[Ongoing] 2023 Writing tidbits

Sometimes, it is easier to jot down a few words in my Notes app than it is to sit down and write a page, a book. So I write all my fleeting thoughts down, knowing that one day they might weasel their way into a character, into a line of dialogue, into one paragraph amidst a thousand.

January

How do you build a life? You do not build it alone. You build it faithfully and consistently.

I see them, that older couple. Time as not been kind to him. His hand shakes — Parkinson’s, I presume. Walking is not as easy it once was. But his wife grabs his trembling hand, and they walk in a halting tandem, into this coffee shop that they called home for several years.

It’s a tender thing, to see love that’s grown old but not stale.

Are we not the loneliest of folks? The people at Whole Foods at 7:55 on a Friday night, hot bar dinner, and phones as companions?

It feels two-fold what we’re chasing.

We’re chasing those bits and pieces of childhood — of laughing until we cry; dancing under a string of lights; cycling as fast as you can to see who gets to your driveway first. We’re chasing the unabashed glee and joy and freedom of it all.

But we’re chasing rich and deep things too. We want to be the one to say “I love you” first. We want to go beyond the surface and say something bold and brave with a simple gesture. We want to sigh deep with another and lay a head on a shoulder. And we want those childlike things for our kids.

February

How odd is it that I see some doctors more often than I see my friends.

Sometimes reading a wonderful book feels like a fever dream.

March

A deceptive incline. That’s what I’ve called the road leading to my street. I pedal with ease and then, seemingly suddenly, I’m straining and huffing and changing gears. A deceptive incline.

Is that not what life is? A deceptive incline. Sometimes deceptive in the way is looks flatter than it really is. Sometimes deceptive in looking steeper than it really is.

There are moments I fear that I should not.

And there are moments that sneak up, fooling me into thinking that I am enough to take them on all on my own.

I’ll be honest. I’m bad at looking people in the face. As I pass strangers on the street, I glance in their direction as we’re two steps apart. I glance in their direction, but that does not mean I glance at them. My eyes are averted.

Why am I so afraid to meet people’s gaze?

Why am I so afraid that we might see each other and have a moment of awkward eye contact?

Why am I in so much of a rush to move past the other person?

What if you were accused of a crime you did not commit?

But what if you fit all the profiles of a person who would commit a crime like this?

April

She plays this game, looking at neighboring drivers and seeing how long it takes for them to feel her eyes on them and turn.

He laughs with his whole body. Shoulders shuddering, throwing his head back, crumbling into a fold.

All art is an attempt to capture something. Nostalgia. A person. A story. An absolute. A snapshot of nature. The feeling of love. Beauty withheld. The brokeness of our world. And on and on the list goes.

We know whatever we’re trying to capture, it already exists out there. We experience it all in our day to day. And yet — we create anyway.

Because without it, we only get those things in fragments. Here and there. We need art to bring it all together.

Because otherwise we may not see it.

We may miss the message, miss the beauty, miss the depths of the heartbreak.

Otherwise we might grow numb to it all.

Art calls us to bear witness. In our making, to make sense of it all.

I sat in church yesterday, watching my kids walk back from communion, and my heart just swelled with love for them. I started crying, smiling.

I get to love these kids! I get to laugh with them and be loved by them! How on earth am I this blessed!

I see them in their nascent state and I love them so dearly.

May

God’s goodness does not exist in a vacuum. He cannot be good in one area of my life, and not in another. He is either good in all of it, or none of it at all.

I wonder — are we in more need of real stories, everyday ones that could happen upon our worlds, or are we in more need of fantastical ones? Ones that tap into the imagination that lies in wait, call us to dream, and wonder? Or — and this is a big ‘or’ — cannot both of those types of stories contain some of the truest truths? And is that what we are really in need of — truth?

I almost feel like I have to take this sabbatical as a form of resistance. To beat back against all the events that threaten it. To say, “Ha! You tried to beat me down but I’m still standing, I’m still going!”

June

These days, you can change a lot or things about yourself — your hair, your nose, your wrinkles and warts, your lids and your lips.

But you cannot change your bones.

So when you say, “I know it in my bones,” that means something.

To know it in your bones is to know it in the unchanging parts of you, the you of you.

It is to say that there is something solid, something of permanence in this spiraling-out-of-control world, and you stand to testify to it.

It is to say that there is something in me that I did not place in myself, but has been there all along.

I think it’s funny how the word ‘body’ can mean so many different things. It is tangible and intangible, spiritual and physical.

Body of work,
Body of life.
Body of words,
Body of people.

A body can hold individual physical pain and communal joy. A body can be a lifetime of creative effort, or just a few paragraphs of outpouring thoughts.

Then there is ‘to body’ — to give form to the abstract, to embody. Morphoó — the outward expression of an inner essence.

July

We often throw around the phrase that time was not kind to someone. Then who is time kind to? Or maybe the question is who is it that forces time to be kind to them? And how do they do it?

August

He asked me if I wanted to go get paella,

And I said, “No, thank you, I have art to see.”

But now I look back at this picture of him, and I wonder — was the art right in front of me?

November

Sometimes I just want to run. Run away from it all. I feel suffocated and starving and stuck. So I go.

I’ve centered a lot of my thoughts on myself — who I am, how I’m made, my strengths, how I’m perceived. I haven’t meditated on who God says I am.

It’s only when i stretch out my hands do I realize just how small they are.