The Immaterial World

....and there are still moments in my day when I think I just can't make it any longer....like now, on my lunch break, not really hungry, listening to Gomez, and I just want to go home and take a walk--get outside and feel my heart beating, feel the breeze upon my back, feel the rocks underneath my feet that make me sure that I am where I am supposed to be....I lost something awhile ago. It was the most precious thing I had ever possessed. My heart shattered when I lost it and I didn't think I'd ever be okay. But, something happened in the air last week and fate took a different turn than I was expecting. What I had lost suddenly appeared in my life! I didn't realize that such a big piece of me went missing when I lost it. I feel so much more whole now that it's back within my reach. I feel beautiful again, I feel so much more at peace. I looked so hard for something to replace that piece with and I failed at every turn because nothing could take its place, ever. Thank you.



I don't feel young today. I feel like I've been here for ages and I'm worn out. I'm tired of this skin and this life. I want another one, a new one. I want to cocoon myself so I can emerge as a butterfly, a yellow one, the kind that you see among the green leaves in the woods. I want to build a cabin in the woods and live there. I want an old oak bed with old quilts and a rocking chair on the front porch. I want to sit and rock for hours, just thinking and breathing the air of the trees. I'd like to find my own tree and find a place to sit in it, get a different view than the one I have from the ground. Being outside is spiritual to me now. I finally have a glimpse of what the woods have always meant to my brother and father. I never knew until now. I had no idea. I can't believe I've gone 33 years without this tremendous knowledge. I am grateful that I opened the door and stepped outside. No one can ever keep me in again.



This post is dedicated to Lawton and Daddy. May you forever find your peace within the moments that can only be found in the woods and may I be able to join you one day so that we may together commune with nature. Thank you for being the men that you are.

Corrections and a bit of Cognitive Dissonance

(I think I might have been looking at my life a little too literally when I checked in last time. I tend to look at things as either black or white. Often I don't see the grey. And the majority of life is found in the grey, in moderation, in compromise, in the in between. I have a vast amount of time on my hands and it is my own fault for misusing it. There is nothing stopping me from learning and using my time to better my self. I have chosen to stare, stare at the screen, stare into the air. Enough, enough she says....I will use my time more wisely, end of story.)

You've heard about the Hermes orange shoes that were my first Spring shoe purchase? Well I have worn them so much now that they are a little stretched! But I love them, I love the color, I love the shape, I love the way my feet feel when I walk, they make me feel like a modern-day Hepburn. So....Church's English Shoes--a very conservative shoe company that has been in business for decades. They make traditional loafers and wing-tips for men and some of the same for women. Whoever is at the helm of Church's has a great sense of fashion and knows how to turn the most boring loafer into something that has zest, zip, and make a very unique contribution to the world of shoes. Case in point: Warm green leather loafers. Sounds a bit "off", yes? I thought so too, at first. Yet I was drawn to them in many ways. I began to deconstruct what it was that was making them seem so off, was it the color, was it the wrong hue of green, or was it the fact that a traditional loafer usually done in brown was now the color of grass? Of course I had to try them on to see what was going on, so I did....and it all made sense. The green reminded me of my old Mary Jane Doc Martens I wore in college and the style was one that I have always loved, a good, old-fashioned loafer. It was a sort of cognitive dissonance. The color was pulling at my memory while the style was playing with my eye for practical yet fashionable shoes.

I had to have some help in knowing how I was to wear these shoes. Do they go with black? Brown? Other colors? So, today I am wearing neutral-patterned cropped pants with the green loafers. I'll admit it is a bit strange, but I like being able to have something about me that doesn't match with all the other things. I've become so conservative in the past few years that it is good to pull out a pair of green loafers to get me out of the ruts I get in. I am excited that I have a color upon me that reminds me of my greatest days at Emory and that I am also bopping along in a comfortable pair of loafers that I can wear year-round! As it turns out, a bit of dissonance can be good for the spirit....

Butterflies

Love eludes me now. I am chasing after butterflies that go nowhere but up and into the sky. Perhaps I need some sort of net to catch them, bring them home, make them mine. Ah but how could I ever trap such creatures. I want them to come to me on their own. I want them to want to be mine. I am trying to be mindful of my life, moment by moment, but it is proving hard as minutes turn to hours to days and I lose track of where I was the moment before. It is only here when I write that I am fully engaged and fully where I need and want to be.

It is Sunday, and I hate Sundays. They are a precursor to Monday. Saturday sits alone in between Friday and Sunday. It has nothing of the week before or ahead attached to it. Sunday begets Sunday night and that means you wake up to the week. Friday begets Saturday morning and that is when the day is all alone and untouched by the week. Why am I so anxious about the week? It is a time when no time is my own and when I am somewhat owned by another, my job. Each day I spend 9 hours of my life unengaged and acting as a robot would with no emotion and no sense of the day outside. I watch the clock to see how much more time I have left to be this automaton and the days seems to last for years. Every day is like this, until Friday comes and then comes a brief end to my wasted hours. Then comes Saturday.

I rue each day that I must spend wasting the precious hours of my life. I will never get them back you see. They are gone. Each week, 45 hours, gone. I imagine what could I do with 45 hours a week and the options are endless! I could learn a new language in one week and begin a novel in the next. Every day would be a Saturday, full of possibilities. I am aware that 99% of the world spends their lives in just this way, but that doesn't make it any easier for me to do it. And somehow the paycheck at the end of the week doesn't matter because I got paid to be a robot, not to share my talents with the rest of the world. I wish I got paid on Saturdays, for those are the days of my dreams.

The Driveway

I want a driveway, somewhere to pull into and park my car, my own special parking place. I want a driveway, with grass on either side and maybe a potted plant near the house. I want a driveway that I can back out of, that I can walk down to get my mail, from my own mailbox. I haven't had a driveway since I left home for college. I've always lived in an apartment or a condominium where I've had to share my parking spaces with other people, where my mailbox was jumbled up next to someone else's.

I'm not sure why I just want the driveway and not the house. I do want a house, but it scares me a bit. I am scared that I won't decorate it properly, that my mother will be so disappointed in my taste, or I won't have any taste, or my taste will be too country. (No, I know my taste isn't country) I definitely do not want many rooms. I like to "live" in one room and have a few others that I just visit every now and then. I would love to have a true master bathroom with lots of storage and a giant tub with a separate shower. Oh and I would love to have a wonderful chair right next to my bed, close to my bookshelves, where I can curl up and read for hours. A yellow chair. I am fine with my queen-sized bed, but a king-sized would be glorious, wouldn't it? And I want my bookshelves to be in my bedroom, I want to keep them a bit private. I could have decorative bookshelves in the den, but my precious books, they need to be near me when I sleep. I would have a kitchen too, a clean and precise kitchen, done in blue and yellow, French country would be my preference.

So maybe I do want a house and a driveway!