Living Out Your Love

I am on the right path, I know it, I can feel it. This is where I was always meant to be, going this way, along the high road, following the signs for my life as it should be.
This feels good, so good. I have been dogged by a feeling of 'wrongness' for so much of my life - opportunity, I felt, was for other people, not for the likes of me, happiness was for those folks over the horizon. No, in the family I came from, it was always tragedy I felt running in our blood, or, in the words of Coner Oberst, " i could have been a famous singer/ if i had someone else's voice/but failure always sounded better/ let's fuck it up boys/ make some noise.."
That is, except when I was small, before I started taking notice of such things as teachers and adults and stupid boyfriends. Before too much self-consciousness took hold, before I started believing them when they said my world was weird or pretentious, or just "too much". It can take so long coming, sometimes I stopped thinking it would ever appear at all, but I kept plugging away, sometimes without even knowing I was still plugging away, and then BAM! a wave of glory or fever or triumph or just plain, no frills joy, hits the bank and washes me away with it. Or else, tender moments of peace and wholeness come climbing up my back in the smallest shiver of perfection.

And I am writing this not to swell in my own sense of personal triumph, but because today, as I listened to a friend's download of music off his new website, I thought, fuck, all my friends are doing this too. I am surrounded by people living out their love. And it's hard work, living out your love, it can be lonely and harsh and embarrassing and maddening. It can, in moments, tear you apart, it's winds can be bitter, it's fruits, sometimes hung too high to even reach. But we all know the pith and the juice and the swell and the taste that such labour brings. And I am inspired to know and be connected to such inspiring people. I am moved by their triumphs and as equally by their failings, and, most of all, by the fact that they keep going. And the creativity keeps growing, it all has a knock on effect, a web of something so beautiful I dare hardly touch it by description here.

So I am writing this, to express my pride and my gratitiude to all those people I have connected with, and am connected to, who have touched me with their beauty and vision and inspiration. If you want to know some of whom I am talking about, just look at my links list, they're all there, as there are others who do not have websites and blogs and the like, by whom I am also equally inspired and moved, by their art or their e mails or their conversation or just by their presence.
So I am raising my palm, turning it upwards, and from it, blowing a kiss, through the airwaves, to thank you, my dear friends, allies, maybe some of whom I haven't even yet met, all of you who endeavour, however it may be, to pull some punches and push the river, to whittle away at your art and bring life force back into fashion, to sail the seas of tomorrow's dreams, to live out your love.