Pleasure is your only law.
Nature is your queen.
Blind and deaf,
You, exulting, cling
To the worms inside your skin.
“Come flock to me,” you cry aloud,
“Come taste what wisdom brings!
“For none sets free from life’s deceit
“But the truth only I have seen!”

I am so productive.

There are days when the love of God feels far away from me—when even though I know in my thoughts that his love never changes, in my heart it feels like it has. When my prayers turn to ashes on my tongue, it is as if the fire in my soul has died.

No other experience in my short life has brought me so much poignant pain as when I feel alienated from the spirit of God.

I wonder what it must have been like for Jesus as he cried his troubled plea into the silence of Gethsemane. If I want a reason for why I sometimes feel separated from God, I can point to my own sins and failures. Jesus had neither sin nor failure. He was guiltless in every way, yet the total separation from God that would have been my rightful end he took upon himself instead. The pain I feel from the mere guilt of forgiven sins cannot even compare to what he experienced when the full punishment for all the world’s sins was cast onto his shoulders.

Because of Jesus, I know that this alienation I feel right now is no more than a mist before the infinite Light. And like a mist, it will fade away into nothing when grace, with conviction, comes once again to catch me.

If nothing else, this pain makes me all the more thankful. For if Jesus had not saved me, this pain would be greater and this pain would be eternal. But because he did save me, my hope is sure.

The Steadfast Poet stands, solitary,
Her hands upturned to catch the rain.
She smiles at the sky with all of her beauty,
And lets the water soak through all her pain.

Four walls and a window,
Three locks and a door.
Sweetly slept the sparrow,
On the hard, cold floor.

Wounded wings enfold her.
Whispers bear her crown.
Winter’s moon climbs higher.
Wishing words rain down.

Come morning, come sorrow!
Peace lost with the stars!
Her hands, caked with tallow,
Bear fresh, burning scars.

Their words are her mountains,
Their silence her sky.
Their words poison fountains,
And laughing, they lie.

Yet truth wrought in whispers
Stands stalwart as stone.
A sword forged of spirit
Cuts deeper than bone.

She fled for the mountains
One bright, bitter morn,
Her eyes to the sunrise,
Her wings ripped and torn.

When fading Light beckoned
The darkness to fall,
He found the sweet sparrow
Flung down by a squall.

The maiden twice born can scarcely remember
Cold floors decked with winestains and fear.
Wrapped in the glow of joy’s waking slumber,
Set free by the whispers so near.

Her feet carve out love songs
On pale, dream-lit sand.
She holds all her treasures
In one empty hand.

Bright words, true as daylight,
Give wing to her soul,
Releasing her laughter
And all that they stole.

I do my coding in Windows. And I like it. I even use PowerShell scripts to automate some tasks, in much the same way one might use bash.

It’s funny because, a couple years ago, I would have thought that doing any sort of scripting or web development in an environment other than linux/unix was tantamount to a dirty act. I was a linux crusader, happily spending late night hours working on my Arch Linux system, trying to get some unsupported piece of hardware to work, or editing XML configuration files to get my Openbox window frames to just the right color.

Those were good times. I learned so much about the hollistic nature of software during those years. Linux showed me the inner world of computers, and I became aware of what sort of things go on behind web pages and GUIs. My knowledge and confidence in technology increased phenomenally, and have served me well in the time since.

I’m glad that younger me had the drive to do all the difficult and geeky stuff that he did.

Now, however, I’m not so tightly opinionated. (At the very least, I no longer think of platform choice as some sort of quasi-morality that deserves to be debated.) I’ve also come to value practicality much more than before, and in my present situation, doing everything in Windows happens to be the most practical. So I do it happily. (Although I do miss some aspects of linux sometimes.)

I’m delivering this site through Github Pages and its spectacular Jekyll static site generator. I had never heard of Jekyll until yesterday, but I’m already impressed with its power and simplicity—mostly the simplicity. After spending so much time developing Wordpress websites, I’ve gotten tired of bigtime PHP machines and all their glorious bloat. On the opposite end of things, working on this website today was a vacation of the mind.

I might be getting ahead of myself here, but I dare say I’ve found my blogging home.