further up & further in.: written on my heart

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

-- Dead Poets Society

Sometimes, as much as I try to be optimistic, I have to admit something: it can hurt to live. It's not the kind of pain where you wish you were dead. It's more that quiet, dull sort of tiredness--the one where you're just tired of living. You don't want your life to stop, but you're exhausted from the daily grind, the pain you feel, and what life is putting you through today.

I know, I've been there. It's been that way off and on for a little while now. And let's be honest: it sucks.

Sometimes, though, it helps to remember the bright things in life, the ones that make life worth living. Just tiny bright spots of sunlight speckled across the fabric of daily living. like sunlight streaming through the window onto a blanket. Here's my list of those things. They're as much for me as they are for you.

sunsets & sunrises

a baby's laugh

raspberries

the feeling of being hugged

that moment when you're listening to music and your heart swells

blue skies and gorgeous sunsets (i know, i have a thing for them)

taking pictures and writing about them

writing, in general

keeping a journal, no matter how messy or perfect it is
getting your seriously painful wisdom teeth out (finally)
(i had to mention that)

watching TV shows

laughing your head off at Parks and Rec
new, unexpected, fancier DVRs

eating watermelon

drinking lemon water

reading a good book that sweeps you away

good friends & family

typewriter font
runaway, faraway drives

the feeling of coming home

You'll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.

-- Jamie Tworkowski

*i originally wrote this in september; this post is coming to you scheduled. yuuuup, still recovering from wisdom teeth, i can only presume. and if i am somehow better, and i am not still recovering, at least i am prepared blog-wise, and can take time off to watch all the tv shows waiting for me on my shiny new dvr. ahem. anyway. wish me luck.

(side note: while i wrote this in a bit of a hopeless place. God gave me hope again.)

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the world is too big to never ask why.

honesty is hard to find in the Christian world as we know it. i’ve noticed this even more lately. oftentimes we rely on appearances only, not daring to dig beneath the surface of things.

why do we do this?

is it because we’re scared? that’s a fair reason, of course, but i don’t think we should let it define us or hold us back from the hard questions. and too often, we do.

is it because we don’t care? sometimes, but not all the time. i think we’re just all so busy, wrapped up in our own lives, tangled in our own emotions. {i know this feeling. i don’t condemn you since i'm there too.}

but honestly i think it’s the first reason: we’re scared. we’re scared to go deep because we don’t know what we’ll find.

in his most shallow and basic form, God is safe. he is familiar to us, he is not scary. he is safe. but i think we’re scared that, if we delve deeper, God won’t be safe. it’s the unknown, and it scares us. {trust me, i’ve been there, too. i am there right now.}

but i think i finally understand what c.s. lewis meant.

“who said anything about safe? ’course he isn’t safe. but he’s good.”

i know it’s scary, dear one. i know you’re scared of what you’ll find. so am i. but let’s go deep together, okay? let’s ask the hard questions, let’s try to understand, let’s admit that there is pain and suffering. let’s try to understand the world and God in a way we never have before. i think that, once we take this jump into the unknown, we’ll realize that our Jesus is much safer than we think.

let’s ask why. why do we believe what we do? why is there pain? let’s confront God with the hard questions; i’ve learned that he’s not afraid of them. i think he welcomes it. the deep questions strengthen our roots, and deep roots are not touched by the frost, as tolkien said.

there’s this quote i read somewhere that says, “there is a certain darkness needed to see the stars.” so in the midst of our quest for why, let’s ask God to show us the stars, too. he made them for us, you know. there are still stars, even in the midst of darkness. life is hard, but i still believe that at the core, life is still good, and more beautiful than you can ever imagine.

in the past year, this has become all the more clear to me: we have to ask why. we have to challenge our beliefs and confront God sometimes, because we can’t get just by living on the surface. it’s not possible.

instead, ask why. because the world’s too big and cruel and deep and beautiful to let such a question go unanswered.

the world is too big to never ask why // the answers don't fall straight out of the sky
i'm fighting to live and feel alive // but i can't feel a thing without you by my side
oh, send me out a lifeline.

ever since i posted my last post, i've been struggling to write. go figure, eh? writing suddenly became challenging for me, and i'm wondering if i'm even ready to write this story yet. so i've been dabbling in other writings, and working on other things, and working on high school biology. the last one in and of itself has been challenging.

as of tomorrow, it's a month until nanowrimo. i'm still trying to figure out what i'm going to write. oh dear. we'll see how this goes.

life has been so busy. there are so many good blogposts i want to write; inspiring blog posts that encourage my creative side. i have all these ideas while i'm trying to fall asleep, and then when i wake up i don't remember them. so this blog post, i hope, will make up for the lack of blog posts. sometimes i just have to let it go, write in lowercase, and ramble.

my laptop also broke again, after just getting it back from the repair shop. apparently the first repair wasn't successful, so back to the computer shop it went. this means i do not have access to my adobe photoshop, and my creative-graphics side is suffering. this is rather frustrating, but at least i haven't been wasting time making avatars when i could be doing other things. it's a win-win situation... i guess. :p

hey, look - it's wall-e!

