Now Pt.2

I am a long string of moments

That I try in vain to capture on a phone

To review later, escaping the present

To only half enjoy the past

 

I was created by God

A frame in a moving picture

A dusty, spirit infused meat

Made to look something like love

Though born with a disease

 

I mutate and regress

I stagnate and swell

Until I fell back into the arms of grace

That stood me up on feet again

And taught me to walk towards the coming son

Taught me to become less, to go down

To learn from the smallest of things

How to be great

 

To learn from death how to live

And from life how to die

To everything I think I need

And grasp the only thing worth grasping

With a grip made doubly strong

By the fact that it grasps me back

 

A moment

Caught in time

Of a hand reaching out

To catch a falling man

 

My whole life is filled with these snapshots

Leaving me walking through a gallery

Experiencing an emotion humans only touch

When they begin to think outside of the present

When they join the great I Am in simply existing

 

Present, past, and future in the meshwork of it all

Recalling past fithfulness and failures

Perceiving future rewards or pitfalls

 

To climb the branches of a tree

And look out over the underbrush of moments

Above the canopy layers

To see all the way to the horison of life

And to know more than just today

Is the only way we can understand this moment

 

Without perspective I am a weird series of stills

A sad collection of washing dishes

Forgeting where my car keys are

And watching my toe bleed after tearing off a hangnail

 

No wonder this world confuses most people

How do we make sense of genocide?

Animals that eat each other

And women who put plastic in their breasts?

 

Is the world so nonsensical

That the option that makes most sense

Is to give up trying and just drug ourselves?

 

Escape, escape

All I see is my friends trying to escape

The moment

 

If a moment was good, they try to nail it to the wall

They want to freese it in time so they never have to leave it

If the moment is bad, and they cannot escape it

They will damage their senses so they need not take it in

 

They would gouge out their own eyes

Impair their ability to enjoy future moments

Just to escape the hell of the present one

 

And all this thinking or lack thereof leaves me climbing trees

Burying my nose in some history book

Or reading about the future of artificial intelligence

To try to tie my life to something greater

To try to find my place in this world

My sense of time has left me

Not wanting to waste it

I yearn to be this well oiled machine

This expensive factory, getting stuff done

I want to be working round the clock

And creating the product with the highest demand

I want to be going to the right school

And learning computer code

I want to be teaching myself french

And how to cook raviolis

I want to be going and doing

Because I was born in the country

That teaches that stillness is waste

And that rest is idleness

I need to reprogram my brain

To mirror the cycles of days and seasons

The way nature goes further by not burning out

The preperation of the pupa

The hibernation of the grizzly

 

Oh God of all moments

Who gives me each day a steady stream

Of now

 

I look for you in each second

Turning my present into praise

Recounting my past in song and tribal dance

 

Offering my future as a sweet offering

All my hours and minutes I give to you

As firsts and not seconds

This moment is a holy place

Just to be with you

 

Just to be

Now Pt.1

Woven

Threads of red and black

Of time and past

The burnt and fraying edges

Of the quickly sifted days

Streaming like the runners of a kite

Behind your lifting life

 

Do not

Become enthralled in the not yet

So wrapped up in the yet to be

That you blindly snub the daily

Flower opening

Of oportunity

The first steps of the stairs

To tomorrow

 

Do not

Yearn so longingly for yesteryear

Painting your dwelling the somber tones

Of melancholy, of remorseful green

Don’t go back there

 

The weeks gone by are meant to be

Left as columns, holding up your everbeating heart

Yet so often you Benjemin Button yourself to the wall

Trying to grow young

So you can relive the moment. It’s sick

 

Let bygones be bygones

You will never enter jr high again

And any kid in jr high

Would want to be the present you so bad

He would think you a fool for wanting to go back

You Marty Mcfly

Trying to die and be reborn

As the same person for a second try

 

