Does it truly matter if I've never been on a plane? Are passports and train tickets essential when you're already on your own adventure now? Those things are just checklist items. The real adventure is the one you chose to experience right now.
Don't get me wrong.
I ache with more feeling than most people experience in a whole lifetime to feel the pressure of the atmosphere from inside the mechanical wings of an airplane. My feet yearn with sturdy conviction to feel the unsteady streets of cobblestone England and the soft country of France and to feel the warm waves of the Italian ocean breaking up the logic in my brain. I see cathedrals of forests, of saints and art and feelings I do not understand. I smell India like a slap of spices in my cupboard and sense the broken spirit of thousands I will never fully understand from places I will always feel I somehow don't belong. My eyes shed the tears of new people I'll fall in love with and ones I'll find peculiar as they find me. I see hearts broken, hands that dance to music I've never heard and ghosts of stories I'll never forget, even if I wish to. Hardly another person could compare to how desperately I believe that there are no accidents in this life and how that somehow means someday I will be destined to see the world and to understand it as my soul seemingly already does.
So I woke up this morning thinking of all the wondrous things I felt, I did and I remembered about this summer and then like a leaf collapsing from a summer forsaken tree--it hit me. This summer is gone. But somehow, I am not sad. I thought to myself quite deeply, "Why is that?"
I am taken back to a moment not long ago with a dark backdrop of night and a center-stage filled with stars...somehow it relates to my travel-stricken dream and then I feel I am in that moment once more.
It began with an idea.
It was from my sister Jessica inviting me to the upcoming meteor shower that very night! How incredible!I admit, I was delighted and excitement began to penetrate from my little toes all the way into my heartbeat. It is something that is hard to explain to another, because I love the stars more deeply than most anything else. They are personal. So personal I hardly just sit outside with them, I listen to them. I beg them for questions and songs and tales of years ago. I see their outlines and wish that someday we could have our little talks every moment of the day and not just at night when the weather permits. Oh how the stars are more of friends than I've ever known. They glitter as if they are eyes lighting up when you walk into the room or telling them an exciting story. They sing as if it were the last and first song this earth has ever heard and oh, how they dance when the music is so softly sad. They are the most exquisite beings this earth has, apart from humans.
But this idea, this message I received was so dearly exciting to me because it meant I was given an excuse to sit outside all night with my dear friends and watch them dance and sing and twirl all the night through--all. night. through. What could more incandescent?
Nothing, to be sure.
Nothing, to be sure.
So day slipped into evening and evening collapsed into night and then the real enchantment began. We walked outside with a bundle of blankets in outstretched arms and climbed upon the trampoline at one o'clock in the morning, our spirits more feverish for this natural phenomenon about to commence. With blankets puddled around our small bodies and nothing but expansive heavens as our station, we were ready for our adventure to begin.
It's funny. Sometimes I feel perfectly capable, even preferable to silence when watching the exquisite stars above me. I don't know, I guess I feel they deserve some sort of reverence or respect to their unalterable beauty and so naturally I assumed everyone would feel the same way. And maybe I was just being a little daring in the hopes that we could watch quietly and speak of things that matter deeply as a sort of reverence to the elegant beings bravely falling and crashing through the heavens just for us. But it seems I was out of sorts to everyone else. They laughed and tickled and teased each other mercilessly and it was then I realized I had a choice--I could sit quietly and be unwanted by nearly everyone beside me (except perhaps my brother Adam, who quite frankly wanted nothing more than to go to sleep) or I could join in the innocent tumult and try to understand my fellow friends delightfully.
I think you can figure out which one the fellow adventurer chose.
Time began to pass and I remember amid giggling and talking and feeling wildly alive so late into the night that it was a strange thing watching the stars fall and flicker as if they had a choice. Sometimes I'd picture beautiful creatures, not quite like humans, dancing through a graveyard of glowing stones and when the music was seemingly quiet, no one moved very much. But then some angelic being would sing and suddenly the cemetery was alight with moving creatures in scintillating gowns and suit coats merely doing what they were destined to do in a moment moved by impulse and emotion. I thought, "If the stars could dance and sing so beautifully, it truly must be because they feel it is the only thing they must be doing. It is the action they know will bring them the greatest emotion, even if it makes them heartbroken at least they are feeling the emotion intended for them."
