the gasp :: much

{via pinterest}

 {over the next several weeks, maybe even months, i will be writing here and there from elora's thirty days of prompts. this is something that i have never done before, something raw and fresh and gorgeous and potentially painful. so please, be gentle with me. you can find all posts i have written from these prompts here}

:: in what ways have you found your way out of the depths? where is your appreciation and sensitivity? what makes you beautiful?

oh, to ponder these words above. what makes me beautiful? from what depths have i climbed? but, to speak of that would be making myself oh-so vulnerable. and that might be where the beauty is hiding, tucked away in the tender wrappings of a heart so easily swept under. 

i used to think that being broken was ugly. not in other people, you understand, because their broken pieces made breathtaking mosaics and all i could was stare in wonder. but my broken pieces were fragmented, distasteful. my being broken was ugly.

but then there was this metaphor, one that i've had in the back of my mind all my life but only recently jogged into remembrance :: that picture of a woman with a hand over her mouth, eyes wide as though she wanted...needed...to speak but could not. and then there was a whisper, what if that hand is your own?

and then a poem found its way into my fingers from the heart of a friend. words that made me catch my breath because they related to my soul. 

because the soft season will come

it will come 

loud

ready

gulping

both hands in your heart

up all night

up all of the nights

to drink all damage into love.

:: therapy // nayyirah waheed

{via pinterest}

it sank in like water to the most-parched soul and i realized. my soul is trying to drink it all, reaching up my fingers for selah merging with beams of Light streaming from the eyes of the One who stopped and spoke into the pressing crowd, someone touched Me. 

i'm only twenty-two, told often that i have not experienced enough life to know pain, to appreciate what it means to wait and experience and cling to something. i won't pretend that i know, but i know my share. and it's not a competition as to who aches the deepest or who needs the water the very most. what makes me beautiful is my past, my broken cobblestones and the scars on my toes from trying to climb a mountain with bare feet. 

but i reached and i gasped with eyes wide and pleading, fingers clutching His robe while His eyes meet mine and whisper, you love much, and you are forgiven much. 

and so i'm gently gathering the jagged and the broken and the cracked into my pockets and laying them out like sea glass on the sand. my heart is there, twisted like wrought iron and molded like clay. and there's a word there, humming soft with Lion melody to mingle with my soul's gasping inhale of Light. 

:: much.