1.

I bound toward the glorious path of noon-day light; it is the luscious flame my soul wades through...it is my pool for drinking. I bask beneath it savoring the glory of Christ that my heart has been starved from throughout this entire dreary winter voyage. I devour each precious second that has sprung to life...I wrap them up in a locket for all the days are no longer enveloped by a melancholy tidal wave of gray. I am illuminated and pouring. Words drip from my tongue like honey some strands of pearls are slow like a summer day porch-swing melody, others dance fast away like the pulse of a hummingbird. They are oozing nectar. I feel the warmth of them slip off of my tongue where there is no more sorrow and no more pain. My hands are released from their chains and the scars have mended so beautifully it's almost as if they are non-existent, but I wear them proudly-they are symbolic of my battle. They are my badges of honor.

Now, the world has stopped spinning into the upward sky; your hands no longer intertwine with mine. Thank the Lord for the progress, for the spring in my step and the spring from which I now drink where life is a rich outpouring and there is only joy. Glory be to God! Backwards chained his doors; he melted every key...the padlocks were bigger than my fingers could pry. Thank God for making me small so that my words cannot take themselves back nor can my feet travel through time. I wept into my pillow-case once, whole seas composing sonnets about the reality of time and how cruel that it is. Praise God that all my wishes didn't come true...praise God for shattered mirrors and the ashes of demolished dreams. Praise God for placing a sea between me and the island of familiarity and drenching my soul with new blessings-whole gardens where I can memorize the smell of Autumn and the hands that drape me with thick blankets on couches in small houses on cold nights. She is home; they are a family. Woven together are the intricate strands of God's plan for my life...he didn't intend for me to live in the sky...but on the ground where I could feel my fingers dig deep into the earth until my soul bled mud and my veins spread themselves like those of a tree-firmly rooting me in the garden he'd created for me.

Now, the rain is cold but like a joyful symphony... it floods me-it bathes me and kisses my ears, my cheeks, my lips and even when it's stinging and harsh it is the reality of my humanity. I am small, I am alive. Praise God! I am smaller than God. Praise God. My hands steer no ship as all of mine have been wrecked. My sails have been tattered; my vessels demolished...with no remains. Ruin...oh the glory of it-praise God for the sweet addiction that courses through me now of being broken by him...praise God for the drought that starved me until I looked up to listen...and praise him for his mercy that he gave-more rain than I could drink from; nourishment to last eternity.

No life was there in such skies-only pillars with no foundation and fairytale watercolor dreams with no substance...it was a recipe for collapsing. But oh, now, I am firmly planted among the fuchsia, the violet, the tangerine colored tasty treats of spring whose pedals the rain springs off of and tap dances on top of. There is such joy here on the ground. Now, I can delight in the way sugar buries itself into my taste buds; the all encompassing buzz of joyful conversations in public places, the rushing of the city lights that flicker and stream, the night stars, the hypnosis of lightening bugs; the adrenaline of dreams...there is joy. There is joy in the crunch-crunching of each rouge leaf beneath the shine of my thick black boots...or the way my soul delights in burying my nose in Autumn's neck as she hugs me and I am wrapped up in the reality that my life had to offer so much more than the fairy-tale I'd composed with my ambitious empty rhetoric. Praise God that my life came apart at the seams!