Driving.

God is a poet who has much more than words and paint to create metaphor and analogy.

As I turned left on to Mission Street, only because I heard it mentioned, not because I knew where it went, I slowly became conscious that I was in the middle of one of His short poems, perhaps entitled “How to get home”. With my eyes open, I still felt blind, tensed and leaning in my driver’s side seat as the truth settled in, I have no idea where this street is taking me, it feels like its generally heading Southwest, and I generally live southwest of here. I could get lost, I could get home. Either way I am going. somewhere.

There were all the emotions in the drive home that a good movie has: everything from fear, to joy, laughter to peace. Eventually I got home. It was a long circuitous route. it was the best one I could have taken. Because it became a poem for me of HEALING. The healing process, the process of finding my way home is one where your muscles get tensed with uncomfortablity as you explore the nighttime roads, and turn on the lights. Where you see in the distants the lights of the buildings you want to get to, you know your headed in that direction as they loom in front of you, but in the distance, more than an arms length away. Out of reach. But you just got to keep heading in that direction. Even though you dont know how these dark, uncomfortable, twisted, streets will ever lead to those illuminated builidngs. You got to have hope. You got to have faith that getting to those buildings, will get you home.

Tonight I went on a drive to old familiar territory. A place I had spent a lot of time once upon a time. Only to find it all underconstruction and only vagely familiar. In the dark car with only the lights of the valley pouring up at us. I felt as underconstruction as the church whose parking lot we were using. This church sits on the edge of fancy houses on the Mulholland Drive. It has the most amazing view of the valley. Its vast like looking at the ocean. It's roar is not like the oceans though, there are no waves, just a simple whispered roar of the not too distant freeways.

I have before compared my heart to a seashell closed and hard. Now there is bulldozer wanting in. Wanting to turn the calcified shell in to soft life giving dirt. The kind you drop seeds into and they grow, and blossom.

I am driving in a car with a unopened seashell in my chest. Yes. Life is as awkward as mixed metaphors.