You and I Both

A lot of girls are looking for a knight in shining armor or a stranger in a white hat.

I'm looking for a man in a powder blue tux.

It was back when Music Television was Music Television, and my older brother sat as he always did watching the latest music videos. He called me into the room, and I entered, begrudgingly assuming he'd beckoned me in order to insist I bring him a beverage.

"What?" I grumbled in my elementary school way.

"Look at this guy. Watch this."

I entered the room further and stood watching the screen.

He was in a bank, holding a piggy bank, clothed in a powder blue tux, and the cops in their riot gear started dance-fighting with him, and all the while he smiled and sang, even as they slammed him onto the hood of the cop car.

I remember thinking this man was amazing.

It wasn't until a few years later, as I discovered YouTube as a viable source to stalk my newfound favorite musician Jason Mraz, that I decided to actually watch his official music videos, and loaded one for a song I knew from his first album.

I smiled to myself, in my adolescent way, at his cuteness as he tried to woo the bank teller with his piggy bank, but it wasn't until he entered the frame in a powder blue tux that the memories came flooding back, that the connection was made that I'd seen this before. I'd held great feelings of respect and adoration for this man before I ever knew of him or wanted to know of him. I had know idea the significance of our first meeting until the second happened.

That's how it should be. He'll come before I expect him, I may not even recognize him for a while. He'll be there, a part of my life that is significant enough to have a memory, but vague enough to be buried under the dirty laundry from my science classes. And then the moment will be right, I'll have found him, perhaps not even aware he's the one, and one day it'll click that I've seen this before, I knew this before, and I just needed to remember.

A lot of girls are looking for a knight in shining armor or a stranger in a white hat.

I'm looking for a man in a powder blue tux.

Living In The Moment

"Well I'm almost finally, finally, out of words." -Jason Mraz (You and I Both)

I've felt a lot of things lately that I haven't been able to pin down into a definitive statement. I know how they feel and what they mean, but it's a language of the soul that keeps speaking out. I can't put it into English, I can't craft it with letters. If I could grasp your hand and siphon the feeling to you, I very well would.

All I can do is toss literary darts in the general area of the target and hope to come out making sense.

I know the following statement to any blog reader of mine is redundant to say the least, but this is were it begins: I'm in a separate state of being when I listen to Jason Mraz. There's nostalgia and there's hope for Virginia to come around, but there is something else that makes it so...makes it so expedient and desirable that I remain there, in this state of being. I felt it irrepressibly tonight when Erin put my dated Mraz Mix in her car's CD drive, and it was such a presence that I felt I had to draw attention to it. So I said: "I always feel...more myself when I listen to him."

And though I've said this and thought this before, it took that moment to connect what Jason's music had lead my soul to experience for years to my recent moments of confidence. Moments that, looking back, happened as they did because I was acting more myself; I was showing up as me.

I haven't read the scriptures in some time. I've been desirous for personal revelation, but I haven't tried to track it down. But lately I can't help but feel that the Lord is guiding me to my answers in the way He knows I'll find it. It's the only place I've been looking.

Jason Mraz.

For the first time in my fandom I have fully connected with an album not because it was catchy or the lyrics made me think or I couldn't get over how phenomenal his scatting is; it's been because that's what I've needed to hear.

I've felt these things for so long, thought about them, almost understood them, but I couldn't put it into words what they meant. Jason did it for me:

"I'm letting myself off the hook for things I've done, I let the past go past. ...I'm letting go of the thoughts that do not make me strong. ...I can't walk through life facing backwards. I have tried, tried more than once to just make sure, and I was denied the future I'd been searching for. I turned around and hurt no more by living in the moment."

There has been much more that has struck me, but this seems to be the overbearing message of it all. This is why my life to this point has been so lackluster and passive and timid. I haven't seemed to "let go of what I know I don't know."

Life hasn't worked for me because I haven't shown up as me.

Today I did it, subconsciously. I showed up as me. And the lightness of my soul that accompanied that moment is the same breath Jason's music breathes into me.

I am more myself when I listen to him sing, but I'm actively striving to be myself even when the music's off.

"And I know I only do this by Living in the Moment."