We are building bridges to no where, friend.
It's brick over brick of slipping shores,
Maybe our love will be like old friends soon
If I can find the strength to keep this going.

I find the waves inviting and you, a fool,
This is no way to live, dear, it's not for us
We've other lives, love, I know for sure
We're playing at this, playing at love.

I'm sure you've lied and sure I'm lying,
It breaks with us, it breaks with us.
That summer we changed our minds a thousand times
Into fall we changed it, into bare winter.

There's nothing left, see? It leaves.
Let it sink, let it be, make it go and see?
We're building bridges to no where, friend.
Brick over brick of slipping shores.

to think aloud for a moment.

to recall something.

to regret it.

to learn from it.

to leave it.

She said, "You don't know yourself well." And with persed lips, because chronically I cannot take criticism, I was quite taken with a window. I stared beyond her because I could not believe it would be true. That I had spent all this time, all these days breathing in and out of the same space and never knowing it...never noticing the patterns, never really seeing the nose on my own face. I shoot myself in the foot. I run myself into the ground. I do it because I believe I must.

It was a horrible night; filled with all the things I crave to lose in myself. I spent it wanting to be in another place. I spent it selfishly. I spent it slyly. I spent it.

It was 7:04 a.m. I stepped out the door into the biting cold, drenched in the smell of an evening. It's a horrible thing to resent yourself, to resent something so gracious as a morning, as your first breaths. Some mornings encase you. Hole you up with a chill, a lonely stillness. And step by step I go in a direction without thinking - anywhere away.

Walking is its own kind of therapy. It is uncomplicated: free-falling from foot to foot, you are welcome to continue, welcome to stop, welcome to think on just who you might be, what you might be doing.

I have come to find my own kind of way lately. That things around this time of a life are definitive - constantly definitive. I am the proverbial block of stone being chipped away at...something emerges, eyelash by eyelash, crack by crack. Someone somewhere is dusting the fragments away, is thumbing the cheekbone to refine the finish.

It is all felt.

"I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of." - Michael Montaigne

And this is why you cannot really look back...you cannot really wish for things that were or that might have been. You are Lot's wife, fleeing Sodom drenched in the wine of last evening, the scent of your last partner, the sweat of the run, the wish for what might have been. And just as you believe that the small yearning for what is not in front of you will not stick, that the disaster you have left behind is now worth hoping for: you are a pillar of salt.

Turned.

Sculpted.

Stayed.

Here's the truth: you know what is there, what lies in the past - it's really not as surprising as you'd think it'd be. Either you'll have it or you won't, either you'll take it or leave it. In between is not forward or backward but rather, no man's land. It is predictable, set in stone.

Set in stone...

As if stone could be set. As if canyons aren't made over time and lava doesn't melt rock. The future is possibility. The past is definition.

a brittle thing
this life
cross hatched between the leaves
and spilt between the cracks

the sidewalks go along
in a grey way
telling a story
:the underneath we hinder

broken grass
and fickle pebbles
all in a whir of fall
its way of letting things go

a brittle thing
glass shards, petals,
tight spaces
tiptoe-like over the spider's web.

1. Car/Motorcycle - probably car as I do value my life a bit.
2. Apt. in city with FREE/CHEAP parking.
3. 200lb. Front Squat
4. BW = 135lb.
5. Crossfit Gymnastics Cert, BB Cert, and Running/Endurance Cert.
6. Debts paid off. So that I can get my dPT, open a facility in Center City, or travel (CAMBOREA!).
7. 95lb. (BB) Turkish Get Up
8. 1:15 400m Sprint
9. Record 10 songs I actually like.
10. "Adam Bede" read.
11. Less the idiocy. More the good. Less the cynicism. More the wisdom. Less the laziness. More the patience.

My latest obsessions:

1.  Watching water

2. Art Museum Apartments

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LiagSjiPXA

4. Rows and Squatting

5. Blackberries (the fruit, people)

6. http://www.toyota.com/yaris/index.html

7. Budgeting like an Espe

8. Kombucha

9. Pondering my animal intake

10. Good friends, new friends

11. Massage and Active Release Therapy

12. Keeping house like a Nardone

13. Evofit Facility

14. The price of oil

15. Gratitude

UPON THINKING OF WIDOWS REMARRIED TOO SOON

we are just people after all,

like fireflies that dance for a night,

meet our lovers, and fade.

the summer's heat is too much

for our warmest yearnings,

so we take them in the night.

for all our glittering wings,

and fluttery talents, we

are like so many one night stands.

it is a marvel to the mind of the bug,

that the light will go out, just as

dawn begins, or a glass jar thickens.

and i think to ask, "Why do young lovers

believe that love is only only?"

"because it must seem so."

what is love but a pattern of movements,

a speck in a field, and a

parting of ways?

there are questions fireflies never ask

of their mates, like,

"if I died would you find another?"

perhaps we are wise then,

when we jar them up to the death

and make of their love, a tragedy.

what is love but a chemical reaction

to lights? some dear Hamlet's

Oedipal complex gone horribly wrong?

we are just people after all,

glinting about on a dark palette,

and loving in spite.

-May 5, 2006

I stoop out the window at around 21:30 to smell the rain, satisfy the call of thunder.  And there, glowing in the trees are fireflies, swinging like chinese lanterns in the oak and maple.  They hover under the leaves I imagine.  Seems a strange combination of light and water.  Makes me feel as if I should remind the universe that hair dryers don't go in bathtubs.

So I do respond.  I light a candle on my windowsill, hover under the drapes, listen to the padding of the raindrops, and breathe deeply to a rhythm I feel in the storm's breeze. I am intentional - because I must be to slow down enough to notice such important things.

