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“We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour,
which keeps believing nimble.” – Emily Dickinson

i’m probably the last person you should come to for hope.  i mean i had an entire year i devoted to learning to hope again, and after 366 days of trying to do so i arrive at today and i still struggle with hope and i still struggle with trust and i still struggle with dreams and i still struggle with wishing.

but the fact of the matter is that we all do.  even the best of us find it difficult to trust over something.  we all face fears and resistance.  we all at one time or another want to give up.  we’ve all had a dream dashed to the ground and some of us still live with the fall out years later of hope deferred.  not that we’re dwelling there, but there is pain when our dreams don’t come true and there are some of those dreams that we will always feel pain over not seeing them come to fruition.

i once wrote about a definition of hope being a small haven.  i still love that definition because when my doubts become larger than my hopes i need some place i can feel safe in.  hope doesn’t always feel safe though.  sometimes we need to feel brave and courageous just to have a little hope.  but hope is still a place, even in our doubts, where we can abide.

so, maybe the only encouragement i can offer you in your doubts is that you’re not alone.  your mother, your father, your wife, your husband, your child, the lady in the cubicle next to you, the guy in the $70k car next to you at the stop light.  they’ve all known doubt.  they’ve all had dreams & hopes broken like fragile, priceless glass.

…and maybe that’s the only way you can see hope as a haven right now.  that you’re not alone.  and that’s perfectly acceptable.  and maybe you need to sit with your doubts for a spell.  and that’s also perfectly acceptable.  and one day after that season your hope and your faith will be a little stronger.  and that will be absolutely fantastic.

“And yet when I wish to explore how faith works, I usually sneak in by the back door of doubt, for I best learn about my own need for faith during its absence. God’s invisibility guarantees I will experience times of doubt. Everyone dangles on a pendulum that swings from belief to unbelief, back to belief, and ends – where?” – Philip Yancy

GIVEAWAY!!

it’s been a while since i’ve had a giveaway and i’m feeling rather giveraway-ish.  to enter to win this original art piece (by me) simply follow the rafflecopter’s friendly questions.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

today’s post is part of story 101.

I’ve become an expert at holding.

My breath
My feelings
My anxieties
My fears
My dreams
My worries
My clenched hands
My heart
My opinions
My cares

I don’t release very easily.  For a number of reasons.

I don’t want to be a burden
I want to be the strong one
My heart is just to fragile to trust again
I’m afraid

Maybe this is my problem with flying.  Toni Morrison once wrote that in order to fly you have to give up what weighs you down.  Only she said it with a bit more of a colorful description.

To fly.  To break the bond between my feet (heart) and the soil of this earth I’m going to need to release.  To exhale the all the things I’ve been holding onto.

I’ve become an expert in holding.

And maybe that’s okay for right now.  But one day I’m going to have to let go and release the things I’m holding.

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Today’s post is written as part of Story 101.

My evening yesterday was largely filled with digging things out of cabinets and shelves for a yard sale my in-laws are having this weekend.

My skin stained from years upon years of dust built up on the forgotten and unused.  My fingers stained from marker, pricing our possessions that at one time possessed us.

Staining marking the opening of grasped hands and the letting go.

My hands and arms have become more and more over the last year a canvas for paint & gesso, markers & ink.

Another opening.  Another letting go.

Hands & heart grasped so fiercely closed.

This life I long to live so so closed off to the sense of touch, the act of feeling.

With pain and ink I do my best to crack open this hardened and roughened shell.  To open my heart that has grown painful from the atrophy it’s learned while being so clenched.

These feathers that I’m attempting to unfurl, these wings I’m longing to put to use, there’s been pain in the opening.  There’s been pain in the choice to use them and not continue to sit in my pain on the ground.  Pain in letting go of my need to feel justified in my anger & bitterness.  In my self pity.

Yet, the opening has been healthful & good.

My friend Elora terms it “Playing in the pain”.  It’s the living it out in the midst of agony of redemption and sanctification.

And there is beauty there.

These past few weeks have been very difficult ones.  Wrenching of my soul difficult.  Anger, wanting to find comfort in hiding in a dark closet difficult.

Not in the hoping, trusting ways though those have certainly played their role.

While it seems this week I’m slowly breaking out of the cloud I’ve been in, the effervescence still leaves me winded and tied down.

