A year later (reference to prior entry) I’ve come to believe: maybe goodbyes are a little less bitter and a little more sweet. I spoke at high school graduation 5 years ago. I described for my classmates a series of photos posted on my grandma and papa’s family room wall. The pictures are of their old home (now my parent’s home) in each of the four seasons. The summer scene: boats cruising around our little lake watching the sunset. The fall scene: colors falling from our many trees and scattering across the landscape. The winter scene: sunlight glistening on the snow, wind blowing in circles out on the ice. The spring scene: buds beginning to pop, promising summer is coming again. The theme of my speech was more or less Carpe Diem. Embrace change; embrace the next season. Seasons are good. Remember from where you have come. Hold on to what you have learned. Never forget those from whom you learned it. And finally, in all of this, fear the One who made the seasons and who made them all beautiful. Looking back at this speech is a sort of window into my five-years-younger soul. The ideas sound pretty basic, but at the time I clung to these thoughts like a lifeline. Today I return to them. Thinking maybe 5 years ago I was wiser than I am now. Or maybe it was the same grace granted to me then that I am rediscovering in new ways now. I no longer hate goodbyes. Their taste is bitter. That is for sure. But it is also quite sweet. Moving forward does taste bitter. It tastes bitter because where I’m at now is pretty darn good. It also tastes bitter because I’ve more or less conquered this season, and who knows if the next will be as successful or not. And it tastes bitter because those I say goodbye to are pretty darn special. I am blessed and cursed with this: everyone I have ever loved, I never stop loving. Everyone I have ever believed in, I will always believe in. And I am yet to be wrong about believing in somebody. It is reasonable to assume, then, that this pattern will continue and that the joys and burdens of loving/believing will grow with each new person along the journey. Moving forward also tastes sweet, though. If I hadn’t seized the day five years ago, if I hadn’t cast my bread on the surface of the water, I would not be seeing the fruits now. Goodbye tastes sweet because it means more beginnings. At the risk of adding to this immaculate display of xanga mushiness/cheesiness, it means more ‘hellos.’ =) But much more than that, moving forward tastes sweet because it surfaces a deep and unspeakable gratitude. An indescribable gratitude for the experiences gained and relationships found during the season which is about to close. This is why I now believe that goodbyes are more sweet than they are bitter. An author I’ve been reading compares life to a book. The book comes to an end before you know it, he says. Time has pressed you and me into a short book and we share maybe a chapter, maybe a vapor of a scene. Stepping back and taking this big picture view, I see every event and every person in my book as a miracle. It is a miracle that the experiences and relationships in my story so far have brought me joy and have changed my life to the extent that they have. I am inexpressibly grateful for those with whom I’ve shared the first portion of my story. So while moving on is bitter... it is infinitely more sweet. It is more sweet because there is something to move on from, something to say goodbye to, and something to miss in the first place. I am yet to meet a young woman more blessed thus far in life than me... or a woman who deserved all these blessings less than I do. because I do not deserve them. yet they keep coming. and it's not fair. but I am grateful. *** “I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a wife to love a man, into a mother to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my husband, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons. I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently. Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once. Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can’t find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did you really do all of this to dazzle us? Do you really keep shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore your glory.” ~ Through Painted Deserts | 
His tag reads: “
ya... not really sure how successful that was. 
