Well.....here we go.
You never do know, when you start a day, just where you're going to end up by the time its over. None of my plans, none of my imaginings for this day, or even this week, would have put me in THIS place. Normally, in a situation like this, when i've come out and said things I meant to hold on to, or really, anytime i find myself, breathless and vaguely bewildered, on the other side of a decision already made, i am immediately seized with panic. Terrified by it's DONE-ness, its irreversibility. Second guessing. A crippling dread that by taking an enticing possibility,calling its bluff, and daring it to become actual - that by doing so I have stepped off the edge into the whirlwind.
Inertia...momentum..motion...force overcoming friction. Any change of state requires an unbalance in the forces, which feels to me like a loss of control...
But today, i'm not afraid. I'm working out what we have to lose, and its not really that much. And the possible gains? well...
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Friday, October 20, 2006
I have a picture to paint, a book to write, a job to find, a self to find, and a future to choose, and what am I spending my time thinking about?
Well, what little is left over from imagining romances that will never happen, goes to stuff like this:
Pigeon girl. On a cold day, I pass a girl on the sidewalk. I smile at her. She ignores me because she is looking down and smiling at the fat pigeon waddling by on the other side. And I think: A pigeon is a pretty unremarkable thing to warrant a smile. They’re all over the place. Scavengers. Rats with wings, really. Yet she smiles at it like a sunlit meadow full of butterflies. I imagine that she knows this pigeon. That they went to high school together. That they go way back. That they see each other every day on this sidewalk. That she is fluent in pigeon-speak, and as they pass, they exchange a pigeon version of “Hey you. What’s shakin’?”
“Same old, same old. Just a few feathers less”
Maybe its fat, jerky ridiculousness in this cold, dead, concrete world is all she needs this morning for a smile.
Well, what little is left over from imagining romances that will never happen, goes to stuff like this:
Pigeon girl. On a cold day, I pass a girl on the sidewalk. I smile at her. She ignores me because she is looking down and smiling at the fat pigeon waddling by on the other side. And I think: A pigeon is a pretty unremarkable thing to warrant a smile. They’re all over the place. Scavengers. Rats with wings, really. Yet she smiles at it like a sunlit meadow full of butterflies. I imagine that she knows this pigeon. That they went to high school together. That they go way back. That they see each other every day on this sidewalk. That she is fluent in pigeon-speak, and as they pass, they exchange a pigeon version of “Hey you. What’s shakin’?”
“Same old, same old. Just a few feathers less”
Maybe its fat, jerky ridiculousness in this cold, dead, concrete world is all she needs this morning for a smile.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
October 3, 2006
A young, fresh-scrubbed, unnaturally cheerful young man in the café asked me, after I gave him his change, if I knew how good God was.
It might have been planned. Debated.Worked up to. Certainly I would’ve needed some “working up” before dropping that one on a complete stranger. But it came out almost casually, as if asking if knew how good the food at Oodle-noodle box was. There was, admittedly, a hint of nervous excitement, barely contained, behind his half-smile, a feeling as if he were leaning forward, ready to plunge off the edge. A vaguely mischievous sparkle in his eye.
He could have been me, 10 years ago. In Buffalo, on the UB campus. An odd role reversal, I the skeptical heathen, and he the earnest young believer. With a sincere, burning conviction that he had something inside that people needed to know about, searching for an intriguing opening line, a way to make the leap from the niceties of idle conversation between strangers to the awkward, but potentially vital dialogue of faith.
I found it difficult to meet his eyes. I replied, quietly, that, for me, the jury was still out on that question. Almost immediately, I wondered if I really meant it. I wondered if I was simply unnerved by his certainty, if I just wanted to see a flicker of doubt, some sort of crack in his quiet assurance. If I was just annoyed by his putting me on the spot, his dragging my personal struggles with faith out into the open, and responded in this way as an attempt to frustrate his plans. If I really, deep down, questioned God’s goodness. If my sense of myself, or humanity, as ill-used by their creator were not more of a fashionable skepticism, and less of a true personal conviction.
If my reply troubled him at all, he didn’t show it. He added, just as quietly, that he hoped I found out some day, smiled, and left.
And it worked. Because I’m still unsettled, and I’m still thinking about it.
A young, fresh-scrubbed, unnaturally cheerful young man in the café asked me, after I gave him his change, if I knew how good God was.
It might have been planned. Debated.Worked up to. Certainly I would’ve needed some “working up” before dropping that one on a complete stranger. But it came out almost casually, as if asking if knew how good the food at Oodle-noodle box was. There was, admittedly, a hint of nervous excitement, barely contained, behind his half-smile, a feeling as if he were leaning forward, ready to plunge off the edge. A vaguely mischievous sparkle in his eye.
He could have been me, 10 years ago. In Buffalo, on the UB campus. An odd role reversal, I the skeptical heathen, and he the earnest young believer. With a sincere, burning conviction that he had something inside that people needed to know about, searching for an intriguing opening line, a way to make the leap from the niceties of idle conversation between strangers to the awkward, but potentially vital dialogue of faith.
I found it difficult to meet his eyes. I replied, quietly, that, for me, the jury was still out on that question. Almost immediately, I wondered if I really meant it. I wondered if I was simply unnerved by his certainty, if I just wanted to see a flicker of doubt, some sort of crack in his quiet assurance. If I was just annoyed by his putting me on the spot, his dragging my personal struggles with faith out into the open, and responded in this way as an attempt to frustrate his plans. If I really, deep down, questioned God’s goodness. If my sense of myself, or humanity, as ill-used by their creator were not more of a fashionable skepticism, and less of a true personal conviction.
If my reply troubled him at all, he didn’t show it. He added, just as quietly, that he hoped I found out some day, smiled, and left.
And it worked. Because I’m still unsettled, and I’m still thinking about it.
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