"I want every moment to be as gorgeous as crayons are"

Do you remember when you were a kid and you bought a new pack of crayons? The waxy smell, bright colors, perfect tips, and untorn papers? Maybe that's just me, but I'm sure you remember wanting to open them up right away. Grabbing paper (Or, for some of us, just a clear space of wall. Sorry, Mama.) and drawing anything that came to mind. It was usually flowers for me.

I spent hours reorganizing my crayon boxes, too. Prioritizing them in order of most to least used (read: prettiest to ugliest). That weird green one that I never used because it was a "boy color" was always the last one to go in. Boys used it all the time because they drew lizards and dinosaurs or whatever they draw, but it was hardly a color any respectable flower stem would be.
 
The title of both this entry and my blog is from the second stanza of Gu Cheng's "Obstinate Child":

       I want every moment to be
       as gorgeous as crayons are
       I want to draw pictures on lovely white sheets of paper
       to paint clumsy freedom
       to draw an eye that never weeps
       a sky, a feather and a leaf pertaining to the sky
       to paint green night and pale apple

I took this poem to mean the speaker wants to make beautiful memories. Vivid and with child-like enthusiasm. The last three stanzas take a turn for the depressing, but most of the poem is about beauty and love and travel, I think.

I want every moment to be as gorgeous as crayons are. I want to look back on my life and get the same feeling I did when I opened a new box of Crayola 64. So many beautiful memories, bright and colorful.

I have a good head start.

"I spent 2 years soaking up memories because I knew I would need them. "

Sometimes we don't stop to think these days will pass and be left as memories. The present transitions to the past and lives change without much realization of the process. We don't always appreciate what we have when we have it.

I read the quote I titled this entry after on a friends blog and it made me reminisce about the years that shaped me. It was in a post (from a few months ago) about all the small things she missed, all the little memories of roommates and college and Louisiana (she is from/currently lives in Texas). It made me a little sad to think that those moments won't be my present again. I won't ever experience the girls TV nights on Mondays or Two Movie Tuesdays. I won't go back to Thursday nights at Calvary with all the amazing people in College and Career...

For a few years, these memories were my life. Then things changed. People graduated, moved, grew apart, grew closer, changed... Life moved on, we grew up.

But we grew up because of those moments. They molded us. We are who we are because they were for us. I am a little sad that people moved on, but I am also extremely proud of everyone. The reason those memories make us emotional to remember is that we made them worth remembering.

So, while most of us graduate (a few more years for me), some of us get married (Chris and Caroline, Christine and Petty), and we all transition into different stages, at least we can be happy that we had our time. We can pass those memories on to others, we can make blog posts about them, we can use them to get us through rough days, we can tell others to make the most of theirs...

And we can look back on those days, get misty-eyed, and be proud that we made relationships and memories that are worth the nostalgia.