Advent 2019: when You Can’t Fake Bleeding

I'm trying to trace how I got from a story about a star over a stable to this aisle of books with grinning preachers and sanctimonious stares. Dust covers of cyclical reasoning and feel-good theology. Happy doses of anecdotal wisdom placate the unease of our contradiction and hypocrisy.

It's so tidy. So neat and glossy. Straight white teeth. It's all going to be okay.

Even the attempts to be real and raw are holstered because they always have a convenient conclusion- wrapped in ribbon like the presents we exchange. Axioms so vague and manipulative, you can't approach with reason or logic because they are built on the ethereal. You can't punch a cloud.

The brutal world that cuts us with the unknown is salved with privileged punchlines. Like prayers and perseverance are all that is needed to drag this body to heaven. Strung along. Strung out.

The chipped rusty edge of life runs along skin and the wound opens- despite all the prayers, all the books, all the stage lights and systematic theology. Life pours out onto the pavement like there wasn't much holding it in.

This is the mess. This is the blood that's missing in the aisle. It's not in the wine by the bread. It's not in the pulse of the preacher. It's not in the hands of the writer.

The blood is in the dirt at the foot of some wooden beam. It's on the floor in a stable. It's on the concrete, surrounded by fluttering police tape, waiting to be washed away by the rain. It's on the ground, below a swaying rope. It's in the waters, below a hull.

So if this star illuminates anything, let it shine and gleam off a body drenched in the stuff. A solitary stable. Arched back, a gasping mother. Let it show, let it prove, that nobody ever comes into this world clean.

A child screams and strains. And if anything is silent about this holy night, let it be the world, the world all scarred from not knowing. And if there is peace, let it be the world, the world now seeing it was never alone in its bleeding out.

Advent 2019: When Bamboozlement and Conformity Assault the Senses

It is so easy to lapse into thinking that everything is mist. That it's all a subtle long-lived lie. The way things are, they way we are, it's just all laid out and waiting. And we more or less stray within these borders of acceptable tolerance. From trailer parks to Beverly Hills. From career-homelessness to real estate developer. The addict to the accountant.

And maybe it is just a plague some of us endure. Some tribulation of the mind like sleepwalking. Sleepliving? The curse of the conscious, or the overly aware. Sensitive to things like repetition and command, expectation and culture. We might not push back on these if they weren’t forced.

We rub up against the normalcy of life and recoil at its redundancy. It's nothing against tradition or familiarity. And practice makes perfect. But that cuts both ways. We can perfect becoming inhuman.

And for some, there’s a visceral response to the omnipresent expectation of conformity.

I say conformity, not similarity. Conformity is sameness for the sake of efficiency. Similarity is a flourish of expression given the same means.

So conformity is death to the free mind and spirit, and assimilation serves no great purpose other than production.

And I often wonder if this is the mist. The need to be the same, to be efficient, so that someone else can reap profit and power.

Maybe this is the root cause of a dreamlike wandering through a tepid and absurd world where people take life away for things like new shoes or fossil fuel. Where entire systems exist to preserve stratification. Invisible and also visible bondage.

Do the colors seem faded? Or is it simply that they are familiar, and therefore no longer brilliant to us? Washed away by pixels and fiber optics, living inside a screensaver. Real like a projection is real. A rendering of something, but not the actual thing.

Is the candle burning? I smell the ozone and smoke from a match struck. I feel the heat when my hand is closed around the flame. It feels real. Like maybe I should wrap my whole self around this small burning thing that looks like a promise. If I listen closely I can hear the flame whip the air.

If I lean in, I can almost taste emancipation.

For A Moment on a Hill

Violet and pink clouds blush across the horizon, a spill of sweetness beneath the heavy gray expanse. Darkness draws over us like some giant curtain. Like floating the blankets over your body before bed- when you giggle and shriek as the comforter descends, all billowy and frantic. I wonder if you'll keep those feelings nearby as you grow older?

Do we?