You only get one life

One shot at this glorious, painful, short,long existence

Don’t abuse it

Live in the now

And let the flowing stream of moments

Weave the rug until

Halfway through your thirties

You make out enough of a picture

To happily continue on your way

Until the merry grave

Unsucessfully attempting to convince others

That they too should stop taking life so seriously

And instead go live it

 

Too many college grads

High on optimism

Crash like test-dummies into the wall of life

Only to pick up their broken pieces

And stand frozen at the prospect of repeating such a horror

 

They stand

 

Eagles

 

Edge of the nest

Hesitant to fly

 

Live your life with such flare and vigor

That they are drawn from the edge, not pushed

That they smell something in you they want to imitate

In this way, you will lead a generation beyond their stupid phones

And tailored snapchat image of themselves

 

They don’t know who they are

Setting countdown clocks on their iphones

And wasting time in the doctor’s office

Scrolling through pictures on their facebook from five years ago

 

Unable to relish the knife edge of this second

The shocking beauty of life

The elusive grandeur of that time account

Paid equally to all

Enjoyed only by a sparse few

While the majority line up at slot machines

Paying their seconds, minutes, and years

To hopefully strike big and make it all worth while

 

All along those bold lovers of life

Inhale the fragrance of the passing present

Called mundane by the exagerated moviestars

Who throw so many hashtags and faded filters on their reality

They can no longer appreciate undocumented breakfast

Or the sun’s first arrival over the eastern hills

Without alerting every social media outlet

 

Release

What’s before and behind

To have empty hands

For everything the present yearns to gift you

Goodbye

I am saying goodbye to me
While I have said my adeus to so many friends
This time it is myself
I’m not talking about cutting out the wrong in my life
Saying goodbye to my faults and flaws
Just the fact that
To remain the same over several years is retardation
I
As I know me
Will change
Should change

There is good and bad to this departure
There are pros and cons to this farewell
Pieces of me are going to end up looking more like Jesus
Others might not
And some things might just change
Ambivically
Amorally
A soft shifting of shades
The growth of fiveoclock
Shadows growing slowly and inperceptibly
As the movement of the sun

The ones who track this slow, mushroom-on-the-forest-floor kind of growth
Are the ones who aren’t there
My friends and family
Who have been shut indoors
And are shocked that night has come so soon
Who have spent a month away from me
And step back at the gauntness
Or the growth of hair
Or the slight accent

Jesus, I cling to you
The only blueprint of my soul
I will dissipate
I will become less
Nothing, even
But I hold onto the pieces of me that already hold onto you
The covelant bond
Formed by our shared Spirit

Let me live
Not trapped in a sculpture
Or prefired so solid I break
But as clay
Moist and malleable
Trusting the hands of the potter

And if I change let me change as the man
Who is longing for his home

Tu Ne Quaesieris

For all the lore of Lodge and Myers
I cannot heal my torn desires,
Nor hope for all that man can speer
To make the riddling earth grow clear.
Though it were sure and proven well
That I shall prosper, as they tell,
In fields beneath a different sun
By shores where other oceans run,
When this live body that was I
Lies hidden from the cheerful sky,
Yet what were endless lives to me
If still my narrow self I be
And hope and fail and struggle still,
And break my will against God’s will,
To play for stakes of pleasure and pain
And hope and fail and hope again,
Deluded, thwarted, striving elf
That through the window of my self
As through a dark glass scarce can see
A warped and masked reality?
But when this searching thought of mine
Is mingled in the large Divine,
And laughter that was in my mouth
Runs through the breezes of the South,
When glory I have built in dreams
Along some fiery sunset gleams,
And my dead sin and foolishness
Grow one with Nature’s whole distress,
To perfect being I shall win,
And where I end will Life begin.

-C. S. Lewis from his first published work, Spirits in Bondage

After the Storm

After the Storm
by Mumford and Sons

And after the storm,
I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.

Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won’t rot, I won’t rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won’t rot.

And I took you by the hand
And we stood tall,
And remembered our own land,
What we lived for.

And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.