You’re a Star, Whose Paradise Awaits

Ever go to hear a speaker who’s sold as the second coming of Gandhi, only to find Chris Farley instead? (RIP spirit of Chris!  No offense.  You were genius, Nick Foley and all)!

I say this as a reminder to all of us to expect more out of life. The temptress of celebrity worship is a fetching little dame.  So much so, she won Snooki a major book deal. Yes, a book, with more than 15 pages.  And no pictures.  I’m sure it’s an okay little tale.  But what about yours?

I see scads of people ignorning their own story, instead worshiping the very idea of just having a picture made with some shiny-eyed TV glitter or a big-Chicklet movie star they don’t know at all. There’s nothing wrong with the picture, as long as we demand something worthy of genuine respect out of everyone in the frame.  Celebrity ought to be earned, not just photographed.

Celebrities are cool, often. But let’s require more them, and ourselves, than a grin bigger than the grill of a ’59 Buick. Let’s ask them, and us, to contribute spiritual value, courage, genuine compassion, beautifully disruptive new ideas and challenges that jar us awake. Let’s require a certain grace of us all.  Let’s make a celebrity of that.

I see too many people sleep walking through life. I find myself doing it at times, and it ranks among my greatest self-disappointments. To waken to the doing of great things, telling fear to drop dead, is to live. It is our calling.

When Faulkner picked up the Nobel Prize, he said a thing that haunts around my heart nearly every day. It wakens in me the urge, the longing, to do, to matter, not merely stand and watch. Faulkner said that humankind will not merely survive. Humankind will prevail.

I agree. And we prevail only by action. By motion.

So, run, forward, off toward your own legacy.  Flee every testy little temptation just to stand and adore stardom for stardom’s sake.  Live so well, so magnanimously, no idle stardom can light on the hem of your mind, there to tempt you just to be rather than be extraordinary.  

Expect more than stardom.  

Many have tangled in the sparkling barbed wire of celebrity.  Facebook has made a business model of the pictures.  But too few become worthy of getting celebrated.  I mean in a way that matters, from the tops of the ivory towers way down into the gullies of the desperate and forgotten. As I said to an audience a few short weeks ago, your ordinary is someone’s extraordinary. Someone waits to see the natural you become a supernatural force in a life other than your own.  Such stardom is there, within each of us, waiting for us to set it loose to run. 

And ever notice that the celebrities who get this, the ones who practice it, are the celebs who last?  They’re the stars who don’t flame out in the waning contrails of flash bulbs.  They tend to be the ones without a mug shot.  But even those who let us down harbor a greatness beyond their own fame.  A greatness in waiting.  And thank God for the firmament that harbors the likes of Tom Hanks and Oprah — imperfect as the rest of us, and determined to matter! 

Each of us has a choice — even when we open our mouths to choose a few simple words — about who we will become.  We get to decide how well we will prevail.  Want to be a star?  Shine some meaningful, kind, generous thing upon the world, especially the cold corners of it, where people seldom find celebrities or much to celebrate.  

A picture with a star is bound to fade.  But daring to waken and live beyond the flash bulbs.  Daring to live with meaning.  That’s how we fall softly into paradise. That’s how we harbor a good and lasting light. 

Excerpt from The Sinners of Honeysuckle Road

This is just a quick sampling of the book, from it’s beginning. It’s a tale of the 1960′s South, lush with oddities, the unorthodox, the spiritually lovely and the outwardly beautiful, all at full-throttle trying to find their way. Much like life today without Vietnam and newsreels and transistor radios. Enjoy this little taste, and feed me back your thoughts.

The Sinners of Honeysuckle Road
Copyright 2012, Michael Cogdill
_________________
One
1960’s Coastal North Carolina

Fredrick Robert Turner claimed he felt nearest to God with his arm up a filly’s birth canal. Even on her side, a horse stood sacred in his heart, high and holy as any cathedral. Going shoulder-deep into a birthing mare rose way above trying to cram his heart up what he loved to call the “airtight ass of orthodoxy.” For him the too highly churched could make an Easter basilica cold as a January well bottom.

