Unlock

"You, sing me to sleep
Talk down my walls
Look through my windows as I wait
You could be the thief
I give the key to..." ~The Thief, Brooke Fraser

There is something so romantic about a key.

I have held a certain love for them for quite some time.

I wear them about my neck and in my ears in many pieces of jewelry, holding them quite close to my heart.

Yes, it might be just a scrap or two of old bits of metal, melted down and molded into a device for opening a door.

But even still...

Perhaps it is only the silly, foolish romantic in me that find some sort of delicacy in something so humble and insignificant...

... but there is a power to this tiny object.

It is one of kind.

A small, delicate kind of object.

There is such a strength behind something so small...seemingly innocent and fragile.

A key has the power to reveal that which is hidden...

...to find what has been lost...

...to capture a moment forever behind a door, or to free something held captive for far too long.

Keys can do much as much damage as they can do good.

So guard your keys closely...

...or else a thief will come and steal your heart away.

He will unlock your secrets, and hold your treasures.

...but perhaps it wouldn't be so bad after all.

There is a romance to be found in keys...

...and it comes when your heart has been stolen away.

Handwritten

A person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill. ~Jane Austen

The art of the handwritten letter is in danger of extinction.

With the advances of technology moving forward the way they have been, the very existence of pen and paper is slowly fading into oblivion.

Text messages. Cell phones. Facebook. Computers.

What need do we have for paper and pencil? For stamps and envelopes? Journals? Notebooks?

It's disappearing.

Computers contract viruses and crash; cell phone towers get knocked out in bad weather. When a file is deleted or erased, it's gone forever.

In a way, we're loosing a legacy. There's no sentimental delight in finding an old hard drive.

We're surrendering so much; it's tragic.

We're giving up that excitement of opening up an old jewelry box and finding a forgotten love note...a "thinking-of-you" note from Mom the day we started High School... a scrap of pencil-decorated paper slipped into a lint-filled pocked by a friend.

There's a fine art to be found in picking up a pen and letting all your thoughts flow out in ink onto a blank paper canvas. There's no spell-checker, no automatic grammatical correcter, and no backspace key.

It's 100% genuine.

You can't hide behind the impersonality of the internet or the disconnect of a text message.

It's a form of reality. It's a way of letting go of our pent-up emotions and letting them just pour out in a way that a keyboard just can't convey.

It seems almost criminal to let go of something so wonderful, so old-fashioned and so fresh at the same time.

Maybe it's just the romantic artist in me, but I can't imagine living in a world where the delight of handwriting is forgotten.

So write a letter...fall into a flashback...

...don't let the ink dry.