.spilled earth.

Melting ice in my stomach and dying flame in my mouth.
Would that the misting warmth could excise my heart:
So unsteady, half glass and half stone
It sometimes seems…

Hunger and sickness, some vive la revolution
Cry stirs within me, but no kingsbanner
Rallies to any causal center.

Empty-handed and too-full-hearted,
I dream with bloodshot open eyes;
Watch me sleep, and raise a cup of unsweetened cocoa
To the moon that dreamed he loves me.

Even the child, growing like a flytrap
From my cardiac arteries
Thinks the woman in me, wherever she may be,
A demon of the reddest kind.

Distance yawns with me.
Pity chuffs grotesquely at my shoulder.
Sunbleached eyes see lies;
Truth seems a dull stylus tonight.

I often have doubts about things.

And every now and again, just when I'm not expecting it, God shows up and says, "Your life would be better if you didn't have this doubt, and I'm going to prove it to you."  The form of this proof is sometimes spectacular and mind-blowing, and sometimes it's tiny and warm and fluffy and still amazing.

HE is so great.  In every sense of the word.

I know it's a whole year away, but…

THIS IS GOING TO BE SO FANTASTIC.

I'M REALLY, REALLY, SPASTICALLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS.

(Also, this was my first attempt to embed a video in blogspot, and it actually worked on my first try!  Hurrah!)

On prophetic stuff and a little looking ahead

(I'm going to just leap into a story here.)
So, for a few weeks now, I've been wanting to get prophetic ministry at church  (for the non-New Dayers who may be reading this, that's where a team of people speak over you what they hear God saying for you and your life.  it's pretty much amazing).  I haven't done it yet because I haven't had the chance, basically, what with having my own duties at church after service.  Last week at Dwell, Seth and Sarah Gerber spoke about prophetic ministry (the history of the prophetic, giving prophetic words yourself, and also a lot about receiving and "stewarding" prophetic words).  One thing Sarah said stuck out to me—she told about this point in her life where she literally had a basket full of tapes of prophetic words she'd gotten over the last several years, and she hadn't done anything with them—hadn't pursued them, hadn't prayed about them, or anything, and she felt like she couldn't go looking for any new prophetic words of the like before she worked to "steward" the ones she had already gotten.

That got me kind of thinking—I've gotten a number of prophetic words over the last three years, almost all of which I have in some recorded form.  I've listened to them all several times, and prayed about them a little bit, but I haven't really made an effort to find out what God means by them and what he wants me to do in regards to them.  So this morning in church, as I was considering whether to go up for ministry, I decided to hold off and really think about pursuing the words I already have.  The weird thing was, I kind of expected to feel reluctant or disappointed about it, but I actually felt pretty good about this choice.

Then, tonight (or, rather, last night [Sunday], since this will post on Monday) was the Dwell Christmas party.  We did some crazy worship, had a fantastic prayer time, and opened gifts; were having yummy munchies and I was just kind of standing around when Jo Leitz (awesome lady who has definitely got a heavy-duty prophetic gift) came up to me and just said, "God's really going to start moving in you with the new year.  I really feel like He's saying you're going to experience a new outpouring of creativity, especially in your writing, and it's going to be really anointed.  God is basically going to be writing through you."

…Whoa.

Aside from that very last bit (verbatim, anyway), and without the specific time frame, this is basically the same prophetic word I have gotten at least six times from various people in the last seventeen months.  (I even got it twice in the same session, by two different people who weren't there to hear each other give the word, and they said almost verbatim the same thing.)  You would think I'd pay attention to this, as God is practically throwing it in my face, but every time I got it I was like, "Wow, that's really cool!" and then didn't really pursue it at all.  (Actually, I proceeded to pout excessively about writer's block.  In fact, in hindsight, I might have actually used it as an excuse to complain about my writer's block.  *cringe*).  But when Jo said this one today, I was kind of like, "OH!  Man!  I am totally going to take this home and tell somebody about it and pray over it and journal and by golly, it's not my responsibility to make it happen, but, by golly, am not going to just shelve this again."  So that is what I am doing.  And I am massively excited, and, yes, also kind of terrified.

Jo also told me that my poetry is especially important, and I need to not give up on that.  (This is especially interesting, because poetry is something  have been writing only very occasionally lately—I used to write several dozen poems a year, and in all of 2011 I have written exactly nine.  Most of which were depressed backlashes at the sudden falling-apart of a major part of my life.)  I wouldn't say I've given up, exactly—I can't imagine I'd ever stop writing it totally—but I think I have gotten somewhat hypercritical of my poetry, which is why I've given up on songwriting ten times over in my teen years.  I don't know what direction God will take it in, but I can't say I'd much object to His influence!

