walking each other home

It's been weeks of this intersection kind of living. Red light. Green. Yellow, and this hesitation. It is on the tip of my tongue to say that I am sorry for being this halting kind of human who is running and stopping to hold your hand all in the same breath, who is the receding ocean tide, but also the waves crashing onto shore.

Yet not today,

I'm not an apology letter anymore.

I am all wide-open fields and winding paths in the forest. I'm feathers in the breeze. I'm still all flowers and roots. I am all fragile with a spine carved of strength. I am all laughter and tears, but everything deeply. I trip over my words and make people feel awkward. I am learning to love and love and love and see the whole person. Most days, I can look in the mirror and say I forgive you, I forgive you for being the person you were and I no longer hold this knot in the pit of my stomach because no matter what I feel at the moment, I have been redeemed and renewed by the Healer of hearts like mine. Some days, all I hold are ashes and there's nothing left for me to do but look up and say, this too Lord, this too.

These are my edges.

It's been weeks and you tell me that silence echoes from the people around you. I will never understand why the world is like this, why it is that givers like you feel the most alone. I want to say that it is the ones who give the most who are also the richest, but these are words that you've heard spilled a thousand times before. You are alone in the midst of a forest and they speak, they reach for your hand and grasp at the last ember of light you hold, but when you turn to open your heart there is nothing but faceless bark and silent wood. It's all mirrors and a crowd that will never know your name. You are all music and solitude that you protect with those cages of iron. Your fingers over the keys are your words, the most like glass you'll ever become. All you've known are takers, the ones with smiles lighting up their face and only enough love to give themselves. Yet not everyone will be like that, not everyone has a heart made of shallows. It won't always be smoke and ash. This is all I know to be true, I am not one for certainties, you know this, but I know that one day you will walk into a building and call it home. You will name the ones inside of it family, and you will be seen and known and fully loved.

I'm trying to say that you already are, you already are you just have to listen. I know that, just this once, you want a voice loud enough to rattle your skeleton and awake your ghosts and send them running. Just this once, you want a hand to hold. You are tired of words and they are all I have. I cannot fill caverns. Yet a voice shook you awake, didn't it? You were held long before you learned to walk, to run. I know you feel alone and solitude has made your feet heavy from the journey, but I hope that you could step outside after a long day and see the golden sunlight spilling from between the trees and setting every leaf on fire and think about how your heart is not hidden from this Light, how it fills every crevice and throws open the doors and windows and slips past all your pain and secrets and picks up the bones and looks at you the same. I hope you listen to that old woman who tells you that your music made her feel alive again, that you spoke a language no one else has ever been able to communicate, and then you take her hand, you look her in the eyes and you say thank you, because she understood. I hope you collect all the moments of good things and pile them up high. I hope you see every sunset as a personal gift and you keep seeing them until you know without a shadow of a doubt that you are fully loved and known by Abba Father, by the Holy One, by light and love itself.

We're already an ocean deep, can't you see? Maybe, just this once, we could stop marching around the fire and sending out war calls? Maybe we could sit down and I would make us tea and maybe this once, we both could stay. I am not afraid of your night, I will not run.

These days, my clock is set to Munich and I've been thinking a lot about oceans and bridges and what it would mean to build one.

I think we're here to walk each other home.