You're with some new friends on the hill. Just shapes now. Shadow arms and legs punched out against a fading snowy canvas. It's all muted and understated and wonderful in its simplicity. There's nothing really unique about this time. Nothing spectacular, except that it all is. All of this. The bed-making. The sledding. The pleasure you draw from life, inhaling the world. You would gulp it if you could- that air of childhood, that slow burn of awakening.

And sometimes I wonder if this is it. If this was the plan. To be here and to be happy with it. To find goodness and cultivate it. Maybe this is what would be leftover if we forgot why we are so anxious or mad and distracted all the time.

I don't know if we are wise enough, or have enough grace or strength to choose well. But I wonder, what would happen, if we forgot for a while. If the people forgot their guns and rivalries and the kings forgot their crowns. What if the media forgot the ads and stakeholders and what if we forgot our resentment or our posturing.

Maybe this is what would remain. Shapes in the sunset, chasing daylight for the last drops of sweetness. Walking in the dusk and laughing like children do, paying no mind to the darkness. Fearless like children are in the open air.

Advent 2019: When We Burn the Tide and Outshine the Sun

The lighthouse was swept away years ago. Tide and turbulence gnashing at the granite, jawing at the stone seat. Gulls, restless and pitching on drafts around the sentry.

And why were we there? To watch, no doubt. Watching the watcher.

The grass and thatch atop the small island overrun by the waters. Steel sea. Steel sky. The deep surging against this monolith. Wave by wave. Her lamp, the pulsing glow, exhaling in bursts of light between crests and crashes. The gasping brilliant beam, shot across a breaking expanse. An ember and glow, a patch of illumination fading below a boiling frothing tide.

For what it’s worth, she never sank. The sea simply took her.

And now, holding the same light, that same burning, we survey the same waters. The very darkness meaning to hold us under.

Those same dark waters often covering us. Roiling. Breakers slapping at bare skin. Faces streaked with salt and spray.

We lift our arms. Lamps high. Water rising. Mouths shut. Eyes ahead.

If faith is a flame still breathing in the damp heavy tempest of time,

If love is a beacon still jubilant amidst the surging sea of loss,

If trust is a triumph in the diaspora of the not yet,

Then the lamp is still burning, regardless of our depth.

We'll turn the ocean into fire and rend the world with its light, outshine the sun, burn the tide.

Advent 2019: When Hope Looks Ragged and Raw

This is some ragged hope.

Still breathing by some miracle. Dragged through hell. Clawed it's way back from the grave more times than we care to remember. Up through earth and root and stone. Through social anxiety, failed marriages, lost children. Trips to the ER. Envelopes stamped with "Past-due". Through riots and brutality. Through violence. Loss. Incineration.

This is no wished-upon star. This is no delicate murmured prayer.

This is the flogged hope that comes to us, rises to us, that is us, that is the spirit of the somehow-I'm-still-alive.

This is prophetic hope with a spine rubbed raw from all the carried crosses. Broken backs from carrying the truth to power. From marching to be seen, yelling to be heard, bleeding to be known. Blood the color of royalty.

This is the buried hope that was beneath all things. That was planted deeply. The darkness of the earth pressing it into a new thing. A burning thing. Compressed fear, rage, and promise.

Ignition.

This hope is the flare and flame. Refusal to go quietly into the night.

Some rebel, this hope. Some specter of what should have been extinguished. Buried alive. Returned. Ignited. A burning thing.

Sister, don't you know that resurrections and revolutions are heat and fire - the same light?

Brother, don't you know that saviors and rebels are buried and broken - the same indignation?

This burning breathing hope comes swaddled in grave clothes. Reborn. Rebuking the reaper. Refusing the sentence. Rebelling. Reclaiming.

This is the rising hope.

No candle, are we. No flickering flame. No spark.

We are the bright fiery tide.

The Art of Holding

I pick up a book and read maybe the first page when you gasp in fatigue - dad I can’t color this forever! You're halfway up the wall of an asymmetrical high-rise and the marker is nearly dry.

