Skip to main content

Poem: Thoughts Revealed in Ink and Lead



How beautifully, it seems, my physical world is colliding and intertwining with my spiritual world. 

 I quickly wrote down this poem about my morning's activity of transforming my ongoing journal of ten years (!?) into a bullet(ish) journal. I hope these words can encourage you to take a journey you may have been avoiding. Or acknowledge the beauty of a past you might be ashamed of. Or to maybe even just write it all down and let it be without having any judgement for it, good or bad. Because I guarantee you it will be valuable to someone some day.
Thoughts Revealed in Ink and Lead


 Flipping through the past, numbering pages
Turn by turn, the pen ink changes
Then to pencil, the lead weight softens
Back to pen again, now in color

 Once my thoughts were in black, bold
Then became a bit runny, muddy, black still, though
Scratched out ideas in every other line, corrections, re-directions
(Forget that. It was silly.)

 Then they all turned to grey. Cloudy. Uncertain
The words were sure, naively so
(But the truth rests in the smudges of the eraser)
Still, never to be removed. Only faded with every new read.

And the last of these, the truest thing, etched quickly and plainly
Not once erased, not second guessed. 
Just written, accepted, and left to rest unread.
Sure. Of nothing. 
Fed up. And ready to let go.

And now, I am back to ink. But in blue this time.
Blue like water. Flowing.
Knowing, only, that change can, will, must come. 
Knowing, because it has come.
And it was good. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rewind and Remember

Sometimes it's easy to miss what is happening right in front of you. Sometimes you realize that there are chunks of time that you were only doing the necessary things to get to a certain point and you missed a lot of the details in between. Kind of like when you get home from a long drive and you get the feeling that you don't even remember driving. Maybe you were lost in your thoughts, but haven't even really kept track of those either. But when you finally sit down, take a break and rewind back to the beginning, you can fill in the blanks. Well, at least they seem like blanks, but you find that somewhere those moments are stored in your memory. These last three months have been a whirlwind. And now, I'm here. It feels as though I was in Arkansas, fell asleep, and woke up married and living my life in Kigali. Now, I have to rewind and recall what exactly happened in the middle of all that glorious chaos. How everything looked, who I encountered, what I was thinking, ...
4 comments
Read more

Lesson No. 2

Lesson No. 2: Living outside your home country can bring out the best in you -- and the worst. I keep restarting this one. It keeps turning into this giant mush of self-pity, and that is not at all what I am intending to get out of writing this. What I would really like to come from this post is for people to see that no matter who you are, where you come from, or what your background is, it is freaking difficult to live outside your home country, and you don't have to feel bad if it's hard. I know in the heading I mentioned the best first but I will save that -- the best -- for last... I have always had this sense like certain things were harder for me to cope with than for others. I think everyone gets that feeling now and then. For some, it's paying attention in class. For others, it's noticing the emotions or nonverbal expressions of other people.  For me it's keeping my cool in just about any social interaction beyond my circle of absolute closest friend...
1 comment
Read more

I Couldn't Stay Away

Although, I would like to have kept everyone a little more frequently updated, I will say, I am pretty grateful for the reason that I haven't put up a post in a long time...I'm BUSY!!! Not just busy doing any old thing either. I'm busy doing things that I really love to do! First of all, I have a job teaching modern and tap dance to kids and adults at a small studio . Secondly, through a few different connections, I have been invited to be a part of a collaborative theater and dance project that will be performed at an arts festival here in Kigali. With all of this going on, I have had so many thoughts on my mind that I have been itching to write about, but the awesome thing is, even within the things that I'm doing, I'm getting to think creatively and share my creative thoughts with people who also are passionate about being creative on a regular basis! This is my drug, you guys! The funny thing is, even when all of this had just begun, over a month ago, I was alr...
Post a Comment
Read more