In other news, today it finally stopped raining and I went hiking up the canyon today.

Is it just me, or is nature delightfully purging when you can't write and to much of life feels like complete shite?

I love the trees when they talk and listen at the same time.

Give A Little...

Y'know how that Coke ad says, "give a little love and it all comes back to you?"

It's not the same truth if you give a lot of love that you can't help giving. It actually rarely comes back anywhere near equal measure to what you gave out.

The trick is not to care, and to realize that you're here to spread love across everything so that it can fill in the tiny cracks of lives that people don't realize need constant filling until you've gone.

What you have to learn (and this is usually the hard part) is how to prep yourself to live with knowing your only appreciation will be a constantly posthumous thing.

But then, the task of life is service - a charity of sorts. Charity isn't something we do to get credit. It's not something we do just to get to heaven. It's the very fabric of which heaven is wove.

All I'm saying is that maybe loving EVERYTHING too much is a soul's way of attempting to repay God for that act of greatest Love.

Mosiah said it best: "When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God."

And I guess that true mortal progression comes when you realize that you can never repay God for all you've been given, and that you keep loving and serving the people around you anyway.

Is there really such a thing as settling for laying up the proverbial treasure in heaven?

The world's such a tainted, crummy place anyway. Why settle for it's recognition?

I'm not saying this to any of you. It's just something I had to explain to myself this morning.

Always,

Chels

I Love

Reading: The Sea by John Banville, The Quitter by Harvey Pekar, Snow by Orhan Pamuk.
Playing: Nothing, at the moment.
Listening to: Indie stuff, The Engineers mostly. Ted Leo. Casiotone.
Using Cell Phone For: Sudoku. Email. Web-surfing. My calendar.

Quote: (from page 108 in "The Sea") "Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much more then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously finished pavilion of the self. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy, I mean that euphoric inability to fully believe one's simple luck."

I can't recall being a child. I can, but most of my childhood recollections - memories, to be so torpid - aren't exactly happy, or blissfully ignorant of their fortune. My descent from childhood, emotionally, was an un-numbing. A slow awakening to the awkwardness of self from the blissful anesthesia of a extroverted penchant for both curiosity and compassion. My childhood was observation, filling in all of the spaces in my subconscious and conscious mind (the white space that blinds you - a child so fresh from God - with it's pervasive sterility.)

I spent my early life assembling the experiential control of a stumbling, perpetual, experiment of maturing which would be lobbed a godless (well, it was painfully felt) amount of unchartable, unstable, unconscionable variables. I never adequately prepared for it, you see.

I never once caught in this giant, pieceless, hemless, smothering patchwork of acute observations a vision, a premonition, a sketch of myself. I am not mother or father before me. Not grandparent, teacher, mentor, friend, crossing guard, bosomous church lady, supposited male figures, artist, artiste, poet, Dr. Seuss character, or prophet of fire and light and the holy terror of the love of God. I was a composite of each of them - including the Harley gang bikers in the bank parking lot who I was convinced were going to kidnap my three year-old brother.

And so it goes. We are each that way - we are divinity and experience (as nouns and not adjectives - we are Divinity + Experience) both constantly grappling for dominance in the meager confines of a fleshy, imperfect, beautiful, expanselessly limited wuss of a soul. I envelope you, my truth-wielding, seraphic self-counterpart; my bumbling idiot.

I am still doing these things.

I am still tripping back to the places where people love me. Quenchless. I am on hands and knees groping from the veritable desert of days and "mellow fruitlessness." I have loved you. All of you. I do. I love you because I cannot help myself. The wretched soul-fingers that reach for your reaching merely because I breathe. I see. Because I need something more red - more here - than here is.

I write, I confess, I mistake, I over-react because of all that encompasses me, of all my patchwork properties, the batting - those very fibers of my being - of any being - that make a quilt worth having - is composed of loves.

Like Brod from Everything is Illuminated, like Jesus, like Enos, like a mercenary, like a sinner, like the faces you half-see and forget, I love you. I love. It claws, it ekes itself out of me. With such force I can hardly believe it's not tangible. Can hardly believe these letters do not burrow themselves into your very corneas with the perviousness of which they're imbibed.

I clamour for this place - this slew of lifewindows, of the real shadowyous, where each breath, space, symbol, absence, cloying presence of mine only begs you:

Love me. Because I am afraid that love doesn't exist - and I am willing to try nearly everything that does to find it.

