Okay folks, just a couple of years late in getting this done, but we’ve finally posted the Song Debriefings and lyrics to all of my albums, including the “brand new” ones for Scarce. I hope you’ll find a moment or two to visit the Sounds page and read up.

Just wanted to make everyone aware that recording of the new album has quietly and officially begun. With Ben Shive acting as maestro, I feel as though I’m in very good and capable hands. He’s a funny guy and is very encouraging in his thoughts on the songs, so I’m glad for his company and direction. Though there is no album title or set release date, I am aiming for a late fall 2008 release. It would be a good thing indeed to get the record out before Christmas. No promises, but a boy sure can dream.

By “going viral” and “blogging it out”, I will attempt to log this, the recording events in all their glory & humanity, as we go along and as the process shapes up (or ships out). I’d be thrilled if you checked in from time to time, asked any pressing questions you might have, comment, yawn on screen, whatever suits your fancy. I’m here and am glad you’re still tuned in. The Middle of the Storm.

You guys are awfully quiet these days. No commentary must mean one thing: Eric, you are boring our socks off. Fair enough. So, to lighten the mood, here’s a video that my wife made. It’s not Spielbergian, or Coppolaic, but it’s still sweet and makes me laugh — ah, sweet laughter. Speaking of…

I watched the movie Lars and the Real Girl last night with Andrew Peterson and his brother, Pete at The Warren. This movie was fantastic on so many levels; such rich characters, so noble, so authentic. If only I knew how to treat others with such dignity.

Last week, I was part of the latest Weaklings meeting. The Weaklings, for those of you who are curious, was started by fellow Square Pegs Randall Goodgame and Andrew Peterson as a collective of writers seeking to challenge, inspire, encourage, cultivate and critique one another’s craft. We have sporadically met here and there to eat nachos and sip cola, and, on those occasions, have often given ourselves writing assignments. In this latest edition, myself, Andrew Peterson, Randall Goodgame, Andrew Osenga, Andy Gullahorn, Ron Block and David Wilcox (in town for a Nashville show) all sat around eating sliced carrots, sun-dried tomato humus and fresh-baked cookies and were as nervous as nervous could be (at least, I was), each awaiting our turn to play one of our songs. It is a soul-swallowing experience to play a new song for writers who are better than you (and everybody in the room knows it). It was a mighty low experience for me to play my semi-half-baked song for these gentlemen, but they were as kind as they could possibly muster for this, my late night, last-minute attempt at fulfilling the call to the assignment. I don’t know if it matters a hill of beans, but I felt a little better at least having come to the group armed with something, even if that something wasn’t worth noticing. The song will never win any awards (they never do), but it was, once I finally got over the initial humiliation and self-pummeling, a good step for me, an admittedly lazy writer, in the right direction. For if I had not had this assignment, I would never, ever have written this song or even tried. For good or bad, it was the effort of being forced to work that stirred my brain to thought, to creating, to thinking outside the lines, to imagine a storyline. To tell the story plainly and deftly - in short, to get out of the way - that is the writer’s challenge.

This particular writing assignment, courtesy of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, was to write a song based on the story of a telephone repairman who dabbles as an antiques collector on the side. On a routine call, the repairman enters an elderly man’s house and notices, sitting beneath piles of old newspapers and debris, several pieces of furniture that appear to be early American and highly collectible. The repairman asks if the pieces are for sale and finds out that the owner can’t/won’t sell them because they are needed for the building’s tenants. Ten years pass and the repairman, who never forgets what he saw that day, asks the owner again if she’s willing to sell and this time she agrees. Long story shorter, the furniture is indeed historic and very valuable and sells at auction for $1 million.

The assignment: write something, however far-fetched, however obscurely referenced, however serious or silly, based on this excerpt. Side note: “Miracle of Forgetting” is another example of a writing assignment song I wrote based on a UJBR excerpt. Here is what I wrote Monday night (and am still in the process of writing):

Diamond in the Rough

There’s a clapboard house in Rhode Island
On a street full of silver maples
Where a man wearing slippers
Is combing his hair

He looks in the mirror
And stares at his wrinkles
And laughs at the way
That his life has unfolded

What is good?
What is noble?
What is lovely?
If anything good from this world should ever arise
It is a diamond in the rough

He’s a millionaire but nobody knows it
He plays solitaire most every night
He owns nothing but an antique table
And a checkbook to say his grace in ink

