written as summer falls down

Wow time flies like handlebars down a steep street.... I'm not gonna be able to wrap this around into something that makes sense tonight, but I figure I better start, and Joanna told me if I wrote something she'd read it.
I feel like a lot of things have gone in and out of my heart in the last days and weeks, and I think and imagine that this stuff is going to mean more in the next while, that this time of feeling like a complete bum has taught me a lot and it wasn't just a waste of minutes. Probably never again in my life will I be so untied-- in a new city, having time off to unpack my life and memories, and hold them close to me, and not have to work, or have a million people after me, or really much expected of me at all. I've been restless a lot of the time, but I've also been focusing on appreciating this crazy freedom. I've been free to choose and not choose to do even the things that I love to do. I realize I need shedules and I'll be glad in the fall to have a few fences, but for now I just love the 'what if' game.
what if nothing got done?
what if everyone just cleared the city and escaped everyone they knew for a while?


what if none of the success stuff mattered, the careers and labels and what your parents want, and what you're supposed to want, or down to the basest things like what you wear or how often you wash your face or how busy you are with social functions.. i feel like so much of our worth is actually measured in busyness-- all the important people are always busy.. as if that defines it.. i think some people like to make life complicated just to escape looking simple, empty handed.. but what looks empty to some looks like the picture of freedom to others... funny how that works out.



I think freedom is a fresh concept in my life that I'm going to toss around from hand to hand for the next little while, and maybe have it toss me around too.



I have also been thinking about money this week and listening to many different perspectives and ways of living with this big idea called currency. It simply puts a name to so much else, such impact, depending on who you're talking to. I decided today that money is meaningless, it is solely a means; or maybe a hoop to jump through to get you what you want, to be free to control and choose certain things, it may provide more options, but I decided it should never be my goal, even if it is for the rest of the people on this boat. (seabus) Even when people spend all their time focused on money, it never really is the core motivator; it means security, or comfort, or success, acceptance, acknowledgement or control. But for so many, all their time and forethought is focused on money: how to get it, how to keep it, how to get more of it.
What if money only served us instead of us serving it?
Experience and perspective shifts are worth more to me. I hope seeing the world, the birth and death of simple and deep forests, to see the complexity of the human heart will always be worth more than any digits.
I know I'm completely speaking from bias, because I have heating and clothes to wear each day, but still.. these are just thoughts without footnotes.

later that month..... and into september

Someone wrote in a letter to me, "I have an insatiable longing for heaven and I must see a glimpse of it everyday..." Sometimes I get crushed by distance. I am asking to see God everyday. I need to see Him, everywhere.. to see heaven in the rain when radiohead sings and people stand so close that the water against foreheads can't break the warmth, even as wet hair slicks across skin. To see Him reveal himself in the people who don't know Him yet, to see Him in textbooks and architecture, and to see hell too... both feel so close some days. But a new day always comes and I see with a new surface to my heart.
I am asking for a shift, for my paradigm to be wrecked, to pray dangerously for this city of light and dark and gray places. In the same space so many people intertwine, and a lot of them are very scary, and a lot of them are very beautiful.