for all things life

recently, i've longed to re-develop a love for all things life. from the womb i attempted to foster this love and welcome it. the book says that no man can love both God and the world, yet it seems we must, lest we completely die inside and recognize nothing within: not because there will be nothing but because it will bear unfamiliar, alien characteristics--in appearance, a ghoulish, ominous pitch of darkness--pokable with a stick in idea only. yet no one nears it for fear of its precariously cataclysmic, infectious nature...but why do i attempt to love life? the Last Man is recorded in the book as having repeatedly stated that those who seek, cherish, love their lives will lose it, yet those who lose, denounce, abhor their lives, will attain it.

people look better in the faint reflection of grungy glass panes; that's what i am doing right now. it's late at my favorite coffee shop and the vintage windows dream this part of the building into a room of mirrors. this one guy is on the internet doing class homework and visiting with his mom via IM, another fellow behind me is studdying gastro physics, a lady to my left tries to reconcile the relationship with her lagubrious, ambivalent boyfriend. and i encounter memory. i remember when Alex, my geomotry partner in ninth grade, would draw philo-grams for me. he called them philo-grams because they would be in nature, diagrams with a philosophical bent. we didn't like to listen to our teacher. Mrs. Snukze would put us to sleep, and then she would put us in detention, which if that occured too many times, we would be put on suspension. none of this teaching us to actually listen in class. however, we did learn that Mrs. Snukze had an enervating, birdlike voice, like a boring angel calling us to sleep. we decided the solution to the problem would be to completely ignore her and doodle during class.

anyways, one time Alex started drawing one of his philo-grams with two parallel lines about two inches apart. he then drew a zig zag line in between them at about forty-five degrees from each point that it touched a parallel line. he circled each angle and stated, "imagine these parallel lines are mirrors and the middle line a LAZER beam, each one of these angles is a creation, despite their equality. it doesn't matter if they are cloned angles, they're isolatedly unique." for being one of the most unique individuals i've ever met, i would wonder why he struggled so with his fingerprint personality. that's when i thought of Alex, and i knew that i wasn't studdying people. i was contemplating creations.

then, i again grasped that sense--the memory--of all things life. somehow the world became beautiful again. i look at it and wonder at the mercy of God. i deny myself, i love life in it's regenerated newness, only because Christ loved me first, and i love him for showing me these irrelevant angles are nothing more than fleeting creations of a fleeting world--deserving not my love. there is another place. a place behind the eyes--for the time--peerlessly sustained by God's holiness...(photo by: Tatsuya Sato)