BreatheouT.

THE DAY: December 6th 2007
THE TIME: 9:29pM
THE MUSIC: Anna Begins; Counting Crows
THE MOMENT: i CANNOT DO SCHOOL WORK ANYMORE. Parts of my Katie letter.

* * *
I have fever dreams and restless feet.
In the cold morning, I am what once filled your lungs and now hangs frozen before your face. Exhale me, it is time to float away.

* * *

Today I was sittin on a couch on campus thinkin.... what if someone were to come to me 5 years ago and say "Hey, so I walked into the future today and saw you." And I would ask them what I was like. Maybe they would say that I had brown hair... which I would think was weird. And then maybe they'd say that I was wearin a brown baseball hat with a bird on it... and a sweet white shirt with green baseball sleeves. I was on a couch at snowy BYU in cheap fake converse shoes, eatin a wrap and readin "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life." What a great life huh? That was me today.I realized how happy I would have been to hear that, and as I stood to walk away, nothing else mattered.

I am so ready to come home.
I want to eat Sunday Best with you.
stay up late talkin to lacey
take jesse bowling
put lots of effort into havin good talks with corey
listen to brad laugh
drive the buick
see kaley and have a big huge thing with the three of us
olivia too maybe
i want to drive at night with the windows down
i want to feel the difference in me with my world
i want to see zach
i want to feel that difference, but separately.
i want to write pages
i want to feel the humidity
i want to sing with the windows down and i just need to feel and cry
i want to breathe the air that way.

Walkin off the plane and down the escalator.

nex·us

1.	a means of connection

2.	the core or center

Some of us, we don't say.

THE DAY: Pre-thanks giving.
THE TIME:12:38pm
THE MUSIC:Sister; Sufjan Stevens
THE MOMENT:a question.

I am not sorry for the things I said in the moments before I left.
I am not resistant to this feeling that-- I am in the antonym of home.
The desert highways.
The blackened bottoms of my feet.
The palm tree over head, the dry earth beneath me.
The pale air, the attempts for irrigation.
All of these things are also within me.

So many climates I’ve yet to absorb.
Here I am,
in a flat desert town,
longing for a landslide.

Am I lonely?

Drivin' under the stars and into an arid sunrise.
Becoming the western songs I never before understood.
Eatin real Mexican food at marias.
Skateboarding with skinny rocker boys in empty parking lots.
Hoping for sunshine, layin under the overcast sky as goosebumps sneak up and down my skin.

Hello Blythe, I am Lyndsi Shae.
Where is my world?

.The calm and the Urgency.

THE DAY: a while ago
THE TIME: afternoon
THE MUSIC: Blue and Green; Julie Moffitt
THE MOMENT: Study breaks in a new corner.

I wrote something the other day.
You know how that goes.
So I figured this time I'd post it up... and then write a little scrambled explanation about everything I was trying to say.

* * *

The rain falls down, like our April on Amelia Island. Me and You. I left my ink and paper on the sand and we ran into the falling water, the crashing foam, the storm, the ocean, the honesty you allowed in your eyes…the force of you within me. Our secret set free for a time, and though she quietly ate dinner in the house above, she never knew.

The rain falls down, like the July off the coast of Carolina. Me without you. I opened my ink and paper to the falling water, letting it run down the words that confirmed my needed escape, my opened heart. I was wrapped up in my release, with no way to truly express to the world how liberated I had become. My new secret sang from within me… she knew everything.

Today I rinse my memories in live salt water. Evaporation leaves them covered in grains of freedom, a complacent glaze between the past and myself. No longer your pretty girl in the dark, I am laying down my weapons…collapsing the impatience of my limbs, spreading my novels across the sand--- As the pages blow open behind me, I walk along the water with anticipation, communing with the coming tide.

* * *

*April on amelia island- me and zach swam in the ocean in the rain. I left my journal to get soaked on the sand. He was really that way.
*July- me and katie, when we let the rain blur over the ink in our journals. The page I let the rain splash on was that CS Lewis quote about how if you never love, you'll lock up your heart to be unfeeling and dormant. (“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
--C.S. Lewis)


*The rinse my memories thing... they're clean and content, but with a slight taint (salt), like that feeling that makes me feel as though he's an old movie, or the feeling that makes me know its absolutely past, like he's not on earth anymore. If the water were to evaporate, it would leave the salt behind... which is what I mean when I say covered in grains of freedom- a complacent glaze between the past and myself. There is a small wall there, but not one that keeps me from going back. Just a content divide. The important distinction is that I could go back if I wanted, I am stronger than salt... but I don't.

*Commune- I know you know what this means, but read how great the true definition is.
1. to converse or talk together, usually with profound intensity, intimacy etc.
2. to be in intimate communication
3. interchange of ideas or sentiments

*There's also supposed to be an evident contrast between "your pretty girl in the dark" and the light associated with walking on the sand.
*Another evident contrast between my journal in the first rain-- closed and left behind. The journal in the second rain-- open and held by me. The many journals in the third rain-- blowing open by the force of nature, behind me but still acknowledged, still free in their numbers and open gates.

*The coming tide is the change I can feel, the one that hasn't happened yet. A natural force that will inevitably reach my life and mold it in some way.

Prone to Wander

THE DAY: November 5th 2007
THE TIME: 2:42AM
THE MUSIC: Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing; Sufjan Stevens cover
THE MOMENT: Flopped out writing with my Siovan

Lately, I sit down to write… and find that I have nothing new to say… Nothing that wouldn’t harbor the same underlying themes of my other words. This, is driving me crazy.

I know who I am. I know what I want. I have exhausted myself writing about those things.

My first thought was that I would love to go to another country, let it mold my perspective… let new images burn words out of me.

My little brother Corey and I used to stand in the ocean and karate-chop the waves that broke at our knees. Eventually, we’d swim out to the big ones. Ten years ago, North Carolina waves were huge to us. We always called the risky ones whoppers. The kind that sucked you beneath the surface, spun you down through the bubbles ‘til you didn’t know where the sky was… and then chucked you on the sand with no idea where it all had come from or how to get the water our of your nose.

(I find myself restless… for a whopper-wave kinda change.)
Though I would rarely expect this of myself, I am hoping for one.

I am the happiest I have ever been. I don’t want to let that fact fade into stale neglected thought. I know that because of this freedom, there is so much new space in me-- for new people, new life and new challenges.

I am ready for something new. I am thankful for this chance I have to focus on things I choose to focus on.

I know I don’t have to go to another country.
I’ve really been thinking about charity, and how I want to feel that love within me, to gain a greater understanding of what that’s like. I could do that. I recognize that I could have done that before… but its just easier now. Everything is easier, because I no longer am exerting so much energy into getting through my own trials. I have a new buzzing within me. I can do so much! There are so many opportunities for me to serve and learn that I am totally ignorant about. I want to seek those out and let them absorb me… rather than fall into some type of pride-cycle where I forget to be thankful for who I am and what I am working towards.

One pivotal day this summer I was in a shop with my loves Katie and Kaley.
Someone painted one of the blank clocks with the words:
“She knows the time is now.”

I am ready.
I am willing.
I will search for ways to discover.

"And now as ye have been delivered by the power of God out of these bonds[…] even so I desire that ye should stand fast in this liberty wherewith ye have been made free…"

Mosiah 23:13