A ride

Since when do I ride a bike? When it's important, because this time it is. I'm pushing really hard, but it doesn't feel like I'm getting anywhere faster. My muscles ache, more and more, and more as we fly by cedar shingles and the curtained windows. What if I was going in the wrong direction. All this extra effort I'm putting in would only serve to create more work for when I would have to turn around.

That's what she's doing. Going in the wrong direction. I've been there before, with the water, and the fire, and the promises that don't make sense. I've got the photos under my arm, because she can't argue with them. She can argue with me but not with them. How can't you see the love in that smile? I was there.

A deep breath relieves the pressure on the lungs, and I miss the smell of patchouli.




"I have to show you something."

Hope in dress

As the number flip by, higher and higher, hope seems to have been drown out by the corporate slogan. Petro-can. But there's some hope; sixty inches of hope in a white and green summer dress. Steps down from her ram 3500, she couldn't be bothered by the disparity that drains me while I desperately attempt to hide it and replace it with the same sun that beams from her smile.

The dream that she lives take me away. Somehow, she becomes innocent as she puts on that summer dress, as if the world could never mar her with the whips we know.

She fumbles with the cap as I walk toward her.

“I didn't think that could be your truck.”

I had to protect my eyes from the shining of the stars that stared straight back at me. Not even waning moons know to smile like that. The cap clicks as it rests in place.



“Enjoy the beautiful day.”

My neck feels cramped

While hitching home to our humble abode in Black Creek the other night, I found myself on a remote road that connects the inland highway to the old island highway down here (Hamm Rd). It's almost nine now, and it's already quite dark. Probably half an hour from anything remotely resembling a large city; this kind of darkness is so thick that I can see the light pollution of Courtenay from a large enough clearing of trees.

After almost an hour of walking and driving now, and I'm tempted to start feeling sorry for myself until I realize I have been blessed more tonight than any for a long time. I finally look up to see more stars than I can ever remember seeing, and a big streak of stars so thick that it could only be the milky way flying from one skyline to the other! I was so captivated that I can't even really remember how long I walked before Trevor came and picked me up later on that night.

I really don't feel like ranting about how we ignore the beauty of nature, or how we need to praise God for his majesty in the things like this (granted those are both true) but something else that captured me that night. I felt nourished while my neck was bent backwards for what seemed like hours. The beauty that I got to behold seemed to fill something. It's like God made beauty for me to make me feel closer to him, or maybe to just let me experience it because he knows that's what our souls long for. I can't say it in any other way than that I felt like I was being sustained, nurtured, venerated...