Raise your fist when the sun comes up

Lately:

I have been working to get images ready for print, organizing items to be made available to the public.  I have been looking for work (as many of us have been), and fighting to not be discouraged.

I have been hard at work.  Grinding, as they say in the parlance of our times.

I have been resizing, and editing, pushing rocks up mountains, crossing my fingers, hoping for something.

For all the work I've been doing, I've held these familiar faces inches from my nose, looking for the fire, or an ember, or spark.  Remembering that I'd created these things, but why?  Why had I started in the first place?  What hunger did I need to satiate?  What thirst had I needed to slake?  Surely, I'm still parched, my stomach still groaning.

Today, I remembered.  The storm slowed, the clouds broke, and I remembered again why I am doing all of this, why I must not only sing from my heart, but sing to the skies, as loud as I can, for everyone to hear, why we all must, all of those who would sing.

Because we cannot march through this life without living.  We cannot live and pretend we are not alive.  These senses, the ability to experience this life, to remember, to feel, to be a part of this world -these trappings are borrowed to us at birth, and we must turn them in when we close our eyes for the last time.  

Our responsibility, to ourselves, and each other, to our singing hearts, and the ears of those craning to hear any signs of life, songs of hope, of glimmer of beauty, is to NOT turn in these trappings before it is time.  Not a single moment before our last breath of air.

A friend of mine once made me promise to fight against death, to fight to stay alive.

That is what I have been up to.  I hope that this is what you have been up to, as well.  And if not lately, then I hope you will take arms again, soon.

Do not surrender this life while you still breathe.  Do not give up these dreams while you can still go to sleep and wake up.  I won't.

More to come.