You make this new world with your usual fury, an opalescent cityscape, the backdrop for your next superhero stage. I could keep reading and put you off but I don’t want to return to this moment someday as a ghost.

I want to do this. Now. I want you to remember us filling in the white space on the poster board with a juicy blue marker, streaking a new skyline across nothingness, bringing our own brand of heroics and vision to the void.

Sometimes, we just need to color and let the sun drag shadows around us.

And people like me worry about missing these moments. About how we can hold them. Because we’re afraid we’ll wake up full of fear and empty of memories on a lazy Sunday morning - the kind parents always wish for until they have them.

But worrying and wishing won’t color the page.

Holding a moment isn’t too hard, you just have to be there. I mean, really be there. Not on a phone. Not with the TV on. Not while folding laundry.

Sometimes we just have to be.

So when our kids dig deep into the layers of their soul they remember our eyes, not our faces illuminated by some small screen where we escape because it’s just too stressful. So when they look back they remember cheesy dance moves and a family untethered from the blitz of advertisements and text messages.

So when they look back they feel what it was like to be close and seen and known, even if they don’t remember the blue marker.

And someday, when we wake up on a lazy Sunday morning, we will be full of memories and moments because we learned that holding them simply meant being there.

The Heart

The heart.

The muscle. The one with its own synapses and neurons. The fickle and furious center of life. The answer back to the why of the world. Why?

Because of the magnetic pulse that nearly rips my chest open whenever my children get on the bus.

Because life is very real and whole but we let it drift by, moaning that it’s boring, or challenging, or uninspiring, or scary. So we sip on the stupidity of sitcoms and binge pixels, our souls craving something more, entire bodies scratching at small screens for more nearness, more meaning, more warmth, and rather than leaning into life, we escape it. We disassociate and divide our minds and attention and pass it on.

Good lord. The inheritance was never supposed to be debt and stress and evasion - it is supposed to be revelation and the promise that life isn’t out there. It's not through some digital funnel or glitchy obscene cosmos, its here. Life is.

It's you. It’s us.

It's my sons putting their arms around one another and giggling with their eyes closed. It's my wife burying her head in my shoulder while I inhale the end of another long day. It's the leather and braided red lacing of a baseball popping in the basket of my boy’s glove.

It's the sound of people marching, singing, writing, building, and dreaming about home and heart, whether they know it or not.

Its gospel choirs and rock concerts singing for god or to god or god knows what. Its conscientious politicians. It’s gritty mechanics who know a thing or two about hard work; who wipe their oily hands on an old t-shirt before flipping the light off in the bay. Its coaches and teachers who lift and build and sweat and fortify hearts; keep going kid, keep going, you’ve got this, you're almost there.

It's the sting of briny tears cascading down the cheeks of mothers and fathers who buried their own children but refuse to bury their souls, who hurl their might and commandments to an open sky and an open world, who demand something more than caskets and craven prayers. Something beyond the crippled world we've presented to ourselves. Something more than faith in someday. Something more than running away.

It's the fucking blood that dispatches life through your entire being and that fist-sized muscle that keep it all going.

So next time you ask why? just remember.

Because this is real. This is real.

You are real.

We are real.

are the why.

Ice and Blue

Today looks like the days my father and I would hike along the Mt. Hope river after a Nor’easter shot through our canopy of Birch and Oak, Maple and Spruce, leaving behind a new world.

We would embark from the warm harbor of the kitchen where my mother made magic; the sweetness of fresh baking, flour flung across a table and the frequent blast of heat from an oven door swinging open.

We crashed into the wild and winter, shrouded in canvas and cotton, post-holing our way into a forest subdued by snowdrifts and ice. That stillness only interrupted by the rattling of branches fencing high up in the balcony of hardwoods.

The intrepid blue sky impossibly deep behind the white, almost electric with a fierce saturation.

A landscape which has become more of a feeling, now.

Stars: Reflections on Looking Up

Your shit is too poetic, he said, and I get what he was trying to say.

My creative history was tainted with force and superannuated imagery.

