incinerate them?

there's a strange monday silence here in the office. my brick red walls, the morning sun comes in from behind, if i turn to the right i can see the brillant blue of the calm lake. i see books all around like little doorways waiting to be opened. and open computer files of several stories i wish to work on today. i'd like to give my excuses to both the books and the files, "i don't have time for all of you, don't have time to explore the worlds inside." but how do you excuse such opportunity. a mountain of gold you don't have time to spend.

don't you think one of the best things about heaven will be its timelessness?

oh, a friend called during my blogging thoughts. she is getting her first book contract!!! whooohooooo for CATHY!!!!!!! years of hard work and continued pursuit, and now she's just beginning on the crazy and wonderful and okay, neurotic journey toward seeing her name on a book cover.

earlier today i wondered, if i wasn't a writer, what would i be?

a prodigal wandering around the world, a professional gambler who's lost it all and dealing cards in vegas, a shady private investigator, a chain smoking alcoholic working at a something job i'd hate thus the chain smoking and the drinking?

is it writing that keeps me in line? okay, this is probably ALL a lie. this would be the dark cindy, the one without god, the person that my many weaknesses gravitates toward being.

maybe instead (hopefully), a more involved community member and kid's baseball coach, a photographer for a travel magazine, a director in a small theater, a sailing family going around the world, someone doing more to make the world a better place like helping stop the sex slave industry in southeast asia, etc....

it's always strange considering the alternate lives we might have lived. the places we might be living in, the people we've missed meeting by meeting the ones we have. but then also those we would've never known if not for the corners we'd turned.

watched a pretty dark and graphic movie this weekend. 21 grams. incredibly filmed and very moving though i recommend it only for those who indie-type R-rated flicks that are both disturbing and thought-provoking. a poem in the movie said something like, "the world revolved on the outside and something in each of us revolved for us to find one another" or something much better yet similar.

sometimes i wish to live many lives, but living also has it's share of wounds and scars. hemingway wrote once, "me i like life very much. so much it will be a big disgust when have to shoot myself...." such tragic to see someone who loves life deeply, lives life fully (even if waywardly in the quest of that living), and ends life so horribly.

i also consider the millions of people giving forty years to jobs they dislike (yet choose this), living lives they wish to be out of, or not living at all because it's just too painful, disillusioning, unsafe. christians who build their own walls even as christ tries kicking them outside a bit.

a proverb in the message bible,
"a life frittered away disgusts god."

then this cracked me up:

"when the samaritans learned that his (jesus) destination was jerusalem, they refused hospitality. when the disciples james and john learned of it, they said, 'master, do you want us to call a bolt of lightning down out of the sky and incinerate them?'

even walking along with THE LIGHT, his buddies ask him, "hey, should be incinerate these people for not letting us stay overnight?"

funny, yet terrible, where our godly intentions sometimes go.

my random thoughts have certainly been random lately. and yet, there's the connected thru-line always. i've got books with worlds waiting to be discovered. my own words and stories that i grasp from the air and tap into a computer file. lives to live, to observe, and to wonder at the missed and the experienced. shoes of my own and of others to take a stroll in. celebrations to be had (yeah CATH!). anger to relinquish, people to find ourselves revolved toward.

it's all in the living.

time, don't take it all too quickly please. god, help us capture today and tomorrow or any tomorrow we have and savor it, use it, create something beautiful within it. or whatever you have in mind.

and just think, this is just a glimpse of the eternal.