole through her skin with her fist, scoop out the water in shaking hands and watch the tiny droplets that splashed onto the ground below. She could feel their hearts beating as they fell.


All that was left in her was a desert. The dunes reflected the moonlight, the blazing gleam where no shadow was cast. It was silent except for the wind, whistling through the hollowed out space. She realized there was nothing that would grow there, nothing she could plant.


She had to leave too, if she wanted to get anywhere. She had to rise over the anti-flood and find the place where the olive branch would grow. She had to nest there, and leave the wasteland. Leave it before she ran out of time.