Every script I endeavored for film, every essay penned, every charcoal swipe across a pad; all rocketed skyward but left the sacredness I was seeking in vertigo. I tried too hard to open heaven and blew the gates off their hinges. Quite the entrance to an empty room.

I held no reverence for our skin and the palette of divinity in every tone. I could not see that the very mess of humanity was itself sacred and whole, though the pieces were around me. I thought God was outside of brokenness, not inside it. A healer rather than a participant. Not afflicted like us.

And now on most days, I look up to feel small and placed well. I touch sacred ground and breathe sacred air and kiss sacred faces. I hold the divine and walk with any breeze, alone or together with one who is here. I look up again.

The wonder of the stars was always in how we held them, and that they simply were.

The Threat of Dreaming Out Loud

To those who almost lost the fire, or are in danger of it:

"This is the one course you need to graduate high school and I'm not sure you're ready for the real world."

Face flushed, jaw tight, I made my way across a scuffed linoleum floor to the door. Fluorescent lights cast shadows over my eyes. Pack slung over one shoulder. Brain swelling with latent comebacks and recalcitrant rage.

Never a model student by grade or conduct, I swallowed myself, reflexively shielding a fledgling flame of creativity and inspiration; trying to preserve this fragment of truth from the winds of assimilation and indoctrination.

Angst and scrambled idioms clogged my brain: I don't want your career and your machine. I don't want the world you’re selling. Say it. Write it. Scream it. Bury it in art and music and words.

I knew something, then. Fragile and honest.

My fingers brushed across a deep and indwelling truth, something massive, nonconformist, something beyond the mind of a sheltered, indignant 17-year-old. I felt it and dug my nails in because whatever it was, it was true.

Only years later could I know: people are born with a compass to the heart and keys to the cosmos but we trade in our familiarity with truth for the perfunctory tools of a role we're told to play. We become the line workers of mediocrity, fragile pillars of neighborhoods, schools, and institutions. We rise and fall only within the boundaries imposed upon us, to create an illusion of mobility and value.

But I didn’t have those words. Not yet. I could feel my humanity being ripped out and replaced with a motor. Kids like me got a label instead of a hearing. Discipline instead of discipling. We were called dissident. Angry. Hormonal. Distracted.

We got detentions.

I wrestled against a system and a broken world and found myself shoving against an iron structure that had rusted into the earth. Kids like me shouted into the wind after pounding on the walls. Like in dreams when we open our mouths but no words come out. Fear. Or desperation. We are left breathless. Labeled. Dismissed.

Told that we’re not ready for the real world, when the real world is the last thing we could ever want. When the real world was a looming pronouncement, a judgement, a prison.

Kids like me didn’t have those words. We couldn’t go toe-to-toe with professional adults to criticize the underpinnings of a society they stood on. We were snuffed out and left smoldering. Embers of truth extinguished in the name of production. Any kindness throughout was truncated by good intentions.

But kids grow up. Some of us didn’t forget. We held the the flame and let it flourish. We held the truth and let it consume us. We learned. We lived. Scars and all, we’re here. Alive. Burning. With words.

Speaking over you, over ourselves, defective and deficient, like we found the keys to the prison.

You are ready for the real world, because the real world was made for you.

Because the real world is not the abject reality peddled to our children. It’s not bills and debt and taxes. It’s not small screens and canned ideology. It's not politicians with bad hair and game shows. Those are trifles and pieces of something beyond.

The real world is the world you will create.

It’s a half-finished epic, a canvas with spectacular strokes, a song with just the bass-line. The real world is today for tomorrow and tomorrow forever. The future being bright and unclaimed. The horizon being untamed.

The world is yours to take. Don't watch it through glass smudged by fingers tracing sunsets. The fearful love fear because fear is safe, but being safe is not being alive. Entire kingdoms are built on the backs of people who find solidarity in the shadows.

Your sight in not fractured. Your love is not diluted. Your gut is not wrong.

You are ready.

The world waits for the people who live.