i've been anxious lately, over trivial things, and trying not to be. unfortunately, it doesn't work to try not to be anxious. i think i'm mostly over it now. ha... emphasis on the word mostly. still, i'm learning that i don't need to be afraid. i don't need to be afraid of making the wrong choices, or of failing. i don't need to be afraid of... well, anything.

however, putting this into practice is easier said than done.

i don't need a telescope to see that there's hope and that makes me feel brave. -owl city

i've been wondering what would happen in the blog-world if we dropped our masks and posted from our heart. i guess this is what i'm trying to do right now. it kind of helps when i can't even think straight. :P chronic pain can do that to a person. someday, i'll write a post about headaches and chronic pain and all that comes with it. but for now, i'm in too much pain. haha, isn't that so ironic?

note to self: headbanging is not a good activity to engage in when you already suffer from headaches. i have a really bad headache now, unfortunately.

that is all.

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I'm sitting here listening to The Saltwater Room by Owl City. What a beautiful, contemplative song.

"We'll turn out all of the lights and set this ballroom aglow."

I've never been to a ball. I don't even know how to dance. I've never worn an honest-to-goodness formal dress. The closest I got was wearing a flower girl dress in my aunt's cowboy-themed wedding. My sparkly cowboy boots were cool, I'll admit, but I can't imagine twirling in a ballroom with them.

I wish I could dance. Sometimes I don't feel graceful enough. I've been taught the basics of waltzing, but I trip over my own feet. And whenever I try, I feel like a klutz. It's kind of awkward to try to dance without a partner, though.

I wish I could walk along the shoreline and inhale the misty breeze. I wish I could touch the stars. I wish I could dance.

Now The Tip of the Iceberg just came on. I want to wear a warm fuzzy sweater now, if only it wasn't sweltering heat outside. I like snow, I really do, but my chronic pain reacts to the weather and I'm not sure if I'm ready for another couple months of storms.

And then I think about what a messed up jumble of a post this is, and I wonder if it's even worth it to hit publish. I second-guess myself in my writing all the time. And don't even talk to me about editing. I don't like it. At all.

I was just tempted to stop and hit the preview button, since that's what I do all the time when I write up blog posts. But I stopped myself. Hooray.

Writing draftless like this makes me feel more contemplative and down than I really should be. I mean, I have lots to be thankful for! I don't know why this post is turning out melancholy.

Okay, I'm going to turn on a different song now. What about Hot Air Balloon?

That's a little better.

Someday, it's on my bucket list to ride in a hot air balloon. I'm afraid of heights in some ways, so I'm not sure how I'd do millions of feet above the ground. (That is an exaggeration, by the way.) But at the same time, it would be so cool to look down on the world below and see the way it forms a patchwork quilt.

So, I guess the moral of this blog post is:

1. I don't know how to dance.

2. I'm sorta-kinda looking forward to winter.

3. I would love to ride in a hot air balloon.

"You made my frown turn upside down, and now my worries are gone."

This post was written freely, as I tried not to stop and just write the thoughts on my brain. This post was written draftless.

Join the Draftless challenge @ Dramatic Elegance.

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I don't read as much as I used to, but I say once a bookworm, always a bookworm. Being the bookworm that I am, I've read a TON of books, and as I was trying to figure out what book to write about today, I realized that there are few books that really truly impact me. There are good books that I read that I will remember as being good. But as I think back over them, nothing really sticks out in my mind about them. Don't get me wrong, there are books that I loved while I was reading them, but none of them have really stuck with me as something I need to read over and over again. I realized that's because they have high standards to look up to.

The Chronicles of Narnia.

I was very young when I first entered the magical land of Narnia. My dad had a habit of reading to me before we would go to bed - we would read chapter books, and take the time to read a chapter each night. We read the majority of the American Girl books, the whole Little House on the Prairie series, and The Hobbit. Then one day my dad pulled out a different book. One about four children and a wardrobe. I entered the magical world with Lucy and have never looked back since.

After that, it took me quite a while to realize that there were more books to the series. I always wondered at the cryptic ending of the series, "and that was only the beginning of their adventures in Narnia." I had no clue that there was more to the series - 7 books to be exact. But one day when I was poking around in the basement, I found the books. THE books. The books that, once I read them, added to the way I saw life, adventures, and my Savior.

I was about six or seven at the time, and I devoured the books, then promptly passed them on to my grandmother. We both loved them. Two years later, the first Narnia movie came out. I. Was. Ecstatic. As a true and devoted Narnia fan, I went to the theater with high hopes, and was not disappointed. I remember walking out of the theater, feeling totally enthralled and still wrapped up in the magic of the movie. I imagined I was Lucy as I walked out of the theater and all through the day, even going so far as to make a wardrobe out of a giant cardboard box that we got with our new water heater. It was as tall as I was, and we made a little door in the back so that we could imagine walking into Narnia. That box holds many fond memories for me, and I remember dressing up in a plaid skirt and knee socks to add to the effect. My siblings had so much fun in that box. It was almost like a whole world of its own.

