Take risks. Hope boldly. After all, the only hope we really have, is hope.

Hope, caught up in love, as all things are--we say these three things abide, faith, hope, and love, and these do. And the greatest is love--they are caught up in love, the love that holds all things together, the love which is God. As long as there is God, there is love, and love, hope. And as long as there is hope... there's hope.

So, take risks. Hope boldly. Dream wildly and love against all odds.
In this, we are held together. In this, we have life.



Good night, sisters and brothers.

So, I am twenty.

You would expect an entry like this one to be filled with all the usual social malaise that we expect from us twenty-somethings and college agers, but I don't want to go there. Of course, we could always take this down the other popular route, and I could amuse (or annoy) you all with exciting tales of the great plans that are opened up to me suddenly upon my passage from the world of the teen-aged, sort of a "what I did on my summer vacation!" but in the future tense. Or I could expound upon all the little frivolities of college life as a junior (for those with a confectionary taste in blogging), could wax philosophic on the wasted opportunity of youth and lost love, could quip with irony about the situation of life at large, or perhaps spin you a yarn about my triumphant journey through the perils of adolescence to this our supposed pinnacle of adulthood. For those inclined toward contemplations of the infinite, I might tell you of late conversations and inspired thoughts in thunderstorms; I might tell of the relationships I've formed in the past year and where these seem to be heading on uncharted seas as our worlds like ships pass each other. Or, for those in the mood for romantic pinings and heartstring-songs of a wandering poet, I could fiddle these tunes for you as well. But I don't want that.

Yes, I have made wonderful friends here, and yes, I have come a long way. Yes, I pine, and God knows sometimes I hurt. I have climbed mountains and dreamt dreams, I have been a fool and I have been a friend. But that is not what I want to talk about tonight.

Tonight, I have been twenty for over a week now, and for all that, I can still look upward at night and almost believe that I am rising into that deep sea of sky, the stars so close you can almost feel them on your skin like snowflakes, or rain.

I am walking in a land of whispered dreams and sleeping pheonixes, and waiting for the touch of dawn breaking the horizon, the light that makes us real. I know the song, if faintly, of those stars that wrap the sky tonight, and the rhythm of the hearts that sleep here. I know the questions that love asks, and I know if I keep searching, if I keep trusting, I will look up and feel the ground fall away behind me. We will dive into velvet starlight.

I am thinking of stars, and hoping for flight.

...a work in progress, to say the least.

Rain in a Dry Land.


The first tears come as rain does in a parched place
sporadically, jerkingly,
coming awkwardly and quiet, wet drops on old parchment.

hardly the prophetic trickle
from a long silent stream,

or the long, dark lines in the dust
on the face of a weak dam.

My body heaves for them, crushing them,
squeezing hard the way you'd wring
a dry cloth for those last, few, quivering drops;

dry heaves.

I welcome them, these tears, I want them,
my body writhes and wrings itself for them
jerkingly, awkwardly,
haltingly in spasms. Their rhythm is almost like... like something else I knew.

I feel them, first in months,
cool as they evaporate,
the first rain on desert rocks and salt flats, long thirsting.

One, and another...

Like a kiss they are gone too quickly.