Slow Dance the Day Away
The melodious melody of a song from the Life is Beautiful soundtrack plays through my speakers. An old jounal of mine from three years ago lays open on my lap. I read the words: the short snippy paragraphs, the long rants of confusion, and I marvel at how the things I wrote so long ago come back to me at the most random of moments.
I sat down to blog a moment ago and a line came to me, a title I believe of a song: slow dance the day away. I can't remember the band. I can't even remember the song. But somehow the title had struck me and in my collective habit I had written it in my journal.
Out of the blue it came back to me. I went searching through my journals and there it was. One line. One thought. One moment.
Slow dance the day away.
I love the sensation such an image brings to me. I love how words do that. To me words are pictures and feelings and struggles. I see the word dance and I don't feel dance, I don't even hear dance; I see eyelashes lying in sleep upon flushed, creamy skin, I see laughter and kisses and shades of pink and blue flittering back and forth like breaths of light through the wonder of spinning gozemer scarves.
In essence I am not a poet. I can't spin the words in endless images of disjointed descriptions to tie in matrimony at the end of the piece. I don't live in abstraction; I live in clarity.
One lady once recalled, when asked about her cousin's friendship with Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind: "My cousin always said that when Peggy would spend the night, she would get up in the middle of the night and write things. She was always obsessed with expressing herself." I find myself the same. My greatest desire has always to be understood.
I'm not very eloquent in voice and terribly out of tune in song, but words--words are my love and my hate. Many a time they are my friends, I write the lyrics and they sing the songs. Then the song gets louder, the words build in tone and strength until all else is blotted out and life is no longer life anymore. All my living becomes words; anger is no long just anger, pleasure is no longer just pleasure, my life no longer becomes life but the expression thereof. Things like love are no longer just love, they're words and posts and thoughts.
Lately this has been my curse. My blogging has become my life, a hobby that has blotted out my living.
I'm a nostalgic kind of person. I hold onto the past and never want to let it go. Lovely things will happen to me and all the while I'm in it I'll be longing for a camera to capture it or searching for the metaphor to describe it.
I can't find the direct quote, but I remember reading an interview with Liv Tyler once where she mentioned a similar thing. "Special moments are so precious to me." She said, "I find myself forever taking lots of photos and then having to remind myself I need to stop being afraid of losing the moment and just concentrate on enjoying it."
I'm having to learn that myself right now. Sometimes writing about a moment or a feeling (and I'm not just talking about the good ones) doesn't actually make them any better. Lately I've found it makes it worse. When I write things down I remember them, even five little words from three years before.
I've found some interesting verses in the Bible lately, two that especially jump out and grab me:
After Job fell sick at Satan's hand, three of his friends came to comfort him. The author of Job says that upon seeing him they began to weep and tore their clothes and covered themselves in dust. "Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was."
Further on in the Old Testament I came upon Ezekiel, the prophet in exile with God's people in Babylon. After five years of their capture, God revealed to him an "appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord." Only an appearance mind you, this was not the full power of the real thing, this was only the sensation, the feelings and images like that which come to us when we read words. However, after seeing this incredible portrayal Ezekiel says, "And there, where they were living, I sat among them for seven days--overwhelmed."
It's the two words "seven days" that strike me. When have I ever let a sensation overhwhelm and forfill me that long? When have I ever swept away the clutter from my life and enjoyed, unadulterated, the simple joys and trials of life without having to explain or express them? When have I ever learnt to just be?
As I mentioned in a recent post, I struggle with just being. I'm not very good at just letting things be in whole what they are. If I'm angry I want to know why. If I'm happy I want to know why. If I'm sad I want to konw how to fix it.
Slow dance the day away.
There are other reasons why I need to leave blogging for a time but in this moment this is the biggest one. I have been reading a book called The Road to Reality lately and realizing just how far from that reality I am. The largest point of that being my new years conviction to work on praying more. My prayer life barely limps along when I've been blogging as intensely as I have been.
Rachel suggested I try blogging just once a week but I just couldn't do it. If I know I can blog a little I still spend just as much time thinking about blogging as I did before. It ruins the whole purpose.
I haven't wanted to come to this point. The last few weeks I've been fighting it, praying, "Do I really have to give it up?" I love blogging and since my readership has gone up after getting the I Want to Be a Mum post "published" I almost feel a responsibility to post.
But prayer was my new years conviction, I realize, not blogging. Blogging is expentable, prayer is not. Nor loving, or laughing, or obsorbing life to the fullest. I have been living in two disjointed worlds, reality and description, and in this moment I've come to the conclusion that to find complete peace I need to leave one of them.
I need to, I realize, turn down the bright lights of whirling thoughts and take a moment to just breath and spin in effortless wonder at the sensation of happiness. In all essence I need to to just be, allowing the laughter to intertwine with the spinning blues and pinks of time.
Slow dance the day away.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home