I’ve noticed more than ever this week flight.  Contrails, birds, airplanes.  This morning I even saw birds flying in a perfect V pattern.  Everywhere I look, it seems I’m seeing or hearing flight.  And weekend before last I had an image of sailing through the clouds.

These last few weeks I’ve felt that I’ve been grounded, tied down, shoved in a dark cave that at times caved in and I found myself under a pile of rocks and tree roots and dirt.  But this week, it feels as though the dawn is coming and hope is once again finding her feathers.

We recently made a huge decision that is going to require steps of faith and trust and patience and believing when there is nothing to see to believe in.  This decision has left me estatic and scared.  And I know I’ll question our timing of making this decision and wondering how just how and if it’s going to come to light, and at the same time feel peace that we’re taking this step right now because we need to.

Because it’s right.

It’s going to be probably a couple months {at least} before I’m able to share with you this decision we’ve made, but I covet your prayers.  And I’m certain the Hearer will discern your words with our situation.

“‘…and you― for a year you’ved lived with your heart’s draining…’  Samuel struck him with a work-heavy fist, and Adam sprawled out in the dust.  Samuel asked him to rise and when Adam accepted struck him again, and this time Adam did not get up.  He looked stonily at the menacing old man.

Adam wore a faraway yet intent look, as though he were listening to some wind-carried music, but his eyes were not dead as they had been.  He said, ‘it’s hard to imagine I’d thank a man for insults and for shaking me out like a rug.  But I’m grateful.  It’s a hurty thanks, but it’s thanks.’”*

I laid in bed Wednesday night dreaming dreams for my future, wondering what those dreams would look like in reality.  Earlier in the evening I had been going through my Instagram feed looking for a photo to share with one of my friends.  As I looked at all my old pictures I noticed something.  I noticed how alive I used to be.  How I noticed the color of grass or a ripe watermelon.  How I used to be joyful.

Lying in bed dreaming these dreams and thinking back over the pictures I used to take, I was suddenly hit with the depth of my deadness.  I’ve lived the last 15-16 months as if I were dead.  Hope gone.  Dreams not dared to be dreamed.  Courage an ocean I did not want to stick my feet in.

Dead.

It’s easy to live dead.  To lose sight of the beauty in life.  To give up on yourself and your future.

I’m tired of living as if I am dead.  So I’m making the decision to live the way I am.  Alive, blood pumping through these veins, a heart that needs to dream of her future.  Lungs that inhale & exhale.  Eyes that long to see and experience beauty.

I’m not sure how exactly I begin living again except making the decision to do so.  To take off these burial clothes I’ve strangled myself with and rinse off the scent of myrrh.  To with as small steps as I need, to exit the tomb I’ve resided in.

Upon making this decision, I felt like the first of ready to fly feathers is being added to my wings.  Some days I don’t feel ready to fly, or like I even can, but it’s encouraging to see at least my wings begin to grow.

I feel like Adam Trask of East of Eden after Samuel Hamilton punched him.  The feeling and discovery of the grey scales falling from eyes and life being seen, and realizing just how dead you’ve been living and how much more life is out there.

*Excerpt from East of Eden by John Steinbeck

When my OneWord for 2013 became evident, I knew that there would be literal flight in my year of Fly.  I was four months past agreeing to go with Children’s HopeChest to Moldova.  A decision that meant literal flight across the US, Atlantic, & Western Europe.  It would be my first trans-Atlantic flight.  My first flight out of the country.  My first stamp in my first passport.

The flight to Munich wasn’t an easy one.  I was fortunate to have a two seat row all to myself, but that brings little comfort when a there is crying baby somewhere behind you, and a talkative couple in the row immediately behind you.  Sleep doesn’t come despite the fact that you took a sleep aid, have ear plugs, & a sleep mask.

And then there is the air itself.  The air that you’re traveling through at upwards of 600 mph.  Our flight to Munich was a turbulent one.  It hit me that even though the sky looks smooth, even though the flight path looks to be without bump or pothole doesn’t mean that it is.  This was a reality I needed to learn.  My year of flight this year isn’t going to be a smooth one.  There is going to be {has been} some bumps.  I need to accept this.  I need to remember this when I find myself brimming with anger again.  I need to remember that turbulence are going to come and it is my duty to power through them and come out on the other side.

We landed in Munich to a blanket of snow already on the ground and more dancing its way downward.  The six of us that flew from Charlotte to Munich deplaned the only way you can…slowly.  We stretched tired, tight limbs, and dreamed of cups of coffee.  We joined the rest of our team already at our gate and awaited the prognosis.  We were shuttled to a tiny plane where we climbed snow covered stairs.  Truth be told I had my own little presidential moment waiting to board, where I wanted to wave & send my love to my adoring citizens.   After we boarded we heard the news…..delayed.  Estimated take off time….an hour and a half later.  I settled myself into my seat, read my book, and watched the falling snow.  An hour and a half quickly became a half hour and next thing we knew we were being de-iced with a compound that reminded me greatly of the pink slime of Ghost Busters, and within another 15 minutes we were off.

As I sat there on the runway, book in hand I was taught another lesson.  A delay is not a permanent stop.  A delay does not mean that you are grounded for good.  It is simply that, a delay.

There was nothing I could do about the delay in Munich.  No matter how tired I was of being on planes or how much I wanted to see Moldova’s borders I had to wait.  The same is going to be for me.  Sometimes it’s going to to take some time getting off the ground.  Hope and grace are going to never seem to find wings some days.  The only thing I can do is abide.

On Saturday of our time there I was feeling “flighty”.  I’d been surrounded by the Russian language for many days, I was dreaming in Russian and only understanding “да, да, да” (“yes, yes, yes”).  I decided to look up the Russian translation for fly.

летать

Pronounced letat, I was drawn to these mysterious characters that sound little like the English version.  I wrote it out on my hand with black sharpie.  A reminder for my day.  I had a great, profound word spoken over me because of this simple word I chose to let my year be defined by.

We’re ten days into January and I don’t feel like I’m flying.  I feel like I’m being drug behind something – like one of those tow planes that sailplanes use to get off the ground, but my body just keeps bouncing over rocks and gravel and uneven asphalt.

Maybe it’s the whirl of getting ready to leave the country and my days are spent working and lunch hours spent running errands.  Weekends full of shopping and evenings gathering & organizing.  Maybe it’s the rush of Christmas mating with the rush of leaving.

Maybe it’s still this struggle for hope.  With secret, whispered words in hope’s ear that I’m still not sure, while I beg and plead and cry out for intervention.  When I cry out that I can’t, I just can’t carry this burden, only to feel a few more ounces added.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to fly.  How I’m supposed to take wings that have become overgrown from lack of use and put them back to their intended purpose.

When the year started, I wrote in my journal the following questions:

What does it mean to fly?
What’s holding me down?

I’m still wrestling with these questions.  Well, I know one of the things holding me down is fear.  In the great words of Mumford & Sons, “I’m scared  of what’s behind, and what’s before.”  Yesterday with all it’s broken hearts and tomorrow with all of it’s unknowns and shall I say it,  {{gasp}} hopes, and the haunting knowings and the wishful thinkings …… I’m not sure how to get lift off.

This morning on my way to work as silence filled my car and weary travelers crept their way to offices and cube farms, I asked God to help me trust Him.  To help me put away this fear.  I think that is going to be one of the first things that is going to need to take place for me to get off the ground….trust.

These wings will fly again.  I have confidence in that.  Sometimes it’s a slow start when we accept these words spoken over us.  Sometimes we have to crash along the pavement before we begin to see our lives flowing naturally with them.

It’s January 01, 2013 and I’ve now started this post three, no, four times.  The words I think I want to say don’t come out the way I’d like them to.  It’s frustrating.

This year is going to demand much of me.  It is going to demand action.  It is going to demand sloughing off of calloused skin and preening of wings that have become overgrown after being clipped.

It’s going to demand that I FLY.

When this word, this little three letter word began to reveal itself I saw the relationship between it and hope.  How I couldn’t just sit here, stagnant.  No, I had to put into practice what I’d been learning over the last year.

So, 2013 will be my time to fly.  To reach new horizons and new heights.

“Away!  Move on!  We’ll carry on to new horizons.  Away!  We’ll fly.” – Future of Forestry

This book…this book holds the last 10 1/2 months of my life.  It tells my story.

The one of finding hope, courage, bravery, my roar.  It holds secrets I’ve never shared with anyone.  Not even my husband or best friend.

