Oh, You

When fear shapes our lives, safety becomes our god . . . Can the safety lover do anything great? . . . accomplish noble deeds? For God? For others? No.

The fear-filled cannot love deeply.

The worship of safety emasculates greatness.

---Max Lucado

Aha Shake Heartbreak

Funny how a breakup can light a fire under you.

It's an unstable energy, though---a chemically induced, too-much-coffee kind of feeling. In the back of your mind, you know at some point you're gonna come down, and hard.

Emotions take turns, and I'm alternately spunky and sullen, pleased and pathetic, confident and crushed, brazen and broken.

If you're like me---single, in your twenties, and notoriously boy-crazy---you've probably (like me) spent a majority of the past ten or so years in the midst of a breakup or recovering from a breakup.

It's exhausting. It's exhilarating. It's exhausting. It's exhilarating.

Heartbreak gives me the shakes. My soul. My brain. My voice. My hands.

But this ain't my first rodeo, and one thing I've learned: a broken heart can SHAKE YOU LOOSE. If you let it, it will rattle and wrestle you right out of a rut, shake and shove you from your precious, stupid nest.

My FAITH isn't shaky. In fact, it has wings.

And there you have it.

I can crash and cry all I want, but Baby, it's time to fly.

The sun has set.

Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The color and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

---Edna St. Vincent Millay, Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended