Jilly Brandon

“Keeper of my heart…Jesus you are..”  I’ve been obsessed with this phrase, and this song since Sunday, after hearing it performed by the band in church.

I had not been to church in many moons, and I felt the urging to go this past weekend.  I was disconnected, and the overwhelming and primal urge to feel held and out ” in the land of the living” got the best of me.

Like many times when you show up to a place after a long absence, things feel different.  The sounds are more personal, one notices peoples’ faces more.  It can feel like people are staring at you and wondering if you are the “new girl?”

In many ways, I do feel like exactly that…the new girl.. Where do I now belong when everything about me feels so drastically different?

Sometimes it can seem that you are wearing a heavy sign slung  about your neck that says…”I’m hurting…”  “Stay away!”  The songs always pierce my heart without warning, and I must try and keep the tears at bay before big black “mascara tears” roll unhindered down my cheeks.

Thats the way it was this past weekend.  This song that Kary Jobe sings,”Keeper of my heart, is just so beautiful, and hypnotic  in the way it feels like I’m being covered by a warm and cozy blanket, and I’ve been just obsessed with listening to it…

“I lift my eyes up, maker of the heavens, keeper of my heart.”

These phrases just envelop me with hope and the essence of a still blue lake after a storm, all misty, and heavy with fog, but the freshness of a much needed rain.  The simple act of lifting your eyes up heavenward, when perhaps just a few moments before, your eyes had been brimming with tears…Yes this a hopeful thing.

We think of eyes being cast downwards, as a sad, and melancholic state, and we seek to find solace in something…in anything.

It is not a difficult thing to just look up, but  it feels like a last resort thing to do…sorta like praying, after catastrophe strikes.  It appears to be the thing to do at the time, and yet we resist.  We can keep away all  help and comfort… We just don’t know why we do?

 

We may know within ourselves what we can do to feel better about a thing, but for some reason…we wait it out…we listen to the sad country song…turn on an old movie that tears our heart out…and we feel….well…worse….

Old photographs seem to stare at us from our walls, and while looking at home movies can be comforting, it can also fill your body with such a deep sense of sorrow , that you scarcely  know how to climb back to the surface…where the other humans are livin’ life.

Even a year out from someone’s’ death can feel like just yesterday.  I’m learning so much about how the brain functions when it is overwhelmed.  The way it doles out information a little at a time, and only when it deems that the human that lives in the body can cope with new stuff.

It kinda blows my mind….how the mind in fact, protects itself, from itself… Not sure I will be making sense here in this particular moment, but somehow it does to me.

It seems that we can only assimilate a bit at a time from our noggins.  Perhaps that is why “shock” is important.  We need shock so that we can’t feel at a time when our lives get hijacked .

From day to day our feelings seem to go up and down, and float about like the leaves from the Autumn branches.  Our patterns of thinking can flit about unhindered , and we can be so unaware that often times we are held hostage by our minds.

Our minds can be our greatest allies, but if we live too deeply in them, they can also stop us from venturing forward into previous places not yet discovered.

The fear of the unknown…..why is it so feared?  I’m asking myself this in particular.  I have been pondering the fact that fear about moving ahead, and pressing on can feel staggering.  It would seem that taking the next, first step is the hardest thing to do.

I’ve  heard it said to me the phrase, “fake it until you make it.”   Also…just take that next step…and so I just did.  I just signed up for a writing course.

My niece was just here for a few days, and she is taking a writing course, so I started browsing around online, and “le voila!” I’m all in….and maybe, just maybe a new dream can begin….?  The course is entitled, ” The Art of Writiing Fiery Prose.”  Yes…I had to look up what “prose” meant exactly… I’m a firm believer in leap….and then look.  While this has often served me well in this life, there have been multiple times where this concept has kicked my ass….so….I’m guessing, that balance is the thing….

Its hard when you put your dreams away, sometimes out of necessity, but I think it’s even harder to let the dream back out, dust it off, and allow it to have wings, and take flight again.

I’m giving it wings people, and I’m encouraging my kiddos to do the same.  When Hope feels like it’s gone on vacation, it becomes necessary to just do something, that next thing, and maybe, somewhere along the way, “Hope can spring eternal” again within my heart.

The sunny yellow of this truck just feels so glorious, and the huge array of pink blooms makes me feel giddy with hope.  Life planned seems to frequently meet us with detours along the way…the stops, the inconveniences.

Maybe  these inconveniences are  the places we were destined to get to, but we were so busy planning ahead, that spontaneity had no place to jump in and steer us in another direction?

Life can certainly be that….unscheduled, and uprooting…..but maybe…just maybe..around the next bend can be the next best thing, and if we aren’t willing to jump into the fear, then we will not  miss out…and nobody wants to miss out now do they?

Sometimes just a subtle change in scenery  can be the thing that propels us forward.  For me…road trips do that.  Just hopping into my “bug” and venturing out onto the open road is like giving my soul the chance to let down, and to just be.

Just  breathe into the next thing, the next bend in the road, and stay within hope.  Hope really is the thing that lightens our skin, and brings the light back into our eyes…we would be lost without it…so lost.