Pale Shell

Waves in my ocean are like winter's snowflakes. Every one is a different story, a new breath of the sea with its own laugh, its own rise and fall. Each one will strike the sand, will end itself in a different way. Like timbers they fall, their peaks never having felt in an entire lifetime the solidness that is the ground. And even in falling every single wave will come as nothing before it has. It will fall like silk, tumble like a giggling toddler, or even strike like lightning, the thunder riding its tail. And then they pull out, they dig white fingers into the sand and drag back out in streaks or handfuls the grainy shore. And every second they come in the thousands, in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands along my beach. In one day out here they have spoken with the earth of a lifetime of things. They come and they go and there is nothing a man can do to stop them. Only watch or run out into them and feel them rush across his sun-brown back. And standing in the waves he feels the heartbeat of the world, the heave and the sigh that is every crest and every trough. This is Time. How else does it make sense? And as time comes, as it goes, beating against the ground, there is a miracle underneath. As every wave draws back from the shore there is always a moment when the water is perfectly clear, when the froth is gone and, looking down, you can see the shells. And it is these that take our breath away. Every man reaches for them. Every thought of staying dry is gone, every precaution we took so carefully is over; making sure the pants were rolled high and the t-shirt pulled up, keeping our feet dry to keep away wet sand, it is all gone. Because every man knows instinctively somehow that the shell they have seen, the one that has taken their breath away and sent it tumbling with the waves, she will only be seen once in a miraculous moment when time has stood as still as it ever will. And looking at that exact moment in that exact spot on this infinite beach he has seen her. A moment later and she will be lost. A moment earlier and she isn't even there. 

So here I am with the sun on my skin, with the sand against my legs, and with the sea chuckling around me like a thunderstorm. And looking down, in that one moment in the wave, I have seen a shell so wonderful that all I can do is bend my knees and hope in blind faith that my hand can find her. And as the sky turns the color of burnt and bleeding roses it looks as if that pale shell is on fire with the setting sun, glimmering with a life brilliant and dangerously beautiful.

Mud and Miles

I suppose that I have some answers, some thoughts, some rantings as responses to what I wrote before. Man is a fickle child. He is so easily torn to pieces and yet it is so hard to realize that this is, truthfully, a good thing. We get close because getting close to another is dangerous. And that is, I have seen now, absurdity in its clearest form. It makes no rational sense to give part of ourselves to someone. It is weakness to give, weakness to expose yourself, and absolute weakness to love something else that you cannot control. Why would you ever tell someone that you know could hurt you with words, with betrayal, secrets that would destroy you if they were given out? It makes no sense. And perhaps this has been the strangest thing to me. While all of these things make no sense. While logically, it is most advantageous, most personally beneficial (it would appear) to wall up your heart, to put it deep into the earth, to wrap it in some socks and carve out a vault in the corner of the bedroom floor for safekeeping, it is the most foolish thing possible. Quite simply put, life is worth nothing without loving someone illogically. Irrational love is what makes life Life. Looking into eyes that you know might never be your's, holding a hand that you are willing to cross a country for, is what makes you not human, but a living, laughing, image of God. Rationality does not define the world. Rationality attempts to make sense of the world, and finds nothing to make sense. Irrational love attempts at nothing, and knows everything. It says, "Look at how little sense this makes. Look at how different we are." And while rationality would call, "The End", the irrational, laughing life says, "I love you. And here, this is my heart. It could be your's one day." And while it could all change, I know that it is good. I have learned that Time moves, that people change, that the things we promised can change and the hopes we assured ourselves of, while still being hopes, can be moved and cautioned and tempered by the life that is always being. There are miles between people. There are states and lives and years that separate possibilities from real actualities. But even so, to love beyond and in the face of what is is the truest, clearest act of being a Man that I know of.
And so I choose to be broken. I choose to be hurt, to be confused and to struggle with God. I will be a Man. I will wrestle with Him. I will have my hip broken. And I will cry to Him from the dust, cry for him to stay true to His Promise. I will pray like a lunatic and love without sense. And yet the hardest part is knowing that, so often, it will be I who does the hurting. I will be the cold steel that rips through love and tears with dull hate at living hearts. But I have chosen to get dirty. And this is part of the fight. I choose to be covered in the mud, the dry dirt made wet with my own tears, my cries for forgiveness and forgetfulness. And so I'll strip to the waist. Give me the joy to fight You till I am broken, O God. Give me the unimaginable. Give me the patience for the greatest promise I have not yet seen.