The world waits for the burning ones.

Lifeline

Scratched hapless phrases into a journal, felt the weight of the gray morning on my mind, and with some effort, rolled the ink into one line:

Letting go is not the same as falling.

And I did not fear falling, but I had no idea how tightly I was holding on to the ropes and tangles that bound me. Face against cool granite. Knees knocking against a cliff.

The coiled imprints on my soul were marks of freedom. Rope burns were signs of faithfulness. I was tethered to a small world.

It took burning questions to char the cord and snap the tensile and when I finally released my grip, I found my feet on the dirt. There was no fall. There was only this belief of height, dismantled.

There was just the wind and the rope where I left it, braided cords nudged by the breeze. My lifeline, lifeless.

My soul, alive.

What I believed, within.

And so, I went to look for you.

On Writing

A radio host asked listeners to identify the sound he would play next. We weren't calling in for the prize but my mother and I waited for the DJ to roll the audio. She said it sounded like a dog sniffing the studio mic. I knew better.

It was the sound of a pen and pad. The scribble and scrawl of ink on paper. It was familiar even as a young boy and it's likely one of the only constants in my life; the wrist flick and dragging of lines. Page after page, year after year. Some days ran together before a journal would skip several months. Themes emerged. Struggles. Patterns. Growth. The silent brawl between my spirit and mind played out over years. Spewed theology. Loves. Hates. Certainties. Doubts.

I found freedom in poetry and short essays. My mind is never in one place long enough to sustain long-form writing. The release of the pen (or keyboard) comes in bursts and starts. Perhaps I'm a product of the culture that shortens "okay" to "k" but the Psalms were never too long and they painted the portrait of a king on his knees. That's not half-bad.

There’s no pretense here. I don't drift around art galleries and connect intellectually with a dribble of paint across canvas. I read famous poets and in all truth, don’t really understand the hype. I read classic literature and drop the books after several chapters. I'm not going to force myself to like the wine because it has the right year on the label. There are many writers more suited for the job of carrying the torch of true literary spirit. Novelists. World-creators. Social commentators. Ink-smudged prophets.

I'd be among that last category, if any. I'm no master of language. The words aren’t always there. But I see clearly. And I put that to words. I learned this later than I would have liked - that my gut and my sight were a gift. As is yours. How you see the world may not seem special, but your sight is patterned after your uniqueness. Thinking it needs to be corrected, aligned, is a fatal error. I spent too much time trying to hitch my brain and soul to my religion and narrow worldview. I cut that rope but didn’t walk away. I simply walked alongside and saw new things, or old things with new eyes.

Life is vast to any one person. We've not yet reached the bottom of our own waters or the expanse of the heavens. We fire rockets into a void, aiming for bright lights. And we think we know something.

Yet, the pulse of the people is easily felt. In the quiet before dawn, you can feel it. In the slow breathing. In a hand over the heart, lips pushing warm air into cold air.

And I write because life is vast but the heart is not. We break easily. Brittle people conquering and shattering one another. So immense in our own little world. And maybe there's a way to stop that, or slow it down, or stop one heart from bleeding out.

Perhaps.

That's a reason worth trying for.

Advent Week 4: Light

“When the sun shall dawn upon us”

Crowning the horizon, chasing dark shapes from the valley, it comes. Slow. Defiant over the night.

We who sat hushed and holding hands, holding breath, holding embers, exhale.

Strips of light brush skin, spilling through dusty window panes. Refracted on the wall through the forested limbs, it dapples and drapes the world in newness.

We breathe again.

Shadows recede.

The light is come.

As if to say, did you think I would forget?

To which a few say through their tears, yes.

And still others, no, but the night was long.

and yet, “Because of mercy…”

…the light is come.

Mercy drags light into the valleys of death and the dark rooms where we shut our eyes and pray for morning.

Daylight breaks over the weary.

“To guide our feet into the way of peace.”

What other way is there? We learned in the dark the terror of power, of struggle, of unseen hushed words, whispers, stolen names, and we rise from the valley to walk.

