This trip is almost over, and while I’ve made a strong push against The Dragon, part of me is still so sad. The tours have been long and the sights overwhelming, but I am at home in this country. Being here brings me a grounded sense of wholeness and peace that is all but impossible to describe. Its history beckons me and calls to mind that although these last sixteen years have felt so treacherous, they’re merely a blip on the radar of my life.

As I’ve wandered here through each village in a perpetual state of eyes wired shut, I’ve imagined having been here in some other space and time walking these very same roads. What did it look like? How did it smell? How did it sound, taste, and feel? So many battles have been fought here and many of these sights have been desecrated and rebuilt, if only to emerge even more breathtakingly beautiful than before. Countless pools of human blood, sweat, and tears have soaked these fervent soils, yet still her flowers bloom.

So, what does France tell me? What does she scream to my soul? It says that humanity is but a history of sometimes less than optimal circumstances leading to either growth or death in endless abound. Each sunset begs the opportunity for me to leave the past behind and awaken to a horizon that hands me infinite choices, beginnings, and endings. My history can really mean something if I let it, even if I never personally witness the outcome.

Perhaps my purpose is much bigger than myself, and the lessons I’m learning will somehow cause a ripple in the history of not just my family, but any other lives I manage to touch, like a pebble dropped into the ocean. Maybe someone, somewhere, somehow, will be standing in these very places that my own two feet have stood, and thus my history will have broadened someone else’s horizon far beyond what I can imagine.

Perspective has to be everything, otherwise I’m only deaf, dumb, and truly blind. Still, during these last days I’ve found myself staring far beyond these beautiful Provencal fields into an abyss I can’t quite connect with. I desperately need to make sense of all my shattered pieces so I can use them to make my life, my children’s lives, and this entire world a little better than I found them. Please, God, I’m begging You. Is it time for my masterpiece to start coming together?

LOST IN A PORTRAIT

I analyze everything, I know what you mean. I answer by questioning all that I need. And I want you to surrender, I want you to see all the signs, all the faces inside of me. I see I’m not perfect, but that’s all I see. Lost in a portrait in a picture of me … this can’t be everything I see. Then my canvas is incomplete. Your color’s everything to me, and my canvas will set me free. My outline’s solid and made up of crying. And nothing’s that you say just burn my eyes. I want to surrender; I want you to find some comfort in the spaces between the lines. {Trapt}