Love me enough to take me seriously when I am not being serious - because even, perhaps especially - insincerity and humor have their truths, their sadnesses, their silent admissions. Who stops to count them? Who gives them priority?

I love you, so-imaginary-you're-real-maybe-even-more-real place. You People. Your nuances, your flavors, your magazines, your harrowing rapport, your steely-tottering precipice of tolerance for the shenanigan, the casual word.

Everyone builds life on a hope for tenderness. Who would shoulder the burdens of actual living if love - in its layers - wasn't worth waking up for?

If happiness in childhood consists of a heedless taking, of sorts, is it safe to conclude that at the bottom of this adulthood, this foot of clay crumbles flawlessly on the happiness, the satisfaction, of GIVING with a clear and observed understanding?

I was merely wondering, you see. I seem to have crossed a threshold. Putting away a portion of my childish things.

I find myself increduless (misspelling intentional). Schrapnelled on the panguishing moments I live. I love.

I was woken up a bit ago by a phone call.

It was one of the places I have finally been able to discern as familiar and not comfortable.

It has been springing upon me lately, in the occasionally successful attempt to catch me off guard - vulnerable to the pleabargaining of my empathy, my good nature.

I cannot escape it's septic clutching of my understanding. I cannot muster up the courage of a reboot. Of draining the same wounds.

I fear it winds around me. I fear that in this anklegrab situation, my only resource is silence and ignorance.

How dare you say now that you love me.

There is no longer the time nor place for such a thing.

We all meander through lives that consist of windows of opportunity.

When you skip a window, there's no going back, and it's closed.

I have said it was a good dream. Maybe it was only meant for that.

You cannot ever be a safety net. You cannot ever unhurt me.

What I have pledged to is both those things. He is a prop for my growing. An anchor rock for my starfish heart.

He is all that is great and good in my days ahead.

How could I forsake that?

No, the moment I agreed contained all moments.

I can trust him to pull me solidly alongside him. I am a greater person in his presence. He lifts and cradles me.

I didn't need someone on my own plane. I needed a way to grow up.

I would apologize for being myself if it was what made you love me, and what made this hurt you.

But what apology can one lay across the truth? Is it my place to apologize.

You love my possibility. The idyllic way you have painted me for yourself. You loved my attention.

But he loves me as what I am, not as the things I could be for him.

And that - THAT - is a crucial realization.

At this impossible 3 am hour, I can nearly touch the abstractions, it's all so clear.

I do not love you. You are no comfort, no step up into the darkness toward which faith in someone propels me.

You won't find or plant in me that irresolve.

I am not yours. Forever.

From my Phone...

Mellow day. Mayhaps it was even somber... I was too busy not talking and distracting myself to notice which.

And now I'm sitting on a window ledge outside at Borders, waiting for a ride home.

And I have to post this in spurts so my phone doesn't log me out.

Went and saw The Holiday today. I laughed and cried. Then I hated myself for relating to a chick flick. And because now I think Jack Black is mainly obnoxious, and not funny.

Then I walked to Borders, where I spent the day reading graphic novels by Craig Thompson. I really like his style. And his book Blankets is amazing. It moved me.

I want to go home and draw my own autobiographical comic book.

Sketchbook/journals were on sale for $4. I bought 3.

Maybe I'll do illustrated books of my poetry.

I felt outside of myself today. I keep going back to that quote from Everything Is Illuminated:

To write is to have second chances. What, then, do you mean when you say you were born to be a writer?

I have spent the last few years skirting the avoidable centers of my life. Now it's not just mine anymore, and I am plunging headlong into my personal Louisiana Purchase territory.

But it's okay now. I have found my Clark. And we shall explore it all together.

More and more I realize that my life to this point was just building. That the actual living doesn't happen until you're whole. And that you can't be whole until you find the person who completes you.

And while I rejoice in the prospect of excavating, scouting the dense jungles of my future life, I feel I have spent the week mourning my imminent departure from the world I will be leaving on the fringes.

There is much I have not the words, or presence of mind, to clearly articulate to that end.

Today I pondered the subtle, nuanced differences between familiarity and comfort.

And the difference between my then and now is defined by the noise of falling snow on fallen snow.

The sound of a change of heart is just as loud.