A Throwback to a bygone era

A throwback to a bygone era

Wow. It's been a year and a few months since I've sat down with a pen and some ink; scribbling onto lonely, blank pages of a moleskin journal. I'm sad that I've let this once daily discipline fade into non-existence. May of 2012, almost 18 months have passed since I last shared my real thoughts with the outside world via cluttered and often-times unnecessarily confusing linguistics.

I'm going back through Portland native and literary extraordinaire Donald Miller's, "Blue Like Jazz". It makes perfect sense. About every 5 or so years something happens to me and I start to freak out like Ricky Bobby, running around in some tighty-whiteys on a vacant race track yelling for Tom Cruise to, "Get the vodoo witchcraft off of me!". In other words, identity is constantly changing. As we change, as does our identity. I'm sad that I haven't shared this last year and a half, as so much has transpired, so many twists in the story, so many plot line addendums.

How come we love stories of brokenness? Why is it that we as a society, more so, a generation, desire to read/watch/listen to stories about broken people? Broken things? In the first chapter of, "Blue Like Jazz" Don talks about being raised by a broken family. Don talks about a father who smelled like beer and called him every three or so years. Yet he talks simultaneously about the wonder of this majestic beer mustache stained muscular emotionless face of a father, and how that made Don feel.

Brokenness is a fascinating concept; it derives from a belief that at one point in time, something or someone, was 'whole'. I was intrigued by the definition of whole. "...an unbroken or undamaged state, being in one piece." That brought liquid to my retinas when I first drug my mind across those words.

This all reminds me of a section in another one of Don's books called, "Searching for God knows what." The chapter is titled, "naked", don't get too excited, its not what you think. In "Naked" Don talks about the Fall of Man, The Pilot Episode of Brokenness, so to speak. Don talks about how it must have felt when shame made its debut on earth. How God must have felt to see the initial chink in the armor of the whole, the perfect creation that he made. A being, perfected and made whole, was broken from the core, by a desire to do life on their own...master their own destiny. It must have been a hollow feeling when the creator of the universe watched his hand-crafted naked perfection fall into shame, crashing loudly upon his ears like a wine grass on a concrete floor in a quiet room.

To bring it all back in, it's been a year of being whole, and a year of being broken. In no specific order. I've been tested like never before. I've been blessed like never before. The financial highs, the emotional lows, and everything therein. I look forward to sharing my thoughts again in an effort to discover more of the story that is unfolding within. Thanks for reading.