30 April 2009

Lola.

Flaming hoops. Cowardly lions. Mirrors Mirrors Mirrors. Elephants in the room.
I go in circles. around the world. around I spin.

I wish i were brave. desperately.
there are things in my life that i just can't face...I'm not strong enough.
so i spin. that way, i will be too dizzy to look you in the eyes. And maybe, if I spin long enough, I will forget what your eyes look like.

i am not love sick...i am not sick of love.
love keeps me alive and breathing. love never fails me.
i am simply sick of games. of mistakes. of spinning.

I know a girl who lives in Utopia. To my knowledge, she is the last of its occupants. She is one in a million. She is rare. She is beautiful. She is pure. In her mind, it is possible to live without being stained by the world. She challenges my cynical mind every day. She inspires me to live pure. In moments of despair, I think to myself...I am too far gone. To return to Utopia would take years.

But in reality, it can happen in a matter of seconds. We have the ability to change...but I think that most of us rather like our sin. But why? Sin makes us miserable. It stains our character. It confuses our souls. It separates us from happiness and peace. So why do so many of us chose to live here? We live in these strange lands that we carve out of our own opinions and emotions...we leave Utopia (a land of peace and prosperity) to abide in some trashy wasteland that only makes us more unsatisfied. We are fools.

After 1/3 of our generation has been murdered by abortion, the other 2/3 are choosing to throw away their lives based on what "feels right". I'm at the point of no return. I long for things to be black and white again. Life has been grey for far too long. I'm not about rules and regulations...or legalism or judgmental ideals. I am not close minded. On the contrary...I simply have found that on this journey called life, true happiness and fulfillment is not achieved by indulging in whatever "feels right." See, that's the thing about lust. It is never satisfied. It always want MORE. You can't possibly be happy if you live according to desire.

We all live in a circus. We all feel pain, we all suffer devastation. Our friends don't come through, our finances are always wanting, and our appetite is never satisfied. Our parents let us down, our jobs frustrate us, and our emotions run wild. How on earth could we ever be at peace in a cold war?

There is peace and hope in life submitted to your creator. I want to obey. I want to seek. I want to understand. I want to know who created me and WHY he created me. Then, and only then, will I ever be able to escape this circus of un-devoted distraction. Where purpose in not known, abuse is inevitable. Stop spinning. Breathe.



28 April 2009

:)



Wisdom.

"Happy are those who find wisdom.
and those who get understanding,
for her income is better than silver,
and revenue better than gold.
She is more precious than jewels,
and nothing you desire can compare
with her.
Long life is in her right hand;
in her left hand are riches and honor.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness
and all her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her
those who hold her fast are called
happy." -Proverbs 3:13-18

Growing up I remember the passage in bold (she is more precious..) referring to a man and how he should look at his wife. Re- reading this now I realize that would be taking it out of context completely. It's referring to the importance of wisdom.

I don't know maybe I'm just crazy...but is the bold scripture not most commonly placed as encouragement to women to realize their worth and something said to men to help realize the worth of women? Not that the above interpretation is doing harm...but its talking about wisdom...which I feel is much more powerful.


over and out.

To Own A Dragon.

“I learned a great deal about myself while watching a documentary a few years ago about elephants in a wildlife trust in Africa. There were twenty-five elephants, all of them orphans, and they had been brought to the trust twenty years before. They were becoming teenagers– in elephant years. The girls were adequate, getting along with the other elephants, but there were a few boys who were causing a great deal of trouble. The narrator talked about the frustrations these few elephants were feeling because they had gone into early musth cycles, which showed up as a green pus running down their right hind leg. This phase produced aggressive and violent behavior, the elephant equivalent of sexual frustration.

The narrator in the documentary said the elephant musth cycle beings in adolescence, and normally lasts only a few days. But among these orphans, the musth cycle was disrupted and had become unusually long. These elephants were taking out their aggression on rhinos that bathed at a local mud pool. An elephant would slowly lumber down to the pool, enter near a rhino, then spear it through the side with his tusks. The elephant would then lean his gargantuan forehead into the head of the rhino, holding the beast underwater until it drowned. The filmmakers followed these orphan elephants who were always on their own, staggering about the wildlife refuge, fueled by a pent-up aggression they couldn’t understand. They weren’t acting like elephants– they didn’t know what an elephant was supposed to do with all his energy, all his muscle.

Occasionally, two elephants in musth would meet, and the encounter was always violent, going so far as to uproot trees in the fray of their brawl. When both beasts, bloodied, lumbered their separate ways alone– without a family, without a tribe– I couldn’t help but identify. I have never killed a rhino, or much of anything for that matter, but there have been times in my life when I didn’t know exactly how to be. I mean, there were feelings, sometimes anger, sometimes depression, sometimes raging lust, and I was never sure what any of it was about. I just felt like killing somebody, or sleeping with some girl, or decking a guy in a bar, and I didn’t know what to do with any of these feelings. Life was a confusing series of emotions rubbing against events. I wasn’t sure how to manage myself, how to talk to a woman, how to build a career, how to– well, be a man.

To me, life was something you had to stumble through alone. It wasn’t something you enjoyed or conquered, it was something that happened to you, and you didn’t have a whole lot of say about the way it turned out. You just acted out your feelings and hoped you never got caught.

Watching television that night, however, the narrator began to speak of a kind of hope for these elephants. Elephant development, apparently, begins very early. Female elephants are only capable of having children once every two years, and during those two years between babies, the young are cared for obsessively by their mothers. They are fed, sheltered, loved, and guided in their learning of basic survival.