At the end of 2012 there are few things that are more precious to me then this book.  I can’t explain it to you.  It’s just the way it is.

When I started art journaling in February I didn’t know what it would do to or for me.  The gliding on of paint, spreading of Gesso, lettering of my heart upon pages has been instrumental in my healing in the last year.

My art journal was is a place I can be perfectly honest with myself.  Honest in a way that I don’t seem to be when I write in my writing journal.

Some times my pages were merely creating poetry out of the original author’s words.  Phrases highlighted to speak my present being at the time.  At other times, they were just a letter to myself on the back of an envelope.  Each page meaning.  My journal has been to the ocean and baptized with salty waters.  It’s received rain upon it’s pages.  It speaks of the hope in my future.

 While I am in Moldova, a friend and I will have the opportunity to share art journaling with the girls living the BOL home.  We’ll get to share what the process has been for us.  And hopefully for these 12 girls it will be a process of healing as well.

Today I’ll make a last entry in this art journal, and tomorrow will dawn with a new word and new journals for a new year.

To view more of my art journal pages you can see them on my Flickr page.

If you want to learn more about art journaling check out The Art Journaler!!

When January 1st dawned and 2011 became 2012 I had no expectations for the new year.  I had no idea how this year of hope would play out.  During my year of grace I had this expectation that I’d be taught to have grace and compassion, but things went completely in a direction I hadn’t expected.  Yes, I learned these things but during those 365 days so much of what I was learning was God’s grace for me.  It was – in a way – a crushed, tattered, bow that would be placed over my broken heart.

So, I started 2012 with no expectations.  Not only because I had no idea what to expect, but primarily because in the heart there is so much equality with expectation and hope.  If I couldn’t dare to hope, I couldn’t dare to expect.  So I started walking fearful of the waves that were calling me.

This year has been one of learning courage, of learning to trust.  And this hope and this courage and this trust hasn’t been easy.  I know I’ve grown but there are moments when I still feel so broken.  I still struggle to trust God.  To give myself over to Him fully again.

But learning to walk takes time.  We stumble.  We fall on our butts.  We walk into walls.  We trip.

But we get up and try again.  That’s what this year has been for me.  Learning to walk, falling, and getting back up again.

I’m excited for 2013 and my Word for the year.  There is also trepidation as it is calling for a choice to act.  I’m excited to share it with you and will do so soon.

“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts.  Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts.  List the the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen child. Anything can be.” – Shel Sliverstein

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for.  And the most you can do is live inside that hope.  Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” – Barbara Kingsolver

“Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering ‘it will be happier’…”- Alfred Tennyson

Happy New Year Dear Friends!

she stretches her fingers
brush of air across my cheek
a burgeoning in soul

when all seems lost
she is there

her feathers dance upon my skin
light upon my face
she renews me

she is grace
when i am lost

hope sings my name
she whispers words i’m parched for
and doesn’t let me go

hope is the light i need to see
hope is the light i need i need to feel

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole of the sea. – Vladimir Nebokor

I look back over these last several months.  From when hope became the banner I tried to once again get a grasp on.

I still wear the silver band of hope on my right hand.  It catches my eye sometimes.  A quick reminder.  I rub left thumb over the etched letters that at times serve as a talisman.

I’m coming up on a year since everything broke.  When my hope was ground up like worthless chaff.  It scares me.  This anniversary of sorts.  I still vividly remember standing in our bedroom yelling at God in the midst of a heated talk with Shawn about it all.  I remember the sleepless nights where I yelled at Him even more.

A year ago a wave broke.  It crashed against my heart and everything within me shattered as the wave retreated and became nothing more then effervescence touching every part of my life. Yet, I’m being taught that these incidents don’t tell my whole story.  They don’t tell of the scared girl teetering on falling back into hope & dreaming.  They don’t tell how these anguished wrenchings drew me back to creating art.  They don’t tell of the who I will be.  How one day, hope will be renewed fully and not only fully but stronger.

They simply tell of a season in the life of a girl.

Sometimes you get to the end of the week and wonder how you got there.  How you made it without punching anything.  Without falling apart.

It finds you breathless.  Weary & spent.

The arguments.  The frustrations.  The need to please all.

You feel the tears threaten your eyelids, and the anger rising….

……again.

