Old Courage

"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations


I wonder if I'll find the courage to bind myself to the unknown in life and look upon it with an eager heart. I wonder what links I'll forge today.


A jazzy, lonesome night tasting like smoky moonlight dancing on the tip of my tongue. That moment between tomorrow and yesterday when all my worries have faded into quiet, gray shadows and each second drifts slowly apart in front of my eyes. My breath beats with a steady, calm certainty against the cool night air and all those every-questions of everyday and everything falls from my shoulders like brown-gold leaves off an autumn tree. It's the boom-boom baby of soft blues in your eyes and poetry in your fingertips when God isn't what I should do or who I'm afraid to be or where I'm going next, but instead He's that rhythm in the soles of my feet, the music that carries me away when my eyes shut and that deep deep satisfaction drifting, drifting like soft, smoky moonlight. It's a night when all my constraints are flung away and I can dare to be free and dare to be alive and dare to stand and breathe in old dreams and faded memories. Dare to remember childhood loves and that magic of circumstance and coincidence. Tonight, I remember.