Floral Arrangements: My Compost Bin is Full

I met my new neighbors last night, as the sun set over the orchards and I returned from my walk past the hazelnuts. They were planting new flowers in the hopes of beautifying their front-yard landscaping, though they admitted to little knowledge in the horticulture or floral department. As I walked past my neighbor’s house, they were lamenting that they’d done a good amount of work, but could not finish because their compost bin was filled to the brim, and they couldn’t just leave the extras lying in their yard for two weeks.

I offered them my compost bin, seeing as we’d failed to fill it in our recent two weeks, and found the opportunity to discuss lives with my neighbors, learning about their church, their gardening naiveté, and their excitement about trying something new with flowers. I sensed, too, their relief at the opportunity to finish what they’d begun, and I understood their sentiment.

For me, this is how life is in everything. I’m terrible with endings and embrace them too soon, and understand the necessity of beginnings, and rush towards them the moment I see an ending in sight. I also struggle starting projects without knowing I’ll have time for finishing.

My entire childhood, and mostly in high school, I focused my entire night around dinner time. This wasn’t because I was constantly starving, but because I didn’t want to begin projects or homework before dinner unless I had enough time for finishing it before dinner as well. So I’d often find myself meandering around the kitchen, munching on chips or cookies, waiting for dinner so that I could get on with my life. Often, by dinner I wasn’t even hungry anymore due to all the snacking I’d done (this still happens).

But this is how I am. I want to devote myself fully, to grasp the horns of problems and wrestle them to the ground without any time-outs or ‘hold on, Mr. Bull, while I wipe the dust out of my eyes and take a short siesta’. I never understood the intuitive individuals who tackled so many projects simultaneously, and often finished few of them. I focused like a laser and picked off projects with precision and planning.

The problem is, I never liked transitions. If I knew that a project in school was worth nothing, there wasn’t a reason for me to lose blood and tears over it; knowing high school was ending and I was already accepted into college, what did it matter if I got a few A- grades or even B+’s perhaps? These are tame examples, and the real problem is that I carry these over into matters with greater gravity: social interactions, friendships, dreams, loves.

I remember that as I neared my end in high school, I stopped hanging out with some of my friends, knowing I’d never see them again. And I haven’t, but perhaps I might have maintained closer connections if I hadn’t severed contact with them so neatly, even when we still saw each other daily?  I see the endings drawing closer, and I think to myself: “this will be painful, won’t it? Maybe I’ll embrace the pain now so it ends sooner. That way, I can begin the next phase of life without having to wait for it.” And with this attitude, I truncate the ending and swallow the pain immediately, while floundering for the nearest beginning, any beginning really, as long as it has something tenable to latch onto.

I remember thinking once, in my last days of college, why make new friends now, or interact with people now, knowing we’re about to split off in a thousand directions?

This has definitely brought me trouble in the recent past, as I’m writing and forging paths for different projects, wondering whether I’ll finish them properly or hurry on to the next beginning; or in friendships, and in the phase of my life where everyone is getting married and starting new paths while I pursue different dreams that those espoused seem not to understand (for reasonable reasons, I suspect, but I’ve never had occasion to find out).

So I’m truncating strings right and left, chopping off the yarn before the sweater’s done, and I’ll be showing midriff all winter long, with a mighty cold belly, I suspect, and only because I didn’t have the heart to finish what was begun.

By dawn’s first light, it’s already night

to my eyes, and to my eyes

your every hello echoes goodbye

goodbye as the fawn born begins to die

as the summer arrives, the days shorten

as the birds rise, gravity reminds them

how soon everything must fall;

the universe expands, Alvie,

so don’t hold onto it all

the apple ripens the moment

it’s time on the branch is no more

and the core dreams already rotten things

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/floral-arrangements-my-compost-bin-is-full/

Anon

Dawn of a new journal, this morning, always one of my favorite times of the year. I love penning those last words and flipping back over the pages, nodding at the poignant passages, smiling at the triumphs and joys, and musing on the thoughts expressed over months of reflection. I often flip to random entries and read snippets, shaking my head at my ugly writing habits, and remember the days leading into these inked emotions.

Before I put a journal to rest on my shelf, eight since college ended, I flip through it quickly, not bothering to read any sentences, but just gathering in the pages like a flip book, watching time pass in a moment and creating a story I cannot understand at that pace, but seems somehow beautiful, in all the illegible characters flying by.