I was barely out of boyhood when he started laying that gospel on me. All about how healing an animal felt hallowed. Cosmic beyond the stars. Doc Turner said ailing creatures, mute of all hateful words, harbor the paradise of mercy, of forgiving life for what it’s given. That God fully flowers in their eyes, whether they’re restored to flourish or cushioned to die. He shunned the fear and strut and pelt-preening of humankind in favor of animal humility, their honest and simple grace, even when they’re pretty. His patients never sermonized him about cuss words or the slippery evils of sex and wine. They refuse to worship some “little red-faced woman-hater aiming lightning at us from the heavens.”He couldn’t remember not adoring them for it. For all of it.

The fall after he graduated Duke Seminary – where he went to appease an inheritance from the mother who fancied him the rising new Billy Graham – Fred Turner enrolled his mastery of United Methodist divinity into the school of veterinary medicine in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He claimed he told the matriarch he needed a postgraduate sabbatical in the high church of Noah’s modern ark. She gave in and vowed he would get the coastal house – its graceful swath of coastal ranch land and all – and the some-odd million dollars anyway. As long as he tested his gospel legs with some occasional marrying, burying and preaching and didn’t slay himself on some “sugar-tit slattern masquerading as a Tarheel princess.” He told her just to think of the DVM after his name as Doctor of Virginity’s Madonna. He once threw a wink at me and said, “If she’d read my mind the day I graduated vet school, DVM would have stood for Dabbler in Vaginal Merriment.”

My memory still raises the man, and the woman he nearly worshiped, into mortal angel-hood, no matter the nattering that went around about them. To this moment they feel to me like the bearers of miracles, having straddled earth and heaven. They could out theologize a dozen clerics and out cuss the crew of an aircraft carrier. Their flaws, to me, made them more nakedly true and far more interesting than most anybody else I’ve known, save some women. The Turners were direct as a fine rifle, elegant as the scroll work of its sides, and always on a hair-trigger hunt for fun, only once in a while out stalking the overly pious doing harm. They made the rarest love, all over one another, even with a glance. Love deep as moonless night and they the only stars in it. They loved barefaced and out loud, and proved it even to the mail man. When he crept around looking for someone to sign for a package, he caught them in the literal making of it – both wearing only the heat of the day on a hammock strung between oak trees in the side yard. Whispers soon rose about the Turner house as a harbor of Godless sweaty wickedness. Gossip never gets around on its tiptoes, so even children, with hardly a twig’s worth of understanding why, came to fear the place as a high-dollar flophouse for the hell bound. But whispers through that grape vine seemed to callus no Turner’s heart. They both still defeated sadness when it knocked at all hours at their every door, even when the knuckles belonged to the duped and the desperate. I live as some proof of that. A witness to the goodness of two people even my own mother had quietly indicted as “right vulgar, I hear tell.”

On a night not long before I turned ten years old, momma smoked tires, as much as our landlord’s borrowed Rambler wagon could, to the great house Doc and Janie Turner shared. My lap rode full of the part golden retriever she had gotten to help replace my father. My Samantha had taken a snake bite in the back yard of our trailer, but we didn’t know of it until the sickness and swelling had laid her so low her breath hardly fogged a mirror.

In the glow of his great front porch, Doc lifted Sam from my arms as a minister might elevate an infant to baptize. We had clearly roused the Turners from still sleep, yet they whispered only patience. Quiet care in their high-ceiling foyer, where we waited in its aromas of cherry tobacco and homemade Limon cello. We stood in silence after Janie and Doc disappeared with my Sam through the curtained glass doors into their dining room. After hardly time to worry, he stepped back into the hallway, knelt and drew my face near the bay rum scent of his own. He pulled down his tiny glasses and gave me a moment to magnify the easy care that came up in his eyes. It was his way of warming the news before he let me taste of it.

Doc said the only medicine we could give my Sam was mercy and a sweet goodbye. The words feel soft and stout as the July wind in my memory, even these years after. He patted my shoulders with a vow to help me live up to so fine a dog’s memory, claiming that remembering how Sammy lived was a good and lasting medicine she had left for me.

Having gone directly to fetch them down the hall, Janie slipped in with the needles that would help me feel the last little gust of breath leave my companion. For four years Samantha had wallowed snoring at the foot of my bed. Rather than force us into the purified chill of the office out back, the Turners gave of the most formal room in their great house on the waterway. Allowed the veterinary workings of merciful death to hold sway under the warmth of their best chandelier. They let me lose her with all the serenity they could provide. On the sheeted table of Doc and Janie’s dining room, the curtains of its tall windows billowed under the soft salt breath of the Gulf Stream. I remember because they ghosted against my arm and soon felt warmer that Sam. Her dark mouth had turned cold against my cheek, and that pulled me away. I remember thinking dogs feel no embarrassment at a mother’s confession she can’t pay. From behind me, her vow to bring the money as soon as she could finally quaked out some tears. Broke her down. Doc eased away toward where she stood near the door. I heard her grief turn mildly contagious to him.

