Reduced to Thought

Looking at my hands, my vision blurs to glance upon them in another year, another place, another context. There were quickened heartbeats in that small girl's chest, but her hands that held the phone were still. Motionless. Strong, maybe. They knew the art of restraint.

You were only just a few numbers away, but there might as well have been oceans between us. You were more than accessible, yet still I would not step into your world. Somehow your nearness, in the strangest way, only made me keep my distance. Perhaps there was intuition buried underneath my reason...back then when I belonged to a paradigm of rules. They told me your beauty would only rob me of mine. It knew that somewhere I had been taken captive, not set free. I only held the phone. Clinging to my rules. Loving how they shaped me.

Then all at once--a shift in person. After all these things make life interesting, right? So I Dialed, you answered. Creating the downfall, the spiral; a new life of different reasons and different choices. They altered my paradigm. I guess we make them and in return they make us.

Well I was made different. When I lost my natural template, I lost my identity. For that was all I was. Passion, security, and fundamentals obliterated, I am no longer a noun, but verbs in transition. Searching, weighing, feeling...and passing the time.

Like fire sweeping through a forest, all has been erased. What changes with the wind--it cannot define my being. All is indifferent and bleak, besides the harsh light of truth. Sometime when the fog has cleared I'll see the world by that sun. There something lies unchangeable, worth adhering to, loving, and chasing after. I do not find it in myself. I have been reduced to thought.

Where I'm at

Maybe the most important realizations are the most ordinary ones.

Situations and consequences, scientific and spiritual laws that govern the universe have cornered me into a position where decisions must be made, where a path is painted clear for eyes that are willing to perceive.

I've had life and death set before me. I've been forced to embrace truth not for fancy, but for health and survival.

Does it have to be written in the sky?

Use the faculty of your mind. Guide your heart in the way. Take in the simple, the complex...cry out for continuity.

And be honest with yourself.

Find it where you can, then hold on to it with everything you have. Strengthen the things that remain. Write it on your forehead. Come on Leah, lets get through this.

Depression

My greatest fear is where two hells meet: unceasing movement and eternal stagnation.

A bottomless ocean.
A maze without end.
Arms, legs flailing.
Energy spent,
Treading water,
Running out of time.

I remember when music connected me with beauty; how that beauty made me feel alive. But I'm not sure what I'm searching for now. Booklet in hand, my girlish frame embarks to save the world. The manual will guide me and tell me where to go.

I used to be the scholar, now I can't make out the alphabet. Hieroglyphics to me.

I stare into thickness, I take in nothingness. Peace without the joy. Rest without recovery in blanketed, nauseating stillness. Inescapable grey.

Here nothing is known, though everything can be perceived. The self-awareness of everything I don't know brings to sudden consciousness every inch of my smallness. It crowds my space. Heart beat after heart beat loud in my chest, I wish to be erased.

Thoughts racing, reeling, searching, connecting, reworking and closing, closing in. I shrink as the expanse grows wider; I decompose in solitude.

I feel like I may die here.

Sometimes there are faint revenues of music begin cutting through the thickened fog. They are all that's left, helping me to breathe, reminding me of breath.

Coined It

Reading the Bible is unique from every other book in the sense that you don't have to master it--the reward comes in allowing it to master you.

Augustine definitely coined this phenomenon.

"I resolved, therefore, to direct my mind to the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were. And behold, I saw something not comprehended by the proud, not disclosed to children, something lowly in the hearing, but sublime in the doing, and veiled in mysteries" (35).

Discussion of the Soul's Condition

St. Augustine says in his Confessions "Behold, the ears of my heart are before thee, O Lord; open them and say to my soul, I am your salvation."

I stopped after I read this, and a small part of me said, now thats interesting. Whether or not choose to think of it in these semi-religious terms (such as salvation, Lord ect.) for whatever reason our souls continuously express the need to be saved. The "eyes of our hearts" are endlessly looking for this something to save us. Why?

This is the pervasive hallmark of man--His constant discontentment and hunger for something more; feelings of enslavement and methods of saving himself.

I Desire Light

John 12:35-36

"For a little while longer the light is among you. Walk while you have the light, that darkness may not overtake you; he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes. While you have the light, believe in the light, in order that you may become sons of light"