The Last Day of the Year-A Poem

The last day of the year,
one of three hundred and sixty-five,
three hundred and sixty-fifth of three hundred and sixty five,
the last of of them,
the end to a long line of moments,
an end of a movement towards,
the beginning of the end,
an end to a beginning,
spinning rapidly in splitting seconds,
passing,
leaving a whole year behind,
remembering,
everything of three hundred and sixty four days,
moments,
pleasures,
pains,
excitements,
trials,
laughs,
tears,
moving and flowing,
out with the old,
in with the new,
the same,
TIME.

Fall Rain-A Poem

Light rain falls,
Like dust,
Early morning liquid residue,
Turning dry earth into,
Primeval particles bubble and ooze,
Reliving constant transfer,
Endothermic atoms rotate to spin,
All unnoticed,
All invisible,
All outside my window free.

A Beloved Country-A Vignette-Part 2

She could see the words behind his eyes and watched them bubble and girgle to the top and prematurely explode with steam as they spewed from his mouth; she did not listen to the words as they came, but followed them as motions and sounds that crawled and flowed over and into her ears and soothed her. They became incessant lullibies.
He tried to stop them, but still they came; a never ending deluge of all his errors exposed. Emotional lacerations in spoken form; cutting him each time anew. He hated the sounds of his voice and it made his own skin stretch, coil, tighten, and reconstrict; each time a little more quickly and strained, attempting with each movement to try and hide again only to realize refuge was always far away and he was alone again. All eyes were on him and they were bored. He didn't know why she stayed with him; if it were the other way around, he would have never showed up to begin with. He repulsed even himself; even his nightmares seemed to let him down. He felt he was swimming and all his words were swirling around him and he kept trying to paddle against them, but they wouldn't let him move at all, but they also wouldn't let him drown. He had long ago quick trying to fight against them, but was increasingly angry at his own apathy, but there was never a solution. All there was were the words and so they came; rushing and spilling all through the rooms and time and he was alone and he each syllable would look at him in his nervous, brown eyes and mock him with mounting repitition.....

A Beloved Country-A Vignette-Part 1

He was all lines of latitutde and longitude; a wasteland of humid shadows where primeval mists rose and fell bearing with it a scent of an unrealized history. All the lines seemed to be racing to some lethargically constructed equator made of imaginary silences and forced pauses of refracted fear in an absence of light; a complete and inner coldness that he could never shake, but that was not the whole of it. He was her beloved country; covered with the scars of a lifetime of wars and reoccuring battles in which only the characters changed, but the carnage did not and neither did the wounds. They were always deep and never fully healed; deep gashes of constant reconciliation gone awry. Never making a beginning out of an ending, only wounding and rewounding deeper and deeper until not even the abyss it was always becoming couldn't acknowledge its own true, outer edge; complete and utter depth where the cold traveled so quickly and so diligently that it exploded into quick flickerings of white heat.
She traced the lines back and forth, pressing deeply into the melanomal landscapes searching for where they began and wondering why they led to so many pockets of sorrow, but all the while he talked both with his mouth and his entire body; awkward rhythms as if his body were trying to divorce itself and its ability for movement from its joints and tissues.....

A New Idea for this Place

My wife suggested that an area of this or a facet of this blog should be new poems or stories that I write or am working on. So...from time to time, I am going to add bits and pieces of stories or poems here. I know it really doesn't matter since only my wife is really following this or reading this, but maybe someone else will stop by and read something written here and enjoy it and just maybe in turn be encouraged to write something themselves; isn't that what good art is suppose to do...encourage you to try it your self and propel you to be better. And isn't true writing something that you must get out of you even if you do not really want to. So, since none of these ideas will leave my mind, I will start putting them here and it will give me a place to showcase them instead of just having them hiding away in my little Moleskine journals. You have been warned. I hope you enjoy what you find written here.

Today, I Turn 30.

Today, I turn 30. It is very odd and sereal. I still feel like I am 16 waking up at dawn to drive my truck around the block. I still feel 13 and out of place. I still feel 19 and wondering when will life feel less like capativity. I still feel 23 and feeling like I had wasted my college years. I still feel 17 when all the world was mine and mine alone. I still feel 26 when I became one of one. I still feel 12 when I ripped my new sweatshirt and went midnight bowling at 9. I still feel 14 running through an African grassland with my shirt off and glowing liquid on my bare chest and living breathing the run under stars so bright you had to squint. I still feel all of my ages all combined and blended together and then sorted out with a very thorough hand. I am all of them and none of them all at once and then never again because I am now another year. And time keeps sprinting trying with each step to keep up with a world that is spinning at 1000 mph and never seems to tire. I am 30 now and nothing can stop that. I am 30 now and do not really know what that means. It feels happy and sad and dense like a Billie Holiday song; if you get close enough to the speakers you can almost feel the tears leaking through in big, watery decibles, but you are not sure if they are from heartache or the sight of something so beautiful that it hurts and makes you so thankful that you can cry. It is not just a number today, it is now part of who I am and I am part of it. Today, I am 30.

