I concluded, last night, in a flurry of penned words, that perhaps all of man's faltering come from this inherent and profound longing to know and be known. Never before has this impression seemed to stamp itself so starkly on my person. Materialism, atheism, lust, idolatry, etc., all pack with them the creature's incessant demand for significance, and perceived understanding of another. Whether we're deflecting attention or attracting it, our eyes are ever looking out to gather in, that which we think will stack, or support us whole.

I loathe how base these thoughts are, and yet, their simplicity seems to be a factor in our overlooking the sins that result from this. There is an inward tending that is vital to a man, wherein he takes his assorted expectations and disappointments, and correspondingly filters and aligns them with truth. Again, this is commonly known to man, but is adequate effort given to ensure that affecting truth is reaching the regions most often touched by the interactions that define us?

The truth about God's feelings to His children and this earth, while meant to be filtered through His word, are much more often filtered through our experiences. Each man concludes an unknowable amount of rubbish about His God corresponding to his own physical attributes, upbringing, and experiential databases, which, in turn affect all that was created to be refracted through the unique prism of his life.

I beckon to you, in an especially simple post this Valentine's Day, to align the love you've received, and the love you've given -- regardless of the quantity, and look up to the Giver for continuing to reach out in love to us. It is He that planted eternity in our hearts to know Him, and He alone that can seam up all our sorrowing souls. This is so spare a post; may the Lord add grace in your hearing.

My words are stopped up, thick, and lodged somewhere out of reach. I have been fetching for them as I walk, and when I wait, but as time flees and days end, I still cannot find them. From some time ago:

A thick band: a chord is fixed; lithe and supple, and the support of a man. Around this is enveloped a pod which opens to cloisters and crevices unseen, of unparalleled proportions and elastic capacities. Collapsed within are the by gone hopes of parted days, and withered words; unspoken, unused. Long forgetting their praise, we are as wood winds never taking a breath; strings, brittle and cracked with muted song, blunted loves and trapped beckonings, extracted only in thought.

So, for what do I play, as I tend and tarry in my inward man? I lean in to be laced, and reach out for a hook, salient and secure, where on I might latch for the support of grace to be broken and remade. For as I step out, frenetic pulses surge and multiply, and I am sprayed onto the canvas of colliding interplay, and I am seared, as a coal to my soul - my chamber is sullied. All souls experience flight, and love visiting to lift, smash, and transport up into cloud shadows and dayscapes of lifted joy onto green-drenched hands of upturned leaves, arched out from the trunks of steadfastness.

So then, all men begin their words with history; his own retelling and perceptions, however disconnected he thinks he may be. He navigates, through his own back alleys, longing to know, and thus to be known. I feel at times, that I was pulled through this life portal as at once, and abruptly. Memories before seem of wood carvings with nostalgic goodness, possessing some sort of removed remembrance, wherein the temporal took on eternal, plastic was replaced by leather, the tarnished to silver, and a full love of cherry, oak, maple and pine was spun open. I began navigating thus in an earthen vessel of carved wood, with the love of the raw bursting upon every memory as the Lenten Rose pokes up through snow. So too, the cloak of draped matter, which covers and contains all that is needed to secure and succor the bodies, and thus, the souls of men. How strange, that an orb might spin, rotate, and hang as Your earth; planets all in orbit around Your Son. Stranger still, that He is mindful of us, dust gathering dust and trying to make sense of it all --

I long for largeness of soul, to glance into grace -- to retain that which can change me, and to know the only One who truly sees me, truly knows me. I am derailed by many things, and while I see that every earthly love must sometime die, I yearn so deeply for timeless love, eternal, unbroken, untainted love, and thus I know I yearn for my eternal One. His grace is as the waters, whose upper gloss could enrich enough to quell all care, and align all regions. The glass shelf that covers two-thirds of this earth -- while able to whelm in a sweep, is shown to sustain as unsearchably deep, drawing as the tide, the heart of man back to his God.

I am not sure anything written here makes sense, but I hope that some nuggets might rise to the surface...