Play another verse...

After the whirlwind of the past few months, one thing was certain: life was a maze. There was nothing straight forward about it. Everything that pretended to be straight somehow ended in unexpected twists and turns, only to leave me full of wonder at how I possibly made it through to the end. I couldn't just pack a pair of hedge trimmers to take a shortcut and hoodwink fate. No, I had to walk the path of life given to me with all its detours. The goal wasn't to avoid getting lost all together - in fact, that was most unlikely given that I was in a maze. I think the trick is to simply keep walking. To enjoy the process of getting lost and finding myself again, different and more grown-up than when I had left. One step after another, that was all that it took. One step after another, so simple and so utterly enough.

Headfirst into the abyss...

I don't know, either way...

I keep quiet and look out the window. The light is weak and watery-looking, like the sun has just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up. The shadows are as sharp and pointed as needles. I watch three black crows take off simultaneously from a telephone wire and wish I could take off too, move up, up, up, and watch the ground drop away from me the way it does when you're on an airplane, folding and compressing into itself like an origami figure, until everything is flat and brightly colored - until the world is like a drawing of itself.

He's been falling, tumbling through the air. But this time the darkness is alive around him, full of beating things, and he realizes that he's not surrounded by dark but has only had his eyes closed all this time. He opens them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterflies take off around him, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below him. All green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath him. And the air around him is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and he's laughing, laughing, laughing as he spins through the air because, of course, he hasn't been falling all the time. He's been flying.

What it sounds like...

Dig in some roots...

Maybe that plane wouldn't ever take off,

maybe that dust wouldn't fly off the drive,

maybe that tumbleweed and me,

wouldn't leave every other sunrise.

Maybe I wouldn't be already gone again,

if it weren't for the wind.

Something I won't talk about...

You are wrong. If there is anything I have learned in my travels across this absolutely absurd concept that is life, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear - whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can. I've seen belief do mystical things, make my grandmother stave off death, and turn my jaded heart into something resembling life. This entire thing that is not a blog has been constructed from belief. Belief damned all those whose heart clung to the hope that another loved them when they did not. Once, it made a me seek immortality. And it has made a posturing spirit think it is something more than a part of me.

Weren't for the wind...

It's during these times when we are weakest, when our feet tremble and we are being pushed down to the ground by the sheer weight of existence. I have to remember that this is when the universe can show itself the most dramatically. And I'm not talking about just taking way my panic attacks, although if it wanted to do that, it certainly could. What I'm talking about is giving me the grace and freedom and courage to live out my life - stress, anxiety, and all - in front of others with a vulnerability that can only come from above. Are you there, universe? It's me, Karr.

It might not let me go...

Fix what you didn't break...

He exists in the tears that you shed when you stumble upon a song that brings all your memories and pours on you at once. He exists in every touch of you, that kills a rose for a second and then makes it immortal. He exists in that thunder that shakes the heart of your world and brings it down to its knees. He is everywhere inside you, where you know he would exist, but you would never search.

Sometimes it's okay to be surprised. It's going to sound stupid, and I wouldn't ever say this out loud, but the way I have stumbled through the last six months er was sort of like getting caught in a thunderstorm. Storms can suck when they're knocking out power and ripping apart houses, no doubt. But other times the thunder is a soundtrack to something unpredictable, something that gets our hearts racing and wakes us up. If someone had warned me about the weather, I might have freaked out and stayed inside. But I didn't.

Go forth and have no fear...

Watch the only way out disappear...

Fold down your hands,

give me a sign,

put down your lies,

lay down next to me.

Don't listen when I scream,

bury your doubts and fall asleep,

find out, I was just a bad dream.

It's breaking his heart...

His whole life, the gnaw of anxiety has made people opaque to him. No matter how well he knows someone, no matter how deeply he loves, no matter the logical patterns, no matter how many allowances he knows someone might make for him, that bone-deep fear of rejection has always made it impossible for him to see any of it. It frosts over the glass. He never had anyone to begin with, then he had someone and she died. And every since he let it be unsurprising that nobody would want to have him around or truly trust that anyone would stick with him even as he's yelling at them to go away.