Chorus

Now, I have never been to Newport
Or seen Rhode Island in the spring
But I am a lifelong curmudgeon
Since I have kept most everything

That was good
And noble
And right
If anything good from my soul should ever arise
It is a diamond in the rough

Bookmark, my 2004 acoustic album (produced by Andrew Osenga), is very nearly out-of-stock as of this writing. The good news - for those of you who don’t have a copy and are still interested in obtaining it - is that I was lucky enough to score an extra spindle of 100 or so printed disks of this album back when I first printed the one and only run in 2004. There is no accompanying packaging or artwork (a bummer, since it is to this day a personal favorite design of all my discography), just the disk itself. So, from this point on I am lowering the price to $2 (normally $13). It will include the disk itself inside a plain white CD sleeve (again, no fancy graphics, no liner notes, no ugly pictures of me).

Also, since Bookmark is a part of my Box Set (available in the Goods section), I am lowering the price of the Set to $35 (normally $40).

Many thanks to the fine folks at Trinity UMC in Murfreesboro, TN last night for hosting me a second time. This was originally scheduled to be a show this past December, but one I had to cancel due to a severe cold, possibly the flu, the first I’ve ever had to cancel on account of illness. They were kind enough to let me reschedule, and though it was a small-ish crowd (apparently it was graduation night across the land), Paul Eckberg and myself were able to make some music that I felt came off sounding fairly decent considering we were both getting over (more) various sicknesses ourselves even though we hadn’t practiced together in nearly a year. Paul is absolutely tremendous and is the consummate professional musician, ever prepared and as tasteful in his playing as the summer day is long. It’s nice to have utter confidence in the musicians one occasionally gets to play music with. I don’t get to do it often enough, but I do love playing music with Mr. Eckberg. Also, many thanks to Stephen of the SPAdotnet who showed up to support myself, Paul and Chris Lee. Please be kind in your assessment, Stephen.

On the 40-minute drive home, I tried praying, but quickly realized I had no idea what to say since it felt like it had been so long since last I earnestly (and honestly) tried communicating with God. I tried being quiet but my mind was wirey and busy. I said staggering things like, “I pray for…”, “I pray this, that….” and realized how stale it all sounded, how inhuman, how robotic. I could muster no flesh or blood or simple honest words to simply talk, one friend to another. So, in retreating response, I asked God to give me a thankful heart, while in the back of my mind I fully feared the very proposition: “What if having a grateful heart means having everything I cherish - the people AND the accumulated stuff - ripped away from me?”. In no way do I want that to happen, so I sheepishly murmured the prayer, secretly hoping He wouldn’t hear it and might disregard it the way a sleeping cat ignores a buzzing housefly. How fearful and strange it is to be fearfully and wonderfully made. I doubt the prayer will be ignored.

I pulled up to the house at 10:03 pm and, after lugging in my gear, sat on the couch with Danielle, already 40-minutes into the 1990 film Awakenings (Robert DeNiro, Robin Williams). I’ve maybe seen this movie once before, probably circa 1990-91, but had forgotten the vast majority of the plot. There is one scene where DeNiro’s character, Leonard, having awoken after 30 years of being in a nearly catatonic state (I’m unclear on the disease: Parkinson’s or encephalitis?), is courting a beautiful young lady who has been regularly visiting her own father in the sanitarium. This particular scene, Leonard, who has been showing signs of his slow digression back into this unresponsive state after a summer of “awakening”, is in the cafeteria eating lunch with the red-headed woman. He is attempting to tell her he will never see her again and is saying his final goodbye. He stands to leave and offers her his hand to shake, himself trembling and ticking from the oncoming illness. She takes his hand but refuses to let go of it. She gets up from her seat to stand near him, takes hold of his other hand and proceeds to dance with him in the middle of the hospital cafeteria, a whitewashed room, with only the onlooking hospital staff, various patients and visiting families as witnesses. As she continues to press him close and dance, his spastic trembling subsides and he at last rests his head on her shoulders as the scene fades to black.

We hold so much dear, and yet let so much go. The touch of another human, so kind, so gentle, so caring, so compassionate, so purposeful, constitutes humanity as the beacon and image of an infinitely greater mercy. Combined in that movie scene and my post-concert drive home I was reminded of hope, how much of it I seem to have lost in my “adult” life with all the treading of responsibilities, the martyrdom of self, the threshing of grain, and how the presence of people, my wife and my son in particular, whom I need more than time itself, who are a salvation of sorts — a grace upon and within my world to keep me from losing hope altogether and to keep me from utter fear and shaking, to see in me someone worth saving, someone worth holding onto, worth touching and worth calming. I’ve never been much of a dancer, but, God, please give us thankful and awake hearts to hold so much dear, yet cling to what is worth clinging onto.

