Smell the flowers, Blow out the Candles
Something that I’m going to take home with me from this place is so simple and yet, so valuable. To feel the depth of ones beauty, be able to embrace it, feel seen even though you are alone, smile inwardly and geuninely, smell the flowers… blow out the candles. Smell the flowers, blow out the candles. Repeat over and over until you’ve passed that one certain rock, turned the corner, stomped upon those fallen purple-hued flowers scattered across dark, red clay; some days dry, some days damp. Inhale, exhale, beating the ground with heavy-laced shoes.
The kids will come out and play while we take our evening run down through the school and around the farm. The dirt-clay soccer field holds their attention for quite sometime and the playground entertains for the remainder.
Tonight, I turned the corner and saw Nyiko sitting in the middle of the dirt road. I smiled. He smiled back. I passed him playing his new, shiny harmonica courtesy of Nate and a lovely man back in Nashville. He laughed. I always seem to say the kids names and wink right after. “Nyiko! (wink)” He laughs again; that beautiful, high-pitched laugh. This time to my pleasant surprise… he winks back. Perched there in the middle of the dirt road, time slowed. I proceeded to turn my running, sweating body to face him – “Nyiko!” – He looked up again and watched, making fun of me, as now, I was running backwards. Just as much as we think the kids are goofs, they think we are, too. It equals out and is quite enjoyable. So many little things to enjoy, to laugh at, to remember. And this being one of them. My memory, my camera.
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It’s easy to write about things that naturally capture your soul. Not trying to conjure up some epic truth of some kind, but simply expressing how life is beautiful.
“It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things.”
-Donald Miller
51 pages [ front and back ] have been filled in my journal.
Active progress: living out and wresting with the questions and loosing the desire to find all, the, answers.
A quote I took with me before I left from a past journal:
“Do not grow faster than you should. You may dislocate and be ineffective. And what good is that? To be ineffective? Wait and grow, strength comes in time. It does not come overnight. Nothing is truly good unless it is worth the wait.”
[ Summer, 2007 ]
