At the Samovar Tea Lounge

I am worn out from life. It’s so full and too fast to enjoy it. I am back from a stress-filled, travel intensive Thanksgiving weekend (from SF to LAX to OC to AZ back to OC to LAX to SF; last minute visit to AZ for Dan's whole family to be with his dear, dying Grandmother) and maybe that is the reason for the complete disconnect and muddled murk of my brain.

As we sit in Samovar Tea Lounge, Dan and I talk in-depth over tea and sandwiches about really living and seeing each little detail in our lives. I told him I know that is my call: to speak of what I see, to write it out in detail and to share it. Yet I am neglecting it in this overly hurried life brimming with good things. As someone I worked with years ago once told me, “You see beauty in all of life; transcending where few go. We could all go there but forget to. You remind us to open our eyes. Don’t ever stop doing that.”

I’ve never forgotten that. Being told such a thing from a co-worker is rather profound. The funny part is, I forget and settle for mediocrity so often it seems I might as well have never been given a gift of seeing. Still, there is an incessant fire within - with flames that keep licking at me as I begin to smolder, saying, “Awake! Do not forget from whence you came and to where you will return! Remind the world – cry out to them: LIVE! Not because you have attained, but because you are able to see that this the truth behind all lies of complacency. You are to be a reminder in a world lulled to sleep…”

How sad to be the pathetically flawed vessel I am with such a portentous message. I am wracked with guilt over my imperfections at almost every moment, which points to my self-absorbed narcissism and cloaked pride.

Yet aren’t we all such raw and empty souls but for the life of our Creator breathing through us and making us what we were created to be rather than what we would settle for in our painful, angst-ridden existence? And most of us never let God get even close to doing such a transformation in us. I fear to tread that same path of complacency shared by the world … as Dan & I discussed at length last night over coffee at LAX, waiting for our plane to board home.

But you know it when you see it: someone so alive and “right” in their own skin that they set aglow their surroundings and the people in their realm of community. Never without their hostile, apathetic moments or failures, surely; but always with a passion to continue to fight for a life beyond settling... beyond the safely expected path of numbness and American comforts.

So how do I begin to enforce the discipline of writing which I have long embraced in my journals, have never abandoned and yet still avoid sinking fully into? Where does one begin to catalog the never-ending stream of impressions and the visions that lead to life? It’s much too large a project for me. So I’ll start here, humbly realizing I will never attain, but may at least hint at, the glory possible for every one of us: unique, radiant humans that we are, created in the image and likeness of God.