Finally, with a theatrical sigh and something like reverence, I pull out the descendent, and pen the first words: May 14th, 2014. Beginnings are just as tough as endings, because I want everything to be just so. I wrote a poem about that recently, like a romantic dinner (though I’ve not experienced said occasion, in my head I’ve romanticized the concept of romanticism, romantically), everything organized to a nuanced degree, showing care in preparation of love.

First words are important, and definitely my favorite things to write in longer works. I agonize for days over what the words should be; this is the hook, this hauls people on board and carries, drags them into a new world. But for a journal? This is just for me, and so the hook is simple.

There are a lot of beginnings, lately, and a lot of endings. I think there always are, if you know how to see each. I think this year’s journal is going to be exemplary, filled with some of the greatest moments of my life, captured in celebratory moments with my dearest friends. There will be associated sorrows, but this, too, is time’s prerequisite it seems.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

But I have plans, oh such plans, and adventures waiting in the wings. But like a magician, I redirect the vision until only I am seen, and not the things moving in the darkness on cue, waiting to spring into view magnificently. A magical year awaits – let the games begin, ladies and gentlemen, for when it comes to these, I’ll win or break trying.

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/anon/

Heart of the City

In the time of our grandfather's grandfathers, a time few remember still, child–

            :What?: The boy said, snidely. :No one can be that ancient, Grandfather. And I’m not a-:

            :Silence, boy: Grandfather frowned darkly, and a glint of wrath entered his eyes briefly which the boy had never witnessed.  :This is a true story of long ago, and I will not have your insolence tonight: The boy hushed as his grandfather began once more.

            Many summers ago, in the land of our forebears, a beautiful city overlooked Parrin Pass, on the Harmonah waterfall ridge, the most beautiful city this world has known. Before the death of the river, a great waterfall tumbled over the precipice on which the town was built, and the mighty Harmonah river split the city.  It was a city of magic, the pinnacle of all the ages.

            Every structure was built not of stone, nor even of regal cedar, but of glimmer-strands, the light magic lost aeons ago.  Bridges spanning the river and its eddies through the town were as the roots of rainbows, twisting and spinning across the waters in a dazzling display.  Homes were opalescent and veined in many colors, colors not even remembered. They were lovers of fountains, the dwellers of that town. River sprites and water kami dwelt in font-shrines across every square, and man-high trees with silver-veined leaves that smelled of cedar and cherrywood, pine and sugar maple and whose colors reflected everything nearby like tiny mirrors.

            The homes were open and cheery, and you could part the wall-colors to enter any home you liked if you knew the way. Around the city, a wall of colors flowed with rivers of every color swimming in chaotic swirls. When you walked through that wall into the city, it felt as if you were being split into a thousand colors and spit out into a new dimensionality of beauty. The entire city smelled of roses and violets, apples and first-rain, hints of flowers and a heady smell that overwhelmed even the most stalwart of travelers, turning them slightly tipsy.

            As the river tumbled over the precipice over Parrin Pass, the river prismed into countless tiny snakes of color, spinning in a helical aura as the waterfall poured into the crystal waters below. Travelers approaching the pass often watched for hours -until near sunset when the pass was no longer safe - hurrying between the mountains before nightfall.

            From miles away, even before the city’s glowing ambience illuminated the sky and mountainsides, an eastward breeze might waft the scents of the city and lighten the loads of the weary. Smells of rosewood and plums, sandalwood and pine, incense, myrrh, and eucalyptus, sweet lemon and cranberries wash across the coastal mountains into the valleys and hills on the other side. Even the barest hint of its aroma is enough that many a strong man broke down into joyous sobs at a whiff.

            But to describe the city itself? Ah, it is impossible! The dazzling display of nacreous streets, iridescent walkways, and the light-weave boats that float idly down the Harmonah like bobbing, circular lanterns; the ever-shifting structures striated in resplendence, sometimes miming the architectures of the cultures: pagodas, pyramidal ziggurats, colossal cathedrals of color, or just simple yurts, while other times, the city’s structures mimicked nothing culturally recognizable: swirling minarets with a smoky-pearl aura; gold-obsidian towers coated in clouds of silver; floating cerulean spheres; a tropical forest, where lampposts shimmered and waved like trees or undersea kelp, and the houses appeared as coral in a bizarre, alien reef; or, manses like in the southern kingdoms, with yards of pristine greens, silver-leafed hedges, fonts and glimmering limestone streets.