…I sort of feel like my mind ought to be blown, but it isn't quite.  I'm just like.  "WOW.  Yes, that has 'God who loves you a whole darn lot' written all over it."

Oh boy.  I am definitely going over all my recent prophetic words again.  Time for an ongoing tête-à-tête with God?  Yes.

a relatively lazy Thursday.

Today is the last day of my semester!  I finished finals on Tuesday, but still had to show up to classes yesterday and today.  This afternoon I am just going in for my last yoga class and to pick up my graded French final.  I am so glad to be done for three and a half weeks.  I plan to read a lot of books, and do that Marathon of Must-See Movies Kiersten Hasn't Seen Yet as hosted by Emily Wright, and go to sleepovers and finish a novel and do other fun and fantastic things.  Oh, and Christmas.  It's going to be a good Christmas break this year.  I can feel it in my toes.

Not to be presumptuous…

…but I am gollydarned proud of myself right about now.

50,041 words on a single piece of fiction in 30 days.
I honestly didn't think this was going to happen.
Now I just need to do some brutal editing on the 4,598 words of something akin to total rubbish that I churned out in the last two hours to make it happen.  And some less murderous editing on the rest of it, which isn't nearly as bad but still very rambling and untenable to an unbiased reader's judgment, I'm sure.
…Also, I need to finish it.
There's probably another 10,000 words in this thing, and somebody shoot me if I am not going to finish this creature I spent a month pouring a good deal of my lifeblood into.  (Ignore the preposition on the end of that sentence, please, except insofar as you need to cognitively process it for semantic intelligibility.)
(Ignore anything else I write that doesn't make sense.  I am so jacked up on words and long sentences right now that could probably invent a subspecies of incoherent English on the spot [because, you know, we don't have enough of it already].  If I lived in Britain, I could probably also give Donna Noble a run for her money for the notable position of the fastest-typing temp in Chiswick.  At least until the caffeine from my tea wears off, at which point I would just go to bed.)

I also cannot believe that was a whole month.  November has been insanity.  Really compressed insanity.  I think there are whole days that time-traveled out of themselves and passed me by without so much as a wave of greeting.  Actually, I'm rather surprised it didn't turn out like more of a train wreck in the end.

Also, speaking of writing, I have two math papers due tomorrow that I lovingly put off writing especially for this.  So I go, back to the keyboard.  (On another bright note, only three weeks left of school!  The end is in sight!  Tally-ho! [Maybe too in sight for comfort, actually…].)
But I am happy right now.  And not as sleepy as I likely ought to be.

I have to say all this out loud, in front of people, from memory, in less than seventeen hours from now.

Je ferai un voyage au Suisse avec mon amie Léa.  Avant notre départ, nous téléphonerons à l'hôtel à l'avance pour réserver une chambre.  Nous achèterons nos passeport et nos billets, et informerons avec des sites Web et des guides touristiques.  Nous demanderons à nos familles de donner à manger à la chats et mon chien.  En Suisse, nous ferons du ski en les alpes, et goûterons la cuisine bien.
La Suisse est très célèbre pour ses montes (c'est les Alpes), sa chocolat, et sa neutralité politique.  Les langues officiel sont le française, l'allemand, et l'italien.  Vingt-deux pour-cent de le population de sept-point-sept million n'est pas suisse; il y a beaucoup d'étrangers, surtout enfants.  Les Suisses aiment lire et jouer du sport.  Aussi, ils font beaucoup de travail volontaire.  L'environnement est très important à les Suisses.
Suisse a commencé au un-mille-deux-cent-quatre-vingt-et-onze, comme le confédération.  Pendant La Reforme au la seizième siècle, les Catholiques et les Protestants ont divisé le pays.  Suisse a lutté avec Napoléon pendant le révolution française, le seul temps ils n'étaient pas neutre.  Suisse est devenu le pays moderne au un-mille-huit-cent-quarante-huit.
Si vous visitez la Suisse, il vaut mieux que vous fassiez votre valise avec des vêtements pour le temps froid.  Il est bon, mais n'est nécessaire pas, que vous sachiez le langue.  Il mauvais que vous oubliez votre argent.  Écrivez les cartes postales chez soi!  ne te perdez pas à la grande ville, et amusez-vous!
(La fin.)



…I'm kind of freaking out.

(I apologize.  You must be sick of hearing about my collegiate stress every other blog post…but I feel like it's consuming my life.) (Yet not enough of it to make me quit procrastinating.)

Main content of my Facebook newsfeed ticker:  a highly emotionally charged metaphysical debate via status and following comments.
Decision:  follow urge to (as non-judgmentally as possible) argue my beliefs or follow much smaller urge to figuratively run far away at a high rate of speed?

*bangs head on wall*

Sometimes, wanting to stand up for the right thing makes actually doing so far more complicated than it seems like it should be.