Nothing where virtue is not.

A new child met his uncle today. I had never held a brand new baby in my life, had never thought I would or should. I had wished to, but the kind of shaking that my hands always have I thought would lead to some harm. But this, my young nephew, how could that be resisted.

A little boy whose sparking eyes looked up at me and whose hands grasped my fingertips. This perfect sort of thing, which made me think that I ought to tuck in my wrinkled shirt or clean my dirtied boots. Because it deserves the freshness it also holds. Such a change occurs in people when they hold in their arms this being that contains an entire long life in its freshly weighted lungs. They receive joy from the sight of the confident sleep of a baby.

Outside of his own blanket wrappings, surrounding structures and the hospital were under construction. All different sorts of objects on wheels were strewn about the hallways, incubators, computers, catheter stands, these things that seem important and like they should be in use or at least placed elsewhere, in a right spot. Sitting about, doing the things that they should not. Some rooms had those translucent, zippered curtains to seal them off from the hallways. And so now, of course, I am back over here on this armed chair with wheels and never elsewhere for use. There is that little baby boy, and if I could have carried him with me.

A giant's dead body.

Starting one of those very timely new year posts here, the sort where you begin to talk about spending your time really living this life, and Lord knows I'm trying. But writing that can sometimes not quite work when the year just past is made to be continually precipitating upon the moments in which my eyes can not be anything but awake, the year end's abrupt changes occuring one after another to where you almost want to let them pass by while under a most incredibly perfect wool blanket. To keep things wrapped up where things can be, that is where I type this from.

What I have been thinking and writing about for some while now is that, as persons among people, we gain a sense of ourselves from others, most often to a greater extent than from only sensing ourselves. They have themselves been woven, like us, and what they present then wraps around you. When, suddenly, you are no longer able to spend that close time with those people because they have moved away or because of your own move, you can feel your whole stabbing insides stop as a result. This happens at varying levels per individual, but this stoppage reveals the sort of dependence you have upon standing nearby those ones closest to your soul. And that is because they are not simply close, or near, to your soul, but are within it. In addition to what and who you are, what they are is what has made you become. I may say for myself, then, that I am so brokenly grateful for the containment of souls I have been given. It is a grace which, to my specific ones, is an inexpressible sentiment. One could whirl obliviously and forgetfully into a new January, but it feels best to sense that grace from within this wool. From right here is where I am able to do so.