I am listening to David Gray pandora.  I am crazy about him.  Whenever I ride my bicycle, You're the World to Me goes through my head, comes out my mouth, loudly and badly and so enthusiastically.  It's the song I sing to my father on our cross state rides.  The song I hum when I am the happiest and most free inside.

Someone special bought me tickets to his show at the Orpheum on Monday and so Abbie and I are going to wear those dresses that make us feel dangerous with shoes that sing when we walk.  We're going to stay up late in my studio, talking about the best things in life.  Maybe she'll help me pack because I am leaving on Wednesday and I am fluttery over it.

Last night I was sick and so I tried all of my rememdies.  Egg drop soup, a movie in bed, the oldest softest sweats.  None of it worked and so I went home, raided the medicine closet and wrapped up in my favorite chair with the dog at my feet.  My sister and I were sick together and I slipped into bed with her, a box of kleenex between us, the same tired look on our faces. 

Sometimes I wonder about heaven and I think it must be a collection of all of the best moments.  That is the closest understanding I can come to.  It must feel a little like those small hands that I love playing in my hair, laying close to a person who means the world to me, that perfect summer day, the deepest of laughs.  Maybe He sends us little shadows of it, just to keep our souls hungry.  To remind us that we haven't seen anything yet.

I am traveling back for my grandfather's eightieth birthday celebration and so I have been thinking on life and thinking about the side of life he is on and the side I am on and it has made me a little nostalgic.  I have found myself wanting to drag every minute of every day out.  To stretch them and pull them and if I could I think I would pause between each one, gathering the seconds in my arms, keeping them from spilling over into the next measured unit.  Keeping them.

I am so tired of progression.  I wrote in my father's card that when I watch my little girls, spinning around the room laughing, climbing up into my lap for a hug and then back down to spin all over again part of my heart cries out that used to be me.  Part of my heart is on the floor with them, giggling and spinning and tumbling.  That used to be me.  That is still me. 

I am supposed to teach the lesson tomorrow and part of me is afraid that I will look at them and have no way to say everything that is stored up inside of me.  You want me to tell you about life?  And knowing who you are?  Oh darlings.  Darlings, darlings, darlings. 

I have made some friends who break my heart.  They are beautiful friends, wildly talented, deeply human.  And they are so close, in each of those moments.  Every second, they are are a fraction closer.  But so far away.  The only words I have about life are these: you can not live without Him.  You must not even try.  You'll break your heart if you do.   And there's no putting together that sort of break. 

You have to believe, in every one of those seconds spilling over into minutes.  You have to believe that none of this is about you or for you.  That all of this is about you and for you.  You have to believe in frontwards and backwards and consistency and deviation.  You have to believe in the simultaneous beginning and end wrapped up in those seconds.   But more than anything you have to believe that He is the author, the keeper of seconds.  The creator and finisher of time. 

Believe every page of His stories.  Don't explain them away, don't pass over the disturbing parts.   The parts we can not wrap ourselves around without weeping.  Find yourself inside His book, find yourself inside prayers.  And believe this:  that He has the greatest of plans for your time here.  Stop there and rest a while.  When He planned you out, fashioned your features, tightened your will, He named you good and left His mark on your heart.  That is who you are.  This is life. 

It is Him.