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