Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Just to balance things out, you know. Not to brag or anything.

I am so very happy right now. Content, and excited for the future, and exhausted at a job well done but in a good way.

But most of all, I feel inexpressibly grateful that out of the gut-wrenching mess of the past, good things can and do happen. I have been redeemed. And it makes me feel a little closer to God again.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

On Good Writing

The discipline of writing still eludes me. After over a decade of intermittent diary-writing, and some years of blog-updating, my words and ideas do not stack up neatly like well-designed, uniformed plastic chairs at the hawker store.

They say writing is good for oneself. Writing is an exercise in truth. It does not reflect truth but creates it. There is so much power in words wielded well, words that are not clumsily shoved into a sentence. Words that exceed their limitations so that it is not the words you hear, but the feelings and ideas expressed through them that are transmitted and embedded in your soul.

Really good writers have that effect, of being able to transport the reader into their consciousness, to see out of their own eyes and think not as one mind to another, but as one and the same mind.

Maybe it's not really about skill. Maybe it's also about heart. The burning desire to communicate something transforms itself into eloquence, the blue sparks glint off the page and creates flashes of light in the dark recesses of a reader's mind.

And I don't have it.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Homecoming

A year. It has *only* been a year. It feels like a lifetime ago, once removed.

This is my bed, white sheets, two pillows. The shower with it's partial sliding glass doors, the collapsible partitions. My old, old clothes. The humidity, not as insufferable as Hong Kong's, but pressing close by like a debt collector or an old friend. The books of my childhood, a row of CS Lewis and L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott.

It's hard to categorize this particular feeling I have. The getting of something that one has longed, pined for for so long - what do you do next? What grand gesture can you do, besides running down the street crying "I'm home! I'm home!" (and even that might not work) that will relieve this feeling in your chest? This exultant jubilation, this bottomless contentment, this quiet relief, this surging sentimentality agitated by the tangible reminders of everything that has shaped you. With wonder you look at the marks you left on your surroundings, pinpoints in time past to a history you barely remember happening.

Success, the future, dreams are vague, but home is very, very tangible. I just want to bask in this for a while.