All three of the movies have gotten my seal of approval, but the books will always, always have a special place in my heart. Because of Narnia, the love of Jesus and his excruciating yet beautiful sacrifice have become all the more clear to me. Because of Narnia and the writings of one amazing man named C.S. Lewis, I have been impacted forever. And because of Narnia, I have been inspired to write my own fantasy novels and live my own great adventure - the one called life.

This is literally a tunnel of books. I want one.

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My post about the history of my blog inspired me to go back and read some of my old blog posts. I found this one - from when I had JUST started blogging. It's amazing how much these words still ring true! And I find it ironic how something I wrote back when I was 10 could impact me now, nearly 5 years later. Amazing, isn't it?
(This is completely unedited. :P)

Hi everyone! I’m fresh back from the park! What in the world was I doing there?

I was practicing riding my bike! I bet your thinking, Kylie, you should be able to ride a bike by now…but, I can’t. When I was little, I went to a park to practice. I was doing fine…until I came to a fork in the path. One was a little hill down…and the other was another mountain up (Okay, it wasn’t a mountain, but, I was little! What do you expect?). Guess which one I chose.   I chose the mountain! Down I fell, and I got a big goosebump right on my forehead.

   Well, after that, I was terrified of bikes. I tried to ride, and I would freak out, and I didn’t learn how to ride. So here I am, still learning, and I regret my fear.

   That’s a sort of a metaphor, you know. Fear is a kind of wall, maybe even a prison that keeps us from doing what we want to do. Later, we regret our fear, but the next time it attacks us, the wall seems just too big to get through.

   Well guess what? Jesus is bigger than our fear, and he can take care of it. He’s always there, and he’ll never leave.

   So the next time you find yourself jumping in a closet when your friend suggests you ride a bike or watch a scary movie, remember what I said, and maybe ask Jesus to help you. He doesn’t want you to be afraid; he wants you to trust him.

   Well, I guess I’d better get to practicing my bike riding! See ya!
Kylie

I never did learn to ride a bike, because of my frequent headaches. However, this still really applies to my situations in everyday life. As long as we remember that perfect love casts out fear, we have nothing to hide from. I guess I should probably come out of the closet now.

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Current song in my head: When violet eyes get brighter, and heavy wings grow lighter, I'll taste the sky and feel alive again....
{I just love Owl City. :)}

Okay, this is going to sound tacky, but I've been listening to the same three songs over and over again every day for the past week.

Wanna know what they are?

1. Space Jam - Let's Get Ready to Rumble

I feel bad saying this, but this is one of my favorite songs and I don't even know why since I never even saw the movie Space Jam (reportedly, it stunk). This song is annoying and it gets stuck in your head. But maybe that's why I love it.

On a side note, it is also the only song to inspire me to play my bass guitar (due to the stinking awesome bass line throughout the whole song... just in case you were wondering, I have listened to this song a LOT.) By the way, here is my bass. I think I forgot to post about getting him a couple months back. His name is Ben. (see right.)

Ben is awesome. But I'll save that for a later post.

Moving on to song #2...

2. Lifehouse - You and Me

This song is awesome. Hands down, end of story. I was first introduced to it when my local Christian radio station started playing it. That was a couple years ago, so this song has been ingrained in my mind for a while. While the band Lifehouse isn't under a Christian label, the people who are in the band are Christians and put their faith in a lot of songs. Which I think is awesome.

To me, I take this song a lot of times as a love letter from God to me. Yes, I know it wasn't written as that kind of a song, it's really about a girl, ladeda. But the point of music is to let it speak to your soul. That's all I'm letting it do. And God loves me as much more than any guy ever will, so really, it's the ultimate love song.

I can also play it on my acoustic guitar whose name is to be announced. I really should write about my instruments some day.

Last but not least on our line up...

3. Switchfoot - Gone

This song has a story scarily similar to number 2. I also heard it on my Christian radio station a while back (think: when I was 10). At that time, I had no idea who it was by. Now I've come to learn it's by Switchfoot. Switchfoot has come to be one of my favorite bands. They are also like Lifehouse in that while they aren't under a Christian label, they are singing for God and that's all that matters.

This song is a good reminder to take a step back and really look at your life. The main point of your song (in case you didn't catch it by the title) is that everything will soon be gone and there's so much more to life than what your eyes can see. It's a reminder that I need... often. Not to mention this song has awesome vocals, awesome guitars, awesome drums, awesome lyrics... okay, I'm done now.

BUT WAIT! There is actually a 4th song. I don't listen to this one nearly as much, but it speaks to my soul every time. The real version is here, but the string arrangement stirs emotions deep within me that I didn't even know existed. Go ahead, give it a listen. But you might cry. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Speaking of crying at music, there are a lot of songs I've cried at lately... but that's a whole other blog post. ;)

Signing off for now,

-Your Resident Music Junkie

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{A Favorite Song}

Grace - U2

group hug!

It's not over.

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{A Favorite Song}

Grace - U2

*group hug!*

It's not over.

About me

Follow Me

Labels

recent posts

Blog Archive

group hug!