On being thankful

Why yes, it is thanksgiving and since I am currently away from America I feel a bit more entitled to be cliche in the tradition of giving thanks. It is a good practice.

I am thankful for people. Being away from family and friends only accentuates the knowledge of just how awesome these people are and how ridiculously blessed I am to have them. With the distance in mind I also want to publicly say how thankful I am for skype. Such a wonderful invention. Of course, I also am growing quite fond of people here as well.

Amid the day to day hassle of living I often forget how blessed I am. This is silly and rather cruel to all the people who grace my life and to the beauty that surrounds me. It is good to be reminded to simply look up from my own cyclic thinking and hazy rituals of the everyday to the surprising sight of gratitude.

And I am thankful even though I do not always remember that I am.

construction zone?

Of late, trudging through day to day activities, with French language piling up near my brain, though not yet truly there, with people's long opinions staining my roughly hewn building of thoughts and with plans never fully executed, I've been realizing that life will never be settled. I will always be able to find some way to move, hopefully in growth, often merely in movement. I must constantly shift in some way (along with most human beings). It seems sometimes as though walls are constantly crumbling around me and I pray that something is being built in all this destruction, and though I believe that something is being established (if only the knowledge of my complete dependence on grace), it is not always evident.

I often wonder as I search through the rubble of my collapsed concepts, always finding shards of other's conclusions, mismatched and generously strewn about the area, what to believe in all this chaos.

Currently:

Silence hangs, tips scales,

shifts the thin grace elaborately threaded

through pin eyed triumphs.

And we are caught:

empty of words,

stripped to the bare mind's pulsing,

with thoughts wrapped around our tongues,

sentences stuck to our teeth,

and remain with echoes only

of past revelations and present perplexity.