-sitting on my porch this morning eating an orange, listening to the highway.
-i got really silly excited today thinking about plants, especially tomatos.  oh, and watermelons.  and pumpkins, which i've never grown before but really want to.
-old tom petty songs on the radio while i got an oil change.
-little notebooks that help me stay focused in the midst of so much busyness, and to-do lists that shrink and then regrow in the blink of an eye.
-finding some really cheap, CUTE apartments.  and did i mention "cheap"? $425 a month for a 1/1 downtown makes me jump up and dance around.  oh city, i love thee.
-rocking my last college final and then saying goodbye to some friends.
-driving home with the windows down, smelling the beach, and thinking about the big life changes going on.  in a week, so much will have changed, and so much will have stayed the same.  with one hand i am closing out some chapters, and with the other i am happily writing new ones.

overall, it is turning out to be a pretty great book.

first, i really just want to show off the spanky new shirt my friend Nicole sent me.  she is so crafty and awesome!  it's a heart with wings and underneath it says "peace peace peace" in Sanskrit.  i feel like that pretty much sums me up lately.

i'm trying to figure out what i want to do with this space, as i have lots of different places that i write (both online and off).  listing the things i am grateful for each day is a good exercise, but probably boring for anyone else to read, and i can write them out elsewhere.  the only other thing i have up my sleeve at the moment is a long piece about marriage and this idea of "completion" but i don't feel good enough about it yet to post it.  so, i don't know, but something new is coming here soon i guess.  i would like this to be more interactive somehow.  any thoughts are welcome.

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today, as i struggle with long to-do lists, i find myself thinking about my work ethic.  it's something that has been coming up in conversation lately.  i have friends who tell me that i am the hardest working person they know, and i used to believe this.  at 17, i was working three jobs and going to college, and i haven't slowed down a whole lot since.  and as i look to the future, i know this needs to continue, i need to get that energy back and keep pushing ahead.  i had the chance to go teach English in Japan but after reading about the structure of the program over there, i know it's not for me.  the bulk of the day is spent horsing around and playing games, not teaching.  a good friend in California summed it up really well when he told me "you've worked too hard and gotten through too much to just settle on some easy job where you don't get to push yourself and use your skills."

all that being said though, i have been peeved at myself lately.  i feel like i have been LAZY.  i have a head full of ideas, projects, and directions that have had to be put on the back burner while i jump through the necessary hoops (like school, for instance).  i really dislike that i have had to give up so much time in order to get through these hoops, because i am so aware of the other things i could be working on.  things that i think are ultimately more important, and more beneficial to both myself and others, things more in line with the lifework i should be doing.  and also i am bothered by the limitations of my body and my energy.  that i have had to slow down sometimes because i am simply too drained to keep pushing forward.  even when i am lying still, my head is racing with the knowledge of other things i could/should be doing.  i have to honestly budget myself time to relax, so that i can say "hey.  you.  listen.  for the next ___ hours, you aren't doing anything, AND THAT'S OKAY."  otherwise i feel guilty and get worked up and the anxiety attacks start to creep back in.  my mom is one of the few people who can spot when i am getting close to the edge, and knows how to so easily diffuse me. she grabs both of my hands in one of hers (to stop the tapping and fidgeting) and says "I love you.  now STOP."  and i breathe out and it's like a hurricane leaving my body.

today i am making an effort to correct some of the things that make me feel lazy.  a big one was reconnecting with a good friend and business partner.  several years ago, we started a zine and craft distro together and it actually took off and started doing well.  i felt like we were actually accomplishing something and other people seemed to take notice as well.  the distro was getting written about in books and magazines, things were looking great, and then... life happened.  both of our personal lives got too crazy and we had to stop.  it's been closed down for over a year now and i was really sad about that.  in the past month or so we have renewed our friendship and today we are seriously talking about what it will take to re-open the distro and get it going again.  i feel like this is really important for us to do and that it will help to jumpstart some other projects that i have had on the backburner for way too long.

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for such a long time, my heart has known where it was going and what i was supposed to be doing.  i feel like it's only just recently though that i have gotten my feet under me enough to really start making those steps.  part of my prayer lately is simply "please help me, i'm ready, i'm ready, i'm ready."

I don't want to write about myself today so instead I would like to share part of what I have been reading lately.  For those not familiar with him, Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.  He was an acclaimed theologian, poet, author, and social activist.  He was also a proponent of ecumenism and engaged in some fantastic spiritual dialogues with the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh.  Merton died by accidental electrocution in Bangkok, Thailand, while attending a meeting of religious leaders on 10 December 1968, just 27 years to the day after his entrance into the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Right now I am working through several of his books: Contemplative Prayer, Life and Holiness, No Man is an Island, and Love and Living.  I say I am "working through" these books because it is slow going so far.  I am an abnormally fast reader; when I look at a novel, I "see" and process three lines of text at a time.  With Merton though, I find myself re-reading almost every page, and then returning to the beginning of each essay once I reach the end.  I am chewing through the pages slowly but thus far I have found it well worth the effort.  The excerpts below are from Love and Living.  Any italics or emphasis is his.  I would love to post the entire essay, but I don't want to clog up your screen any more than I already have :)

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In reality, love is a positive force, a transcendent spiritual power.  It is, in fact, the deepest creative power in human nature.  Rooted in the biological riches of our inheritance, love flowers spiritually as freedom and as a creature response to life in a perfect encounter with another person.  It is a living appreciation of life as value and as gift.  It responds to the full richness, the variety, the fecundity of living experience itself: it "knows" the inner mystery of life.  It enjoys life as an inexhaustible fortune.  Love estimates this fortune in a way that knowledge could never do.  Love has its own wisdom, its own science, its own way of exploring the inner depths of life in the mystery of the loved person.  Love knows, understands, and meets the demands of life insofar as it responds with warmth, abandon, and surrender.