Thunderstorm Burns

I know I will be writing more about this, but for right now what I have to say is shorter and not especially profound. It is more problematic I believe.
It is easy to hear, to speak, to believe words like, "Just take it a day at a time," or "Life goes on." It ought to make sense to just move on from something, to shake off a memory, to shrug something away. But somehow I believe that doing that is to lose entirely what it means to be human. I am a man, a boy, a fool covered in his own mistakes, defined by his scars. And that is not special. It is not unique, as we would be so happy to believe. It is nothing unusual to be a fool. It is not a novel idea to announce yourself as being stupid. And neither is it an excuse. I am not less broken by pointing out I am indeed broken. So what of it? Why is it that when we open up to those near and, when we put ourselves into it,  far away when we will inevitably hurt them and be hurt by them? It will happen. No amount of romanticism or honeymooning the idea will last long enough to keep us from eventually tearing through a heart with the sharp steel of words or a cold action, and so often it is both. But life goes on, they say. Forgive and move on. Give yourself without restraint because that's what's good. Man was not meant to be alone. Indeed, but man was not meant to destroy everything he loved. Men were not made to snarl at the woman they swore to protect for eternity, not made to do push away those they love. So I suppose this post is a question I've been thinking on for quite a while, or maybe a few questions. It is not me doubting anything massive, only trying to make sense of what is. Why is it good to lose pieces of yourself to those who you know are leaving, to ridiculous, kind, and patient people you will never see again? Why do we get close when hurt is what inevitably comes of it? Do we shut our eyes, hold hands, and say that love will find a way? How can we trust ourselves enough to love like we ought?
Our lives are hurricanes, are screaming thunderstorms of tears and joys that don't mingle together nicely. They break each other. They strike, lightning bolt against lightning bolt, and the sparks come raining down, burning dark gaps into the bright earth of our world.

Beginning

People are not fair. We are not honest. We hurt and cut and spit and tear each other apart. We undo those we love most, drive away our best friends and push away our families. We let things be said that belong in the mouth of hell and speak words that we regret the second our mouths close back. Forgiveness is a weak word for what we need, a word used far too often.

And then we leave. Having lived in towns among people we never expected to know, we move on, as we're apparently supposed to do, and rip up the soil, the life, with the roots we laid down and let run out, far too often unintentionally. But this is how life works, they tell us. This is what happens. Your high school friends won't be your college friends, who won't be your married friends, who won't be your retired friends. Our lives are filled with faces of people who bear parts of us away, pieces we have lost and will never get back. And that is pain. Not a selfish hurt like watching the other kid grab the blue crayon, but the pain of seeing your love hushed by distance and time, the years muffling the laughs and tears that made you who you were.

I am not a fascinating human. I am not caught up in some deeply mysterious and difficult life. I have no catchy ideas, no quick witted phrases that I plan to give to the world. But I am not starting this blog to show anything off. I am a boy from the beaches of Florida, caught up in a hurricane of living that has, for right now, brought me into a small town in the Northwest. And the only hope of writing this can be to describe the colors and smells and sounds from in the eye of this storm that carries me back to where I belong, back home. 

But there is no real going back. I will never be the same boy I was before this winter. And this is what I have found to be true: I am made who I am by the people around me. Never did I think that I would find the friends that I have, that I would love kids from the hard north and the east coast. But I did, and I do. I am being thrown only forward, pulled through time watching those I now love leave to a good life. 

So this blog is to remember, in one way or another, the places and people and days that make up the wild journey that is my life. It is to make some sense of the way I will become who I will be. I cannot undo the words I have said. I will never be able to make scars disappear that I have caused. I can only live among those that I have, reach for those that are far, and, more than anything, look for miracles in their eyes. Because here, below these words, there is a current of memories and a thunderstorm of life that roars with the fullness of an entire world and will strike me with its laughing lightning.