            In the night, ah, what a sight! The stars are magnified, as though brought nearer, gazing with a greater intensity into the city – and none shy away from sight. The moon is always broad and round, and of the brightest golden yellow. The Harmonah carries its own stars as the river fills with the half-spherical boats made of light, forming almost a complete walkway across the water of bobbing boats, and the fae flit across the surface of the waters.  A dullness of light affects the outer buildings, leaving the central heart as a beacon of fiery energy.

            A delicate resinous smell with a hint of citrus and lavender wafts across the waters, and incense is burnt in tiny lanterns hung on lines over the river. A dance begins, though who starts it each night, none can say, and a sweet music as of a harp, or a flute, or a melancholic violin orchestrates the wind and the slowest of dreams drapes over the living. Sometimes, on the darkest of nights where storms rage outside the walls and the rumors of war break through even these stolid walls, a thin, vibrant falsetto floats across the city. The music briefly pauses and every movement ceases, as every ear strains to catch the words, though even those who understand the pensive and plaintive words remember them not in the morning, only as a distant wisp of a dream.

            Whatever shape and style the city, they say that from the tallest mountains looking down, the city always has a heart at its center, vibrant and pulsing with life, and the roads and canals are its arteries, carrying the lifeblood throughout the city. The heart’s shape and hues transform, also, but it remains the city centerpiece, in form and function. And this heart, the ventricles of town, was where the Avov stayed, the creator-creatures of Zevah Nuahr, city of liquid color.

              If Zevah Nuahr’s resplendence was unmatched, its people were more so, carved from a different plane of existence. The first time anyone saw a Rhuach, it almost overwhelmed the senses. They contained a presence that tore apart the senses: smelling of nearly cloying sweetness, as of honey and wine; they appeared as ghostly figures of spinning colors, spirits of spiraling threads and a copper fire that billowed behind each color, giving substance to a plasma ghost: bipedal, lean, tall. You almost believed you could pass through them, and it might be akin to walking through the prismatic wall, a spiritual passing. Stranger yet were the other feelings assaulting your senses in the presence of a Rhuach: a taste of cloves and cinnamon; a tingling sensation as of arrows of cool wind passing across your skin, fletched with a fine mist; the sounds of a keening voice, high of pitch and ever somber. Those who spoke of it after always described its being a lament of unbearable loss, but one borne mightily.

Destiny

Walk any path in Destiny's garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.  The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny's garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths.  However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead, and see only darkness.
Sometimes you dream about the paths of destiny, and speculate, to no purpose. Dream about the paths you took and the paths you didn't take... The paths diverge and branch and reconnect; some say not even Destiny himself truly knows where any way will take you, where each twist and turn will lead.
But even if Destiny could tell you, he will not. Destiny holds his secrets. The garden of Destiny. You would know it if you saw it. After all, you will wander it until you die. Or beyond. For the paths are long, and even in death there is no ending to them.
~ Season of Mists - Neil Gaiman

This is one of my favorite beginnings to any story, though the beginning of Season of Mists holds a special place in my heart. It is certainly one of my favorite Sandman novels, which makes it one of my favorite books overall. Choices are an interesting quandary, in retrospect. With an omniscient God, sometimes I have difficulty reconciling predestination and free will, though that's a philosophical topic too deep, perhaps, for this setting. But I can't not believe in a semblance of free will, for without free will, I'm not responsible for my misdeeds nor, even, for my righteous ones.
So, assuming I must claim responsibility for my actions, and the consequences of such actions carry me along a lane in Destiny's garden that cannot be unwound, I often deliberate overlong about meaningful decisions or happenstance in my life. This is not always detrimental. However, I'm also something of a personal perfectionist. It may matter little whether my friends  live perfectly, choose perfectly, behave ideally, but this is my life. With careful choices and faithful movements, should I not be able to live perfectly? Write perfectly? Be perfectly kind or loving? If the possibility exists, with enough rigor and rigid control, surely perfection is not out of reach for the rest of my life, right?
I don't actually think these things. But sometimes, in the aftermath of foolish choices, I wallow. I read a particularly insightful blog post the other day on this topic, and I'm going to shamelessly quote it here: (on the topic of a spiraling downward of shame)
...And you’re not allowed to shame spiral, either.
Why? We both have a life to live. Words of wisdom to offer. Gifts God has given us. And once you and I allow ourselves to be shut down and chained by guilt or mistakes, we are rendered ineffective.
And we both know who does that.
So let’s not let that happen to us, okay? I’ll make you a deal: If you don’t let it happen to you, I won’t let it happen to me.
Let nothing silence you. You have things to say.
And God still likes you.
(Thank you asparaguslane. I appreciate your words and the tactfully blunt way in which they are spoken. I wish I had your talent. For now, I'll just borrow your words)

