Reflections in Spring

The summer sun is starting to shine through the cold winter clouds and at last the trees are blooming bright reds, pretty whites, and firework yellows. The break has been partly cloudy with the chance of life well lived and the weather has been opposing itself every couple of days seeming fill the void in the silent thunderclouds of our Emerald City with the liquid lightning of laughter and laziness.

Here’s a true story. I woke at dawn yesterday to see the rise of Christ in the Western sun. I woke to the still fog of Seattle pre-sun, a day baptized by late night rainfall and early morning risks. The cars were still licked and littered with gleaming raindrops and the trees gleamed, growing and excited about their life giving manna from the sky, grinning faceless like Labradors after retrieving a tennis ball from the lake. I wanted to shake the branches lose of water and feel the rain again upon my flesh, if only for a few glorious moments, to be baptized like so many others.

Here’s another true story. I slept late yesterday, through the morning services until the sun poured down through yet rainy skies, waking me from my slothful slumber. I sighed into my sleeping bag-couch combo and wished the sun had let me sleep awhile more. I rose, checked service times, and realized that I could still be saved, despite my dead slumber from a too late night.

God is in the church and yet totally apart from it. I found Him there yesterday for the first time in more than half a decade, but I’ve found him over and over again this break. He stood with me as I watched the placid Puget Sound; He sat with me as I rolled through mountainous forests and over rivers I had never seen; He ate with me the terrible Chinese food at the claustrophobic Pike Place Market, and listened with me as I spoke with my infamous ex-lover for the first time in half a year. I never expected to see Him in church again, but yet there He was, seeming to fill the warehouse, and bless the water, and grind my inhibitions into soft sand. I wonder if others still experience the same high as I did when I received my first Christian Communion?

I promised others I would write this break, but instead I’ve read and listened more. I’ve taken time to stop talking and listen closely to the world around me. I’ve taken time to hear others’ words instead of having my own heard. The world is redolent with people who want to be heard, but so lacking in men and women who are willing to listen.

Words hold so much energy and so much tension, like a thousand nuclear explosions falling upon each other, fission creating and bursting atoms eternally. I’ve spent this break coked on the only drug I will ever need, completely wasted and utterly consumed by writing and words and I wouldn’t trade it if I could. I am addicted to words, addicted to racing heart it gives me, the euphoria instilled by hours of using, yet incited by only a moment’s snuff of letters. It’s a very mellow high, a drunkenness that leads not to the death of neurons, but instead to their fertilization. Words are a form of sex, their fire consuming me, taking me inside them and stripping me of my innocence and returning me exhausted but heart pounding and with a greater understanding of what it means to be alive.

O sweet Spring

Your flesh is fresh roses, silken and delightful , thorny and raw

Your eyes are seasides, slate gray, sapphire, and algae green

Your hair is a sycamore’s bark, thick, rough, beautiful

O sweet Spring

You tear my skin, rip my habits, and challenge my beliefs

You heal my heart, sew together my ideas, and calm my nervous fears

You steal my kisses, return your passion, and renew my soul