stairwell accompaniment:Patty Griffin

I spent the first eighteen years of my life trying to impress God, among others. Not until the spring of 2001 did I realize how plaintive, how empty: a palm-sized bird flapping unbent into a hurricane, avid to find rest in God’s eye. That spring, I stopped this graceless flying and allowed myself to fall: the falling action, were my life a movie script. The rest, my life since and ever, is me unraveling: fade to the credits.

God only knows precisely how I got to that point—-His memory is better than mine. I write to remember and I have enough of the script to make sense of things. Now and then.