Today was an encouraging day, even though I'm entirely too tired (from having a cold). I like these kinds of days. I like simple conversation over coffee and biscotti, and prayer of two vastly different forms within the day (book of common prayer and extemporaneous, charismatic prayer). I like thoughtful discussions and disagreeing well. I like found cameras. I am blessed to be reminded that I somehow reflect the Lord's glory. I like conversations over lunch about graduate school and church background and other such things. I like whirlwind tours of the thought of Freud, Lacan, Cixous (with background on Descartes and Kant) and second half of class movie watching. I'm learning to appreciate, perhaps. Dr. Pearse's teasing brand of humor, and am fascinated by the Catholic Reformation. I'm also really enjoying what I've read so far of Letters to a Young Catholic, especially its discussions of G.K. Chesterton and Flannery O'Connor. And I have far too much to do, that I'm ceaselessly putting off, but I feel some kind of joy--for friendship (what an impossibly wonderful gift!), and the binding nature of the Church's (or Christian holy people's) identification and reception of the Holy Spirit, and how this binds us together in such deep, unsearchable richness and compassion. I like these graspings of the hope and joy of the Lord.

Sometimes I'm just flabbergasted by the speed of thoughts, of tears, of laughter, of words, of images, of affection. And then I grow melancholy. I grow melancholy because I fear my lack of love; I grow melancholy as I realize what treasures await us each gracious moment, and how just as quickly as they are revealed they are buried again. I grow melancholy when I think of things I wanted to say, or should have said, or shared, or prayed, or written.
But, there is joy in all of these things, and ever new delights are given to us: in the people we are given to love and honor, in the merciful hum of each new day dawning, in the dance of light and white dots of night, in the feeding of birds and of the throwing of snow, in cards and calls of 'this is the good I see in you, that God is drawing out of you', in the 'knowing' that is made possible among close friends, of how and why one is feeling.
Oh, to live in gratitude for these things, and not to mourn unduly the loss of what we were given for just a short time. But to celebrate it, and to celebrate the legacies we leave each other.