With That Moon Language - Hafiz

July = Heart Explosion

Can someone freeze time?

This may have been the best month of my life--like one heart exploding moment to the next--lots of crazy partying, epiphanies, unexpected surprises, and God's presence thick like honey in all of it.

I'll start from the beginning.

The first week I spent at the beach with my family, mostly with my mom (in her beach chair with her baseball cap, practically in the water all day like a reptile, theorizing and seeing visions of the future). 


On Friday morning my girlfriends headed to Montauk for the weekend to celebrate Jessi's birthday. We mostly rolled around the town, bar-to-beach, with browning skin and salty hair, chatting about the great romance life is to us. We also created a near circus at Ruschmeyer's (getting 2/3 of the people in a venue to wear face paint for your best friend is an abnormal, but serious victory). 

On Tuesday I met up with our team serving in the South Bronx. We partnered with Sara Frazier's work - A House on Beekman. I watched the team take off their shoes, stand in God's glory and wash their neighbor's feet. This is the spirit of Jesus that changed my life forever 8 years ago. Being with them reminded me. And I got to film adorable inner city kids--my favorite!

After that I headed to Philly and stayed a few nights with Carolina at the Marriot. We did some stage design for the annual ACTS413 prayer event...and laughed. A lot.

Of course I was running around like a headless chicken shooting the event and--in my spare time--dragging my dad's staff members into a creepy stairwell for ANOTHER secret video shoot for his 50th birthday.  

Sneakily, stealthily, we put together a montage that came out with the big news... that he was flying out to the world's BEST golf course in St. Andrews, Scotland! 

...the magic of July just kept rolling. Saturday night Jessi and I had a life-changing conversation via an allegory I wrote in college, The Gumblers. It really does blow my mind that God would use a story about alien creatures holding water bubbles to alter the course of someone's destiny.

Speaking of how literature affects us, Monday night we had the author of The Shack over for dinner. When he shared his story, there wasn't a dry eye in the room. I feel like I met a friend, like when two souls are fellow travelers on the same journey. C.S. Lewis says the picture of lovers is two people staring in each other's eyes, but the picture of friendship is two people staring at the road ahead. Friendship is always about something else. Something much bigger than either of you.

And as if this month hasn't been wild enough, I just found out today that Ken Graves, aka The divine and human bird, is visiting tomorrow. {heart explosion times one hundred thousand million}

Dear Ken, you coming to my house, riding trees like a mountain man to the ground, reciting poetry around the fire, and banging tables in righteous anger is probably the best way I could imagine ending the best month of my life.

Cupcake cafe

I like this place! Anita and I basically sat here all day and worked remotely.

The ambience is somewhat shabby-chic with a white stone slab of a table, tons of outlets, benches, and really thrown together decorations (so New York). A big window sits to my left so I can dream and people watch as my files render themselves away. And a big plus is, it's close to jessi.

I can see myself having a meeting here. It's cozy enough to hole yourself up and work all day and not feel restless... Quiet... Unassuming...

Weltschmertz

philosopher-kings

never rule

fat mouths
speak nothing-words

to the world

wealth rots

in empty houses

limbless captains

navigate our seas

and no one believes 

in stargazers

anymore.

Some late pinterest favorites

Elm

Elm, Sylvia Plath

God's Grandeur - Hopkins

The World is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare not, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast, and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins