Away from home

Taylor left yesterday. He came to my apartment Thursday complaining about all the hoops his school is making him jump through. He was all puffed up, words flowing out of him like if he didn't hurry he would forget something. All week long we did more than we had ever done. Drank more, ate more, laughed more, complained more, reminisced more, and just sat gazing upon the endlessness of the rice paddies. This place that was so foreign, where we had felt nature itself telling us we didn't belong, where stares greeted us with a weary suspicion, this place had grown and changed in our youthful minds, or had it really changed at all. Wasn't it really we who had changed as the viewer stares at the masterpiece and his heart overflows. First we floundered and almost drowned in our ignorance, doing just enough to stay afloat. Gasping for air as we struggled and slowly building up our strength, and then suddenly we realized that we could swim like a baby taking those first timid steps, we knew that we could move on through. We still missed so much, but we caught a little more, and with confidence a whole new world was opened to us, astonishing in it's sheer immensity. It was like a gift really. Sitting before us begging to be explored, to be enjoyed and cherished, not to be wasted in that smallness that comes with fear of the different, but to be opened as a child opens a present on Christmas. Not weakly and hesitantly. No, with a frantic abandon as if the gift will disappear any moment, the paper will be gone and the box will be opened to reveal nothing inside. For this is us. We do not have forever, and most of us don't even have a long time. So let us live! Let us attack life with a roaring, dangerous passion! A passion that can't be pushed down and hidden, locked inside. No, a passion that forces us to reach beyond ourselves, to explore the depths of our soul, and as we stand looking out on the ocean that is life, we will not sit idly on the sand, we will swim deeper to the places that few have gone before, and when we reach our place of rest, regrets will be like the delicate drops that glisten as they run down our skin.

Now a chapter of this journey has closed, but as the regrets roll off, the scars and joys will stay written on our very hearts and souls, indelibly hidden to be recalled and not forgotten. Images will fade and voices will be lost, but the warmth of the memory on your heart will stay with you, and the soul will sing soft mournful songs that carry the faintest hint of satisfaction. For this mourning will not have risen from a self unexplored, but one who held back nothing, who wrestled with the things of God, and in this soul, it will be well!