Things Here and There

I have tried to write so many things lately. All of them come out wrong missing pieces or saying things I never meant to say. So here are some people who are saying things more worthwhile. The first video is excellent. The second, is the answer to an argument that I've been having all of my life with so many people about art, aesthetics and practicality. The third is great food for thought and leaves the 'art theme'. If I can grow up into a person with something to say, I will have succeeded.

My quest has never been for beauty. Beauty is something people have intrinsically because they are people. Male or female. It is something you let yourself not something you seek out or develop.

My search has always been for strength. Why? Because it is not enough to be beautiful. Pretty things break. Not all breaking is bad. Not all breaking is good. I want to be strong enough but not too strong. That is something I can seek and develop.

I have been told all of my life that this is a man's pursuit. Women should be beautiful and men should be strong. Women should want to be beautiful. Is it possible that so many women want to be beautiful because they were treated as slightly lesser humans than men? I could never prove that. I have known that I am beautiful and it has brought as many problems as it ever has blessings. I want to be strong. More than that, I need to be strong. I have places that I want to get to and a lot of people telling me it cannot be done. Good places. Peaceful places. Far away places that lie across the valley of the shadow of death. And I am going (and have been going) because that is where I have been led and I cannot wait for other people to be strong for me.

Also, I cannot help but think that the world needs more beautiful men and less men who are only trying to prove that they are strong.

What if we were all beautiful and strong?

I think we know this. I think this is why we write books and have Bible studies about "real strength" and "real beauty". In every women's Bible study that has ever tried to teach me to be feminine and beautiful, we talk about real beauty not being fleeting, not being on the surface, not being how we look but how we think and act and... it all sounds like 'strong beauty' after awhile. Real beauty has to be rooted and lasting and loving. Have you ever trusted weak love? But if I say that I have been searching out strength... well, apparently I have forgotten that I am female rather than male. So I will use other words. I will say "patience" or "discipline" or "self-control" because those are gender neutral words and I am allowed those even if I am denied strength.

It's been a long time.

wandering

I am taking a Spanish class.
I am finishing a Spanish class. On Wednesday.

Much better.

However, the final for this class requires me to tell about my life up until now. I have to fit my life into 8 photos and 10-12 minutes.  Admittedly, I only have to make sense of 21 years and yet... I am proud and ashamed to say they have not been an empty 21 years. It takes a good deal more time than 12 minutes to make sense of them. I am struggling because, the point is not to make sense but to use the past tense of Spanish. And because I have only just finished remembering that the way I remember things is gone. Where I come from exists in fragments and it would not matter how many times I rewrote my past and what adjustments I made. The past is always just fragments. This crisis is not unique to me.

But I want so badly for it to make sense to these near strangers. I like my life, all of it. It is the tangled knot of yarn and time and memories and people and other broken bits that may not look like much one apart from the other, but that maybe, just maybe, might add up to something all together.

All of this would not matter so much except that it feels like the most disrespectful thing I could do, this condensing of life and accepting that I will misrepresent a good amount of it. Not disrespectful to me, though I guess that is likely to be true as well, but to life itself. I think there is a certain amount of respect due to things just because they are alive and even more so a certain amount of respect due to life.

Living is tough sometimes and it takes a lot to hold on. But life, life is a tenacious thing with strong hands and maybe even claws that dig in deep into living, whatever living is made of, and do not let go until it is time.

I do not understand whatever pact Life and Time have made, but it is not one to take lightly. I see them, in my mind, shaking hands. And if I had the time and the ability, I would draw for you what that looks like to me. It is terrifying and beautiful and just about comforting but not quite there. I promise. You will have to take my word for it because words are all I have today.

I am constricted to 26 characters and a handful of punctuation. Twenty-six characters to explain to you that I am homesick and day dreaming and not altogether here because everything that I want to touch is not in the least bit real. Some of it was. Some of it may be... and a lot of it never has been and may just stay that way. And that may even be ok.

26 characters to communicate the sort of pictures that my mind sees which is tricky because my mind knows no language only picture after picture after picture. Today, my translator is broken, both of them. And so I say too much and draw and paint too little and never get the right thing out, never say what I meant, always wish I could take back what I said even when no one is hurt. It's still a waste of words to say anything other than what you mean. Anyway, I am lost and currently untranslatable. Don't expect me to make sense; and please, send my apologies to my Spanish class after I try to explain myself for 10 minutes and leave them to wade through my verbal debris.

A picture and a poem. 

It's been a long start to this new year, but I am almost to a fork in the road with a promise of a change of scenery. I can see it now with eyes that no longer have to trust that the darkness ahead holds more than shadows. For this occasion, I have a photo. It's of Coloma, California on a beautiful night. It was probably a minimum of 60 degrees after the sunset and we had pitched our tent. Good times. One of those nights I will travel back to many more times through the years.