His voice is music to my ears
Without it the silence is deafening
And when the music stops there's nothing to keep me here
No one to untie the rope around my neck
No one to blow out the flame
No one to take the blade away
Cause to everyone else it's all the same
Whether you die tonight or live the next day

There was a subtle, but yet aggressive tone,
In her voice.
This woman wanted to run away
And up into the stars.
She wanted simpleness to sweep through her veins.
That's the life blood she needed.
You can't have life without cracking
A few eggs;
Without dying a few times, in this, our only escape from death.
Life.
Life itself is the escape she longed for.
The type of life in which it's OK to lie and die, every morning, and smile over it.
Lie to herself and to her
Universe inside her head.
Oh how it rest there, subtle, yet eerily aware of it all.

How about that Polish guy:
Karol Jozef Wojtyla!
AKA Pope John Paul II,
Previously, a Cardinal,
The Archbishop of Krakow . . .
A tough cookie; in 1941
His mother, father, and brother
All died, leaving him the family's
Sole survivor.
Worked in a quarry,
Later a chemical factory,
Enrolled at a university,
Closed by the Nazis during WWII.
Ordained as a priest in 1946.
Holding 2 doctorates, Professor of
Moral Theology & Social ethics;
A powerful preacher,
A great intellect with vast charisma,
Working as a Catholic priest in
Communist Eastern Europe,
He was often asked
If he feared retribution from
Communist leaders? He replied:
“I’m not afraid of them.
They are afraid of me.”

Sounds like a scary guy?
Pope John Paul II,
The name he chose--
Tipping his yarmulke
To Lennon & McCartney,
For “Hey Jude,” no doubt,
Patron Saint of lost causes &
Desperate cases--
History’s most well traveled pope,
With that signature bit,
Coming off trans-oceanic airplanes,
Cutely kissing the ground.
First non-Italian Pope
Since the 16th century.
A strong stoneworker’s body, &
Knowledge of chemistry,
When Pope John Paul I--
Another Beatles fan—died in 1978,
After only a 34-day reign,
Few suspected Wojtyla.
White smoke (fumata bianca)
Announcing a new pope,
Chosen on the 7th round of balloting,
The first-ever Slavic pope,
The youngest pope in 132 years,
Yet conservative, a Papacy marked by
Firm, unwavering opposition to
Communism & war,
Abortion & contraception,
Capital punishment, & homosexual ***,
Coming out later against
Euthanasia.
Human cloning, &
Stem-cell research.
But, hey, you had to love him.
Took a bullet, famously in St. Peter’s Square,
By would-be assassin &
Double ***-*******,
Turkish political extremist named
Mehmet Ali Acqa,
A Muslim, later a Catholic-convert,
An early skirmish in 21st Century
Anti-Islamic Crusades.

Our Polish Pope John Paul II,
Died, succeeded in 2005 by
Our German Pope, Herr Ratzinger,
Calling himself Benedict XVI,
After The King of Pop,
Michael Jackson’s favorite rat,
Benny began the beguine—
Beatifying John Paul II,
During his first year on the job.
Later, acting as if
The Papacy was actually, just a job,
Does the unheard of:  RESIGNS,
Rather than die in office.
Rather like Nixon,
*N'est–ce pas?

I am sun-kissed and I glow in the moonlight,
my eyes reflect like water,
and summer makes me speckle and freckle
and I crave rivers and mountains
and other things that make me beautiful.

I am long-legged like the spiders you hate,
my hair is red like roses and smells like springtime,
I am soft in a way you imagine clouds to be
and I no longer fear you or the dark.

I have grown out of sidewalk cracks,
I am a ******* garden and you can't step on me anymore.

I am too tall to be contained and too beautiful to be detained
and I will never again haunt myself with things I couldn't be.

I am too much to be too little and somewhere you always knew it.

So when you talk to me like you think I still love someone who made me believe I was just an ugly girl,
remember that there are flowers growing inside me,
and I washed the taste of your sharp tongue out of my mouth months ago.

I am an ocean with waves and depths and storms and beauty and there is so much to me that you will never get to see.

You were an anchor weighing me down confining me to one stark place of myself,

I am so much more than you ever saw, I finally know this now.

24 is an age of paradox. A type of 'adulthood puberty' full of change, hair in strange places or colors, and a continual battering of unprecedented demands and expectations.

Conversations evolve. Your phone calls with parents and family become more frequent and important than ever before. They also consist of bites "Your mother and I were married at 21" "How are your savings going?" "Taxes are due on Tuesday" Something involving grandchildren rears its head weekly. How you talk to friends changes as well. The college friends no longer talk about hilarious nights at the bars-your conversations center on reminiscing, planning trips to the mountains, and genuine encouragement. Scotch and Gin have replaced well drinks and Evan Williams-thanks be to God. If you are blessed to have good friends from high school and eras prior the conversations are a combination of dreaming about the far future, checking in on aging family, and an underlying theme of ******* about work.

Making new friends is ******* exhausting. You are all lonely, craving to be known deeply. Liz Lemon screams the mantra of 24, "Yes to staying in more! Yes to Netflix and night cheese! Yes to drinking a beer alone!" Even the most extravagant of extroverts start to value solitude. This is not bad. This is a sign of growth. Herein enters the necessity of balance; commit to investing in those around you and to investing in yourself.