Nobody rises for another grave.

Peace. The absence of chaos, or a shield despite it. Peace is a high calling but we’ve all seen the dark. Felt it. Hate it. But peace whispers of something different.

Peace whispers something about a cradle, a cross, and a crown. Peace whispers something about another king. Another way.

Nobody rises for another grave.

Mercy brings light.

Light brings peace.

Peace brings us home.

Burn

I light a candle for the cake. My son turns one. A flame shapes the very face I kiss in the morning. The face I cradle in one hand. The one I wipe tears from.

I light a candle and wrap my fingers around the heat. To shield the wind. To keep it burning while we stand in the dark, praying the children would just come home, demanding recompense from the sky. Someone is yelling on the microphone. Someone is weeping.

I light a candle in the sanctuary. Silent night. Holy night. Eyes mirror and reflect and wander and search for something like hope. Flames flicker under threat of breathing. We breathe slowly. Silently.

I light a candle on a table. We hold hands. We break bread. We say thank you. Thank you for these hands to hold. Thank you we are here around a table. Thank you the flame is still burning. Thank you for the rivers of wax witnessing to the life in the fire.

I light a candle alone

and I am no longer alone.

Happy

You don't have to be happy.

Let's just get that off the table. There's enough pressure to deal with every day without feeling like you've failed as a human being by 7am because you didn't wake up toothing the sun with a fake smile.

Like it's something you just pick off a lower branch on your way to work. Coffee in one hand, an extra-large grin in the other, no room for cream.

Life's not like the toothpaste commercials. 

I've heard so many people say to 'just choose joy'. Be happy! But that doesn't work. You know it doesn't. You've probably tried it. 

Prescribing happiness is a favorite pastime of motivational speakers and stay-at-home Facebook gurus who wear cartoon pajamas to Costco. 

It's been held up as the pinnacle of having your shit together. It's the holy grail for good people. 

But spend your life looking for happiness and you'll always be disappointed. Because happiness is a reaction. A response. A huge super-soaker of joy that is fun as hell to use, but quickly runs out of water.

You don't have to be happy.

Right. 

But.

But it's worth trying to be content. 

Maybe you'll stumble your way over to happiness after that, but try to be happy before being content and you're only fooling yourself. 

Because content is where you can be imperfect. It's where being okay is good enough for this moment. 

It's where we can be a bit of a mess - and on our way to putting the pieces together before dawn - we can breathe. We can breathe because we're not trying so hard to be happy, we're not pretending, we're not forcing, we're just accepting. 

There will be happy days. Or you'll be subdued. Or pensive. Or creative. Or angry. But contentment will draw you back to some center and release you from needing to be someone you're not. 

It's ironic when people are sad they can't be happy. So don't be.

If you're going to be anything, be okay. 

Find some peace.

And move on from there.

Sons

Call them sons.

Not boy. Not youth. Not child.

Sons. Who, even when their bones and sinews stretch towards celestial lights, will continue to be sons. As I am a son. Even as kings and fathers.

Sons of inheritance. Their father's eyes. Their father's love for mountains. Their father's heart. Their father's kingdom. Their father's dreams, maybe.

To be a son is to live forever. My father, a son. Me, a son. My sons.

Men, someday. Kings.

But sons, nevertheless.

Advent Week 3: Presence

The journal was removed from its leather sleeve and casually tucked in a corner of the workshop, beneath flakes of dried pipe tobacco and sawdust.

The card stock cover provided no context so opening to an entry from Christmas a few years ago was a surprise. It wasn't much writing. A few lines. Words scrawled hastily across a cramped page. A confession.

Too many gifts.

Not enough presence.

A time for reflection becomes a mad dash of color and light; a feeding frenzy for consumers of trivial things. Consideration and celebration are exchanged for a cheap plastic cradle and we move the star from above the stable to dangle it over a sack of toys like a carrot.

But the gifts are good. Giving is good.

Only, not at the expense of the gift.

The hope and promise.

