There are those who in their very first seeking of it are nearer the kingdom of Heaven than many who have for years believed themselves to be of it. In the former there is more of the mind of Jesus, and when He calls them they recognize Him at once and go after Him; while the others examine Him from head to foot and, finding Him not sufficiently like the Jesus of their conception, turn their backs and go to church or chapel or chamber to kneel before a vague form mingled of tradition and fancy.

night brings the tremors, the unquiet of all of these souls
yet in mere hours, such armor of dawn clads the entire of sky
if we did not have fear, what significance would courage be?

When we go through life
So sure of where we’re headin’
And we wind up lost and it’s
The best thing that could have happened
’Cause sometimes when you lose your way
It’s really just as well
Because you find yourself
Yeah, that’s when you find yourself

– Brad Paisley

Max Ernst: Birth of a Galaxy

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Believe in second chances.

I am alive: the rush of this realization. Pleasure and pain are the chemicals that fuel my being, the pumping of the blood that mixes the strange concoction into a living soul. I am a dream that has awakened from the earth, of my creator Who is love, in whose image I am made. And if I believe, it touches on my awareness that I shall not see death, even when I leave this world. I am wonderfully and fearfully made, more than the starstuff that constitutes my matter. I am full of fear and hunger, I am full of rage and lust; but I can be eccentrically kind, deeply humble. What, o man, o woman, have you done with what your maker has given you? Do not hide your light while underneath the starry sky, but let it shine from the highest of your reaches. Burn with the life that from on high has been ignited in you. Live like life were the barest thread, cut by the Reaper at the slightest flick.

[Book.]

You know what? I’ve seen too many movies. They make me want to remember splendid things, important things, as if they happened to me; they make me want to live a good life full of compassion and wonder, just like all those characters up there. They make me want to remember her like that, like she was one of the spirits pictured on the big screen, that she was larger than life. Somewhere I know she was small, though, with small hands like the rain, just like the poem tells it. She was very human. Not in the bad way do I depict her so, when I say that of what she was, even if there could be said that some of the bad was thrown in, too. Even in the movies can the main characters have flaws, I suppose. And the movies also make me a sucker for happy endings, so I’m expecting my own any time now. After which I can die. Heh.

The Jews would not willingly tread upon the smallest piece of paper in their way, but took it up; for possibly, they say, the name of God may be on it. Though there was a little superstition in this, yet truly there is nothing but good religion in it, if we apply it to men. Trample not on any; there may be some work of grace there, that thou knowest not of. The name of God may be written upon that soul thou treadest on; it may be a soul that Christ thought so much of, as to give His precious blood for it; therefore despise it not.

in fire i have burned, though like the bush, not consumed
as if in the imagining, the calling of my name, my name
a voice like unto a doom, but no, my calling, my calling
wordless, huddled in a ball on the floor, alone
still, a hope still hidden in the hollow of my heart
and like a fantasy, forgotten, lost in the sands of thought
until a notion, a smell, to stir awake the dream, the dream

[Book. Chapter 3.]

I remember when she rescued me. I often wondered why it is that we rely so heavily on chance when it comes to love. Perhaps this is how it proves its significance to us? Destiny, usually to prove itself to be true the second one tosses the notion of it out the door. I seem to recall an apocryphal moment, me awakening from some fitful sleep to her smiling face, suddenly above me from out of nowhere, a moment out of her time as professional angel. This never happened, of course — not like that…. It seems, after all is said and done, that we have no ultimate control of when or where or who we love, and perhaps this, genuinely, is a sign. That it is a greater thing than all of us. Unspeakably powerful, but also, unspeakably kind. And that, perhaps the intuition of the famous phrase: “God is love.”

I’ve got another confession my friend
I’m no fool

– Foo Fighters

Egon Schiele: Blind Mother

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My parents knew what was the good stuff. And as I grow on in age, I find that I am inheriting this gift, that I, too, begin to know what it means to find the good stuff. I recall back when I didn’t think about such things, took for granted the things they bought, for me to eat, for me to wear, for me to use. Growing up to discover for myself that when I got something, when I picked things out for myself, that somehow they weren’t the same. I realized that I was thinking on the concept of “quality” on only abstract terms. You begin to make choices in your going, exactly what is to be a part of it, when it dawns on you that you can decide you want to suck the marrow out of life — and possibly, if you’re lucky enough, you will be able to pass that ability down to the next generation, when they, too, take things for granted until it is up to them to decide what is to be a part of their lives. Here’s to the good stuff. That’s a little of what makes life worth living.

A saint will give away his best, and keep his worst.

so many dreams have never touched the ground, or wanted to
so many of us never rise enough from the ground to see them
so many chances lost, to play the fates: a conduit be

The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.

Night falls, as if time itself stopped, and everyone were freed from it.

Night falls, to resume the haunting of the moon, no one to know why.

Night falls, the spells of light to be dispelled, no such magic on through.

Night falls, we to escape the darkness in dreaming, but not always.

Night falls, where the fire speaks loudest, but lacks in subtlety.

Night falls, the distance between things becoming as infinite, in darkness.

Night falls, the cycle to remind us of the end — and a beginning.

[Book.]

Is it a(nother) cruel trick? Is this a fiendish imagination of the invisible angels, that I be frozen in fear without a cloud in the sky, without a worry in the horizon, without any hint of cataclysmic resolution? Am I a mute Cassandra, only able to know the future, not even to speak it to be disbelieved; and even then, that the instantaneous prophecy prove false, after all? Jeremiah complained to his God that He had made him like unto “a drunken man, a man full of wine” — so what has my God made me? I am a frozen man, a man stopped in time, who has never heard the voice from above assuage his madness. Surely the mercy from on high shall merely let me go, trouble me no more with the deeper thoughts, the thoughts too heavy to form into words. At least release me from the gravity, when nothing wicked this way comes.

And it is just then that the ground shakes violently, where I am thrown to my knees.

[UPDATE: This concludes Chapter 2. The whole of what I have so far is here.]