NPM Day 3 {Crystalline}

Crystalline
September 30, 2016

You used to say
you were too prismatic
and I’d hate all of your other sides.
I never believed you,
I didn’t believe it,
even when I saw
that crystalline dagger
coming for me.
And no one believed me
when I said you were beautiful,
when I believed in your beauty,
when I put all my hope
in the colors
I swore I saw
from my point of view.
But that damned perspective
saved my life so many nights,
even when I cursed at you,
even when I regretted you,
even when I simply
glimpsed
your dark side
for what I thought
must have only been the first time.
And all these years later
I still call you a hero
though we haven’t spoken
and we haven’t reconciled
and we’ve thrown all our love
out of the light.

NPM Day 2 {Beckoned}

Beckoned
April 2, 2017

The Oregon sun was petulantly dry,
the earth beside the road quiet and choked
with enchanting travelers' dust, clustered
with tiny mountains sharp, yellow rocks
between blinding white daisies or
a thrush of persistent dandelions.

A short climb through grass on the left
led to dragonflies, green and blue,
darting over the river stones and gerridae
and the sun was not cruel but tender
as water rolled and gushed around boulders,
thundering to be freed over the falls.
To the right the ground sloped, ending
abruptly, giving way to the truth below
where waters dangerous and blue beckoned,
and it was there I flung my tiny body
over the cliff, into the deep, feeling my feet
just touch the murdering rock below the surface.

If I close my eyes I can still feel the sun
purifying the gold in my long hair,
and the air around me cooling in descent
just before the water meets me gladly,
devouring me up from my toes as
I plunge myself into the unknown, and
wondering almost infinitely--
if I break the surface, will it break me?

NPM 2016: Day 19 {The Sound (Just)}

The Sound (Just)
September 30, 2015

We passed 300 midnights
just awake within the sound.
I can barely remember it anymore–
the chilling alertness I felt
as that serendipitous chime
resonated among books and silence.
I just don’t have the energy.
What was a hopeful melody
has become a foreign dissonance,
a flawed note in a forgotten voice,
or perhaps above all things
just a noise.

The Exceptional Uncaptured Moment

When there are difficult things weighing you down, suffering and struggles that take your attention, it's easy to focus on the wrongness of "everything." I remember, in every era of depression, someone asking me what was wrong and my response being quite honestly, "Everything." And it sounded dramatic, and people called me dramatic, but there are those experiences where everything truly seems wrong. And then, after some conversation, you can pinpoint that one thing, that untranslatable exception to the everything else, that singular flaw in your life that somehow feels worse and somehow "more wrong" than everything else.

In turn, there are good times in life when everything does not seem wrong. Everything isn't wonderful or overwhelmingly happy. But it's good. It's alright, it's pleasant. These are the times, I believe, that finding "joy in the Lord" is most accessible, because that sort of joy is often quiet and contented. It doesn't require wealth or impressive photography or acknowledgement from the world. It just is. And even in those times, there are also the exceptions--the untranslatable thing that rises above everything else, the singular fragment of bliss that surpasses all the "good" and the "alright", the thing that is "more good" than everything else.

I have experienced both of these times in abundance. I have experienced these exceptions. And since I spent my last post talking about the mundane frustrations of a gajillion doctor's appointments, today we're going to go in a positive direction.

A few weeks ago I went on "vacation" to Wisconsin. We went with a friend to see another friend (and her parents.) It's a short drive up there, just about three hours, and the country is simple and comforting. Lots of corn. Lots of fields. Lots of cornfields.

We even took pictures in the cornfields.

We also made meals together, and drank coffee and tea together.

We went to High Cliff Park and had adventures on the rocks.

We made mountains of food and had friends come over from near and far for a Friday-night barbecue. We sat around a fire pit drinking gin and tonics, munching on overzealously-prepared s'mores, laughing about life and laughing at each other.

It was, in every sense of the word, good. It was a good vacation.

But there are exceptions. And a part of me wants to mention the bad exceptions, because they happened, and they're small but important. Like when I got really dizzy for about an hour and had to lay down, and ended up taking a nap with Emily.

However, the "good" exception, that exceptional moment of goodness is where my heart really wants to be.

We were outside. It was nighttime. The stars were out.

It's a moment so exceptionally good, so overflowing with all the wonderful things that come from friendship and love, that I cannot even describe it here. It is so near to my heart that I cannot even find words worthy of giving.

It is the exception to all exceptions.

And that, my friends, is where God lives.

In those exceptional moments that tip the scales. He is there when things are exceptionally bad and there when things are exceptionally good. While the joy of the Lord is contentedness, quietness, and peace in the midst of the mundane, it can also exist in flashes of brilliance or despairing shadows.

These are the moments I don't write down. Sometimes I'm simply incapable of words. So much of our lives are captured in photographs and shared with immediacy as if they didn't happen unless someone else is aware.

But not every good thing has to impress others in order to be good, and certainly not to be exceptional. They are such exceptional moments that they deserve to exist only without tangible proof.

They go on uncaptured, except in our memories.