As some of you know, I have been part of a congenial group of songwriters here in Nashville called the Square Peg Alliance for the past three years. We most recently asked our good friend, tasteful producer (I’m honored that he’s producing my new album), pianist/keys player, musical castle of finesse, and exceptional songwriter, Ben Shive, to join our little merry band of men & women. Ben has been working on his first ever solo album for a couple of years now, of which we SPA folks collectively have agreed that once this album is released, we will all bow in humble deference to its beautiful promise and mastery. Ahoy, at last, I am personally thrilled to announce the upcoming arrival of his long-awaited record, The Ill-Tempered Klavier, on Tuesday June 17.

Ben is a very hard-working musician (and gentleman) with a family to support, so I would encourage each of you to support this “budding” (I put that in quotes because his own writing puts mine to shame) young songwriter in his entry into the world by purchasing his album.$10 pre-orders are being taken now in the Rabbit Room, and if you purchase before June 17, Ben is also including two bonus tracks and a digital booklet. I encourage each of you to check out Ben’s wonderful music here and invest in music that will be worthy of all our time and palettes. I am doing that now….

This is an interview I did on 12/7/06 while on Andrew Peterson’s “Behold the Lamb” tour. It took place in an upstairs loft at a wonderful youth facility at a church in Huntsville, AL. Here it is for your viewing pleasure/displeasure:

So your album, Scarce, was just recently released on iTunes, right?

Yes, finally.

So my question is, how does iTunes affect the indie artist?

How does iTunes affect the indie artist? Well I guess that the obvious answer is that it’s an avenue of music distribution that didn’t even exist when I started playing music about ten or so years ago. So the whole idea of online distribution didn’t exist when I started, much less the internet. And there’s a generation of folks who are coming up that live by that. And that’s not necessarily my generation, and I’m slow to change, so that’s kind of a new world to me. I’m old school in that I love artwork and packaging and I want to have the whole thing to hold in my hands and read liner notes and lyrics and such, so I would much rather buy a CD than download an album off of iTunes.

I’ve bought a few songs, but it would be hard for me to buy an entire record if it’s something I really wanted. I want to read to the notes and who played what. I don’t know if that’s old school or just an old way of thinking.

I think it’s just a musician thing.

Yeah. Maybe the normal fan just wants the music and doesn’t care for all the paper and plastic.

How it affects me, numbers wise, I have no idea. It won’t mean anything on the grand scheme of the charts on iTunes or number of downloads and all that stuff. Obviously it’s another way of getting my music out to people, and I have no other distribution. So the only way to get my CDs up until this point has only been off my website and at shows, just out of the back of the van kind of story. And so this is another way to get songs out there, and I think it’s cool that people who like one particular song may not want the whole record and may just download one song, and that’s fine.

So you started you playing in college?

Yeah, I was late. I was late on the boat.

What made you decide to start playing one day?

It was jealousy, really, which is hardly a noble reason for playing guitar. My brother and my dad were learning how to play guitar together. It would have been early college, and they were learning how to play guitar together. Finally, I just kind of was like “Man, forget this, I want to learn how to play”. They started showing me a few chords, and my dad bought me my first guitar and then I just got addicted and hooked and kind of stuck with it. I had a really good guitar mentor, especially early on. He was really good, and I looked up to him a lot. I could ask him questions like, “How are your fingers making that chord?” and “Show me that lick” and he was more than willing to show me and was a very patient guy and basically my tutor.

What records were you listening to at the time that influenced and shaped the way you played?

Wow. I’m trying to think. Back then, I got hooked on The Who in high school, and so I was probably listening to a lot of The Who. My dad’s old records and basically my dad’s old music that he grew up with is stuff that I really got hooked on in high school and college. Mama’s and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, The Who, The Turtles, and all this stuff. It was hardly contemporary, but it’s still some great music and great songwriting. And I was listening to a lot of that.

I went through my skater phase where I was listening to Suicidal Tendencies, Dead Milkmen, The Smiths, which is kind of funny. If you’re familiar with my music, you would probably be shocked at that. REM, early REM is beautiful, and I’m blanking on pretty much everything else.

When did you decide to move to Nashville? And why Nashville?

I met and married my wife in Baton Rouge. That was ’97. In ’99 we moved to Birmingham, Alabama. We lived there for six years, and we moved to Birmingham because we knew we didn’t want to be in Nashville, but we didn’t want to be in Baton Rouge either, so it was a spreading our wings kind of thing. We just wanted to be a little more centrally located for me to travel and do music. Finally, I toured with a guy named Andrew Peterson. He invited me to tour with him in 2002, and he and his buddy, Ben Shive, kind of started planting the seeds of moving to Nashville telling me and encouraging me that it would be good for me and that it was not what I thought it was, and my preconceived notions which, some of them are true, but a lot of them are not true. And so they started planting the seeds about four years ago. Finally, we grew out of Birmingham, and it was just time to move. And we felt like I needed to keep doing music and Danielle was all for it, and mainly she felt like it was time to go to Nashville. I had to think about it for a long time.

She seems supportive.

She’s more than supportive. Overly so. In fact, she’s kept me from quitting many times. For good or bad, so that’s the story.

I’m trying to remember my next question.

Man, it’s burning up in here.

It really is.

For the record, it’s like 80 degrees up here. (upstairs loft at the church venue)

Well, how do you think fatherhood will affect your songwriting?

<laughs>

Or do you think it will?

Yes, I think it will, and I hope it will. I thought about this question a bunch actually, and my songwriting friends have said “Just wait for the songs you’re gonna write when the kid comes”, and so I look forward to that, for sure.

How it’s going to affect my writing, I don’t know. I think I’ll probably have a better understanding of love, and a lot of times I think I do and probably really don’t have a clue about loving people. So I have a feeling my son is gonna be a great challenge to that in good ways. I don’t know how it’s going to affect my writing. For one thing, part of me wants to figure out how I’m going to write. It seems like a baby is very, especially the first few months, they need a bunch of attention. So I don’t know, and finding a quiet space to write and think, I imagine that will be a big challenge. Usually I have to be reading in order to write. That’s just kind of the in and process that usually affects what I’m writing at the moment, so I don’t know how that’s gonna work when there will be no quiet moments, so I don’t know. We’ll see how it works.

You play churches, and you play regular venues, and you play coffeehouses. I want to know, do you change as a performer? How do you transition from place to place?

That’s a great question.

Because you can’t say curse words in church.……… Unless you’re Derek.

Yeah, maybe he can get away with it.

Man, that’s a great question. I definitely don’t change necessarily what I say; I change how I say it. I don’t ever know what people think of my music. But I suspect that if they hear song and read the lyrical content, they know where I’m coming from. And my big thing as a writer is to never be obnoxious about what I’m talking about. My thing is just to tell my story and to lay it out there with no strings attached and just to let it be and for people to hear it and do what they will with it.

It’s funny because I don’t really feel comfortable in any setting. If I’m in a club, which is not often, but when I play a club, I don’t feel cool enough to be there.

That’s a great quote.

I don’t know. When I’m in the church, it’s difficult on a different level in that I feel like there are things I’m supposed to say as opposed to when I’m in a club, I feel like things I’m not supposed to say. People are the same, but their expectations are different.

Exactly.

So when I’m in a church, I feel like people expect me to say certain things that will make me acceptable that they can put their stamp of approval on. “Okay, this is Christian music” or whatever they want to call it. And maybe I’m a bit harsh in thinking that way, and it’s probably very judgmental, but that’s just the way it processes. And then when I’m in the club or a non-church venue, I just don’t ever want to be a bore. In other words, I don’t want to be obnoxious about what I believe because I recognize that people have been burned by the church, so they associate Christ with BS. And they associate it with being walked over, and, obviously not that’s at all what the gospel is about. And that’s okay, we’re believers and we’ve all got our faults and all that stuff, and we’re not good at loving people. And the world will hopefully one day know us because we love people. But we fail every day, so my thing is I just want to write the best songs that I can and I want to hopefully communicate on some artistic level that draws people in melodically, but that’s what draws people in and hopefully to have some kind of content that’s not preaching a message, per say, but that’s telling a story, and the stories that I’m most often telling are my own.

And occasionally I delve into third person kind of stuff, but mostly it’s just me sharing my deal in all of its good and bad and ugly. So yeah, coming back, I find that I speak less when I’m in a club setting and I’m less direct in setting songs up.

