I'm drinking my coffee.....the two songs on repeat coming out of this computer are "Amie" by Damien Rice and "Comfortable" by John Mayer.  The window is reluctantly open to the morning...the air is cool but I can only feel it grazing my hands and face as I am bundled under my massive comforter, my favorite spot in the world (read into that all you will)....oh wait I just got a chill that reverberated my whole chest...Victor is shooting a bee-bee gun some thoughtful moron gave him outside at who knows what and I hear tangled Spanish being spoken in passing through the window...I can make out the bad words....the coffee is barely warm now and Damien is singing again, maybe for the fourth time in a row now.  I have this inside joke with a good old friend of mine about what thoughts run through our minds the moment we wake, and how in a world where I find it increasingly difficult to put words to the enormity of almost anything I think these days, how this one thought tells a greater truth than a thousand scattered randomly throughout any day....every morning this week I found myself thinking of Cheri and my times with her and her home, her family and friends last weekend in Seattle.  I woke up every day and even in a haze of sickness that followed me home I wrote....and no one will ever see what I wrote because it was trying too hard.  I owed her those words....I owed that experience and all the details and effort a written memory of its existence....and yet, the details, the ones that I will remember somehow seem diminished on the page. 
  So, when I woke up to a note from Cheri, who from the moment she picked me up from the airport, to this very morning when a package arrived with a book we had talked about, a book of "secrets" akin to all the truths we spoke of, all the truths we wondered about the people we care about, about EVEVYTHING....every moment of it, as if she knew how far over the edge I had been slipping for too long, every moment of it she somehow showed me the simplest acts of kindness, she showed me how to open my eyes again to that which brings purpose to my life, she showed me life, her life, her family and history and dreams, her home and hopes. 

   So when I woke up and the coffee was still hot and my mind fighting two conflicting thoughts of promise and doom for the day, I read the blog Cheri wrote.  I also watched the video Brenda made....sweet Brenda who gave me a moment that changed me. 

Maybe you are reading this with a desire to get lost in a story....the truth of a little time between random people who happen to make up a piece of the tapestry of this haunted and searching man's footprints.  If so, then I hope you will follow me from here, maybe when you alone one night and willing to get lost in the world of a few. 

  These two write about how strange random ME somehow touched them....makes me uncomfortable if I am honest, maybe because I don't feel I deserve it, maybe because I get too wrapped up in all that I am NOT as apposed to what I can be and even AM sometimes.  In truth, Brenda getting the nerve to live a dream and come sing with me on We Are in front of all those people, Cheri putting the camera down and letting me sing those songs five feet from her eyes so alive that night....they are the story....and I humbly share their words without modesty.....because today, in THIS time of my life, I needed to hear them.  There's nothing wrong with saving each other...even if we don't realize we are doing it.

 

Cheri's Blog....................

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendId=50004501

Brenda's story............................

http://justbrenslife.blogspot.com/

Well, if you got that far....hmmmm...I don't know what you'll think.  Me, well I feel kind of embarrassed.  If I were in front of you, my hands would be covering my face....it's hard to hear such amazing things about yourself when you yourself have trouble facing a mirror some days wondering not how you are doing so much with your life, but how it's all just passing you by as you wonder why, how, when...you will ever be enough.

p.s.....The words thank you aren't enough Cheri...but then again you knew that.  So much to come....so much to come....
Peace, be you,
Jake

P.S....remember to take a moment and share your thoughts at www.jakewalden.com/blog