“Sweet, there’s no charge here.” His voice tumbled into the room and pillowed into my ears. Eased down into me. The sound of him reminded me Doc was neither devil nor God, but a man bearing our broken hearts under the strength of his own. “No charge, honey, long as you let me share some in raising that boy. I believe there’s God’s own goodness by the ton in a boy who can love a dog that well. I feel it in him. I see it, right there.”

Janie had kept near me, and chose then to ease my face further off from Sammy’s. She kissed her, massaging my hands where they held the fold of her front paws. I still recall the smell of those dog feet — the fresh tang of summer weeds she had romped earlier that day. Janie draped her in a white towel. I stepped back and said my first words since Sam died.

“We were kids together, this girl and me. What happens to her now? What do we do for her now?” In making the voice, I thought of chopping dry oak, how it gives way to a good blade, and that a boy must cut his way out of acting like a baby. Out into being like a man.

Doc had taken my mother from the room, and Janie quietly followed, having said nothing. This gave me time with Sam, a moment to pull back the towel and think about the finality of stroking the gold silk of her. Her head a perfect fit for a boy’s hand. I stood with both hands on her in the quiet. Taking in the lonesome peace left where a good dog’s bounding life had been.

Janie soon eased back to where I stood at the table. She reached a picture of Doc Turner into my view. A snapshot of him in a tuxedo, and her semi-gowned for their wedding, both faces splayed with laughter, as if a wave of fun had crashed extravagantly into them. The shutter had caught him with one hand on her backside, the other wrestling against her own toward some petting of her cleavage. The glass held a web of cracks that reached into the black wood frame.

“You see that glass?” she said delicately from behind me, with her arms slung across my shoulders. “I can’t fix that. It’s just a ruination now. But when I knocked this picture off and broke it a month ago, I didn’t break what’s in it. Or what’s behind it. Not a thing can ever break the times I’ve had with that crazy, beautiful man.”

I looked at the picture, looked up at Sammy’s half-covered silence on the table, and I felt the truth of what she meant massage the places where I hurt. Her wisdom so simple and clear, so easy to miss. My boyhood grief and I were bound to step right past it without her.

“Son, not a single goodness of your Samantha will ever break down as long as you remember. Remember her. Celebrate her long after she’s gone. Write her on your thoughts . Carry the remembering of her everywhere you go. Death will take her from you only if you let it. Only if you worry more about losing her than you think about loving her.”

We sat a while at the dining table, and she told me how the Doc – a true boy of 27 when she married him — had paid the photographer extra to join him in busting in on her an hour before the organ music started. They ambushed her with a camera to capture him proving his love for her with a little pre-marital molestation. She lived it again, softly out loud, looking at the picture, letting it carry her off a moment. Handsome rascal scamp bastard, she whispered, and covered her smiling mouth and apologized. She told me that picture spoke to her. Had a good say about his crazy way of being in the love they had made together. Love unstoppable. A kind a boy and girl ought never outgrow.

“Darlin’, I thought my mother might beat him like a rented three-legged mule,” she said, helping me stroke Sammy’s head. “Now she’s 101 years old. And wouldn’t trade him for Marlin Brando, a tub of whisky, and another 20 years.”

At that I felt a laugh brush at my insides. Then I cried. The crying came, finally, good and shattering and long. Janie had made it so, willfully, kindly I believe. She and Doc Turner had made it all right. She held me for what seemed an hour, and we cried over Sam together until the crying, for then, was spent. It would buy no more comfort for a while. Then she listened while I told her about Sam — a dog who had walked, adored, for years at my knee with no need of a leash, a far finer creature than most of the people I had known. She told me that meant Sam and I had lived out the secret to their marriage. At their hearts, where no one could fully see, and in a way words won’t quite tell, she and the Doc had romped through life at one another’s knee just the same, free and devoted at once.

Three years after that night, when her diagnosis of an aggressive skin cancer came, Janie aimed the fireworks of her life at the world and lit all the fuses at once.