When people are truly in love, they experience far more than just a mutual need for each other's company and consolation.  In their relation with each other they become different people: they are more than their everyday selves, more alive, more understanding, more enduring, and seemingly more endowed.  They are made over into new beings.  They are transformed by the power of their love.

Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning, value, and identity.  But this revelation remains impossible as long as we are prisoners of our own egoism.  My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in their eyes; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior "package."  The package is totally unimportant.  What matters is this infinitely precious message which I can discover only in my love for another person.  And this message, this secret, is not fully revealed to me unless at the same time I am able to see and understand the mysterious and unique worth of the one I love.

This mutual revelation of two persons in their deepest secrets is something entirely private.  It is their possession, and it cannot be communicated to anyone else until it is embodied in the child who becomes, as it were, a living word, a physical manifestation of their shared secret.  Yet in the person of the child the secret remains a mystery known only to the love of the two who participated in the creative surrender which brought the child into being.

Love, then, is a transforming power of almost mystical intensity which endows the lovers with qualities and capacities they never dreamed they could possess.  Where do these qualities come from?  From the enhancement of life itself, deepened, intensified, elevated, strengthened, and spiritualized by love.  Love is not only a special way of being alive, it is the perfection of life.  He who loves is more alive and more real then he was when he did not love.

That is perhaps one of the reasons why love seems dangerous: the lover finds in himself too many new powers, too many new insights.  Life looks completely different to him, and all his values change.  What seemed worthwhile before has become trivial: what seemed impossible has become easy.  When a person is undergoing that kind of inner cataclysm, anything might happen.  And thank God, it does happen.  The world would not be worth much if it didn't!

lots going on but not much that i want to say.  words are better face to face, when they're not needed anyway.  i am restless in a way i can't even really explain; i can feel the changes on the wind -- they are coming soon and i am ready for flight.

here are a few songs that are worth a listen.  this is more where i am anyway.

Feist - I Feel It All -- mp3 -- lyrics

Sia - Pictures -- mp3 -- lyrics


i hope you are all well.  message me if there is ever anything i can do for you.  really.


don't wait for the poetry to come to you.

yesterday i actually posted music that wasn't hip hop and so now i'm thinking.... back to our regularly scheduled programming  =)  this is one of my favorite Atmosphere tracks, and they actually have a video for it.  enjoy.

saturday ended up being a perfect sort of day.  if you saw me with my friends, you would not believe this... but i am actually very shy and introverted.  given the chance, you will find me at home either by myself or with just a close friend or two.  nothing wrong with that, but change is good, ya?  my mission for the summer then is to work on this and force myself to do things, even when i can't drag other friends with me and have to go by myself.  saturday morning i nervously met up with a new friend (introduced by a mutual friend), supposedly just for tea/breakfast/etc.  instead we ended up talking for two hours and making plans for future get-togethers.

while i was at the bakery, i saw a poster for an art party going on there that very night.  "come hang out and paint."  okay, i'm going to make myself go.  and i'm really glad i did, because it was awesome.  live music, good food, and getting to sling some paint around.  a local artist provides all the paint and materials (old, weathered fence boards) in an effort to get people creating.  he calls it "folk art revival" and i think it's such a great concept.  these parties happen about once a month and i will definitely be going back.  it felt so good to paint again, and now that's all i can think about.

i ended my night sitting out on the prairie with two good friends, passing around a beer and a clove, looking up at the sky and telling stories about "way-back-when."

i can already tell it's going to be a really good summer.

The past week has been long and busy, but very good.  It began last Tuesday with a concert I have been looking forward to for a while -- Psalters.  Their music is hard to describe but it's awesome.  This was my first time seeing them live and it was great; my chest actually hurt because those drums were rattling my heart around so much.  They played all of my favorites, including Wayfaring Stranger.  More pictures from the show here.

The next morning I headed east to Asheville, North Carolina.  My friend Tracy lives there now (I met her a few years ago when we were both living in Florida).  I know I'm biased, but I think she pretty much wins for "Cutest Kids Ever."  They are absolutely adorable.  Of course, I say that about all of my friends' kids.  Anyway, we hung out and they showed me the sites and I wandered around Asheville with a very happy Jiana hanging onto my neck.  (pictures)


After North Carolina, I met up with my friends Wendy and Sean in Gainesville who were also travelling around.  This was sort of our last shot to hang out for a while because they are moving back to Canada next month.  Anyway, they are good people and their kids are -- you guessed it -- adorable.  I showed them some of my old stomping grounds plus touristy things like the football stadium.  We also took the kids to the park and embarassed them by playing on all the swings and merry-go-rounds ourselves  =)   (pictures)

My last stop for the day was to recover some quiet for myself.  I headed to one of my favorite hideaways -- Baughman Chapel.  There is a lake right in the middle of town that is actually part of the university.  About six years ago, they built a chapel right on the water's edge.  It is *beautiful* -- no, that doesn't even cover it -- it is *stunning.*  It's very small and is all wood and glass.  The end of the chapel has been left as just a huge arched window that looks out onto the lake and forest.  You would never guess that you are in the middle of the city.  Anyway, this is one of my favorite places to sneak off to when I need to reconnect.  (pictures)



And with that, I'll leave you for now.  Oh no, wait, music =)  Three songs for your Wednesday:


I hope you are all having wonderful days.  Love each other like there's no tomorrow, because you never know.

~Sara