I think that we will never fully and completely understand everything about God. Perhaps eternity will not be a time where we will suddenly know everything, but a time in which every moment will be spent discovering something new and wonderful about Him and his infinite love, boundless grace, limitless beauty, and unfathomable goodness and strength.
That sounds so sweet to me, to spend eternity learning.
I reel with love and disgust at once, wishing for sensitivity or sympathy from practicers of groundlessness – an idea of fun is to run, hide, or laugh, never getting to the heart of the matter.
I’d like to spend time to know and grow in closeness – I am angry when it’s used as time to drown the conscience. Out of warmth, out of loneliness, I approach encroaching on my own integrity.
Some things are too immensely and intensely true
To interrupt the mechanisms of mundanity, of necessity.
In the sound of the dishwasher, I hear the clanging of a railroad crossing bell
And I reluctantly go to sleep – already, again.
Wandering the streets, I paused to ask a bystander a question. It must have been a stupid one, because I was turned away feeling ridiculed.
I don’t belong here, I realized – I don’t belong here, because it’s a dream.
If I am the dreamer, why am I out of place?
Somehow, the world that I’ve fashioned for myself does not welcome me.
It feels wrong to stay at the lake for five days and not five thousand,
during which the water and the landscape and people it shapes could claim me for their own
and I’d grow used to it all, maybe.
The flitting swallows and wood fire at twilight puzzle me, like an embrace that makes you feel guilty for leaving (or ever coming at all).
I leave while the embers still glow under low, wind-tossed flames that leave the scent of smoke in my hair.
I found a beetle in the boat, laying flat on his back, wiggling his meaty, spindly legs in the air, trying to grasp something – anything – to right his shiny, swollen body.
Slowly, he stopped straining and scrambling on the carpeted floor of the docked pontoon and just lay there, little feet in the air.
He reminded me of myself when I try Pilates.
Pathetic,
I thought, sympathetically.
You are in a room, or at least you think you are. It is pitch black on all sides, save for the light shining from the single, round skylight above you.
You spend your days standing, sitting, laying down under the skylight. You sometimes pace along the border of the circle of light, sometimes sleep, sometimes talk to your self, or imagine someone is there with you, listening to you, and talking to you.
Sometimes, you venture outside the spot of light. You walk some feet, even dozens perhaps, across the wooden floor. It creaks in some spots, which makes you shiver. You look ahead – there is nothing but thick blackness. Behind, the lighted area threatens to shrink and disappear altogether, and so you return in haste before you go much distance at all.
One day, you wake up, and what is before your eyes is darker than sleep. The skylight is gone. Or, at least, what gave it its light has gone out. There was no sense of direction in the first place, but now, not even the distance between the floor and ceiling is discernible. You can only hear your own heartbeat and breath increase in frequency as your stomach drops.
You wonder whether you should move, or wait for something to happen. You wait for a spell – the light does not come back. Colors start to swim in the darkness before your eyes. You cautiously stand up. You can’t see your body – not even your hands – you can only feel it. You take a deep breath, and begin to walk; the direction has no significance.
You walk for what seems like a whole day. Whether you turn, slow, or quicken, it is hard to sense. You only know that you haven’t stopped.
Then, in your peripheral vision, there is a glow which flickers warmly through the black fog. Your eyes fixed on it, you turn, and draw closer. The light issues from a candle in a holder, which sits on a round table. The flame dances merrily, its orange and yellow and green and blue all melded into one small, soft tongue of fire.
A few feet beyond the table, the light from the candle illuminates an end to the floor. A solid surface cuts into it, rising up, and goes side to side in a straight line – it is a wall. You press your hand against it, and an inexplicable excitement rises in your throat, escaping as a cry of joy.
Picking a direction, you eagerly follow the wall, bringing the candle with you. Not long, and the wall has already brought you to something else: another wall. It meets the first one at a perpendicular angle – a corner.
Built into the corner is a door, attached to the wall by metal hinges and which has a knob at waist-level.
Your observations are interrupted by the frantic flickering of the candle, which alerts you to the fact that it has burnt quite low. The light dims quickly, and in a few seconds will go out altogether.
You look at the door again. You reach out and, turning the knob, open it.
It is a cloudless and windless night in winter. Stepping out from under the roof, I walk across the asphalt and into the dark.
Crunching across the ice-glazed driveway, it hits me: the moaning roar of the highway that echoes across the quieted, bared suburbs and frozen landscape.
The sound grows louder for a few moments, and washes over me a wave of timidity. I realize that it is the first time today that I am not enclosed by walls; the only solid thing near me is the ground that I stand on.
I look in the opposite direction of it, and both up and down vanish – the immensity of the sky and the distance of the lights that dapple it make the smallness (but not insignificance) of such concepts clear.
My eyes search for the familiar; I find Orion and, surprising myself, recognize the Pleiades. Do they acknowledge me, and name me, too? I’m not sure if I even want them to. It would depend on the nature of their characters, wouldn’t it?
Though they are so far, it still matters to me.
Draw me out, with brittle charcoal and whittled pencil
Onto whatever surface you can find.
After all, don’t I look better on paper
Than under those merciless rays that overwhelm the outdoors?
Where the external is viewed in however many angles,
And the reflected light is equal parts piercing and protective?
Here, my veins aren’t visible; you don’t see a single pimple or stray strand
Or even what the outline of my face looks like.
Here, in a line or two, the internal is traced, a strand of genotype that was never expressed.
Right, left, right, left, right, and then left again;
Though a dimension is lacking, it is almost easier to get lost.
I think that the trees are happy in autumn. Their heavy cloaks are cast off, and their lanky, springy arms stretch a little higher than before. Their simple forms are on delightful view – branches pierce the cold air, and brown bark starkly contrasts with the frosted sky of the season. Moreover, they have sweet rest; rest from the hasty making and consuming of food, and instead live contentedly on wealth already stored up. They will soon exist in numb half-consciousness that renders the weighty, cold snow not a burden, but a divine embrace; a heavenly, chilling covering in exchange for a green, earthly one.
I am, therefore I art 
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