here is the deepest secret nobody knows

I am home and it’s Christmastime.

There are lights up in my room and lights up on the house. It is warm inside and cold outside. It snowed fat, beautiful flakes while I was in the mountains this past week and when I stood outside in the light but steady snowfall and closed my eyes it sounded still. My senses kicked into overdrive. You can smell the cold and hear the wind gently shifting the snow and it’s not perfectly silent but it’s perfectly peaceful and devoid of human noise. I’m in love with that feeling.

At night, I wrapped my long fuzzy white scarf four times around my face and went outside to see the stars. There are hundreds visible in the mountains away from so much light pollution and when I look at them my mind gets mixed up between daydreams and the facts I just finished learning in my Astronomy class last semester. Did you know that if a star we’re seeing is six billion light years away, then we’re really seeing the way it was six billion years ago? It takes the light that long to travel to us. It may have exploded or shrunk or turned into a black hole in the present, but we can’t see that. Did you know that shooting stars are really just meteors as they burn up in our atmosphere? Still, I wish on every one I see. When I learn about the absolute vastness of our Universe (which is still expanding) I am in awe at the extent of God’s creation.

I was glancing through some of my old pen & paper journals recently and I found a few “favorite” things I’d written down. I’d like to share them with you.

“Do not demand that things should happen just as you wish, but wish them to happen just as they do, and all will be well.”
–Epictetus

I repeat this to myself when I am overwhelmed and unhappy with the twists and turns my life seems to be taking.

This next excerpt I copied out of a book I had to read for class my freshman year of college. Re-reading it now it feels more applicable than ever and I am glad I had the foresight to write it down. I feel like this could have been written specifically for me.

"Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor do I find it surprising that they keep company, for each belongs to a mind in suspense, a mind hanging on what the future might bring. The cause in both cases is failure to adjust ourself to the present and a tendency to project our mental processes far into the future." -From The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca

This is one of my favorite poems. The first time I ever read it I felt incredibly intrigued and moved by it and each time I read it I understand it differently and love it all the same. I think, someday, I will understand it even better. ee cummings is all about syntax and format so I am copying the poem exactly as it was meant to appear, even if it doesn’t make traditional sense, and hopefully it will publish to the blog the way I’m typing it.

"i carry your heart with me"

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root of the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

-ee cummings