I looked on as an elderly man was painting an old farm house in oils, surrounded by trees dressed in their autumn finery. The house was shown as an aged and faded white surrounded by a low picket fence that had fallen into disrepair and long since been forgotten. The old dilapidated barn in the distance was expressed in varying shades of grey and peeling red paint. I was enraptured by the image I was seeing unfold before my eyes. It appeared to be such a simple piece, but it grew in complexity the longer I viewed it. Its underlying tones were of sadness and loneliness, time, and things forgotten. I balked at that, finding my initial assessment woefully inaccurate, this was not a lonely place, a forgotten place; this was a place that had seen life and heard stories! I knew the man had not yet finished with his painting and would not be so for some time. He was quite meticulous, as if he was paining the memories of his life. Every stroke of the brush had its designated place, its own meaning, and the way his hands grabbed absently at the different brushes seemed as if they had been pre-selected before he ever began. As his story was being narrated in layers of paint and hue, I found myself thinking about what life might have been like in that place he was creating. Who might have lived there? The colors in the painting boasted an autumn season, and though they were warm to the eye the season would have been cold, the growing…slow. No, it wouldn’t have been planting season, it seemed more likely that it would have been hunting season. I imagined game animals in the surrounding hills and a man in a flannel jacket walking silently through those amber colored woods, with rifle in hand and beagles in tow. The frost of his breath echoing the smoke that whispered from the chimney of the house. It would have been warm inside, and maybe children played by the hearth in the day’s early hours before they went reluctantly about their chores under the watchful gaze of a firm, yet loving mother. My thoughts darted to and fro about this painting in the most ridiculous of fashions, seeing people I would never meet, living events that never happened. But I was held to it long enough to allow my imagination to escape, and for a while, frolic freely with the idea of something beautifully simple.  I left the elderly man to his work as I carried on about my day, thinking to myself all the while that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a painting is an unread novel.

I found myself siting in the sand, my back against a Hesco bastion, writing on an old familiar note pad. I imagined myself at home, sitting against the old oak tree that grew in the back yard, grass tickling my bare feet in the humid summer breeze. The old cheap pencil I was using had bite marks on it and the eraser was long gone but it wrote just fine and made a scratching sound against the grain of the paper that I found soothing as I filled the page. It was my escape after all…writing. It took me away from the day to day stress of southern Afghanistan. I thought about that as I wrote…how people needed a way to escape. I’ll admit to thinking about all kinds of things, that’s just what writing does for me. It makes me think. It makes me want to tell stories of love, pain, sorrow and joy. It makes me want to abuse my notepad with doodles and tear stains long after I forgot what I was doing in the first place, which wasn’t the point anyway. It wasn’t important “what” I was writing. It was important “that” I was writing, because the joy is in the doing.

I wanted to write you a love poem Honey
I wanted to tell you in so many beautiful ways just how important you were to me

But you know…

The more I thought about it
The more my words escaped me

There were just so many things I wanted to say

I worried that if I made it too complex it wouldn’t sound like me at all
I became afraid that you wouldn’t understand what I was trying to say to you

So I typed…

Deleted…

Typed…

Then paced back and forth thinking of what to say
Because who knows me better than you do?

I must confess that I came up with less than I had planned on
So let me just say it plain

I love you like a cat loves a laser pointer!

I stared out over the field of wild grass as it lay before me
Untamed and swaying in the breeze.

I thought about each individual blade slicing the air
Each flower upon its stem
Defiant
Bending…but never breaking

And in that time, seated upon my grassy knoll, I understood
These were my thoughts of you
As numerous and defiant as the grass of the field

As untamed

Running together in a blur and standing in the fore front of my conscious endeavors
Washing over me in a breeze

Bending me… but leaving me unbroken.

They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, that’s what they say any way.

Thinking back to my days as a child, I remember my grandmother’s house and the times I spent there with my brother. I remember so many things about those days. My grandmother had lost her husband before I was born, and had replaced him with a bottle of bourbon. The bottle was in every memory I had of that place, like a picture on the wall or a specific piece of furniture and she was always cooking something or canning something for people who never visited.  Her life seemed so sad at times, but what stood out were her eyes. To me they always seemed like looking through the broken windows of an old ramshackle home and watching children laugh and play on the ***** living room floor.

They say that they eyes are the windows to the soul, that’s what they say any way.

Some days I think back to that Sunday in Mississippi, the old farm house with the rusted tin roof. I was sitting on one of the rocking chairs on the front porch, just waiting for the rain to come in. The sky had turned grey as the cool wind picked up and you could smell the moisture in the air mixing with the smell of cut grass from earlier. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, just breathing it all in. The ice cubes clinking around in my glass of sweet tea as I Idly swirled it around, day dreaming more than anything else. I slumped down in the chair and kicked my feet up on the railing as the rain started coming down, slow at first, like the slow hand of a teasing lover. The droplets that were hitting the tin roof echoed across my skin as I felt my stress start melting away. Meanwhile, off in the distance, I heard the faint roll of thunder adding its sounds to my little symphony as the rain started coming down faster. There was even the occasional sound of pick-up truck tires driving down the wet road. And me? Well, I didn’t accomplish much that day. I just sat there, eyes closed, letting the rain wash me away to wherever it was going.

Instructions for Life-Lesson 1

How to be Awesome daily.

Step 1: Wake up each morning and say “I’m Awesome!”
Step 2: Go to closest mirror and visually confirm Awesomeness. (It’s there-trust me)
Step 3: Continue on with the rest of your day…being totally Awesome!

If followed regularly, these simple steps can change the one thing that differentiates the Awesome from the Non-Awesome, and that is belief in self.

Now get out there and have an Awesome day!