Single Shooting Star

I know a guy who is unbelievably observant and super deep.  Everyone deserves a friend like this.  He tells me when I’m wrong, when I’m right, and when I’m so far off base that it is impossible to categorize.  The best part is, he most often does this without me asking.  Throughout my college career, he gave me a lot of wake up calls.  Most of them were necessary, but few were asked for!

One time, I was lamenting to him about much life was beating me down.  As with most of my collegiate career, I was stressed and worn out and probably sick and sick of people.  I don’t remember the circumstances surrounding this particular talk, but I’m sure they were as giant in the moment as they were insignificant in the grand scheme of things.  Anyway, I had gone into him so he would listen to my long-winded monologue and then say something to put it all in perspective so that I could sleep that night.

When I finished my word vomit, he thought deeply for a moment.  Then he asked me, “Kyle, what do you do to relax?”  I thought long and hard about his question, but I didn’t have an answer.

He told me that most people had something they did for release.  For a lot of college students, they drank.  He told me part of why alcohol was so prevalent for people are age was because it was a socially acceptable mechanism to deal with stress.  Other people, he said, played video games or read books.  I guess some people go bowling, too, but that sounded really lame to me.  After providing some examples, he asked me again what I did to relax.  I still didn’t have an answer.  He contended that it was no wonder I was so beat if I never took time to release anything.

This conversation has stayed with me for sometime.  Actually, it is probably one of the factors that has led me to this point - hacking away at my keyboard tonight.  I realized that writing is something that is fun for me.  Sometimes it serves as a way to express what I’m thinking.  Other times, it is a way to think new thoughts.  Often times, though, it’s a way to make sense of parts of life that I don’t understand.

Another thing I made a point to do after that conversation was to go on drives around Manhattan in the middle of the night for fun. Nothing can clear my head like a 3am drive with my windows down.  In Manhattan, this is how I got my release.  This is what I did for fun.  Alcohol was could never do for me what a tank of gas, a road to nowhere, and the wind in my hair could.  Sometimes I did this alone, and sometimes I did it with friends.  In either case, this was a way to feel like I could breathe again.

As I reflect on this, I remember my first day in Manhattan.  I was not quite a college student but no longer a high schooler, and I drove around my new home for over 3 hours and 100 miles.  That’s quite a feat considering how small Manhattan is!  But I learned that city well and was able to feel at home much quicker because of that evening I spent alone in my car.

What I rediscovered halfway through my college career was something that I first learned at the very onset of this chapter of my life: I can think when I drive or think about nothing.  Either way, it makes me more comfortable.  When I did it the first time, it made me comfortable in a new environment.  It made me comfortable with the layout of the town, but it also brought me a great deal of comfort in a time of transition.  When I would drive in later years, I learned that it made me more comfortable in any environment.  It allowed me to release.  It allows me to think.

Night drives to nowhere spurred some of my very favorite memories in college.  I remember getting stuck on a road north of town that literally just ended in a field.  I remember eating Frostys with one of my roommates and discussing what it means to be a leader.  I remember processing some of life’s interruptions that seemed too big to tackle.  There were also countless realizations and ideas that can’t be captured easily on paper.  More than anything, though, I remember the sense of freedom and being big & small all at once.  I loved those nights.  I loved the time to challenge magnitude and question gravity.  I loved spending time to listen and learn.  I loved to drive… Just drive.

Whew… Blog:  I’m so sorry for neglecting you! I will return soon :)

As each of us walked off of the plane in Milwaukee, we hugged each other because we all understood one part of each other’s lives.  It was what we couldn’t quite explain in the phone calls to our loved ones that we made as soon as the plane landed.  It was the gravity of a few hours that I can’t fully convey to you in writing.  You had to be there.  You had to share the experience.  Because my family’s travel had been delayed, I was traveling without them.  But I was traveling with all these new friends.

This is not too different from other parts of our lives.  This evening I met with a group of college age students from my home church.  Our group of ten was quite diverse; we had people from several college campuses, ages, majors, and living environments.  The only thing that we had in common was that all of us had, in our respective times, been a part of the same youth group at the same church.  Some of these people were there when I was in junior high and high school school, and some were younger.  But each of us were connected to the same organization.

While we had never all sat in the same room together, there was shared experience.  Each of us was impacted by the same organization.

We talked extremely honestly with one another tonight.  Our youth group has always been a place where people could be open and transparent and find support and love.  Tonight was no different.  It felt like picking up where we had left off.  It felt comfortable.

Fraternities and sororities thrive off of the reality of shared experience.  It is very hard to understand Greek life if you are not a part of it.  It is impossible to understand the depth of memories you create when you live with a group of men 24/7, when you are challenged by them and you challenge them, when you work towards the same goals, and when you struggle through the same difficulties.  It is hard to illustrate how well you get to know others in that situation.  But it is a theme that is shared by members of individual fraternities and sororities, and by these systems as a whole.


While I was at my Fraternity’s National Convention last summer, I could share relaxed conversations with men of multiple generations who had no relationship or connection with me outside of our Greek organization.  When I have traveled to visit other undergraduate chapters of my fraternity, I don’t have reservations about staying in a place that I’ve never been or with people I’ve never formally met.  I know that they will be waiting with open arms.

