Miles Into the Blue
Essays on life, God, and wandering the world
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I’ve been blogging for almost 20 years.
That’s…kind of a long time.
I surprised even myself when I started looking through all my old writings. Have I really been writing online since 2004?? According to the timestamps in my hard drive, I have. All those old webpages are gone now, but I still wanted to share some of the things I’ve posted over the years. So I sat down, picked the best of the best, and put it into this little book.
In the past almost-20-years, I went to college, moved back home, moved overseas, traveled to a dozen or so different countries, and moved back to the US. This book isn’t really an account of my travels, but rather a collection of thoughts and observations I’ve had along the way.
Please enjoy a small preview:
everywhere in everything
They say there’s beauty everywhere in everything but when you live in the city, all the soft earth and rough edges you grew up with get pushed in and ground down til you’re compact and straight and square like the buildings you inhabit and the ground you walk and when the stars get closed out by the false darkness of alleyways and skyscrapers– *deep breath* –you forget that there’s in beauty in things. I remember it sometimes…I smell it in the orange peeled on the subway, hear it in the snap-snap-snap of the gas range lighting to warm a meal, sense it in the morning fog that twirls down from the Taebaek mountains. God can be found anywhere, in anything, we just have to still ourselves enough to look.
My craft as an artist is with words, not pigments, but one spring in college I stretched myself and took a class on watercolors. I learned how to paint–how to look at the colors and discern light from dark, shades from hues. Visual art is a discipline of the eyes, not of the linguistic mind; one that takes a highly tuned sense of concentration, different from what is required for scratching letters on a page. I had to be still; had to let my eyes adjust to the scene so I could interpret what I was seeing. I had to look; had to watch the way the sun angled the shadows on the mountains and mix the right amounts of blue and green pigments to replicate them. I had to look and keep looking, because one glance would not suffice to take in all the information I needed; one glimpse would not notice all the detail hidden in plain view…
Angela At-Large 