An authentic present

As I wrote to a friend a few days ago, I feel there are many things inside of me, jostling around in freezing water, trapped under arctic ice. Surely there is an escape hole nearby so I can break free from the taunting jaws of my predators! (pardon me, I watched March of the Penguins this week and I apparently have lingering Antarctic images in my mind). It’s not that I truly feel that I’m being eaten alive from the inside out — it’s more that I haven’t expressed myself in much depth lately, and things are starting to get dangerously full inside. Like I need to let them out to make room for newness. Confessions? No, it’s more along the vein of declarations. I want a witness(es) to my inner life. Can a life be validated through the sharing of thoughts and ideas and impressions?

Brandy and I were talking a few weeks ago and I was telling her about how I’m not exactly reconciled to my past in terms of my conservative religious upbringing. Sunday School, Awana, structured “quiet times,� weekly attendance of a church service, summer camp, scheduled helping of the poor and needy, extreme elevation of the Scriptures (making the Bible, God, almost), etc. Where does all of that fit with my shifting paradigm? Knowing God is like being in love. Being enraptured with beauty and becoming it’s captive. I never heard that in Bible college.

Beauty. I feel driven by my desire for beauty… integration and absorbtion into the ultimate source of Beauty (God) but also driven in my quest for finding beauty all around me. In the way my friends’ eye lashes c ( t’s a guy, of course), in the slope and undulation of the hills surrounding my city, in the mysterious wafting of steam off the rim of my coffee cup, in the bounce and sway of the coniferous trees outside the house where I work, in the falling rose petal, in the sudden rush of birds out of the brush as I hike in the hills (I saw a bird that hovers — any ideas what it might be?), in laughter shared with friends. I want to know Beauty and become it’s prisoner. His captive. My Father’s beloved daughter.

As I test out this new, unknown path of adventure and vast possibilities, I find myself scorning the ideas of the past. Yet that doesn’t feel right to do and I feel a time coming when my past and my future will collide in an homogenized, authentic present.

Thoughts…?