No one is perfect. Sometimes I feel like I just see my foibles too clearly, like muddy palm prints on crystal-clear windows, or droplets of blood dripping into a glass of clean water (that was a bit gruesome.. make it blue dye). Now that water is undrinkable. Spread it around in 10 gallons so the blood is so diffuse you could not dream of tasting it, and still I'd know it was there, polluting. And it is in these times that I'm thankful for my friends. I often mistrust their kindness, misinterpret it as lying on my behalf, as flattery. Friends don't flatter, they compliment.
But, the reminder is there. I do have things to say, and God (and my friends) still likes me, loves me, even when I make mistakes, and then more mistakes, and even when I make the same mistakes again. While I've not shame spiraled recently, I remember times of having done so. Thankfully, my friends are wise, gentle, and knowing. What I want more than anything is to be there for them when their shame spirals begin, preventing that slippery slope and catching them when they fall. I want to do more than just pray, though sometimes the distance is too great. I want to be there for my friends on every branching path their walk through the garden of fate takes them. Then, when we reach the other side, I want to celebrate at our faith and faithfulness to each other.

Hook, Line, Sinker

I've been thinking lately about beginnings, and endings. Many of my favorite books I remember via their beginnings and endings, and I picked up more than a few of them sheerly through becoming hooked on the first line.


The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

The wheel of time has always held a special place in my heart. I remember once, during the peak of my reading prowess, I read two in one night in high school (slightly over 2100 pages) before going to school the next morning (biology lab, 7:30). Despite this beginning being slightly overdone - Jordan does not alter it throughout the series beginnings - it has still stuck with me as a moving entrance into an epic saga. It was also one of the first high fantasy series that I read.

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

I've always had a little soft spot for Vonnegut, even though he's a tad vulgar at times. Though I may enjoy the beginning of Cad's Cradle even more than this one.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

I've always really loved this introduction as something truly mythical. It is a mystical entrance into a divine work of art - our world.

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

I love Neil Gaiman, so it comes as no surprise that the beginning of Graveyard Book (one of my favorites of his novels) has a chill and incredible beginning. 

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a fantastic satire and comedy, and the beginning certainly did not let me down. I still read sections of this book when I see it lying on my shelf, forlornly, and it never gets old.

I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased.

Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky is not his best work, but I do still think the beginning immediately captures your attention. He knows how to develop characters like no other author I've ever read, though I've not even read all his stuff, someday I hope to.

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

This one is cheating, since it is a poem and not quite a story. Though perhaps it is a story after all... 

The story so far: In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

However irreverent, Douglas Adams never fails to amuse me.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Oh, CS Lewis.

Walk any path in Destiny's Garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times. The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny's Garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead, and see only darkness.

Season of Mists have one of my favorite beginnings of any of the Sandman graphic novels. This section continues further, and it is splendidly crafted.



I've been contemplating beginnings quite a bit, in stories and life. Sometimes, we fear them, though perhaps not so much as endings. Many endings are just beginnings in disguise, though the unknowing can be frightening. I'm walking my way through Destiny's Garden right now, making choices and turning along the hedges and vines - sometimes there seems not to be a path at all that I follow, just an imagined destination. Who knows where I will end up. 
I contemplate beginnings because I'm seeing endings, though they frighten me not. I've read some interesting books, lately, and many have had their own interesting hooks and I've swallowed line, sinker, pole on others. I also really like the beginning to Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, though that book is hilarious in its entirety. And the beginning of Name of the Wind, but that takes an entire prologue.

