All The Best

HAPPY NEW YEAR!
:)

Funny Michigan Dinner

So funny story here.

So my family and i went out to eat dinner tonight in Michigan. We went to this sort of semi-formal buffet type restaurant, where you are supposed to wait to be seated and then, once you are seated, you can help yourself to the buffet and pay at the end. One small detail. My family and i came into the buffet restaurant through a back door instead of the main entrance (yes, it said not to use that door, but being the people we are we ignored it thinking it didnt really matter). That being the case, we failed to notice the incredibly large line of people that was formed at the main entrance, all waiting to be seated and waiting for their turn to eat in the buffet. Apparently, this was a popular dinner choice and we weren't the only ones wanting to eat there! So being oblivious to both the seating requirements as well as the large line of people already waiting to be seated, my family and i simply waltzed right into the dining area of the buffet through the back entrance, grabbed the nearest free and clean table available, and dove right into the buffet line. Leaving an entire line of people waiting for a spot behind us. Hah. We didn't notice the line at the main entrance and all the (angry?) people until well after we were done our meals, at which point we realized how rediculous our mishap was.

Hah, ok so maybe this story isn't as funny as i thought it was. It may have been one of those "you had to be there" stories. My apologies.

Christmas

So this is Christmas, as the song goes.

i spent awhile trying to think of something profound or meaningful or bold to write about. It seemed like this day deserved it, it seemed like it needed something more. But there is just nothing more than the simple here. But i guess that is ok. Because Christmas really is a simple thing. It's been made complicated by us...but really, it should be very simple.

God lowered himself and came to earth, and even if it did not happen on this exact day, it is still the day we have chosen to celebrate this on, and that is why Christmas exists. Admist the hectic business and brightness and colors of this day, it is easy to forget the point of Christmas. I do it all the time. But then...when the day is about done, and all the gifts are open and family seen, and the house is finally still and silent with floors decorated in piles of colorful papers, bows and presents...then i make myself remember, and i sit in awe for timeless minutes.

God came to earth to save a world that is destroying itself. God - huge, wonderful, and in need of no one...came to live among us, to grow up with us, to experience the same pains and hurts and joys and love that we feel. And ultimately to set us free. Freedom, freedom, freedom. God saved us and gave us a precious and wonderful freedom.

i love the snow at Christmas. It doesn't seem like Christmas to me if there is not white snow. I find it ironic as i watch large and wet white snowflakes drift wordlessly into a serene world of white all around. Ironic because it is more than just our physical world that has been colored white. Know this.

Merry Christmas.

Under the Sparkling Tree on Christmas Eve

are the stars brightly shining this year?
i am not sure.
they are brighter than before
but not as much as i thought they would have been by now.
i started to put it all away
but realized that i shouldn't, or at least that i really can't bear to.
i can't believe i have lay under the sparkling christmas tree
now in a pentagon.
i was thinking new each time, but never without missing.
never, never without missing.
it's been a long day coming
but i no longer want anything to help it pass.
still, silent, magical, sparkling Christmas Eve and Christmas tree
the atmosphere is perfect enough
but incomplete. always incomplete.
Oh Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining
usually they are not through my eyes.
this year i can't bring myself to check if they are.

i miss you
i love you
my angel

Traces

like music
holding all glory once bodies are lost in the resonance
it never needed a beginning or end
only a time to capture, and all else is starved

i said try me
and you said we've been past that
since this all started
and so i took your hand
and traced it and wanted to fit mine in it
and then you showed me they were my fingers all along

have we blended that completely

there's something that is not entirely right
i always knew there was something unsettled
even though it was always kept so still and so neat
and i was so careful that it would never be disturbed

i still reach for something that is only you
your palm and nothing else with it
needing it to be more than at any other time

there's something that has become a little too fake
about this sleeping emaciation
something a little too warm about hands held in a fire

Go Back?

if you could go back and erase what has caused you the greatest pain in your life, would you do it?

i have thought about this for a long time. Then i had a conversation with a friend a couple months back about it. That insight pushed me a bit further. Then i had a very similar conversation with a group of friends just a little while ago. Everyone had some thoughts on it, although i am not sure if in the end we got anywhere.

i'm still thinking about it.

Sometimes i think i have my answer. In those moments when time becomes strangely still and pale and open (i hope you can understand what i mean by time being open) i think i have my answer. And in those moments where i feel like i am looking at myself from the outside, watching my life instead of living it, i am pretty sure i know what i would choose. At those times i would never go back and erase any of it because it has made me a person.

And although it is my greatest weakness, it has in the end given me my greatest strength.

But then there is reality. Then there are the days, most days, where the obscure is no longer, and only bare tangibility surrounds. Those days detesting the strength and shaping, and only wishing the weakness was not there. And doing anything to numb the pain.

Numb the pain that holds me so captive that finds me a freedom and makes me so much greater than i could be without it.

Quote

"I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived."
- Margaret Mitchell

one of my favourites.

Noticing A Bit Of Christmas

i noticed Christmas for the first time this month. Which is a bit sad to me, because i usually like to begin celebrating Christmas incredibly early, so that by the time it is over i really feel like i have experienced Christmas. This year, the Christmas season all seems to be passing in a blur. It scares me when life moves so fast that it becomes a blur. There is so much that i could have experienced...that i may actually have experienced...but it all went so fast that i didn't have much time to notice any of it. i'm not sure how to react when i can see that i am missing what is happening right in front of me.

i walked around downtown Windsor Ontario tonight with my sister. The trees in one section have all been decorated with Christmas lights and Christmas designs, making a sort of Christmas Light Garden, complete with paths that you can walk on winding their way all through the different trees. Lights strung above, below, and all around. You can get right up close to it all, let yourself become surrounded by the sparkling garden. On the other side of the Christmas Light Garden is a skating rink, also decorated with some Christmas lights, and with speakers that play fuzzy Christmas music into the not-so-silent downtown air. We tried skating on the ice for a little while, but it wasn't very fun after about a minute since we were only wearing our shoes, not skates. Besides, we weren't exactly dressed for the cold air either, seeing as how we had just gone hot-tubing.

