Anxiously Engaging - My Blog

Anxiously Engaging is a blog focused on all things optimistic. Even on its darker days, it uplifts and inspires. It includes everything from random rants and mock poetry to inspirational insights and deep poetry.

Young Mormon Bloggers

I created Young Mormon Bloggers (a blogging network especially for LDS bloggers under 30) because I saw a niche in need of networking opportunities. I designed the header and use webs.com to design and manage the website including incoming requests to be included in the BLOGS section.

Waiting For My Missionary

I created, designed, and manage the Waiting For My Missionary website. The community currently includes 130 girls and counting. 

Logo

This logo was created for a friend's band.

Sabbath Day Parade Logo (1)

Logo

This logo was created for a hypothetical Photography business owned by my friend, Annan Gross.
Annan Gross Photography

Wedding Invitations

Some of the wedding invitations I have designed through the years.

Au Pair Paw Care

This logo and fire hydrant were designed for Au Pair Paw Care in St. Louis, Missouri. The dalmation print and fire hydrant were both created in Adobe Illustrator

You are the Mountain

This photo was taken in Northern Utah and edited using Adobe Photoshop.

The Princess and the Sky

The princess spun in her dress,

giggling as the white cotton fabric swung

droplets onto her face.

She stopped twirling and teetered,

looking out at the endless stretch of blue.

She had never realized that the sky was made of water

or that it loved the land so much.

Again and again and again she watched

as the watery sky crashed kisses onto the sandy beach.

Its kisses tickled

her ankles as she squished the wet

sand between her toes. She knelt down to kiss the sand,

but the jealous sky crashed into her open eyes

and startled her upright.

“Poor sky,” she thought. “I’ve watched it kiss

the land all morning, and not once has the land kissed it back.”

The princess knelt again

and kissed the sky’s edge,

and the sky kissed her back.

She felt it slobber all over her face

which scrunched as she thought of pretzels

and salted apple slices.

La Chanson de l'étoile: le fin

A brilliant gleam of brightest light on sky of velvet black

that doubles on itself and turns until it has turned back -

across the sky it cuts a slice of color radiant pure,

but then retracts to origin as if just not quite sure.

Oh, star, you move and move again - retrace your graceful fall

and warp me back to glimmer's glimpse then back to dark night's call.

Your radiance, repetitive, grows dizzy in the night

and, Falling Star, you lose it all and end your jagged flight.

Now darkness closes all around the slice that you had forged

and all that was your lasar show is swallowed in its gorge.

And I am left to gaze again at prickled points of light

that never in their stationed roles could ever bear your flight.

But though this night is crisply cold and dawn seems far away,

I know that in the sunlight, I'll awaken soon to play.

A point of light or streak of light, no matter how it flies,

will never hold the light of sun to fill forever's skies.

Line of Women

I come from a long line of women.

They matched outfits with their men - and fed their men - and loved their men

and many of them

lost their men –

some of them many times over .

They smiled as they brought each successive woman into this world

and they cried as they sent each successive woman out of this world

and they held the hands of their daughters on their deathbeds

and they remembered their mothers on their deathbeds

and they thought of their men -

the ones they had loved

and the ones they had lost

and the ones who had never come back

and they dreamed of reunions

as they each fell asleep

in the long line of women I come from.

Lone Leaf Torn

Flaming leaves caress shared secrets as night
falls on a blanket of beginnings.
Wedged between clear past and foggy future,
sits the present perched at a peak 
- ready to drop.

A lone leaf torn between
the safety of the tree
and fellow leaves who've fallen.
Can he hold on? Or
must he too fall?

Against the wind -
fighting night and day,
clinging to the comfortable branch
'til wisp of wind grabs waning leaf.
A struggle ended.

The battle to hold on
lost 
in a descent of spinning color bright
against sound of sleepless night,
around and around, falling silently down.
Exhilaration flushes the leaf with red
as it dances to meet its comrades below.

Settled in peace at the place he had feared.
Not lost, but found
in giving in.

Autumn Blaze

Oranges whisper secrets to Yellows. 
Reds fight to be heard. 
Dying greens fade 
as browns rustle impatiently forward. 

