"For some moments in life there are no words." -Willy Wonka (the original)

Sometimes just driving over the mountain back down into the valley isn't enough.  Sometimes a distant lightening storm and Guy Clark tunes make it better.  Driving into a visible storm with no rain or thunder left me speechless, however, thinking.  Silence and stillness are powerful things.  In the truck with Matt by my side and not a word spoken from him or nature, just a show.  A show of the road moving beneath me as Matt is driving.  A show of Mother Nature making the sky dance in a deep purple.  It makes one silently reflect on life.  Thinking of how just being calm before the storm seems to make it more endurable.  And of course, a storm can be anything, symbolically speaking.  It was a moment that could never be defined.  Not enough words or phrases or descriptions could make you feel this moment the way I felt it, unless you were there perhaps.  Its a shared emotion, its human nature, something that is not taught but felt.  But to have peace from such moments, one must regard the feeling is there at all.  Feel the moment.  Take it in.

I've experienced many moments in my life that have left me speechless.  Some good, some bad.  Sometimes I can only remember the bad ones, I guess they had more of an impact.  However, the good leave-me-speechless moments I do remember, are some that should go in the record books.  And this ugly realization of only being able to remember the negative moments, has forced me to write the good ones down, along with the bad.  To me, its kind of like leaving a piece of my mind for the future to read.  And reflect on the beauty of all things...good or bad.

Being a child of divorce and being away from your mother for so long (2 months) you begin to have night terrors, losing a baby brother, losing a close friend as a teen, losing a intimately close friend as an adult.  I've been speechless pretty much all my life with just the bad.  But as the saying goes "the good outweighs the bad".  And in most cases this holds true.  Being at 5,000 ft elevation with mountains touching the sky, having a song written for you, about you and played privately for you,  that song later being played in front of 3,000 people, lightening storms coming across the mountain, the nice things strangers say to you, the beautiful way children think, overcoming personal obstacles and reaching personal goals...many more speechless moments tipping the scale to the good side.  But without the bad, one wouldn't be able to appreciate the good.  Another saying..."take the good with the bad".

Recently, I took on an "around-the-house" art project that involved cutting out words from newspapers and magazines.  And not just any words, but words that evoked emotion.  Mindlessly reading headlines is second nature to some, but when you take the literal meaning of each individual word, it takes on a whole other meaning than what the words portray when read all together.  Again, in this art project, was another moment where I stopped to reflect and asked the question, "If something this simple became so profound, wonder what else we're missing because we don't slow down?"