Looking around it all seemed very cheap to me, very made up, very created. Kind of like a carnival, all the lights and sounds and whirring rides. It all seemed so glitzy, so fabricated. But it made me smile. Because at the same time it was so classic, so sublimely unmarred in its Christmas-ness that i have become so accustomed to. It is true that i am a person who rarely finds anything a city has to offer spectacular. The man-made formulations that make up the entity of a city usually repel me, and even irritate me. Except at Christmas. For some reason at this time of the year, i embrace the fabricated dream world, for all its cheap glitziness. The streetlights illuminating falling snow, the christmas lights decorating every erected building, the christmas music floating out of sidewalk speakers, people hurrying, busy yet peaceful all at once. And silver bells and sleigh bells, and warm roasted almonds being sold by street vendors, and pine trees and angels and stars and glowing nativity scenes outside every catholic church. It all speaks of what Christmas has become, and even though i often wonder about it all...it still means Christmas, the familiar and safe Christmas that i have grown up becoming used to, and relying on.

Safe, familiar, something i can rely on. These words are slowly becoming meaningless to me. Life is showing me more and more that these words are simply what they are: words. So i guess for all its fakeness, i still cling to Christmas because it is something familiar and something safe and something reliable and something concrete and something faithful. i guess we always cling on to fakeness, all sorts of fakeness, for those very reasons.

it was cold.
the blankets, cloaks, mittens couldn't - wouldn't - keep out the cold.
the snow, frozen, lay in icing sheets of white. they were black.
the snow queen had cast her spell.
winter's finger. jack frost.
ice princess.
angel perched eminently on the tree;
in the snow.

The Valley of Dry Bones

Ezekiel 37:4-5 "Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord...I will make breath enter you, and YOU WILL COME TO LIFE!"

Here we live day to day in this wonderful world that God has created, surrounded by life and vitality and God's wonderful, breathing, alive, and truly living creation...yet so often we ourselves are only dry bones in it all. Dead, dry bones. We are surrounded by life - everything else lives - but so often we ourselves fail to live.

We watch a river flow continuously, watch how it praises God with its constant babbling and never-ending song; and we can only sit in shame because we don't even spend a single day praising God, yet the living river spends its enternity.

We watch the rocks and the trees glorify God in reverent stillness, content with merely standing still in the presence of God, moved only by his breath in the wind; and we can only stand in humility because we struggle to spend even an hour in reverent stillness an quiet, yet the living rocks and trees spend a lifetime.

We watch a petal soar in a breeze, dancing and twirling in rhythm to a unheard beat, joyously moving and laughing in utter contentment with being God's own creation; and we can only lower our heads because we would rather sit in our own misery, focused only on the hardships, instead of truly knowing how blessed we are if we just started to live, yet the living petals do this as a destiny.

We watch the stars above us sparkle and shine in the darkened sky, reflecting so wonderously the glory of God, illuminating an entire blackness to mirror God's face; and our hearts can only break because we want all the glory for ourselves, and find it a chore for our lives to reflect God to others, yet the living stars spend an entire existance.

The grass, the dirt, the sun, the stars, the moss, the pebbles, the leaves, the rivers, the mountains - everything is so alive, so beautiful, so breathtaking. Everything around us reflects and speaks of God. And we can only long to be like that; like the creation around us that we never think of as being alive, that we look at as dead surroundings. We think we are the only alive creatures. Yet the entire time we are not at all living but rather dead, dry bones.

We need breath. We need breath to enter our own bones, the bones that have become of us, just like breath has been breathed into the luscious and awesome creation around us. We need to become flesh again, we need to be brought to life. We are useless, non-functioning, dry bones. Dry bones with the potential to become so much more. Take us, renew us, wake us up inside, breathe living breath into our fragile brittleness. Make us alive, make us able to stand up on our feet, let us be creation that is living.

What I Saw Today

gold plated beams
roaring to the ground below at furious speeds
only to be...

spilled on the snow



i just want to be done, i think
i'm ready to move again
i want to be where that sun
is making crystal diamonds dance
on a sterling blue and white
pearl lake

Better Left Unsaid

you say it won't come this way
and i saw it the way you saw it
and realized i had picked the best time
to be the worst i could

and am i watching myself from the outside

knowing i let it become trapped
but i will continue to depend on this
though i depend on it regretfully

is looking always enough
maybe sometimes it can't be found
changing it all when it should have stayed
i told you not to want
and you still envy the people who know me

but i will continue to depend on this
though i depend on it regretfully
just for tonight, just for tonight

Shadowland

she calls it shadowland
because her world has become an outline
and she can no longer say it is anything more
than half of what it used to be
but a different half, like a cut-out figure
like shadows of what used to be there

her body
it gets smaller and smaller and smaller
losing herself into nothing to become everything
forming into a shell of something former
of who she once was
and she cannot remember, but she thinks she may be
a silhouette of who she used to be
in a different land that she has forgotten the way to

but shadowland is where she lives now
stays as it is, keeps all of her there
barely anything now, but what is left
she is caught in profiles
in hallowness, in frames
instead of what everything else displays
and she'll take this fake pacific
if it means that she...
and she'll take each frail breath
if it means that she...

...she doesn't even know what she'll get anymore
but it's like it has stopped mattering
there was a reason once, a long time ago
but she has been in shadowland for so long now
that reasons and elucidations no longer make a difference
she is fixated on this acheived half-existance
trading it all in to be one of the silhouettes