Weekend Words

I don't know what this weekend was. A beautiful mess? I spent all weekend at a wedding in SoCal for one of my very best of friends. Normally, I find time for writing every day.  This weekend was blessedly chaotic in artful and heart-wrenching ways. I laughed until my sides ached, cried salt towards the sea, regaled fairy tales of chandeliers into A's listening ears, was healed and lent healing, was broken and prayed for God's soothing, loved, lived, listened, thrived.
Words of poetry surrounded me surely as the ocean mighty, whose waves cried against my feet each dawning morning. Burgeoning words blossoming as first flowers after forest fires, violet, gold, and crimson in an efflorescent wildfire. And no time for journaling, for sewing seeds and reaping some glorious paean of writing following a nearly ideal weekend.
I'm bubbling over with words, but I can't even begin placing them down correctly. I'm shy on sleep, my metabolism bristled against my despairing circadian cycle and staunchly refused all food all weekend.  Every night, we stayed up late and shared a desperate joy, a last gift whose spiritual offering was not just for A, but was equally a gifting unto ourselves. I want to write. I want to shout and write poetry and scream and dance and live and run around in circles until I wear silly holes in the floor. My heart is ablaze with love, and where art thou now, brother?
Change is this: an end and a beginning. I craved an important piece of this ending, and an earnest christening of this new beginning (A actually broke a wine bottle in the car and spilled wine everywhere. There is some "christening" pun being made here, certainly, but I'm whistling innocently with measured nonchalance). Hugs and photographic memories, heart-wrenching words that followed me all weekend - I'm full of words and empty. I'll never find time for writing everything this weekend meant to me, and I suspect I couldn't. It meant everything to me, and always will. It was sanctified, a holy communion.
I wrote a couple of poems trying to capture my thoughts, and ended up with 6 broken haikus, 1 sonnet (Elizabethan), 1 free verse, 1-ish metric adventure, and nothing worth repeating that adequately captured my feelings as this weekend captured my heart.

These words have soared with me on my journey into normalcy, whatever that is, as another beautiful exemplar of this weekend. I don't know why I put them here. That's how cognizant I am of my current thought process.

The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.


And I come back, remembering two different worlds. Sagebrush and succulents, a saline seaside where sands and shores mingle, and roll uphill into a tanned and sunny world. Palms and aloes dominate the fauna, gulls, pigeons, turkey vultures, and herons the fowl. Adobe and sun-bleached or sandblaster woods are boxes leading into the hills above the ocean. The worlds as like as green and grey, and colored in like pallet, each in exquisite fashion.  The mightiness of the sea, here, in the southern lands, and the mountains, evergreens and trees, here, in the 45th, a green belt of verdant flora with scarce a pace of dirt between where brush or shrub clamber skyward, greeting the sun's harp strings. I would miss my world, though the greatness of theirs burns brightly in my heart. But when the mists roll in over the mountains, and the dewdrops trickle down tulip petals and along the efflorescent hydrangeas and rhododendrons, and each blade of grass prisms the light into tiny rainbow droplets - I know I am home.

Time

Time is inexorable, our defined perpetual machine.  Animals care not, nature takes not note.  A perpetual machine not harnessed, but which, perhaps, tethers us.  We are bound to it, bound through it. Our world is not dualistic, though we phrase it so. Darkness is not equal and opposite light; good is not equal and opposite evil; cold is not heat's antithesis.  Aristotle posited a third option we oft forget: the Aristotelian Golden Means.  While this concept existed prior, Aristotle phrased it with clarity: everything in moderation, including moderation.
Yet, this ideal does not preclude dualistic scenarios. Sometimes, there's no twilight between night and dark; no middle tide between high and low, and our choices entertain only two antithetical trails.  But time is an interesting quandary, a quantity that relatively feels both quick and drawn.  A youth in love frets at fleeting moments; while the destitute in trial languishes as each moment passes in excruciating sluggishness.
Then there are those moments which pass with equal disdain for each, moments racing by in slow motion. Where seconds effortlessly pass, too slow, too fast. We are cursed, we are blessed, and many things in between.
So, as intermittent time sweeps on by, in drifting dreams and midnight tides, join the sweeping chorus of creation as it sighs and sings, sleeps and dreams, in endless, shifting time.

Married to Words

A leaf in autumn watches it fellows fly, fly away and wonders where it shall fall. As they land jobs, or seed families, planting trees, my leaf gazes solemnly. The wind brushes by, soft as kissing butterflies, and still my leaf sticks on branches thick, rooted. When doth its chance come nigh, that it may join to spinning life or journey lands far and wide, afore it lose all leaves beside?
A baby bird must someday try - else married to the words, at least invent a life. And on these winds and in these times, I sigh and s'pose, I'm married to the words.