liz moss

     I thought that the older I got the more I would know what I want in life, but it seems as time passes and I am more aware of the plethora of options available to me, I am less and less attached to any one vocation. Each day I fall out of love with my old ideas of success and fall more in love with the world.      The other night I went to a concert at a small venue in Nashville to see one of my favorite artists, and after staying at the venue until midnight to help count merch and clean up, I listened to the band chat animatedly about getting waffles afterward and how they’re looking forward to the next stop of tour. I thought about how draining the cycle of performing is, how I like to listen more than I speak and how I like to be in bed by 11pm, and how maybe this isn’t what I really want. I know I can fit any career to my personality type--I can make being an introvert work with being an entertainer, but lately I’ve discovered the heart behind my am...

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” Indianapolis, IN The Indianapolis skyline sits in a vast bed of pink pushing down on blue, and I’m caught in the sunset, in the liminal space between night and day, clinging to the fleeting warmth of the sun as the moon crushes down on me. A lanky, excitable man on the cusp of middle aged sits down on a tree stump with his daughter and points to the escaping sun and its casted light over the skyline with a childlike wonder exceeding that of his daughter’s. “Look at it, look how beautiful it is!” he kept repeating, and I was left to wonder if I could see the city, see the sunlight the same way he did. John Green once said that the reason he loved Indianapolis was precisely because it wasn’t easy to love. You had to stay here a while to see it’s fruits. The problem is, my hometown was so easy for ...

“ Why Are You So Quiet? ” “Why are you so quiet?” My five year-old self lifts my head from the Cinderella coloring book I was intensely focused on to meet the excited, bulging eyes of my kindergarten class clown. Even then it dumbfounded me that someone with the social skills to charm an entire class with his witty remarks could simply not comprehend that his endless gregariousness was not a universal trait. Back then I didn’t think much of it, although I did find it odd that my preference for coloring over social interaction was an unsolvable mystery, requiring constant questioning from the finest five year-old detectives that the Indianapolis Public School system had to offer. My quietness was a brandishing, and I realize now it was all they saw of me. --- “She needs to talk more.” My eight year-old self sits patiently, hands folded tightly under my desk, at the annual parent-teacher conference. I was at the top of my class, I never turned in a late assignment, and I was reading high...

i remember the first time i saw the birth of a butterfly i was hunched over in my parents’ backyard watching wide-eyed as the cocoon unfolded like perfect origami and bloomed into four mirrored hearts in an instant having to reimagine its home from all encompassing darkness  into infinite air. i remember the first time i sank into my mother’s arms after eight months apart her touch holding every sense of temporary-ness in that same backyard where the moon shone like a stopwatch and the trees ticked in the wind telling me that every place plus time equals a memory and a memory plus time equals vapor to get carried along in the passing of the wind sweeping the dust of the road into a cocoon of hand-sewn bedsheets and weather-stained polaroids until i must reimagine my home from four walls into infinite air.

  I sit on a shady patch of grass overlooking my college campus two days before I leave it. Light pours down on the white marble fountain, water trickling excitedly over its curves, the birds echoing their incessant song, grass dancing in the wind. Everything is normal here, but nothing is.  I watch silently as car after car pulls up along the winding road that normally serves as a student walkway, kids tossing the last eight months of their lives into a backseat. As campus grows quieter and I see more and more parents touring the school, I anticipate when my parents pull along this road, and I give them the tour, and I return to the people and places that were once my everything but now seem to exist on a separate planet. I wonder what it would be like if all of my pasts were packed into a single present--if everything that is my life was a whole instead of a collection of scattered pieces. My life back home in Indianapolis and my life here in Nashville hold few similarities;...

 A video journal on hope and strange encounters.