Today is a day of more questions than answers. More queasy, heart racing, incomplete sentences than anything sure or noble to think on. This is a day of swirling memories and emotions, grappling in the uncomfortable silence, waiting. Waiting for something to fill in the gaps, the holes in the story. Waiting for something to make sense.

Winter, 2013

     How do I find my way through? How many times will my heart burst open with grief and sorrow in this lifetime? My heart doesn’t have eyes, it cannot shut out the pain, the loss, the brokenness. It can feel it from miles away. It can taste the agony, relive the adrenaline rush of fear, remember the defeat. So why can’t it remember the way out?

Why are these hands of mine so quick to tighten the reins of control gripping fear, rather than the motion of unfurling release? Why are these muscle fibers prejudice to tension and anxiety? Why do these thoughts of hopelessness and helplessness persist when I have tasted the joy, the love, the courage? Why does the sadness feel so comforting, so familiar? Why does the laughter bubbling forth seem so shallow and empty in comparison? Why do these pursed lips hesitate to curl into a smile of gladness?

Chicago, 2013

     I am waiting for a different emotional pattern to emerge. I am waiting to discover my own center of gravity, the refuge that cannot be moved or shattered when the waves of fear and pain come crashing in. I am waiting for the steady rock of unmovable serenity amidst the storms, the peace of knowing the sun is always shining–above the claps of thunder, below the ocean depths of Uncertainty.

San Sebastien Spain, 2013

      I am waiting for these decisions to feel right, for the alignment of my dreams to flow through my neurons, electrifying, exciting– firing impulses of courage and purpose. I am waiting for the forces of nature to propel us to a different place, for the tectonic plates to shift imperceptibly enough so that we no longer stand where we are now.

I am waiting for the magnet of attraction to draw us together again. I dread this propulsion with each heart fluttering sigh; I long for it with each gasp of life sustaining breath, with each expansion of my chest I am filling all of the cracks and crevices with a fragile hope.

    It is winter in my heart, winter beyond these floor-to-ceiling paned windows, winter behind the dullness of your eyes, the static poignancy of your cold, dry, hand squeezing mine. It is winter. But winter does not equal dead. Decay and death are not the same. Silence does not imply absence. Stillness does not mean spiritless.

Kansas City, 2011

As long as these cracked and raw hands can hold a pen, as long as this voice can reverberate sounds with meaning, as long as these lungs can take in molecules of light, I will choose love. I will choose to expand with hope instead of filling the hollow places with hallowed pain.

I will wait in the dark and feel the steadiness of my feet beneath me. I will sink to the floor with my back against the wall if I need to be held. I will walk through the night and the cold to sit below a tree, I will take refuge in the earth, in the weight of something other than my own foolishness.

Estes Park, Colorado 2010

I will echo hallelujah and whisper love until it swallows me Whole.