"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all." The Road, p. 28 It isn't easy being a journeyer. You'd think it would be, now that we have so many electronic means for maintaining ties with the people in our lives. But it just isn't. I once considered myself a man of many talents, skills, and attributes. I followed a roaring crescendo of success through high school, college, and into the world of a young professional. I exhibited ambition and compassion in equal parts, most of the time. I was the golden boy, the wunderkind, the one who was 'going somewhere' in life. The wanderer. Difficult as it was to imagine at the time, I stepped into a new stage of my life that rendered my strengths as weakness. A turbulent undertow of depression tore me into a surging sea of unfamiliar thoughts, feelings, and actions. Stability became a thing of the past, replaced by the chaotic instability of the worst of me. No longer was I the dependable one, the rock, the one who knew no failure. All of that was transformed, swapped for an unwholesome alter ego. A survivor of some spiritual devastation I knew nothing of. A lost soul. A slave. I learned that separation was not the worst part of being in bondage. Sure, I missed everyone and everything, sometimes so forcefully that I wept for hours. I missed you. I missed me. But I learned that a whole world filled with lonely nostalgia casts dull shadows next to the pyre of shame, a perpetual and all-consuming phoenix of the soul without end. Insatiable. Immovable. Ravenous. A paradox: the relentless raptor of my shame burned in the core of what was, on the outside, a winter of the soul. That winter lasted for ever. I fell away, and I regret that I took so much with me from so many people. The closer the friendship, the deeper the sundering. There was nothing that could be done for it. It was what it was. Thankfully, to the everlasting glory of God Most High, ever is no time at all. I have recently experienced a dramatic rebirth that well overbalances the damage of the long winter, and I have begun to reclaim some of the dear things I'd lost or buried. I'm coming up to another crossing place of sorts, and I'm eagerly anticipating a fresh word on what the next leg of my journey will be. I'm dreaming again. I'm remembering my dreams again. I'm finding myself again. I'm beginning the long and uneasy work of mending broken relationships. I am certain that great things lie ahead, for us all. God bless you,
and again,
again. Much love, <>< | 
