The next leg of my journey...

During the last few months, I have journeyed with the most incredible individual. Intelligent, sharp witted, loving, loyal, talented, and dedicated, my friend is unlike anyone else I've encountered. My life is different because of this person, and it is due in part to her that I emerged from the deep sleep my soul had fallen into. But we find ourselves at a crossroads now. I am going one way, and
for a time, maybe forever, she must go a different way. My heart is broken, my soul
in shock. I cannot imagine walking without her companionship. I only hope she knows just how much she changed my life, and that I will always be grateful for that.

Awakening

Recently, I was awakened from a long, deep sleep. I had slept for years, and no longer knew who I was. I'd forgotten how to live, how to love, how to hope.
But then I awoke. Like Chopin's Edna Pontellier, I saw that I was living, and dying, by attempting to live within the acceptable confines of a world I truly do not belong to. I see that living that way is no life at all. It is a type of slow suffocation, my breathing becoming more desperate as I attempt to survive. I just cannot do that any more. And now it's too late--I have risen, and I am taking the steps toward a full life. I can never go back.

Is there a "right" time?

What is "time"? One beautifully written definition simply describes it as [that thing] that keeps everything from happening at once. Time, in some ways, is undefinable, though. It can race beyond us, over us, and even through us. It can slow down, crawling along, each minute feeling like an entire day.
Newton argued that time was an essential component in the structure of the universe, independent of events, yet allowing for events to happen in order.
Is there a "right" time? I imagine that things happen exactly as they should, therefore rendering each moment a perfect one. But perhaps it was St. Augustine of Hippo who put it most eloquently: time is an extension of the mind by which we simultaneously grasp the past in memory, the present by attention, and the future by expectation.

A few thoughts on love...

What is love? Deborah Anapol writes that "love is a force of nature. However much we may want to, we can not command, demand, or disappear love... Love is bigger than you are. You can invite love, but you can not dictate how, when, or where love expresses itself."

The Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians that "love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
What is love? I think I finally know.