While I was in college, I knew a few men who had lost one or both of their parents while they were still teenagers.  I would argue that, even if complete strangers, they could understand parts of each other’s realities and struggles better than most anyone else.  It seemed healthy for them to talk with each other.  They had shared a heart-wrenching road.

Shared experience is why two high school classmates who hardly spoke to one another will go out of their way to say hi if they are at the same college.  It is why I could immediately engage in dialogue with another American in the middle of a Chinese city.  It’s why there are support groups for alcoholics, parents of depressed teens, and women who are pregnant for the first time.  It is the same reason that people who have traveled to developing countries can understand each other’s experiences better than their closest friends could.

What is more interesting than understanding the power of shared experience is observing the way that humans thrive off of it.  You see it everywhere.  All around us, people seek opportunities to engage in these sorts of relationships.  Whether it be through your church, your living community, your family background, or even a short period of shared time, people want to be known.  They hunger for a chance to talk to someone who was affected by the same things they were.

Many of the most successful people in the world are those who can create connections with others instantly.  To be able to unearth something in common with a total stranger in a matter of minutes is something that comes naturally to some and is developed by others.  In either case, it is breaks down barriers faster than any other form of communication.  The most successful person in a room - however you define success - is often the person who has created a connection with the most people present.  The easiest way to do that is to find what you share with others.

Connection is part of the human condition.  I strive to be like people who seek opportunities in commonalities.

I was in Orlando on a family vacation the summer after my freshman year of college.  When it was time to come home, we went to the airport, checked in two and half hours before our flight (I have no idea why) and proceeded to Chili’s Express for dinner.  Ninety minutes later, when we arrived at our gate, we found out that our flight had been cancelled due to “fog” in Milwaukee, our destination city.  Some interesting facts about that: 1) Other airlines were still flying from Orlando to Milwaukee. 2) The same plane had been in our gate for over 6 hours, and earlier flights were cancelled because that plane and two others had “mechanical failures”. 3) When airlines can’t fly because of “mechanical failures,” they’re obligated to give you meals, a hotel room, and taxi vouchers.  When airlines can’t fly because of “fog,” they aren’t obligated to give you anything except another flight.  4) And they won’t give you anything except another flight.

When airlines cancel flights, everyone’s day is ruined.  The gate agent is bound to hate their lives for the next 4 hours while dishing out bad news and new flights to disgruntled passengers.  Other airline staff have their own headaches and arguments.  And passengers are screwed in every conceivable way.

There is one interesting thing that happens the next day, though.  When I returned to the airport at 4:30am for my flight, I saw many of the same faces I had seen the night before.  Some of my fellow passengers seemed like they got a good night’s sleep while others appeared to have slept in the airport.  The interesting part, though, was the amount of energy buzzing in the terminal.  You kept hearing different versions of the same story: ‘We got the last room at this nice hotel three miles down the road.’ ‘Oh, yeah, we went to the hotel over there.  It was danky.’  ‘We didn’t even get a hotel!’ ‘Me and my kids could hardly wake up today.  I didn’t know if we’d make it on time. Luckily…’ And so on.

In that moment, in a mid-renovation un-airconditioned terminal, each of us was sharing our own story from the evening before.  All of us were talking like old friends.  Each of us had a genuine interest in telling our story and hearing others’.  Because we had all had all been a part of this same unfortunate event, we learned about shared experience.

That day, in that airport, there weren’t any strangers.  Everyone had a common bond.  Each of us was cordial, interested, and connected in each other.  This is the power of shared experience

All of us almost died together on that plane.  Literally.  For the last thirty minutes of the flight, we went through turbulence that continuously tossed me like a sack of potatoes.  The cabin of the plane lost power at  least twice.  People cried.  Groups were praying aloud.

It was absolutely terrifying.

When the plane finally landed there was an ovation to rival the crowd at a rock concert.  Within seconds, people were on their phones to tell their loved ones that they had survived.  I’m completely serious - this event was unbelievably scary.

As we began to deboard, people hugged.  Passengers who were strangers 16 hours before carried each other’s bags off the plane.  But you didn’t hear people say, ‘It was nice to meet you’ or ‘It’s been a pleasure getting to know you.’  Instead, people said, “Take care!  I hope you and your family enjoy your vacation!”  and “It was nice running into you!  We’ll see you soon!”

But we wouldn’t see each other soon.  These weren’t old friends: we just shared a brief snapshot of our lives together.  The back ⅔ of the plane was filled with people who had come the evening before for a flight that never happened. After that, we had been turned loose on Orlando to fend for ourselves.  By the crack of dawn, each of us was back in the airport sharing our stories and talking like high school classmates.  When you add in an extremely frightening 30 minutes together, we had shared some amazing experiences.  But that time was the only history that we shared.

Let’s be real for a minute.  There are a lot of things I’m not good at.  I’m not particularly neat or tidy, I sometimes lack organization, and I have can never remember birthdays.  Also, I’m not very good at being a perfectionist.  But I am one.  This is a great struggle for me.

