Lacking

I realize I haven't really written anything worth reading in a long time. My inspiration comes in flashes and I guess I haven't been struck by lightning in a while.

Lately my life fits into a tidy little box that is filled with love ... to the fucking brim. There are no messy edges. No carelessness. No angst.

Basically there's nothing to write about.

And yet here I am still struggling to put words to my humdrum. Passion to my plaintive. I don't know what moves me to do this. I don't know why my fingers always search for the keys.

I am inspired by a lot of things.

Today it was a little girl in red mittens. A sign in a living room window. The old man pushing a heaving cart of bulging bags full of cans past my house to the beer store.

I know its dysfunctional to envy his messy edges, but I do anyway.

The thing is, my inspiration is fleeting. It never sticks. I subsist in it for as long as I can, backstroking happily through waves of insight and revelation and then nothing. Poof. Like a dream, it's gone.

I wake to find myself staring at that homeless man's face, feeling nothing as the woman in the car behind me begins honking her horn.

And all the sudden, I'm just a girl in a car at a stop sign.

if apathy is the poison, hope is its antidote

When I think of the events that occurred on Tuesday, my first reaction is to attempt to cage the disbelief running circles in my head. How do I wrap my head around this thing? Did it really happen?

Let me tell you what I have learned from all of this. While my heart aches over the last eight years, I am grateful for the clarity it has brought in its wake. Clarity so strong, it compelled a country to change.

The way the nation has come together and the speed of their unity amazes me. It gives me faith in humanity and restores my trust in democracy. The faceless masses across America and around the world have united. They need no faces, they have one, and in it is the proud reflection of the United States -- disabled, but determined.

The capacity I see for hope overwhelms me. It transcends race and ethnicity, wealth and poverty, cultural diversities and border lines. If apathy is the new poison, then hope is its antidote. Barack Obama knew before anyone that hope could change the world.

And as I stare into the open face of possibility, the United States of America gives me reason to believe we've only just begun to fight.

So continue to let freedom reign and trust in the fact that the rest of the world is listening.