Because you can’t help but wonder if God has you on mute because others similar requests seem to be more important to Him than yours as you see theirs answered and yours……

And so you stuff it all down.

the frustrations
the anger
the bitterness
the confusion
the questions

…………………….the everything

Because your burdens are your burdens and your fellow man has enough of their own.

You look at the faded words of life on your hand, and wonder where it all went.  That hope and excitement that was percolating a few weeks ago.

And you find yourself here, comparing the ratio of weekend to work days and wonder when things will go your way.

When hope won’t be so hard.

When faith is just a tad bit easier.

I haven’t been around much this week.  I’ve been silent here, been fairly quiet on Twitter, and haven’t even been reading blogs.  In fact I marked quite a few as read just because I don’t have it in me right now.  Those left unread will wait for me.  Their #secretmessages will be right when I need them.  I believe this.

Remember those emotions?  Still battling them.  Yesterday I wrote in my journal it’s like my heart is speaking a language I don’t know and is getting tongue tied at that.

How do you communicate with your heart when you can’t understand it?

Shawn sent me a quote yesterday,

“Bravery is a muscle, like love.  You have to exercise it constantly or it will turn flabby.” – Chris Brogan on depression & bravery

I’ve never thought about bravery this way.  In all my learning that being brave is something you do when you’re afraid I never realized that I have to exercise it the way I exercise love or my legs.  Shawn and I recently got bikes and I’ve been working up my number of miles per ride.  My legs get sore with each rotation of the pedals but they’re slowly getting idea of what they should be doing.  Each ride is going to get easier.

The same is with my bravery.

This week I haven’t felt brave.  In fact I’ve felt pretty low.  There’s no need to worry.  I’m dealing with it.

I’m going to do my best to plump my feathers and allow the wind to carry me where it wants, keeping the smallest amount of bravery I can muster up in my hands.

“sometimes the smallest amount of bravery exudes the most courage.”

Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things – with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope. –  Corazon Aquino

I stood in our driveway watching the late night skies brew overhead.  Wishing I’d walked out into rain, but the wind alone rustled our Palms, the Mesquite across the street, and the city’s Palo Verdes that turn the ground bright yellow during spring.

I rested there in the howling wind and on concrete still hot enough from the day’s sun to burn the bottoms of my feet, and in one deep breath I was overcome with a sense that all was going to be okay.

Not the storm that I wanted to drench us.   Not the wind rattling the foliage, but our lives.  Shawn’s and mine.  All the questions we have, the dreams, the goals, the things we want more than anything may never happen….but it will all be okay.

It’s taken me a while of course to get here.  To begin to accept this, the okayness of the outcome.

If you’ve been knocked down you know it can be difficult to not only stand back up, but not to expect that around every corner you’ll find yourself back down on the ground.

I’ve had a good run of hope lately.  I’ve allowed myself not to get depressed that things in our lives aren’t moving at the pace I’d really really like them to.  And perhaps this is because things have been moving forward.  Even baby steps feel like giant steps when you’ve never taken any.

This week has been one of the harder one’s in the past couple of months.  The anger simmering again.  My hope taking a beating.  I’m not perfect at this.  I’m still learning.  I’m still learning that just because things aren’t going according to my plan, hope isn’t failing.

So I’m trying to hold onto that howling night.  Where the wind whipped my hair a tizzy, where whispered in the currents of the air was a promise that everything would be okay.

note: i started this post about a month ago.  it’s taken some time for me to be able to write out what now needed to be said.  that night was windy and rain seemed promising, but never came.  tonight (08.16.12) as i finished the post, proofed, & got ready to schedule it to publish, i heard the faint tinklings of rain drops meeting up with concrete.  i was over joyed.  i rushed outside just to stand in it.  tonight was a reminder that what was whispered last month still holds true tonight.  i even took my art journal out in the rain and captured some of this promise on her pages.

I’ve needed a change around here for a while.  I mean I still have a theme for autumn/winter.

Skeleton trees don’t exactly sing of spring and summer.

But perhaps there is a deeper meaning here.  Besides a laziness on my part to get it updated to something more summery.  Maybe the strings of last year have been holding onto even this.

There is a new PrudyChick.com coming.  She’s gonna be a little like me.

Okay a lot like me.

