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.

Sick Days

Growing up, I was taught that as much, or more, can be learned outside the classroom as in. My dad, being the outdoorsman that he is, believed that nature, the woods and the mountains and the vast emptiness of the skies, were an environment ripe for learning. And so we learned. I learned that it’s better muster the strength to go to class when ill, in order to save your sick days for when you are best equipped to take advantage of their gift. The best “sick days” are the ones in which you are most healthy, lively, adventurous, and exuberant. The best sick days are the ones in which school and work are hours away and the only thing you need to be taught is whatever the world chooses to show you. The best sick days are when you wake up at 3am and drive through fading city lights to reach the thick and impenetrable darkness of the desert night, or when you find yourself in the salty playground of the ocean before the sun begins to peek over the cliff tops, and the waves reflect no light but the moon’s and the stars’. The best sick days are, indeed, the ones in which you are not sick, not even close.


It was with this in mind that Sarah and I boarded a train in yesterday’s morning light. We had a backpack and a camera, and school was right where it should be, miles away. Sarah had taken the GRE the day before, and we both felt that a mental health day was in order. We boarded the train and watched the lazy coast slip by, and I secretly hoped an animated Tom Hanks would take us by the hand and lead us to the roof for an even better view.

When the wheels screeched and slowed an hour later, we stepped onto the platform and into a new city. We wandered in search of a hearty brunch. Our feet took us up past the red-domed mission that loomed overhead, and eventually across to the river road where our noses told us we had found what we were looking for.

At a quaint home-turned-restaurant there was a wooden sign reading, “Ramos House Café.” We sat and let the morning breeze waft scents of fresh biscuits and eggs and apple-butter and bacon around us. A small card on the table told us the proprietor lived in the very house we were eating at, and we felt like long-awaited guests at the table of a most welcoming host. The food arrived in an elegant pile, if ever there was such a thing, and we savored the hot meal and sipped crisp melon-water from mason jars. And when we were done we walked off, satisfied and grateful for the small and timeless pleasures of life, like the lingering taste of a perfect breakfast on your tongue.

We passed the rest of the day in slow movements. From the café our feet carried us to a park where we stared at the sky ‘til our eyes watered, and we laughed with our bellies.

We pretended to be architects and built a house of paper and ink, while drinking coffee from cups covered in snowflakes and carolers that reminded us our favorite holiday was on the horizon. And as the sun blinked its goodbye, and we grew hungry again, we stepped into a restaurant where time slowed almost to a standstill.

By the time we left the restaurant the earth had twisted us 2000 miles further from the sun, and its light was merely a fading memory. In the dark we wandered to a bench and read to pass the time until our train would take us homeward once more. We opened Traveling Mercies and random chapter by random chapter learned about the beauty of our imperfections and a woman’s struggle to live with God.

We moved to the platform where we first stepped into the city and continued to read. A freight train thundered by, and we huddled together to escape the reach of its grasping, windy fingers. Eventually, the headlights of a more amiable machine bent around the corner to us, and we climbed aboard. And with the sleepy mission town falling rapidly into our past, we gracefully slid over greased rails all the way home, basking in the quiet contentedness.