early morning

it is something,
to fill your mind with good things. worthy things.

it has been sorely lacking in me for awhile now, i realize.
much to my regret.

lingering on the ephemeral
rather than chasing after what will endure,
what will renew my mind and heart.
and what will help others, help me to love them
into a better person.
and allow them to love me into who i should be.

sometimes the emptiness becomes too much. you need to wake up.

love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control


i like this because i recognize myself, others. how proud we are when we are young.
maybe he meant that they kill his soul.
but itll kill our souls, to think we know everything, to be unable to listen to truth.

Honestly, I rarely write about theological issues because if I do I find myself in a room with white, twenty-something males whose parents are paying for their education and, like me when I was their age, think they know everything, think only in black and white, and defend their ideas as mingled with their identities. It kills the soul. -donmilleris.com

another good thing i ran across this morning:

Levitt, who died this year at 95, had a Whitmanesque generosity. Her pictures are loaded with unqualified love, which is something you don't see a lot of in modern photography. - nytimes.com

to remember to hold onto love, show love, even in art, especially in art, where perhaps, it has gone missing.

gratitude

i love my friends.
too much.

though i have not so much this past year.
think it has only now dawned upon me that i am leaving them.

and i am thus crying in ct hall at this hour, and writing letters when i should be writing daily themes.

but such is life, and it is good.

i hope, my mind- can return to what is good.
it is slowly making its way there.

i'm not enough.

others aren't.

The Lord is.

maybe the lyrics are greater than the song

ah, the depth.

love it.

you're my heaven, and my feet the only sound

you're the shadow in my mind

i am hollow all the time

- leigh nash, along the wall

and i wake up happy.

glory, glory, glory.

on a pillow

is it possible, for the heart to fall in love more than once?

not free love
but hard love
because what is in me is hard love.
fear of God, and not of man.

for lee-shing

:)

but its not about you. haha. related to you.

blessed are those who hunger and thirst
i was reading a series of beatitudes in a random reflection book the other day. and for some reason, it was this part of the justice and righteousness one that struck me deeply.
those who hunger and thirst.
i think i got really frightened. because this semester, i began to lose that hunger and thirst, for something better. i do not know if i have ever felt that, in quite that serious and insidious of a manner. how is it even possible to strive for something if you do not desire it? and how it is possible to desire something if you do not remember it?
a recognition of the reality that ... this world is strong, and it can dissolve your ideals and your beliefs. it can. in goodness, and love, and mercy, and kindness, and forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. how it is that children and people lose the sense of what is supposed to be and who they are supposed to be.
how the self becomes inured to what is less. and settles more and more deeply in it, because it is too hard to desire what is more.
hunger and thirst. i think i will have lost everything if i lose those two.
i need to be reminded every day. because i know, to let go of what i dream of and know to be right, would be to give up on anything of value.
i think- to give up on the world as it should be and could be.
...because when you feel the weight and truth of goodness, and do not have it, its a hurt your heart, down to the bones kind of ache for something that is not there. and you will work at it with your all, to taste it. to make others see it.

and so, the terror, really: what if i lose it?

o fickle heart of mine

i am writing for no reason in particular, but for the fact that it helps me understand.

i had a beautiful conversation with a freshman the other night, and it made me realize how much good conversations make my day. make my life, really, in turning me into the person i will become.

i've been thinking lately about art, and artists.
what is it that distinguishes a soul of an artist?
maybe there is no distinction or separation i can actually make between those who love art, and those who do not.  because maybe everyone is inclined towards beauty, but it is simply that their ideals of beauty are different.  in a form other than one i can recognize.  ...yet still there.

art
1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

of what is more than ordinary significance.