My Soul's Release

"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

For days I have held on with clenched, trembling hands
weak in the knees, unable to stand

May the shadows fall from my eyes,
God it is time, my soul wants to rise

I am free-
and with You, as my Father, my Confidant, I am able to be

I love you with my every breath
that beats from inside this newly awakened chest

Consume me for Love's cause
Cleanse me of the scars and the flaws

Forgive me for living half-way
Convincing myself all along, unworthy to move solely worthy to stay...

I feel You, here. You were here all along.

I was living distraught, telling myself that I didn't have a song.

Holding back everything, hopes and dreams,

feeling broken at the very seams.

Once stifled by the weight of the world,

now known, resting in Your arms, in a romance divine, my heart is being twirled.

You have come into the cracked pieces, the disshelveled mess--

You have adorn it all into something beautiful, something of worth and nothing less.

"But no matter how much the mess and distortion make you want to despair, you can't abandon the work because you're chained to the bloody thing, it's absolutely woven into your soul and you know you can never rest until you've brought the truth out of all the distortion and beauty out of all the mess-but it's agony, agony, agony- while silmultaneously being the most wonderful and rewarding experience in the world- and that's the creative process which so few people understand. It involves an indestructible sort of fidelity, an insanse sort of hope, and indescribable sort of...well, it's love, isn't it? There's no other word for it...And don't throw Mozart at me... I know he claimed his creative process was no more than a form of automatic writing, but the truth was he sweated and slaved and died young giving birth to all that music. He poured himself out and suffered....So in the end of every major disaster, every tiny error, every wrong turning, every fragment of discarded clay, all the blood, sweat and tears- everything has meaning. I give it meaning. I reuse, reshape, recast all that goes wrong so that in the end nothing is wasted and nothing is without significance and nothing ceases to be precious to me..."

-Susan Howatch