Life Lately / August

I've been thinking lately. A lot. So much so that my friends and family have had to snap me out of stupors where my head is a billion miles away. It's hard to come back down from a billion miles away.

A few weeks ago, I had resigned myself to the sense that the world is an awful place. News is always bad and people are usually cruel. Sometimes it seems that way. But lately, I get this crazy feeling that I'm blind.

As I rode my bike home from Institute last week, I ended up on a lonely dirt road in the middle of nowhere that I've always hated to drive on. It was almost twilight. The sky was pink and peach above fields of alfalfa and wheat that crashed together. The only thing I could hear was the ticking of bicycle pawls, but then it seemed like an orchestra rose up to meet me. Horses mumbled in baritone from beneath a half-dilapidated stable right off the road. Frogs and crickets sang together from the cattails. A lamb bleated, a calf lowed, and a breeze snaked through my loose hair. It was incredibly romantic and incredibly peaceful. And incredibly not like the way I've been living my life this past year.

I've been so focused on names and numbers and figures that I've forgotten poetry. I've forgotten the way it feels to sit back and stare at some menial thing and see the magic of it. I've forgotten how it feels to find a verse in an interaction, an ode in a face, or a new story in an old place. I've forgotten why I wanted to be a writer to begin with: to catch wonder and put it somewhere where it can't be fleeting. Only now have I been reminded.

I don't know why I'm writing all of this here, because it gives you no big glimpse of my life. Work is stressful, school has become complicated and, as of today, I'm probably not going back now, I still occasionally feel the small wound of 'what if' when I think about life.

But I'm alive, and I have stacks of words inside. And lately, they spill out of me. And the world is more beautiful than it's ever felt.