Les Miserables Too Tough for Dirty Harry?

William Faulkner said most of his work dealt with the human heart in conflict with itself. Victor Hugo dealt with the heart beaten, chained, trampled, stalked, debased, lascerated. Then he got to the conflicted parts.

As in great literature, so it is with this human race.

The human heart is one fine, complicated, beautiful mess of a world all its own. It breaks easily, heals stronger than it was, craves and repels love, fools the hell out of us, and defies all poets who’ve tried to harvest its every field. It is a fool’s errand, walking this life with such a heart. It’s also the very best thing about being alive.

A heart is a land that ages only as its owner allows. Anger burns holes in it. Scorches its ground. Malice swamps it in a cold-water hell. But a radical love cuts into it, lets a warming overtake the place. It keeps a human soul growing, young and well, with the dew on it, and the June sun always rising.

Les Miserables confirms all this, with a sweep so great, you think it impossible that such a tale sprang from just one imagination. The latest life of Mr. Hugo’s great novel on screen exposes his unruly, revolutionary, grace-filled heart anew. He clearly grasped that every soul is destined harbor rocks and snakes and human devils, and that outrageous love is a heart’s only worthy blade to plow them out. Only such love can turn our ground and grow us into something fit and worthy to carry on.

I dig the Dirty Harry movies, but for raw survival, fire-tempered strength, and the will to live, Hugo is an original macho man. Dirty Harry, sure, whipped his scoundrels by the shorthairs on the streets. Most of them died mercifully fast. But Hugo — he drilled his people into the streets. They live a long-suffered hell under thoroughfare’s of the slums, way beneath the blood of fisticuffs running out doorways of the upper crust, even the higher poor. Dirty Harry might turn Kardashian if you chained him to Hugo’s Miserables.

Hugo dared to break strong men and women with a rod of human indifference, scatter their pulp in sewers of inhumanity, then remake them. He loved to plow them out of the lowest swamps. To read him is to live reminded even the most hopeless harbor hope, and are fit vessels of grace. In Hugo’s world, any of us can ride upward, pulled out of the cold dark on the stout blade of that cosmic love.

“Feeling lucky, punk?” Harry asked. Hugo might answer, “Keep your luck, Harry. I’m not afraid to live without it.”

None of us need be.

Adding Some Golden To The Fifty Shades of Gray

Anyone who knows me knows January in the Northern Hemisphere is not my heaven’s gate. The gray, damp cold pulls me toward hibernation. A run, the gym, a body of water — my usual happy zones — they all hold a tad less allure.

But a golden retriever changes the weather of the heart.

Mags romping a field near some old woods in the afternoon cold — the sight of it warms my eyes, runs spring up into my wintry dark. I more than watch. I throw. That girl would chase a ball through a sub-zero swamp. She’ll run at my knee for 4 hardly winded miles. The pulsing fog of her breath, her sheer immunity to winter remind me January begins our ascent. It calls us to begin climbing out, toward the first balmy run-sweat of spring. To Mags, January is God’s morning playground. The high church of thanksgiving for what’s to come.

Maggie abides none of her dad’s January doldrums. She lives, instead, an endless summer within herself. At full stride, wild as a gold star fallen to bounce the ground, she creates a good, clear spiritual weather for herself, and for me. It is more than good.

A golden matters, especially when this life turns chill. They matter as therapy dogs for the people of Newtown, CT. They carry healing through the halls of hospitals, hospices, vet centers, day by warming day. Mags and the spirit of our Savannah — her late cousin — stoke the June in your writer here, even through these 50-plus shades of mid-winter gray. They make me a far better soul.

Perhaps it’s no accident that all light of the sun, even deep in winter, is golden.

Such a dog will take you as you are, especially on a dark and colorless day, when you’re lowdown and giving hell to a world giving it right back. People strain at being so good as a golden retriever, and we ought look to them as a quiet model for a human life. Oscar Wilde captured the truth of it when he reminded us “Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.” Mags is a sweet dream of a sinner, but with a heart warmer than the human kind.

She seems to know the gloom of now will not make the leap into days to come.

People will add to your gloom. They’ll wag a cold, scolding, moralizing finger at you, thinking it a wand of their own sainthood. They have no right. And when those of us who count as human creatures do this, we have no fun, no real joy. Mags seems to know better than to live our way. Rather than a finger, she wags her backside — in a way that transcends how words can say, “I dig you, and you needn’t try to earn it.”