The Coming of Fall

As I write this, the outside temperature is about 74, which I have both heard and read is the ideal temperature, or within the range of ideal temperature (72-74). It has finally turned the weather that I have been looking forward to since July. I do love the summer and all the things that go with it, but somewhere in July my mind tries to escape the heat and humidity with thoughts of standing outside and not sweating, or the idea of actually needing the sports coat that I wear to school. So...it has officially been Fall since September, but it has only as of late felt like it and I am so very happy. I now look forward to the great sleeping of the trees and the wonderful art of the leaves. I now look foward to the smell of buring firewood and fleece jackets. I look forward to the sight of my carbon dioxide condensating in the air and steam coming off me after a long run. I look forward to possible camping trips where warmth can be found deeper in my sleeping bag. I look forward to Thanksgiving and stopping for an all too brief moment to name how faithful He has been and continues to be. It is here again (Fall) and wraps its arms around me like a friend I have not seen in too long, but whom I can instantly pick up where we last left off, because he never really left, but only stepped away for awhile.

The Gift of Language

Over the weekend, I noticed and read several things that made me a little depressed both about my vocation and myself. It all stems from one thing: laziness. I am quick to see wrong actions and wrong beliefs in others, but also know they are in me or I would not be so quick to recognize them in others. The articles I looked over were about the fact that more and more schools are choosing to not teach the art of writing in cursive. It made me sad, but I personally only sign my name in cursive. So, not really helping the cause. What I noticed was that while driving a van full of Junior and Senior high school girls to Augusta and throughout the race, hotel stay, meals, and the eventual ride home. There seems to be a severe breakdown in language, both spoken and written. There are about, give or take, 250,000 words in the English language, but it seems we have settled for much, much less of a total. This breakdown of language can be seen in our writing, both on the student level and in our modern-day authors. Some of those said authors churn our 300-600 page books in mere months and some have even admitted to having ghost writers. It seems we have lost our imaginations and in giving that away to the many, cookie-cutter media outlets, we have also given away our memory of what it was like to read a story, or an essay that was thought about before it was written. We have become so lazy that we allow ourselves and those who write for us to follow patterns and insert new names into the same plots. We talk and write for utlitarian use only, but have lost even the true definition of that. We speak too much about things that do not need to spoken and leave unspoken all those things that need...must be spoken. We are lazy. We do not read as we should. We do not speak as we should. We do not write as we should. Which makes me no longer wonder why our leaders, teachers, preachers, ourselves, etc. cannot have a conversation or a dialogue about very important topics in very trying times, but this is not new. Humans have always been lazy with language. We have always tried to use two words to say one. We have seemingly wasted the gift of language. I wish I knew a remedy. I will end with a quote from Abigail Adams:

"We have too many high-sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them."

The Long Slow Run

This past Sunday I ran, with own, two, short legs, 16 long miles. It is the longest I have ever run in a single portion of time. I cannot explain what it feels like to run that far. I could use all the quick adjectives like painful, sweaty, exciting, but feel so much would be missing from that. Minus the pain in my sore legs, I myself feel a little odd in saying out loud that I really did run that far. It feels like it was something I meant to do, but got too busy and added it to my to-do list or slept through. I will say this, I did run those miles and will run them again because running is like nothing else except life in general. And this is only a connection I have just recently been able to understand. 16 miles is a long, long way. It would take about 20 minutes to drive in a car. It took me 2:20 to run. You can think about a lot of things during two hours. You can pray about a lot things in two hours. You can plan a lot of things in two hours. But all of that is not why I will run again. The reason I will run again is two-fold. One is that two hours is a long time to make yourself believe in the "small, slow, next step". I need to believe in that. My whole life has been and still is millions upon millions of both real and proverbial "small, slow, steps" and it is and has been hard for me to make it to the next one. On Sunday morning in the early morning, I saw my white car waiting for me and I knew and got to see first hand that the next, small, slow step does eventually lead in the right direction and does eventually lead you to your goal. And the second reason is real simple, I love food and I burned 2300 calories while running and that is a lot of food. That is a lot of brownies. Not such a bad trade-off. So...if you need me next Sunday morning, you'll find me running and training for my next chance at an eating contest; making it there one small, slow, step at a time.

Blessed Friday

Friday and all the things it means is a great example of how powerful concepts can be. Friday is not much different than the other weekdays. It is still just a 24 hour period where most people still have to go to work. We do not get paid more on Fridays. It is only the end, which for some reason we are happy about. I am not happy at the end of the summer, or end of the weekend, or the end of my current good time or event. Friday stands alone for me. It has the same feeling everytime for me as those first couple of mornings when Fall has finally come. My energy level increases. I forget that I am still sleepy. I am driven outdoors instead of indoors. I feel happy that I get to be alive; all these things, even though I am still sitting in my car, driving on the same roads, going to the same job, to do the same things, but feels like nothing else. So, with all of this said: Happy and Blessed Friday.

Christian Environmentalism

I have really been doing a lot of thinking about Christians and our views toward the environment as a concept and our local environment. Wondering how Christianity has gotten so far away from Adam in the Garden and his role as caretaker. Wondering how we have only completed the easy act of producing offspring and thus only completed or seemingly paid attention to one-third of the Dominion Mandate. Wondering why there are not more sermons...no strike that, any sermons about Christianity's responsibility for the land. God thought His Creation was good. How come we do not? Maybe too many Wendell Berry agrarian essays, but I do not feel like that is the case.

Greetings!

Have decided to move both myself and my thoughts into the Twenty-First Century. Hope you enjoy my thoughts, comments, etc. Feel free to add to the conversation and the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and opinions.