Oh Captain, My Captain...

I'm listening to "Evacuate" by the Boxer Rebellion. It's like a party and a revolution all rolled into one, and it makes me want to scream my barbaric YAWP while running along the edge of Puget Sound. Yep. Music has an interesting effect on me.

I have a barbaric YAWP, and I also have a place to which my mind and body--nay, my soul--has to go before I can sound it aloud to the world.

Music does it to me, mostly. Fantastic conversations. Illuminating discoveries. Sentences so perfectly crafted they make me want to laugh and cry and rip things apart and patch things back together again. Maps of foreign countries. Instances where love wins out. Tears for no reason at all, or for every reason in the world.

In that paradoxical contradiction--between supreme emotions that do not often live together--I find what I believe to be bits and pieces of the eternal. Things that God leaves for us to know what it is to live forever in longlasting joy. The kind of joy that makes you want to implode. The kind of joy that comes from deep, deep, and goes higher than anything. Sweeping, glorious, breathtaking, scandalous joy.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world.
(Walt Whitman)

-The GLS