Every soul wears its stains and tears. Maggie teaches me to let mine show, for they are forgivable after all. One look at her and I remember the house training failures, the bathroom door she chewed, the time she swiped a whole loaf of bread from a neighbor’s child just because she could get it in that mouth. I remember these for a nanosecond. Then, I forget. I forget because she forgets to judge me. It is a divine forgetting — one that reminds me we’re at our best when we’re downright extravagant with love. When we wag our own backsides, rather than our tongues.

So in these swamps of winter, may the ragged garments of our souls become the handles by which others raise themselves to limp along with us. May we hold to the brokenness of one another, warming our tattered selves, knowing we’re loved beyond the stars! Maggie, Savannah, thank you for this wisdom. You have helped to teach it to me.

Just across the threshold of a new year, a toast: To our pasts, to our futures, and to the January in all of us. For all it’s chill and early dark, I am wakened and moved by the stride of a truly good dog. So often, she is a far better man than I am. She makes me a better man all the time.

Well, Maybe He’ll Grow Into It….

When Harry Truman ascended to the Presidency, amid one of the most threatening and dark times in global history, he declared himself “too small for this job.”

That declaration, for all its noble humility, would prove right and wrong at once. When he said it, he just hadn’t grown fully into his relationships. Truman was man enough to admit he needed help to meet the high calling of the man he would become. The people he knew, would know, the enemies he would befriend, had yet to grow him.

So it is with all of us, in the calling we all hear.

Truman was, it’s true, a small man from a tiny piece of Missouri. Yet he would prove himself a giant among leaders.

Early in his Presidency, Europe was literally starving in the rubble of WW-II — people in Hungary literally reduced to eating acorns to survive. Somebody had to do something.

Truman did. He anointed one of his most bitter rivals to get it done.

He and Herbert Hoover agreed on virtually nothing. The wiring of their minds and hearts and backgrounds was crossed and hot. It sparked with antipathy for one another. If it were socially acceptable, the two men could have turned a 5 minute political chat into the dust and gore of a raving fist fight.

But they did not. Instead, they buried their hatchets square in the forehead of global despair.

Hoover had already helped keep many from starvation after WW-I. Truman knew this. He dared asked his enemy to do the same again, even though he did not adore him. Not yet.

These two men proved a world literally gets saved by humility, and the leadership of flawed men who decide to transcend their flaws and allow what feels like a senseless form of love to rule their hearts. Instead of hating on each other, they loved on many. They loved, and led, through one another.

It was right. And it worked. Millions were saved from the indignity of openly starving to death.

I write this just to think out loud on how relationships matter. Our friends, and all who love us, sustain us. They cover our ground, keep the frost of heartbreak and lonesomeness off us. We grow under their warmth and light, and they under ours.

This grows more radically true when a sworn enemy turns to friend.

The men and women who built our republic are flawed souls. Yet the fabric in which they’ve enwrapped the world — slubs, tears and all — spreads a warm and healing weave. They acquited themselves as giants after all, in large measure because they refused to stand alone. They prove the power of even a singular courageous friend to restore the blush of life to a man or woman who seems, and feels, too weak and small for what’s at hand.

Just the thought of them reminds us that the WW-II generation — wet with the dew of youth not so long ago, really — thrived through times far more ominous than our own. Their generation refused to lose heart. Even from their graves, they manage to shout this out to you and me.

We are not born for despair and victimhood. We are, instead, born to light the dark of another soul whose times are far worse than our own. Living up to this inspired de Tocqueville to call America great because America is good. He was right when he said it. Even from his grave, all these years hence, he still is.

In the coming year, amid all the despair-speak and the hell raised through the cables on our TV’s, through all the right fighting that grabs at us us day and night, may we remind ourselves that we are called to become a one-man/woman solution. We’re wired for leadership, original thought and radical love, even when our wires cross with someone we enjoy despising.

To feel too small to change the world is natural. To admit it and ask for help is heroic. Lyndon Johnson did it after the Kennedy assassination. Truman did it to call a dying Europe to life. Truth is, if we drill into their history, we’re bound to find this is a hallmark of the American Presidency. Around the world the pinnacles of leadership can become the most lonesome of places. The great dare not stand on them alone.

