LOVE

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carful round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in teh casket of coffin of your selfishness. But in the casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable... the only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is Hell. (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves)

There are things I am afraid to feel for fear they will hurt too much. There are things I am afraid to cry about for fear that the torrents will never stop. There is a longing in me so deep and so inate to love and be loved, and in this season I am keenly aware of it. Is it the remembrance of the hope that was born to me so long ago in the form of an infant vulnerable; love Himself? Is it the heart of flesh that now resides somewhere protected between flesh and bone, that now bleeds? I have dared to love a few times and been hurt deeper then I could imagine and maybe even more then I can understand. Will I dear to love and be loved again. Could it be that all He says is true? These are the ramblings of a mind that runs in circles desperate to find the off ramp. A body stretched between time and eternity, preferring to be torn in half to feel the release of the pull. Will the release come? I dont know, but until then I will try to love deeply in spite of the depths of sorrow that matches the heights.

O Me! O Life!

"O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse."
Walt Whitman

" I'm sensitive and I'd like to stay that way"
jewel

Longings For Home

"O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-things—All moving things, and the trees where I was born—the grains, plants, rivers;
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands, or through swamps;
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa, and the Sabine;
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my Soul to haunt their banks again;
Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes—I float on the Okeechobee—I cross the hummock land, or through pleasant openings, or dense forests;
I see the parrots in the woods—I see the papaw tree and the blossoming titi;
Again, sailing in my coaster, on deck, I coast off Georgia—I coast up the Carolinas,
I see where the live-oak is growing—I see where the yellow-pine, the scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto;
I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and dart my vision inland;
O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!
The cactus, guarded with thorns—the laurel-tree, with large white flowers;
The range afar—the richness and barrenness—the old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss,
The piney odor and the gloom—the awful natural stillness, (Here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave has his conceal’d hut;)
O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of the rattlesnake;
The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon—singing through the moon-lit night,
The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;
A Tennessee corn-field—the tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn—slender, flapping, bright green with tassels—with beautiful ears, each well-sheath’d in its husk;
An Arkansas prairie—a sleeping lake, or still bayou;
O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs—I can stand them not—I will depart;
O to be a Virginian, where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!
O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee, and never wander more!"
Walt Whitman

I scarcely appreciate what I have until it is gone. Wanting what we do not have I guess is the plague of a soul not yet settled. When will my bleeding heart rest in your hands? "Peace I leave with you my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid." Therefore I shall set my face as flint and head into the wind with you as my strength and my shield