Garden

 Your thoughts are beautiful things and you should treat them as such. They are yours and yours alone until you share them, and you have the choice not to. It's okay to keep some of those beautiful little thoughts to yourself because your mind is but a vast garden where seeds of imagination are planted and fruits of hard work and discipline may ripen. Sometimes other people's thoughts enter our gardens and whether those thoughts are fertilizer or pest depends purely on the company we keep. Thoughts can be expressed without words, and I suggest we do so from time to time because words fail us, do they not? Even writing this silly little post tempts me with thoughts that others will think that I'm less than I really am. I know who I am, at least I think I do. That's good enough for me because my thoughts are a green garden with sunflowers always facing the sun. You'd get lost in a garden like that; I do all the time. Life can pretty beautiful if you think it is.

Poetry

What an awful time to be writing. Elena is out frantically searching for a specific type of glue for her project, the car isn't packed yet for the trip, I played with my phone instead of grading papers the morning, and the boy is about to be up. Off into the forest tomorrow. The rivers. I'm guided by rivers.

I want to write poetry; for me, not you.

I feel like I might have something to say.

:)

"Daddy was born because we needed music." 

I wish there was a cliff

right behind our house.

I would sit on the ledge

every night

and play a little song on my flute

just to say goodnight to the crashing waves 

below.

Old Mission

Yesterday I found myself standing in front of Old Mission Lighthouse, looking inland from the perspective of a frozen lake. I came out to make a fun little video of me playing an ocarina by a snowman, but only seconds after playing those final notes I fell into a deep an utter despair of depression. I could barely speak, barely move. I felt cold but sweaty in the hands. I acted weird around my family, and the silence of the frozen bay entered my brain like a parasite killing of any sense of guard I've placed around any raw unprocessed emotions I had yet to sort through. It was intense and confusing, and I would still be floating in the mystery of that experience if it had not been for my mother sending me a picture of a painting of that lighthouse that hangs on the walls of her home. My dad fancied that lighthouse as one of his favorites, and the painting verified that I was indeed standing quite a ways out into the frozen lake. 

Maybe I was visited by a ghost. Maybe I was the ghost.

That night I fell asleep into intense dreams about a *friend from a long time ago. 

*Demirci

Val

This morning I met Val. Nice lady. Works at the hotel. She made a passing comment about living with a Turkish person, and I couldn't help but prod that conversation a bit further. Her husband passed away a few years ago and she had an open room in the house, so she accepted a young student from Turkey as a roommate. A few years and two trips to Turkey later and she's hooked on the culture. That's a beautiful thing, finding something so special through a time of loss. 

7:56AM at Blossom Hotel and Suites, Traverse City, Michigan

When you lose a parent, people are going to tell you to get help and talk to somebody. You know that's the best advice ever and you know deeply that if you don't take it you are going to suffer. But, you put it off until it's been three years and you're sitting by a hotel pool with your son listening to Journey while using the chlorine to cover up why your teary eyes are all so red. 

That's what I did. I didn't talk to anyone and now I'm fatalistic about everything. I think about death all the time. Sometimes I see flashes of my father on his last days and I feel a loneliness come over me that I could not compare to anything else. 

I can talk about that here, right? That's the premise of this new version of my online ramblings. I'm going to be completely transparent and speak freely. I don't really have any strong opinions about anything like others do in their blogs. I'm just a lonely and confused person who has to prove to his son that the world is something more than a lonely and confusing place. That's no easy task.