I feel for a moment that things are as they should be.  Or at least, fine as they are.

Barefoot, I walk outside with a cup of coffee, brush my feet over the grass and my hair away from my face.  It is a nice contrast : the storm, and soft things.  Soon, I sit and glance at the windowsill.  There is the candle.  I wiggle my toes in time with the flame.

I once wrote about fireflies.  Then, I was trying to say that life was the strike of a match: an abrasive start, the flare of life, heat, youth and a slow burn into black.  The lights, the show, the love is all for naught.  All for brevity's sake.  It was also very, er, poetic.

Things are not nearly so bleak, I gather, watching these fireflies in my trees.  I believe in a lot of things.  More than I allow myself to know sometimes.  

I believe that health and movement can free almost anyone.

I believe that love exists, and is most often unrecognizable.

I believe that God could exist, but that's also unrecognizable.

I believe that laughter is as powerful as guilt.

I believe that music stirs souls.

I believe in the enormity of potential, the capacity of human action for good or ill.

I believe that "known" things are merely assumptions.

I believe that everyone has and always will have secrets.

I believe that forgiveness is possible.

I believe that I can change.

A belief for every firefly.  Lately I feel flighty.  But I am learning and reminded constantly that you can't run from yourself.  I am weak in many ways, strong in few, young, and learning so much.  I've heard it said that the best writing follows one rule: tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.  The truth is that with my life, this one life I get, this great thing I hope to use well, I would just like to do things that I enjoy, to risk just enough so that I am able to value those things I wager.  I don't remember when it became so complicated to do so. 

Today I played.  I can't tell you how wonderful that feels.  To just play.  I had nothing to do, nowhere to be, and sweat on my brow.  I'm in love with the air.  If a job could be like that why would I leave it? The last year of my life in one word has been: surprising.

I gravitate between two poles: I would like to live in a planned life.  But I would also like to simply live.  The best kind of planning sets you free so you can, I think. 

I have only known fireflies over fields - wide and speckled with light.  I have never known them to fly higher.  And yet, there they are. 

A million things at once as always.  I feel I'll be somewhere else soon enough...penning entries in my journal about far away places and familiar frustrations, adventures and loves.  

My name means Peace.  Peace.  And I always found this so presumptuous.  

I was once told by a friend that the strangest thing about my personality was that I wanted to be in a place of peace at the same time that I hated to be there.  This is, I think, because peace doesn't really exist in a vacuum.  Peace is not boring.  It is not the absence of something...but the fullness I feel in a moment when I am not thinking about what I must do next.  Clearly a flighty thing.

The other day I was listening to a program on www.ted.com.  One part of the speaker's presentation included a bit where he mentioned that the person you remember yourself being 20 years ago is actually gone.  That person is physically blown away the way that dunes drift in groups for miles across a desert.  

Peace is like being a conscious grain of sand.  It's not grasping at time...so much as giving in to it.

This man: http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Problem-Answer-Important-Question-Why/dp/0061173975/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204439764&sr=8-1 has my perspective on life as of late...and frankly, the history that has brought me to it.  I am resigned to it.  I am not happy about it.  But I'm not sad about it either.  I am beyond missing what I don't find to exist.  My moments of eager wonder are what tell me that being a Christian is not synonymous with being the only the wonderer in the world.  I crave beauty, truth, goodness, fullness, a life so rich that I can almost taste it to think of it.  If this is it, then it is worth everything.  

Existence is desperate.  And if I'm not gasping for breath now, I will be. 

The history is heavy though.  There is an ever-present elephant in the room, I think.  It is this heaviness that makes me want to leave everything, I think.  

I want peace so much.  Peace in myself, peace with others.  I get carried away.  When it is time to change though, sandstorms are just a necessary part of being taken up by the wind.  Peace can be had in the air, can't it?

Cause freedom is a naked heart that always dares to give
A willingness to let the tenderness be taken as it may
-Katie Herzig, "Jenny Lynn"

How much of who we are has to do with who we're around?

How much of what we do is who we are?

Is how we spend our days really, how we spend our lives?

I've spent these past few days doing absolutely nothing really: laundry, chasing mice round an apartment that's not mine, walking a dog, figuring out a remote.  I haven't been alone like this in a good, long while.  And it feels so strange, but so relieving.

I think who we are is never so certain.  I am this great flow of things that meets the morning, fits into a schedule on occasion, wills movement, experiences waves of emotion.  But I'm never really sure if all my goings combine to be who I am.

I am no Descartes, and no Freud, but I think consciousness...it must have a great deal to do with the idea of even being able to know "who we are".  If I'm not mistaken I think falling in and out of this consciousness is a point of contention for many religions. 

Christianity, I believe, would have us conscious of the state of our souls, the fullness of our beings, the fabric of ourselves, especially with regard to how all of this relates to our creation by a Creator. 

The further "east" you go however, I find that consciousness of self is actually an undesirable thing.  This is, I think because the self cannot, in "their" opinion really exist.  No soul stands alone but instead wakes to find itself out of the womb of eternity and into this world of time.  And there is nothing in me that does not somehow exist only in relation to something that is, to my mind, not me.

Blah, blah, blah. 

All I know is that I feel so fragile lately, like I could step outside and break into a million pieces if I'm not too careful.  This from one who used to be so brave, so ready to leave anything for something that was at least different.  Was that really me?  Did I ever do anything because I really wanted to?  It's no comforting feeling, and it makes me want to buy a very big Northface jacket- the kind with the Sherling (sp?) hood- and Uggs.  Seems I need sleep if I'm contemplating such blasphemous thoughts. (Uggs=blasphemy)...

What should someone do with $8,000 in loans?