Throughout the last seven months there have been so many times I’ve seriously considered shutting down this space.  Of taking off my gloves.  Throwing in the towel.

It is truly because hope has slowly been re-birthing in me that I haven’t.

I can’t wait for you to see her.

I never said it would be easy, in fact I distinctly remember knowing it would be probably one of the hardest things I’ve done.

Re-learning to hope.

Despite our lives not moving forward at the pace I’d like them to, the curtain of despair seems to be shifting.  I can see it blowing in the wind allowing light to enter through its rich thickness.

In spite of a crazy couple of weeks at work and over four hours of overtime this week and looking like more tomorrow, these past few days have been good.

The darkness of fear and abandonment aren’t shadowing like they have recently.

I’m allowing myself, for what seems like the first time in over six months, to feel hope.  Not a shallow hope, but a deep one.  A hope that penetrates my core.

Frustrations and discontentment still lie there because the goal hasn’t yet been reached, but right now ……. right now I’m able to say “okay…I can do this…I can let go and fly”.

I have no way of knowing if this bravery will continue unhindered or if I’ll find myself clinging to my fears again.  Knowing my fickle heart I won’t be surprised if one day in the future I find myself having fallen backwards.

The only course of action I have right now is to walk these steps of hopefulness I’m feeling.  To allow myself to continue letting go and allow the air streams to carry me and be my rescue.

I never knew I could be brave.

I always thought I had to be fearless, not understanding that simply being brave was an option.  I would face circumstances in my life with this attitude that I needed to be without fear and never move forward.

Today, I’m over at Elora’s sharing how I’m learning that I have freedom to simply be brave.

Join us here.

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{image source}

What do you do when you fall backwards?  When angry words spew out like white, hot lava because emotions are running higher than they have in a long time.  Sometimes I wonder why God puts up with us.  With our tantrums and our bitterness that creeps out from behind where it was hiding.  It would probably never surprise me if He were just to turn and walk away, telling me if that’s the way you want it, then it’s all yours.

And tonight I seem to have fallen backwards.

It’s hard when our emotions bring out things we thought we’d left behind.  Yet we discover those things (the anger, the bitterness, the sense of defeat) seem to only have been hiding in a dusty room we forgot about [or that we thought we'd locked more secure than we apparently have].

Honestly I don’t know what I’m doing.  I’m taking my baby steps and some days feel I’m walking backward rather than forward.  This all seems to consume my every thought.  There isn’t a day I don’t think about hope.  About dreaming & hoping for the future and just how hard trust feels some days.

I feel as though I keep cresting a hill, but every time I attempt to cross over the summit I tumble back down the side I just worked my way up.  I never knew it was going to be this challenging.

So I find myself tonight, picking myself up and wondering if I should bother brushing the dust off my knees from the tumble I took.  I’m looking at this summit knowing wholeness and hope reside on the other side, and I wonder how many more times I’m going to fall backwards.  I’m trying to come to acceptance that He’s on this side of the hill with me, that He’s not on the other side playing backgammon until I finally make it over there.

What {baby} steps do you take when you’ve fallen backwards?

The air Monday was thick with smoke from a wild fire burning about 70 miles north of us.  I’ve been feeling heaviness – like the smoke – in my soul recently.  Struggles with my ego & pride, struggles with hope.  Most days I don’t know what to do with myself.  I think about shutting things down here, of hiding, of going completely silent.

I wonder out loud to my husband over blog reading and coffee if I’ve just been faking it these last few months.  If I’m really no farther along than when I started.  It seems so real, yet so not.  To be here four and a half months after starting slip hope back on wondering why hope seems so dang fickle.  Why my heart some days simply wants to sit down on the dusty, dirt road and say enough already – I can’t do this any more.

I feel like my heart is bound up.  Locked with one of those clasps where you lift a lever to toggle the clasp into place and push the lever back down to lock it in place.  I just want to lift that lever back up and unbind my heart.  I explained to my best friend that I don’t know how to translate everything inside for myself, let alone other people.

So, I was driving home Monday, through the smoke thick air.  Trying to process all of this.  I know there are times and places and things we must keep as secrets for ourselves; but I made my way through the physical and metaphorical smoke I simply told God I wanted to write.  That I needed to write.  That I don’t want to be afraid of what others will think or say.

That I don’t want to be afraid of the untranslated words in my soul.