Blessed Are The Peacemakers

  The Runner Who Couldn't Run Over the past few days, I've found myself revisiting an old song. Be Not Always is a haunting lamentation written from a place of global grief. Born out of watching war, poverty and the suffering of children across the world, it pleads for the pain to stop. It mourns humanity's strange habit of believing that if we simply wait long enough, somehow things will get better. Its a heavy, sweeping song, but one line detached itself from the weight of the world and settled onto mine. “Time has made promises.... just promises.” Michael was singing about history, about the cruel illusion that humanity naturally heals with time. But sitting in the silence of my own home, listening to my body fail me, I realized the lie of time isn't only a global tragedy. It's a deeply personal one. I wasn't grieving the world. I was grieving every tomorrow I had counted on: the healthier version of myself I assumed I'd...

    Indigo Feather, Golden Thread The air in the Meadow of Beginnings tasted of spun sugar and crushed mint. Here, the grass did not simply grow, it hummed an amber melody that kept time with the turning of the cosmos. Wildflowers opened and closed with the breathing of distant galaxies, and the sky shimmered with colors that had not yet been given names. Boy and Girl sat together upon a hill of violet moss, watching a pair of celestial weavers thread ribbons of silver starlight through the great looms of heaven. They had awakened together here more times than stars could count. Every beginning felt strangely familiar. Every ending felt like a promise. Yet if they reached for the memories they slipped through their fingers like morning dew. Sometimes, when the wind drifted in from the east, Boy felt phantom roots tugging gently at his heels, as though he had once stood as an ancient oak, patient beneath countless seasons, learning the slow grammar of the earth. ...

I've laid the plans,  Now lay the chance, Here in my hands. If I ever need to open the floodgates and let myself sob, there are only a small handful of things in my toolbox that can get me there. One of them, ever since I was a teenager, has been Whitney Houston's One Moment in Time Oddly enough, it isn't the song by itself that moves me. I listened to it recently without the video and realized something was missing. I needed to see the images. The athletes. The Olympics. The competition. Watching people pour years of sacrifice into a few brief moments. Some win gold. Some win silver. Some don't place at all. Yet every one of them has given something extraordinary just to stand on that stage. It's the marriage of those images with the song that gives it its full emotional weight. Something about that raw display of human effort, determination and endurance moves me every single time. I actually avoid watching it too often because I'm afraid I'll beco...