Idle and Blessed

My entire being is a jumbled mess of everything. In yoga classes, when you’re supposed to close your eyes and look into your own soul from the outside, I usually just pray instead because I don’t know what “looking at your soul from the outside” really means. But right now I do. And it’s that scene on the news, the helicopter cam looking down on the land where a tornado was. It’s those paintings in the children’s section of the Frist where all the colors are muddled together into brown because kids can’t really use paintbrushes. It’s that sentence you can’t get out so you keep stuttering and mixing words together because you’re nervous. It’s how you would imagine drowning being like if you can see the glimmer of daylight through the water but can’t tell which way is up. That’s my soul. That’s what it looks like from the outside. I’ve been going through the days by swinging in the middle of calmness and frenzy. Silence and screaming. Fake and real. Up and down. I keep thinking either th...

There are some times in life when all of the sudden something explodes and you become a different person. These are the times in my life I have come to fear, expect, love, hate, stand in awe of; in some ways I invite them in, wish for them, pray for them, and in some ways I expend lots of energy trying to avoid them. I think a lot of people refer to these times as crises. Crisis. That’s got to be one of my favorite words, because (side note) I use it all the time about everything, especially when I want to exaggerate, which is every minute. But still, crises shape us in a very strange and unpredictable way, and I feel like if we all just sat down with our neighbors and recalled the crises in our lives we would all get to know each other better, and we would get to know something really important about humanity and about life. Again with the side notes. Last night I met some friends my roommate had over, and we stood in the kitchen for a while and talked about moments of panic ...