Which tells us plenty about ourselves. Ours is a life made for addition, not subtraction. May we add friends who look like enemies and make them feel like family. May people walk away from just a chance meeting with us saying, “I am made better by him. She improved me. This very moment, I am changed for the far greater.”

In this we write our history. We sustain ourselves by this extended family we harvest. Living this way, history will be kind to us.

We will have grown ourselves deep into this hard, good, beautifully wild humanity. Especially when the times get hard, we’ll prove nothing fits a soul with quite so much elan as the unstoppable love of a friend.

Wall? What Wall?

There is one way — and only one — to know who you truly are in this wild mortal life.

Run headlong, like a man or woman on fire, into a challenge.

You will never fathom what you can do, who you can become, until you do.

Everybody eventually hits a wall too high to jump, too steep to climb. Plenty of little human chihuahuas will yip and bark their despair at you when you hit it. They’ll claim it impossible. They’ll yap and yammer on that you can’t clear it — that it can’t be done. Most of them have never dared take a run at it.

Steve Jobs delivered a commencement at Stanford a few years ago, just after his cancer diagnosis, and he said something that will ring in the ears of my heart for life. Steve warned that eager crowd that time is short, don’t spend it living someone else’s life.

I say, amen. I say be the someone else most everyone else won’t dare become. Okay, it’s a tad confusing, but it’ll make sense when you roll over at 3 am.

This is a season of life’s sweeping resolutions. People make promises to themselves, then break them when they find the resolution is a wall that looks, or feels, too hard to break and too high to clear. Because it bloodied them once, too many won’t try again. They won’t look for a way around!

Instead of making a resolution, make a life. Remake yourself into what you want, into who you feel called to become. Good science reminds us the mind is a flexible. We can bend it, shape and re-shape it. Think and act for yourself, not at the behest of someone else. Ignore the yip of the little dog. Become, instead, the alpha dog, the one of quiet courage, strength, compassion. Lead — starting with yourself.

Camus wisely said the best way to deal with the shackles and walls of this world is to become so free, even your very existence is an act of rebellion. All the greats have done it. Your inner great will as well. Let him out to run. Set her free to fly. Sure, you’ll smack the wall, face first, more than once. It may pulp the hell out of you. This is human. But freed from the despair of sleepwalking through a withering life the yapping masses demand you live, you will waken to one so great, you couldn’t imagine it. You’ll clear the walls, one after another. And you’ll begin to know, at last, how stout our mysterious Maker made you after all.

Wall? Yep, it’s there. And another one behind it. They are uniquely your walls in this wilderness life. And beyond them is your paradise. Go. And go well. In going, you’re bound to show others the way.

The Unexpected Beauty of Brokenness

Grief quiets us. It teaches us. Breaks us, yet grief makes us better than before.

We’ve seen it through the sorrows after Newtown, Connecticutt. Grief weakening us to make us strong. Such global loss of lives reveals us. It reminds us the breaking of a heart opens that heart. Into the breakage step the broken, there to abide and embrace and heal one another. Watch for it. In the words and tears of a stranger, the embrace is there, one human brokenness serving another. It’s in the volunteers who bring golden retrievers to love on surviving children and children at heart. This brokenness lets in a rare band of light. Even a pinprick of it reminds us that darkness is no match for a random kindness. In the same fine way, death is no match for love.

The aching of a human heart is a prayer. As a heart groans and weeps, outwardly, inwardly, it opens its arms to the mysteries where God abides. There, in the dark, an aching heart feels around to find its way. It reaches for a light switch that waits for us all. In that dark, God beyond the divisions of religion comes down to us. As the psalmist said, even the dark is not darkness to God. To God, the night is as bright as the day.

The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. In this dark time in American life — in the life of the world — some will shake their fists at the heavens, asking, “why?” “How could you? How dare you allow it?” This, I believe in my faith, is a conversation starter God adores.

In this conversation, may we listen well. May we serve beyond what looks possible. May we recognize love as the only truly high gift a human life can give. It is the only gift that grows more beautiful each time it’s returned. Unlike a chartreuse sweater trimmed in lavender, love drapes us in beauty. It becomes us. Becomes the only lasting part of us. It is the gift we ought give, and receive, with extravagance.

Cheers to extravagant love. It is the entirety of why we’re here. It is the only antidote to what wounds us. Such love makes brokenness beautiful — which makes it a perfect fit for us all.