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    * above: open space in Wakaw, Canada

Let's Travel...

Sit With Me.

Mauthausen : Day 3

Vienna : Day 2

Vienna : Day 1

Good morning.

Trolley crossing.

Brightly colored macaroons look too picturesque to eat.

Evening shower.

Tell Me a Story.

I just heard this beautiful story from M83.

"We would be hundreds, thousands, millions
The biggest group of friends the world has ever seen
Jumping and laughing forever
It would be great, right?"

Yes, it would be great.

Baked Whimsy.

Over the past year I've developed a terrible addiction to cake pops, especially the Birthday Cake flavor from Starbucks. In case you haven't yet indulged in these aforementioned delights, cake pops are bite sized pieces of unbelievably rich cake on a stick, complete with a candy coating and a whimsical aesthetic. 

I've been wanting to try my hand at crafting my own cake pops, for the purpose of freely enjoying as many as my gluttonous self desires without leaving the comfort of my home, or my bed for that matter. So, last night I found a recipe here, and went for it.

The steps looked something like this...

Faces Like Lockets.

I’m sitting in Panera, my eyes glancing around, flitting from face to face like a bumblebee bouncing from flower to flower in a field of color. I’m one of the youngest in the room, most being well into the winter of their years. As I look onto the faces of my elders, the lyrics “A world inside us” ring through my ears, and suddenly my eyes are opened. I see the stories in the wrinkles and scars and sunspots around me. I see faces like lockets, heads full of wonderful stories and sentimental photographs that just need to be opened. These people have lived. They have been young and have felt what I feel and have done the things I do. They have walked in my shoes, and the shoes of those older than I, and they have neared the end of their days. I want to sit at each table and ask of them who they are and where they have been. I want so badly to hear their stories, to learn what adventures gave them their scars and what jokes were told to produce such deep laugh-lines. I’d love to hear their tales of loves lost and won, to hear of their first love and their last. I want to learn from them, to hear perspectives on life that have resulted from looking back through the sea of time that drenches their lives. I want to hear them say they’ve been in my shoes. I want them to say they’ve made the same mistakes I have made and have forgiven themselves and have been forgiven. I want them to listen my story and my ideas for where I’m headed, and when I finish talking say, “Kid, you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You’ll do just fine.”  I want the telling of our stories and the sharing of our humanity to bridge the gap between our years, or better yet, eliminate it, to make the young ripe with wisdom and the old fresh with joy and inspiration. These are the things I desire, but instead, I’ll sit quietly in my booth typing, and they’ll sit in theirs reading the paper and slowly drinking coffee, and we will grow no closer. I’ll feel too busy with my work and too polite to interrupt their quiet time, and they will enjoy their reading comfortably, probably believing someone of my age wouldn’t want to take the time to listen to their wisdom. And if I sit unmoved, I guess that makes them right.

The Pain of Parallel Lines

Few things are sadder than parallel lines. Because parallel lines never touch. They can span the distance of eternity in both directions and race around the world twice, but they never touch. They may shoot from heaven to hell, but they never cross each other’s path. They can walk through life side-by-side, heart-breakingly close, near enough to feel the warmth of each other’s skin and breath and life, but they can never touch, because to touch would be the death of the parallel line.

Let’s make a pact, a promise to each other. Let’s search for the parallel lines in our lives, the things we refuse to touch because of fear or hurt or anger or prejudice. Let’s hunt and find and weed out the parallel lines in our lives. Let’s take our parallel lines and bend them, even if only by a single degree, towards each other. Let’s bend them so they touch. Let’s turn our lives into the messy canvas of a child’s sketchbook, where all the lines cross and intersect and touch each other, and the colors run off the page and stain the table. Yes, let us touch each other. Let’s touch it all. May our hands be smeared with the vibrant colors of the ink and paint and bloody lines in our lives, and may we grow sweaty and exhausted with the strain of turning those seemingly immovable lines towards each other. It’s not easy, but the beauty of these lines is that it only takes one degree. With the slightest twist, the briefest turn, the smallest change in course, the lines must eventually touch. They may not touch today, or tomorrow, or in seven miles, or three years, but one day, some mile, they will, and a single touch can make all the difference.

Fear/Curiosity

The Slow Stillness of a Lonely Quiet

It was the jeans that did it.  It was the swish-swish slapping of my jeans at the calf that did it. They swish-swish swished as I walked alone through the cool morning, and the swish-swish swishing alone kept time in the overwhelming and beautiful stillness abounding. There was swishing and my breath slowly churning the hanging mist, and there was little else. Sure, there was the passing of cars and the tweet-tweet of birds hopping from branch to branch in nearby bushes, but mostly there was swishing and breathing; the swishing and breathing that for a few seconds slowed my careening pace through time and reminded me of the import of the slowness. It is in the slow stillness of a lonely quiet that the body submits to the authority of the mind. When the limbs cease their grasping at the next rung, it is then that the mind begins to reach. When there is nothing to say and no one to say it to, the mind finds its voice.  And when the mind speaks, its whispered words in your inner ear will foster creativity, and your thoughts will be made pregnant and swollen with the potential of many new and beautiful things.