Little Seeds, Soft Soil

It’s interesting who we become when we’re planted in different soil. I was watching a show where a woman has a full breakdown at work and ends up going to an alternative treatment center and finding spirituality. She comes back centered and at peace, meditating twice a day with her crystals and attempting deep and vulnerable conversations with the people around her. She quickly realizes people are less than interested in joining her on the journey towards a higher self. She gets a crappy job where no one wants to listen to her ideas and finds that the people who saw her as crazy aren’t all that interested in reframing her in their minds. She slowly (quickly) falls back into old habits and basically proves everyone right, that she hasn’t really changed.

The person she found when removed from all the stressors of daily life hadn’t yet grown the muscles to stay true in those irritating and impossible circumstances.

There’s this sentiment “Are you really healed or did you remove all your triggers?” Though there is value in being the kind of soul that grows through concrete, I’ve been having this deep craving towards softness. I want quiet, serendipitous moments. A warm mug in hand and a beautiful view. The gentle whispers of direction that you have created just enough space in your life to follow. The flow of the river.

For all of my five year plans and attempted discipline, life has been lived in the small nudges. The curiosities. The gentle asks and the tentative actions that followed. Life has never been according to a plan. It has been according to what made me feel alive. What could not be denied despite my careful plotting. The determined map of my own soul. When I look back, the moments and choices I made when I listened rather than planned are the ones that have stayed with me.

Awards Season by Bon Iver is playing in the background right now.

“Oh, how everything can change
In such a small time frame
You can be remade
You can live again
What was pain now's gained
A new path gets laid
And you know what is great?
Nothing stays the same”

So much in my life has changed. I barely recognize myself from this time last year. Was that only a year ago? I remember quietly asking God to bring the wonder back. To look at the ocean without a sense of familiarity. To renew my awareness of the little things. Now, everyday is starting to feel like a small miracle. A beautiful and simple miracle holding my son. Watching my dog run across the sand. Holding a good book. A hot cup of tea.

I’m creating again. Not for work or out of obligation but because my soul longs to. Because I find joy in it again.

I’ve been photographing. Writing here. Writing music again. That’s been the biggest one. I haven’t written a song in over a year. Most of the time, the songs come through fully written. I get this feeling and it’s like I have to catch the song before it disappears. Usually, they get played straight through on the first time. They feel more like gifts than songs I’ve written. But now, I’m actually writing. Putting together rhythms and chords and writing from my life.

I’m nervous to put the lyrics here (even though I’m almost positive no one reads this) because it feels so vulnerable. This kind of stream of consciousness journaling feels different to me. If I were to fall into the right conversation with a stranger, I would probably tell them all of this and more. But my music? There’s something about it that is vulnerable in a different way. It just is. There is no curation to it. I can’t control how you would feel about it. True artistry is like that. Someone knows instantly if it connects with their soul or not. It’s a yes or no. You have to take both, one does not exist without the other. Rejection is innate to creating anything worth a damn. It is intrinsic to the art within you. That’s why so many artists struggle to truly pursue it. It’s everything we hope for and everything we fear wrapped up into one. The true sense of being known. The wilderness that comes with that.

This is the most recent song:

“If I poured my heart on the carpeted floor,

would you revel in the flowers and the salt and the stone?

I know who I am

When your hands in my hand

Did Christ the carpenter smell the wood of the Cross

and for a split second forget what was lost,

And think of his home

Where him and his father used to roam?”

There’s something about the humanness of Christ that’s been sitting with me lately. The part of him that was fully here, experiencing the joy and the heartbreak and the fun of being human. The glasses of wine with close friends and the feeling of adventure for a new day and the wonder at the cedars in Lebanon. The knowledge of impending pain. The fear he felt at the sacrifice that was being asked of him. He had a home. He had people he loved. He had a desire for more. All of it held in one perfect life.

A lot of my walk with God has been me trying to supersede the human experience. Praying perhaps out of avoidance rather than faithfulness. There’s this hawk eye view you can misuse when you experience the reality of Heaven. But Christ was here. Turning water into wine and bleeding in the garden. If I can call anything into my life right now, I want to be present for this human experience. The grinding work and simple joys and nerves of a new crush. The often challenging relationships and perfect moments with a close friend and the constant, constant misplacing of my car keys.

I want to reconcile with the imperfect, silly and often misguided human me. The me who is just figuring it out. The me who is on this grand adventure of returning home.

Though I will always feel a responsibility to the divine in me, for now I want to hold the human me with the softness of a warm mug and the appreciation of a beautiful view.