Parents told us "You can be the president! Fly to the moon! Cure cancer!" Those time-stamped conversations are over a decade old. We settled for status on campus via greek life, leadership positions, or achieving a 4.0 GPA. Post-grad none of us are president of anything nor have we walked the lunar surface. For most, a 5 digit salary without benefits equates our level of success. Some have babies or marriage bands, some have masters degrees. The awakening of 24 is sharp. After two decades of being promised we will all achieve the best, we walk in a daze of wondering if we have failed. We have not. Yet we feel the weight of failure. There is much ahead.

At 24 we learn that the promise of the "much ahead" is not guaranteed. Death becomes terrifyingly more constant. Friends, grandparents, teachers, even ones younger than us seem to be dying at a more rapid rate. This is new and it is terrifying. It teaches the importance of community, conversations, and creating.

We may not yet, or ever, be president of the USA. But we have lived enough to know what skills we enjoy and what talents we harbor. The importance of using them rings deeper than ever before-it resonates in our bones. The joy of a well prepared dinner, a thirty-minute watercolor creation, or a blog post your three followers may or may not read in its entirety is a joy worth the effort.

At 24, we are in transition. We are beginning to admit certain unalienable truths about this world and ourselves. We are beginning to really become.

Growing up in Northern Alabama means you know that WalMart sells crickets and those crickets are on sale Sunday afternoons. The art of wetting a line was mine to claim from, a young age. Dad and I would spend weekends on various simplistically named bodies of water (Gunterville, Goose Pond, the Elk, the Flint) equipped with an alarming amount of crickets, ZOOM bait, honeywheat bread and cheap ham. Riptide Rush Gatorade and Michelob Ultra were the choice drinks to ensure proper hydration. The days we filled with a simple formula: cast, reel, catch, release. Bass love lake-**** and Crappie muddy banks. Catfish are not worth the effort involved with avoiding their poisonous whiskers when unhooking even though they look like Dinosaurs. After a lunch of sweaty ham and blue-bag doritos a quick swim in the water is absolutely crucial to cool down and finally get rid of the weariness sitting on a rocking boat gives you.  The big fish bite during dusk and dawn. Some only after the sun goes down. Sleep came when the green and white light rods on the boat become too bright for tired eyes. Finding a random small island in the water, tying the boat to an Hardwood Oak, and rolling out the sleeping bags on the red-clay will always provide the best sleep of your life-just don't think about snakes. The stars are always brightest and the cricket and cicada harmony the most melodic on this little Alabamian islands.

With each year the opportunity for these ventures dissipated. The fishing never stopped-the creeks in the neighborhood, pond beside our family home, and lakes on the Robert Trent Jones golf course (the 18th hole on the River Course was the best) provided ample opportunity to cure the itchy thumb syndrome.

I remember in high-school my father would fish alone by the lake with our dog by his side and an Ultra in his cup-holder almost every night. It was his time to unwind and process. I always appreciated his dedication to the art and the mastery of skills he passed on to me, but I never understood why he fished every single evening.

Until now.

I have been in the so called real world for a mere two year since college graduation. I have completed a post-graduate program, dated and broken up with various women, obtained a full time position doing honest and difficult work for those in need, and recently became a Dad to a hound of my own.

There in a river that flows through my city, but it is to far to venture to every night. The rivers surface in most places reflects bright lights. On weekends you will find kayak enthusiasts paddling against the current like wasps in the wind. The river, here, is a place of fast motion and has forgotten the beauty of a restful yellow bobber downing crickets.

Fishing equates opportunity for breathing. I still wet my line most weekends, but at 24 there is not enough time to recapture the dreams only found on red clay riverbanks. The river remembers and the fish still look like dinosaurs to me.

If you give a girl a with a big heart your broken pieces,
she will gently pick them up and carry them in her soft hands,
and pay no mind to your sharp edges.
She will try to glue you back together
and she’ll do it in a way that made you forget you were ever broken.
With scratched finger tips and ****** palms,
she’ll lift you up to the sun,
letting it's blinding rays shine through you
to show you that even the worst things have things to love in them
and that even the shattered can again be whole.

If you give a girl with a big heart your body,
she will study you like an archaic God.
She will learn your curves and surfaces like braille,
she will adjust her hearing to the pitch of your laughter
so that no matter how far apart you become,
her ears will perk up like a dog's when you giggle,
and she will smile, knowing that you smile.

If you give a girl with a big heart your time,
she will make each second feel like infinity,
and each sunset like the end of the world.
You'll forget that the universe is as vast and wondrous as it is,
because you will be so captivated by the light that she emits
right where she sits,
by your side.

And if you take from a girl with a big heart,
please,
for the love of God,
do not take it all.

If you take from a girl with a big heart,
please remember that her love is not a renewable resource.
The wind and the sun and the water will forever be there to serve you but
she will run dry, and become another fact of history that will one day be forgotten.

If you take from a girl with a big heart,
please remember how sharp your edges were before her,
how lifeless your body was before she touched it,
and how meaningless time was before she made it into something magical.

So bad you'll puke it out
So good you'll eat it again