It is only at the first musth cycle that a young male elephant leaves his mother and enters into the African wild, searching for a mentor, a guide. The green pus running down his hind leg and his smell like fresh-cut grass alerts an older, fully mature male, that this is a young elephant in need of guidance. Upon finding a mentor, the young elephant’s musth cycle ends. The older and younger begin to travel together, to find food together, to protect each other– the older one teaching the younger what elephant strength is for, and how to use it for the benefit of himself and the tribe.

Watching television that night, I wondered if humans aren’t like that, too. I began to wonder if we guys were designed to have a father, whose very presence would cause us to understand more accurately what our muscle is for, what we are supposed to do with our energy.

You have to wonder, don’t you? Some statistics state as many as 85 percent of the guys in prison grew up without a dad. This is sobering to me.

And so watching the documentary, I began to wonder if those of us without dads aren’t making mistakes in our lives we wouldn’t make if we had a father to guide us. I wondered if there isn’t a better paradigm for our existence– a way of being men, a way each of us could truly embrace if it were instilled in us by a man who spoke with altruism and authority. I wondered if people who grow up with great fathers don’t walk around with a subconscious sense they are wanted on this planet, that they belong, and the world needs them. And I wondered this: Is there practical information we are supposed to know about work, women, decisions, authority, leadership, marriage, and family that we would have learned if there were a guide around to help us navigate our journey? I wondered if some of the confusing emotions I was feeling weren’t a kind of suspended adolescence from which the presence of an older man might have delivered me.

– Excerpt from To Own A Dragon, by Donald Miller (pp 31-34)

24 April 2009

Refreshing.

23 April 2009

And I claim I'm not excited with my life any more
So I blame this town, this job, these friends
The truth is it's myself
And I'm trying to understand myself
and pinpoint where i am
When I finally get it figured out
I've change the whole damn plan
Oh noose tied myself in, tied myself too tight
Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that I'll probably regret soon
I've changed my mind so much I cant even trust it
My mind changed me so much I cant even trust myself

18 April 2009

My photo is going to be in the following art show :) Come see it.

I wrote this awhile ago and just found it in my drafts...interesting.

We've all had our heart broken. Even if not through a romantic relationship...someone has betrayed our trust in one way or another. The kind of betrayal/hurt that makes your stomach want to fall out your butt. Makes you feel like there's no hope in people anymore; hurt happens and it sucks.

But when did it become acceptable to cause this hurt? When did it become acceptable to cheat on your boy/girlfriend that you've been with for a year or so. Who decided that was OK? We didn't. We just let it slide, became more comfortable with betrayal and lying...not necessarily to say we don't mind if people do it, but we expect it. Whatever happened to expecting the good until proven wrong?

Too many people have gone and fucked up the system.

What in your right mind thinks (this is more towards the guys cause that's where my experience lies) that emotional mind games are ok? You like a girl you date her. Cut & dry. No more of this gray area of confusion. Especially when you have a gf.

This is turning into a rant more than an insightful thought process as it began...so i'm going to stop now. I just wish we could get back to organic dating. Taking a girl out if you like her and then dating her. As opposed to "hooking up" or "playing the field."

Organic Dating.

14 April 2009

Felicia, Re-Invented (A Little.)

So this first half of the year has been a complete growing experience. And almost everyone I talk to gets an entire mouthful of me rambling and just thinking out-loud...because that's what I'm best at. If you would have asked me in January what my plans were for this year I would have told you confidently that my best friend faith and I were getting an apartment and then saving up for L.A. in which I would be re-locating to in the fall. Well that plan has made a one-eighty turn into something life-changing and completely different.

Towards the end of January a friend of mine asked me to come to this church called the anchor. I was a little weary because the last church I visited with this particular friend was not anything I liked or felt moved to join, by any means. As I walked into the church I was amazed with the culture of it...there were kids tattooed from head to toe...kids (well, young adults) with piercings, and these "kids" were what the average churchy-church would turn away. I think there's a HUGE misunderstanding between the church and the average young adult-artist where they feel unwelcome and uncomfortable when normally they're not unwelcome but the church also doesn't know how to reach out or connect with these young artists because they themselves are elders and just simply can not connect. So as I'm walking up to this church I realize immediately this is something I want to be a part of; and even more so when the worship was so filled with the presence that I had tears streaming. That being said I now go every week and I consider this my home church. (www.anchorfellowship.com) (listen to some of Josh's pod casts, they'll blow your face off)

The above being said I feel like I should re-iterate where I said with the whole churchy-God stuff. I grew up in it. Never felt connected to it. Never felt this overwhelming love coming from people that could effing care less if you have long hair or where a skirt or even have money or....there's always been this list of do's and don'ts that I associate with church. But God loves us wherever you are on this journey and doesn't hold back because your dress like this or sin more than the next person, he loves us always the same amount abundantly and unconditionally. This is something that has been re-revealed to me in the past couple months.

So growing up almost feeling the complete need to rebel against organized religion...I also lost touch with leading my life by what I'm called and lead to do. I am a completely independent girl who at times thinks she knows it all and likes to be in complete control....which is not a lifestyle that is synonymous with doing whatever God calls me to do.

All of that rambling above is to say plans have changed.
I feel lead to live with my dad for a few months, and just let this healing process that God has started completely work out until I know what my next move is; which potentially is Greece in the Fall...but who knows that could change in the next couple months.

I'm just happy where I'm at and the weight of trying to figure out my life plan is lifted and its changed to I trust God to guide me as opposed to I'm going to figure it all out on my own-it's impossible btw.

This new thing is exciting and life-changing and also everything I already new just reiterated and re-revealed to me in a way that just clicked.

Love,
Felicia-Changing.
(and change hurts....but its a good and exciting hurt, if that's not too much of an oxymoron for your brain to comprehend)