I don’t want to see shreds of wrapping paper like breadcrumbs tracing back to when we should have bathed ourselves in the hope of a newborn king. To miss the grace is too great a risk. To enter Advent as dusty sojourners and not come out the end as light-bringers is a tragedy.

This is our chance to reclaim the glitzy warp-speed world for the manger. This is our chance to remember how the darkness froze in terror at the sounds of birthing from a stable. Mary’s groaning. First cries of life.

While people inside the inn ate, or argued, slept, or worried, on the other side of the wall, the king came unto us.

The stable is where you find us, the ones who pine for mercy. In the quiet corner, on the silent night, when hope came unto us.

Here we are, Lord. No lights but the stars. No sounds but our feet shifting on the hay.

Nothing but the presence.

And that is the gift.

Tough

You don't have to be tough.

Heavy chest, feels like 9am was a push. Cycle through the usual rotary of inspirational quotes or verses and come up empty.

Empty like the hands we're turning over. Palms facing sky, soft altars offering up one-word prayers.

Help.

Save.

Please.

And empty hands is a great way to begin. Because we can't be tough forever. We can't ride adrenaline and caffeine until we crash through our doors at 6pm.

You don't have to be tough. But if you want to be strong.

You need to let someone open those white knuckles, love, so you can receive.

Palms up.

Receive your name. It's been too long since you've just listened to it. You have worth.

Receive your hope. It's been too long since you've been built up. You have a name. You have worth. Your life has meaning.

Receive your identity. It's been too long since you've drawn your strength from anything other than effort. You have a name. You have worth. Your life has meaning.

And you're strong because of who you are, not what you do. Not what others see. But who you are.

Your identity is your strength. You don't have to put up the fists. You don't have to grind your teeth. You don't have to hold the heavy world.

You have to hear your name.

And be strong, again.

Nice

You don't have to be nice. 

Nice is the Botox of human dispositions. 

It's an injection of switchblade smiles to cover up the truth that we don't know how to be kind or civil. A true smile is in the eyes, but when we're nice, the paralysis only allows for a slight crease in the lips. 

Kindness, however, is that kind of natural beauty stopping people on the street. Because it's rare. And it's cultivated. It's attractive. Magnetic. It leaves you with an impression. It comes from a deeper place. 

Kindness comes from authenticity and unshakable identity. 

But not like Instagram authentic, where you're "real" because there's a trending hashtag. And not like your grumpy-ass friend who is just "being real" whenever she/he barfs up criticism. 

The real woman has molten iron in her veins. She's warm to the touch but is metal inside. She's not nice. Not even close. She might swear. Probably, actually. And she's either fearless or has more courage than you or I.

Real people are not nice, they're kind. 

They're not agreeable, they're straight-shooters. 

They're not pushovers, they're resolute. 

Real people don't smile unless they want to and when they do, it's in the eyes.

Be real.

And be known for your kindness.

Freedom

Freedom.

That's what we're promised. Like we have to be convinced of this fact.

But we return to our cages. We're familiar with the coolness of metal on the soft of our cheeks. As much as it keeps us in, it keeps the rest out. And that feels like safety.

We learn to live the cage. It is the eternal excuse for the well-intentioned. At least I tried. That's what we say. Is that my voice?

Because to be free means we have something to lose. And choice. And the dread that follows hope around like a shadow, even on dark days. There's risk here.

Freedom is not peace. Or joy. Freedom is owning yourself. Freedom is unmerited grace. It has substance. Weight. Worth.

You are free and you have worth.

And anything of worth, I suppose, can be lost.

Freedom can be terrifying when all we've seen is a sunrise through the grate. To run towards that light...maybe we never thought that could happen. Better to not dream. Better to stay here. Better to keep to our solitary shadowy kingdom than to have something and lose it.

Or.

Maybe...

Better to risk losing something of worth than to forfeit the inheritance; what could be. Better to run in open fields. Better to try. Better to fail and rise again.

To rise, the same way our freedom came to us.

To rise.

This is freedom.