dear diary

dear diary,

i am reading this new book. it's flashy and trendy and has exactly the right amount of author honesty stamped on its clean white pages. the beautiful stories of someone else's life has got me hooked like a helpless fish and grasping to make her struggles and dreams somehow part of my own.

on the pages of a book even the tragedy of loss seems strangely romantic. yesterday i picked it up again and flipped through several chapters. i can't help but see her life as dreamy and extravagant, though the typeface admits her daily struggles with life's everyday-ness.

i don't fit there. i'm almost positive there will never be a time when my 'everyday' includes spontaneous trips to europe or annual vacations to private islands or elegant dinner parties or frequent flyer miles to visit old friends. i mean, i guess i can't be totally sure.

but, i'm okay with that. why do i feel like, as i'm reading, that this has to be my story too? that what this author pens as her dreams and tales and desires... somehow has to reflect the bud wrestling to burst forth from the little tree inside of me?

it doesn't, right?

my 'everyday' discoveries of joy and my less elegant, far simpler dreams of what my life will become ... those are legit too, right?

i believe yes. i believe that if five years from now i'm still making art on canvas that no one understands (we'll just call it abstract ;) and still wishing for solitary places to write from my imagined deep, philosophical gut with the hopes of one day writing something that is significant and still acting 17 though I will be pushing 30 and still floundering about without a "normal" job and financial plan and still wishing that I could be part of something outrageously bigger than myself (though not completely sure what that might be) and still just doing the day-in-day-out randomness that seems to be the puzzle pieces of my life...

if i'm still that person, i guess that's okay.

and i guess, diary, what i want to say is that i'm learning that loving people is hearing them ask this same question and then hearing different answers. even the author, i'm sure, as she was writing, was daily proving her legitimacy - of dreams and joys and struggles and pains.

loving people, maybe, is knowing that what i've got to say may not resonate with you. and what you're telling me may not make any sort of sense at all. but hearing each word - a little gift bundled in a (sometimes) messy package - open up to reveal a teeny bit more about who we are.

i think when i was in high school i had this quote on my wall: "to understand any living thing you must creep inside and feel the beating of its heart." according to my google search, W. Macneille Dixon said some version of this so he gets the credit.

the wonderfully crazy thing about creeping inside anyone and feeling the heartbeat, is that this kind of deepest love always, always, always reveals who made us.

now that is significant.