I read this Tom Petty quote one day, Tom Petty’s one of my favorite songwriters, who said “Good music will be heard”, and hopefully good music can stand on its own and good songwriting will eventually get heard by people, and so I’ve just kind of gone by that mantra.

What are your goals musically and how do you know when you’ve met those goals? Or have you met those goals?

Early on, I wanted to be famous.

I think everybody does.

Yeah, I mean everybody picks up a guitar and wants to write a song. It may be immature, but everybody thinks it. I thought it and still fight it and struggle with it, and for me, I remember that one of the earliest thoughts were “How cool would it be to do this for a living?” In most measures, that’s what I’m doing right now. My wife currently works, and she’s worked on and off, and so here in the next couple of months, I’ll be the breadwinner of the family. And we have a mortgage now, and all that stuff, and insurance. I mean we’ve got all the bills that everyone else has, and so none of that is different. I’m self-employed is what it basically comes down to. So, for me, it was always how neat it would be to do this for a living. And so that’s what I’m doing, and I suppose that was the goal, and we’re not getting rich like people think just because you write and play music for a living, that equates with making a lot of money. And some people have made a lot of money as musicians. When I play the comparison game with a lot of these folks, I compare myself with most of the folks on this tour or the artists at least, and it can get depressing pretty quick. [Editor’s note: at this time, Eric was on the Andrew Peterson “Behold the Lamb” Tour in late 2006 with artists such as Sandra McCracken, Derek Webb, Andrew Peterson, Jill Phillips, etc.]

But I’m learning basically to be thankful. And as weird as that may sound, it’s hard for me to process that and to accept and just to grapple with being grateful and content in my place. And sure, I want to sell a bunch more records than I do, and I don’t want every month in and out to be a making ends meet kind of thing and stressing about all that stuff, and that’s the way it is. God has given us our little plot of land so to speak, so I’m just supposed to tend it and fertilize it as best I can and till it and make it home. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I guess the goal, I don’t really know… I tend to lack goals in my life. <laughs>

That’s the most honest statement I think I’ve ever gotten from a musician.

That’s probably ignorant and naïve to be that way with the famous five-year, ten-year, twenty-year goals in life. I mean, honestly the future scares me a lot, and I’m afraid of growing old and thinking about doing this. The human body can only take so much touring, and that’s how I make my living. I have to be playing shows ‘cause if I’m not playing, I’m not selling CDs. So it’s a double-edged sword. That’s just where I’m at in life and career. I can’t be doing this when I’m sixty years old. To think that far down the road scares the crap out of me, but I just trust that God’s intentions and noble and that I won’t just drop off the face of the earth.

I am back at home after a long, exhausting, exhilarating and very worthwhile run of shows in Mississippi, Louisiana and Illinois. So far in the month of April I have slept in my own bed a total of 3 nights. I’m cautiously glad for a brief pause in the action before heading to Colorado and Minnesota for more shows. This allows me a chance to catch my breath, if only for a moment, and for a time to venture into the yard to witness the green life straining to reach for daylight in the flower beds we recently tilled, composted, mulched and planted with all manner of perennials, hydrangeas, maples, and various shrubs and liriope. It has been nice to come home after a time away and to see greenery, once a mere root or rhizome buried beneath the earth, breaking the surface, invigorated, and growing out of its winter isolation. Life and growth continues.

Danielle and Ellis flew to Louisiana this afternoon for her aunt’s funeral. I am at home alone, a situation that is fun for a total of about five minutes. I have plans that involve anything BUT watching television (an admitted weakness of mine): finish reading Andrew Peterson’s new book, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, Vol. 1, and to write a new song or two in anticipation of beginning the recording process for the new album. Ben Shive is producing, and, as I am a big fan of his, am eager to hear what his creative mind brews up. I also need to hang the new ceiling fan/light fixture in our den; a project that I’m sure would please my lady. And, if all goes well, try to get in a few holes of golf in the interim. Long list, short time.