Well.
I do think deeply even if everyone else is not doing just so.
But I've always marveled at the idea that cemeteries are scary. When every Halloween would come around it almost angered me that graveyards were made spooky and demonic and dark. They are such the opposite to me. I find cemeteries comforting in knowing that all these souls are at peace even if they never knew such a feeling on this earth. The sea of headstones and statues and flowers left by a soul that's journeyed on, it is an elegiac painting of what love truly is. I know that every soul is real. I know that they meet their marvelous and all-loving Maker when they die and so it does not scare me to see all of those souls at peace in that element.
So the stars, they bring a sort of happy-sadness, something my sister Rachel and I talk about endlessly. I sometimes call it "necessary sadness" or "elegiac pleasure", but it is difficult to name because it's something that is complex in its own idea. How could one feel happiness and sorrow at once? Their very names defy each other. But to me, it's a type of emotion that doesn't look sad on the outside but is very personal and reaching on the inside. It's as if you lose a loved one and you hear their favorite song on the radio or you stumble into their favorite shop without realizing it and though they're both acts of "chance" you know it was something meant for you. You know it means something and so how could you be sad when you know it makes you happy the universe or God is thinking of you? I used to run from songs that made me sad because at first, it felt wrong to me to be violating old memories or feelings--they seemed to have no right in my life in that random moment. But, by bravely getting through that emotional barrier, I've learned that feeling sad isn't wrong. I learned that feeling happiness all the time isn't right either. There must always be a balance of letting go and feeling things as they really are. You must do the latter in order for the former to be at ease. It is a cycle that can be quite exquisitely beautiful if you let it. There is a certain power in owning your own feelings, but letting nature course their depth and time of place. We are often told to hide your feelings if they are not in the proper place or setting--but how on earth could that be normal if emotions themselves are not beings of time tables or hours or even time at all? If we look closer we realize that time is merely an invention for living beings, most especially humans, so how could it possibly apply to anything apart from that? Broken hearts do not heal from time they heal from allowing your emotions to become real and then by letting go of them. Happiness is not from an element of time but from people or your dog or a painting. It comes from finding a crumbled love note in the street or a red balloon floating carelessly through the sky. Just as happiness, broken hearts and sadness are not elements of time emotions are the same. We are never pained by time. We are pained by experiences.
As I looked up at those glittering stars it was remarkable to feel that "happy-sadness" of them once being there, still and solid in the sky and then so suddenly gone in a matter of a heartbeat. How lovely it would be to be so beautiful, so sure of your small purpose in this life, even if it lasted only a moment.
Sometimes--all the time--I see moments or people through my day that remind me of that small verity. The autumn wind full of spices will jostle through my hair and whisper a sonnet of sadness only I could understand. Or a book long forsaken by someone else will become a dear love of mine because we somehow found each other. I'll hear a thousand songs that speak my name in every word. A smell. A shoe. An old friend. I see God in everything, I hear His voice in that autumn wind and look into His lovely eyes when I find a new companion (a book) or gaze heavily into the glittering stars.
I know that when I look into those stars I see Him because it is as if those stars are telling me exactly how wonderful my life is and is still going to be and so I dream. I dream of autumn breezes and forsaken books. I dream of cobblestone England and quiet misunderstood cathedrals yet to be discovered.
I love the stars, my friends. They've always understood.
I can hardly tell you how incredible the sky looks just before dawn. They say that's when you can see stars the best, but to me every moment with them in view is perfect. But through the waves of exhaustion for everyone else, through their small napping with heavy breaths and quick dreams of the morning, I was there looking at the stars. Never once through that night did my eyes leave the stars, my friends.
So night slipped into morning and morning collapsed into day and as I've learned throughout this interesting summer--Robert Frost said it best:
"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank in grief.
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay."
-k.p.b.
(Post Script: And what do you know--that poem was resting in my pocking this whole time, written by my own hand. How lovely. And...it's a Tuesday.)
Audible Pleasure: (It helps when you're writing)