Sneaky sun's rays ignite trees with celestial glow - 
colors melding to form a new shade -
at once stagnant and
changing. Essence of season.

Trees cling to jewels, fighting
against
the playful wind - skillfully picking one
after another -
leaving some barren while others maintain glorious array.

Air charges with electric pulses of movement and emotion
as the glowing Western orb settles behind the last hill.
And so the leaves catch fire,
burn quickly,
and simmer into evening.

Scattered remnants of momentary wealth lay
discarded on the sagging ground,
deteriorating into spring.

Cinderella

That shining slipper sits
on my prince's stupid stairs.
What was I thinking?

Princes can be oblivious -
Will he even notice?
I long to linger looking
as it rests in lunar light.
Does it catch his eye?

Half barefoot, left foot cold in the chill morning air -
No prince, and now no shoe.
What was I thinking?

Hunting Oxygen

As your chest rises, 
your lips - vacuum - 
drawing in the air I meant to breathe - leaving
my lungs to grope in
the dark, hunting 
stolen oxygen,
running in circles
only to find a void black hole where
air just was.
Struggled gasps bring mal-
nutritioned respirators
only empty calories -
cheap imitations of the 
prey I am hunting -
until your chest decends,
your lips - release. my grasping lips 
seek after
rich oxygen
and as they pursue
the remnants you have left,
at long last,
just before I am caught in my own 
web of suffocation,
I catch my breath.

(dis)appear

Internal fog clouds my view. 
You stand like a vague misshapen form
born of my imagination
stationed here and now.
How when all else flies can this
bliss be pushed down by
my - or your - inability
instability?

Wings so fatigued
believe still that labored flight
might transform to painless soaring.
Morning breaks your shadow in
when to my view
you                                           


                          ?

This is what dreams are made of
love is nothing (what?)
but a fleeting shadow
growing out of light -
white transformed away from black
back.

Where are you?
Viewed shadows (dis)
appear with the dawn.
Gone.

Your ashes to ashes

Your remnants lightly 
cover the knick
knacks that remain- a light finger 
paints a heart in your fallen ashes
a ring around the rosy finger is
gently removed then violently cast aside
like a long-forgotten loaf of
bread in the furthest corner of the cabinet,
you morph and mold to crusty sourness
putrid in the pantry, you 
wait

wait

wait

wait

for me to rediscover you
amidst cobwebs and cat hair
you conceal yourself in my corners-
disappearing until caught in the sunlight
or on a pair of new black pants-

I'mMortalized

Too many poems begin with the phrase:
"Who am I?"
Next a list of qualities
no one cares to read
of things that make the poet
who the poet wants to be
as remembered through the poem
that begins with "Who am I?"

The list begins with
"I am a woman."
something meant to sound
profound, but lacking originality
or distinguished creativity.
yet the poet hopes to convey some
new obscurity to the reader
who longs to find the hidden meaning
that never existed behind the
phrase
"I am a woman."

the poet continues with a list of 
contradictions such as:
"I am both black and white"
though my skin is neither.
and perhaps "I love to love and fight"
though conflict breeds despair in my soul.
In other vaguaries, he or she may list his or her
qualities self-observed and perhaps
distorted by 
personal desire
and wishes to become.
"I am a rock"
but more of a pebble than a boulder.
"I am beautiful"
in the eye of some beholders.
"I am not your everyday (insert stereotype here)"
though I may fit most of the guidelines.

And then the poem doubles on itself
and begins fighting within
to bend the poet into some pretzel of 
humanity's mold
where he or she is nothing more than 
bland exotic uniqueness
through the poem that ends in the simplest phrase:
"I am me (or some likeness of the phrase
perhaps the poet's name)."

The reader tries to find the meaning
and the hidden actuality 
within the metaphors that do not
quite exist
from the page that the poet
immortalized himself or herself
in. And feeling dumb,
the reader guesses that the poet
is also intelligent and quite metaphorically gifted
beyond the scope of humanity's simple mind and 
with time, he or she loses the poet's empty meaning
and simply says
farewell to a poet who will neither
be loved nor
remembered for his or her
attempt at self-immortalization.