I played on St. Charles Avenue on a Thursday night in New Orleans in front of a wonderfully respectful audience (whose church steeple had caved in during Hurricane Katrina), and afterwards strolled down to Cafe du Monde for late night beignets and cafe au lait. The moon was out and shining, the river was overheard lapping at the pier, and my wife and I walked along the levee for a stretch holding hands and acting like we were young lovers. Since my parents had met us earlier in the day in Manchac, LA at Middendorf’s and drove Ellis to Baton Rouge, we enjoyed our brief Crescent City date, but found ourselves missing our boy immensely. The Ridgely pseudo-reunion show the following night in Baton Rouge was quite enjoyable. Nearly a hundred folks showed up as we did a writers-in-the-round: me, Kevin (Smith), Ridgely. We somehow managed to pull off old Ridgely tunes that I didn’t think we would be able to conjure anymore since it had been nearly 10 years since the last time we played them together. It was good to remember and to sing those songs again, especially since they are impossible for me to pull off in a solo setting. Singing, I recalled just how well and naturally our voices blended and the richness of those guitar parts. Our brothers, Brian “Bubba Fong” and BB joined us on drums and percussion. The evening was recorded and videoed. There’s talk of releasing this concert on DVD. Stay tuned for that. Good memories of the salad days.

After spending Monday night in a pop-out camper next door to our semi-nomadic friends, the Garrigans, who also live in a camper in the parking lot of our former church in Birmingham, we drove back to Nashville the following afternoon, whereupon I got in the car on Wednesday for two college shows just outside of St. Louis. The Thursday show was at 11am, and after playing for an hour and loading the car in the pouring rain, I drove back to Nashville, where, after spending not quite two hours with my family, I got back in the car with friends Andrew Osenga and Jeremy Casella to make the drive up to Chicago for a Friday night show. So much fun. So much weariness. I’m getting old for this sort of thing. The Union show with those guys was good, clean, humbling fun. Their songs (and albums) are tremendous, and there were several times while onstage I asked myself just what business I thought I had being up there alongside these gents, these genuine musicians. I am a lucky dude, and a fraudulent one, to be sure. To call this my “job” becomes more and more an amazing realization as the years go by. I am not worthy of such good things. Many thanks to all of you who showed up, in some measure, for one of these recent shows. You do my heart good. May this tax season bring you cheer (and a refund).

Easter is breathing in the east.

After downing victuals of mildly grease-soaked Mississippi country sausage bathed in Creole mustard aboard a two-week old onion roll, the remainder of a sweet tea from today’s lunch, and a pair of chocolate peanut butter eggs, I can feel my mind slowing to a stock standstill, eager for the pillow. College basketball is hovering on the muted television, today’s newspaper – a less than stellar daily – is scattered across the couch ad hoc to my right, my son is fast asleep in his cradle, and the family cat, Gurdy, as obese as a pumpkin, flopped down from the foot-high perch on the rocker she’s been curled up in for the better part of the evening. At this point, I can hear only the whirring of my computer’s internal organs and the occasional high-pitched timbre of the analog tube inside the television set. And yet, outside our cottage walls, a freight train crowds the night as it lumbers across the Cumberland River atop Shelby Bottoms, bellows its deep fragrance and leaps northward out of the city. I could live no nearer train tracks than I do now; all that sound, all that steel, the grease, and the smell of oiled and burnt railroad ties, lying there in support of momentary passage, heightened commerce and resurrecting such lumbering vessels.

Tomorrow begins. Today ceases. The darkness defies the antihero.

He suffers in the garden sweating as if with blood. A scrub jay finally ceases its daylong ruckus and roosts on a lower olive bough nearby allowing Jesus a night of fitful prayer to himself. He absorbs the scourge of every man. Another man, in a different town, awakens from a dream in which he has passed through the eye of a No. 8 Schmetz sewing needle. He feels blow after fisted blow. A woman defeatedly hails a cab in the early dawn after a night with her married lover. He carries felled timbers to his own demise. You curse the day you were born into this world. He receives humiliation with abandon. I mock life by hording it for myself. He kneels and rakes the dust of the ground with his fingers, telling with no words a story we ache to hear and take part in with as much as fullness as an orchard pregnant with vigor and life. We long for it because we need the commonality of that gentle and forever grace. The proud and the religious and the meek and the sore and the ill and the fallen shall inherit the Good Grace of every fervent second chance, with its undoubtable intentions. But seeing, in the rippled dust of the storyline, a little or large part of ourselves, all shuttered and shackled in anguish and desperation, utterly fallible as lumbering vessels, we find ourselves ultimately delivered; delivered as pilgrims unto a New and Free World, Adam unto Eden, Moses unto Promised Land, Endurance unto safe harbor, Jesus unto his Father’s house.

May the risen crowd the dawn with their shouts of blessing and exultation, for all are blessed, but not all are risen.