NOT BLOGGING FOR TWO MONTHS IS LIKE...

not blogging for two months is sort of like holding my breath underwater—until the oxygen is mostly depleted from my brain, and my eyes start to bug out (which doesn't feel great but is sort of exciting), and i finally let go of the tightness, the potential energy of holding it all up inside, and come up with this result: i suck in salt water and seaweed and splutter to the surface to gasp for a while in the air.

that's a bit what it feels like.

what i have been holding tight and thinking over these past two months:

-how remarkable insects are (watch life on the discovery channel. sunday nights.)

-how the christian reformed church (not just the entity but the individuals, myself included), has often over-fetishized the mind/intellect and has devalued or been apathetic to the body

-how i would really like to have a kaleidoscope again

-how art is not excessive or unnecessary

-how ants sometimes seem more purposeful than human beings (again, life, as well as psalms and proverbs)

-how we should tell the truth. also, how we should stop pretending like we can ever have the entire Truth in our finite state. this might keep us from wielding it like a sledgehammer to smash through people's heads and homes.

-how i was created with an able body an able mind and, however flawed they may be, what God wants me to do with them

-how i need to live in sunny places

-how "man is a vast deep" and we rarely get to the depths of ourselves or others or what we were meant to be and do (borrowed phrase from augustine, confessions)

-how learning more never makes the world or people or God smaller, but only more infinite and mysterious. i know so little. i want to know so much.

-how good it is be still

-how badly we need children's literature to save us from our smallness...to save us from being over-critical, overworked, overbearing, over-rational, overcautious, over-categorized, over-arrogant, overstudied, over-independent

-how i want to have a mud fight in our backyard

-how being kind or humble is sometimes better than being right (especially for those of us—ahem, leah—who really really really like to be right)

-how good and necessary it is to rest, and also to laugh (which are often the very same thing)

-how often i use parentheses

-how i love school and probably will forever

-how i want to write stories and poems that people can enter by multiple paths/realities and leave with more conclusions than i can anticipate. in other words, ones that expand and not restrict.

okay. those are some things. there will be other things. thanks for reading these things.