kite flying

Dear friend,

The moon is full and so vibrantly bright tonight; it feels like a birthday present from God.  Today is my birthday, but more than that, it's a day of hope and celebration and people.  So many good, encouraging people walk beside me in all my doubts and fears and faith and crazy dreams.  These people make me who I am, and if you're reading this you're one of them.

Below is an old poem I wrote for a dear friend.  It's more silly and less structured than I usually am, but I hope you find the goodness in it.  I hope you have people that know you and are known by you.  I hope you feel loved and celebrated and accepted.  I hope, I hope, I hope.  I could write a book about all my hopes.  Maybe one day I will.

for steph.

Sometimes I dance in the aisles of the grocery store

And I remember pieces of who you used to be

A cage full of dreams and wings,

Yearning to be set free.

Rewind and freeze

Back to when we thought pop tarts were dinner

And a 401k was a marathon

And tables

Were strictly for dancing upon

And we took the long way because we weren’t in a hurry

"Busy" was an old person word

Right after mortgage

And just before worry

It wasn’t so much about the destination back then

The 9-5 paycheck to paycheck of making ends meet

Because if you have to pencil me in

If you spend all your time waiting for life to begin

If your goals turn into a means to an end

To a means to an end

It’ll never end

It’s in the journey

In between squiggly highways on maps

It’s the whisper of wind that says

Make your own path.

It’s the second you release a kite to the sky

And it grows wings and soars

So much higher than you thought it could

Or ever even expected it would

And suddenly, you realize that your hope is in flight.

You stop where you stood

Because your mind can’t wrap around

That while your feet are on the ground

Something beautiful is alive

And somehow it is tied

With a thread

back to you.

The truth is

That these are our days

You gotta shake yourself out of this haze

Dear friend,

If you keep worrying about what comes next

You’re gonna miss the best part of the movie.

Meeting life with breathless anticipation

Coffee and good friends and grand central station

Frayed jeans and loud music

Sometimes the best motivation

Isn’t money

Or success

Or seeming important

It’s dancing and exploring

And recklessly living

It's in having the grace

to be wildly forgiving

It’s in knowing that losing

Can be the best kind of winning

And having the strength to start 
from the beginning

when you

just

want

to quit

I don’t want to go down the checklist

Of graduation to college to fast-paced career

I refuse to live my life based off the fear

That when you color outside the lines

It’s not okay.

There’s freedom in knowing the whole world isn’t gray.

There will be

people in this life that will scoff at your dreams

But if we can’t see the forest for the trees

Maybe our broken eyes need to relearn how to see

Because

It takes much more courage to believe

Than to break.

Giving up is easy but

hope?

Hope takes the biggest kind of strength.

Hope has faced disappointment and yet still chooses

grace.

It requires that we wrestle

all our fears and flaws

and still remain

vibrantly courageous
when faced with the unknown.
Keep holding your kite strings to the sky
and know-
everything is possible.
everything can fly.
everything can grow.


including us.