(KendRa).

To the two absolutely beautiful, bright-eyed women I just encountered in Panera in Richmond, VA: Thank You. We collided at a time when I really needed the re-assurance the two of you just brought me. I am truly better for having met you and shared that hour of life with you. By all means, follow this journey and live it with me! I'll think of you fondly every time I treat myself to this delicious coffee. :)

This morning my wonderful Traveling Companion looked at me and said ever-so-quietly "Be free, Kendra". At the time my insides were swimming with a number of thoughts and emotions but later when I sat with a cup of coffee and my book of empty pages I realized just how deep those words wanted to settle inside of me. For the last 3 years all I've really wanted is to be free. Free, free, free. I've ached for it, longed for it, caught glimpses and had slight tastes of it that have sustained me through the confines of the life I was living and now, NOW! Now here I am and finally, I am free in the greatest sense of that word. I am free from obligation, free from any place or time schedule. Free from any people, any mind-sets, any group or function or... anything! It's taken me two weeks to finally be able to ease into that; to look these circumstances I now find myself IN in the face and realize wow, this is it! This is what I've been longing for all these years! Me with dirty feet! Me with a wind-whipped face! Me with fresh conversations, fresh perspectives, fresh experiences all dancing through my own limited view of what this life is. I'm realizing that as much as this trip is about encountering, as I wrote previously, it's also about discovering the Beauty I've always believed in. Despite the heartache and brokeness I've bore wittness to time and again, I still believe in Beauty. And I'm realizing now that without the ugly stuff, beauty would have no force or power at all. The beautiful needs something to be contrasted with. That's what makes it so beautiful, makes it something to be sought out and desired... a fairly simple thought, yes, but allowing this to sink in changes the way I see so much...

Two years ago a man in a cafe asked me what I wanted more than anything else in the world. I thought about it briefly, sighed deeply and said so quietly, I want to be free. I meant that more than I could have meant anything else. Circumstances have changed since then and my heart has certainly grown and been re-shaped a number of times, but that simple truth remains: I long to be free. I have this sense inside of me of what that will feel like. There have been brief moments and occassions on which I've felt it, and such rich moments they've been, but they've always passed as the pressures of life have rediscovered me. But this is it. I'm taking a deep breath right now (really, I am), breathing in the reality that right here, right now, I am free. The possibilities are endless. There's nothing I have to do or can't do. I am free to breathe in deeply as this person I've become and, as I exhale and swirl into the fullness of the God of the Universe, to begin walking in all that I know myself to be, as limited as that knowledge may sometimes be.