If I were a true perfectionist, I think my room would stay clean and I would keep a calendar.  Since I’m not neither of these things happens regularly.  However, my perfectionism rears its head at some very inopportune times.  Every time I am working on a project, it seems like I can’t let any detail go.  Unfortunately, I usually don’t work on projects until the night before they’re due (because I can’t keep a calendar).  This combination of perfectionism and flaw has been known to kill already sparse sleep patterns.  Also, when I clean my car, I have been known to spend more than six hours to ensure that every surface, instrument, and knob shines.  If I were just better at keeping my car clean, I’m sure I could reduce this to a rational amount of time.

The point is, I struggle with being perfect.  I am often driven to put forth a perfect image, present perfect work, and have everything put together all the time.  I want to be the perfect friend, tell the perfect story, and be perfect in each discipline that interests me.  But I can’t keep up with it all.

I have failed at all of these things.

I remember when I was in Oklahoma over Spring Break.  We were in Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation.  One evening we had a group of Cherokee college students teach us how to weave baskets.  We each were given supplies to weave a basket and a detailed demonstration on the Cherokee weaving process.  Weaving, though, was much more difficult than they made it look.

After the third time one of my new friends tried to show me how to do it, I was rather frustrated.  I would get two or three rows in and mine would look like crap but his would look great.  I didn’t understand it.  Finally, as he was helping me for the fourth time, he told me just to go with it and keep weaving.  Reluctantly, I did as I was told.

And it worked.  Within an hour, I had finished most of the basket.  I will tell you that my basket was far from perfect, but I loved it more for each of its flaws.  And despite its imperfections, it still works to hold things and looks pretty decent.

In the moment that I finally gave up on perfection, I started moving toward something that left me fulfilled and proud.  This is a lesson I learned and relearned throughout my college career.

But even these last few nights I have found myself struggling with perfection.  I wanted to write the perfect blog post so I could put it online.  The perfect one never came… So you get this instead.

And you know what?  I’m actually quite content with this blog post.

Whether it has been falling short as a friend, not preparing for a test, weaving baskets, or writing in a blog, I am slowly accepting that I’m not a very good perfectionist.  I can’t always do everything to the caliber I would like.  It is the times that I can accept these lapses of perfection that I begin to move toward accomplishment and pride.  It is these times that I can be fulfilled.

Kyle would love to update his blog, but he is quite tired and hates everything he’s written in the last few days.  Please check back soon :)

I wrote a couple days ago about how it seems that our lives are cyclical.  Some days we feel like we are conquerors and sometimes… We don’t.

But I believe this is true of other things, too.  For instance, historically.  Smart people who know about history would tell you that dominant world-powers come and go.  Each one has a time period where it rules and then then - eventually - it erodes.  I am lucky to live in the United States at this time in history; we are a country that enjoys as much power, influence, and prosperity as any nation in the history of civilization.

Similarly, bands come in and out of success.  The Backstreet Boys were cool once.  That time has passed.  The four men of the Beatles were once among the most well known people in the world.  To most of my generation, though, they are irrelevant enough that my friends who ‘only listen to bands I’ve never heard of’ (on principle) will wear a Beatles t-shirt.  A group that once defined their culture is now countercultural enough for my hipster friends!

On an even smaller level, I witnessed this in my own campus.  Fraternities and sororities rise and fall.  For a few years, one fraternity may be known as the “nerdy fraternity,” the “involved fraternity,” the “party fraternity,” the “creeper fraternity,” or the “fratty fraternity.”  Similarly, a sorority might have the reputation of having all the prettiest girls, or the party girls, or the slutty girls, or the smart girls.

Whatever the reputation, however, a fraternity or sorority is only one pledge class and a couple of semesters away from turning things around.  Sometimes this is for the better, and sometimes this is for the worse.  But no Greek house - as far as I can tell - is immune to it.  Some may fluctuate from one side of the spectrum to the other, while others may say closer to a certain point.  In either case change is inevitable in some way and to some magnitude.

Hearing stories from my fraternity’s alumni has repeatedly confirmed this fact for me.  When I talk to men who were initiated in the 50’s or 60’s, they have great positive memories.  When I talk to alumni from the 90’s or early 2000’s, they sometimes wonder how our house has 1) Not collapsed and 2) Not been kicked off campus.  Simply put, the answer to these questions is that the fraternity has changed.

Besides Friday Night Lights, one of my favorite movies is The Departed.  One quote that I like comes right at the beginning of the movie.  Jack Nicholson says, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment.  I want my environment to be a product of me.”  Generally speaking, that statement resonates with me.

However, I think that each person needs to recognize their environment and the environment’s location within its cycle.  Environments - just like our lives, our culture, and nations - are cyclical.  Because of this, we would do well to understand what areas we have affected our environments and in what areas we are the product of an existing system.

To take this back to my collegiate career, I was extraordinarily lucky to join the fraternity I did at the time I did.  Without any real knowledge or insight, I managed to find my way into a brotherhood that was on a steep upswing in terms of social responsibility, campus reputation, and the respect of our peers.  I entered a community where I was challenged to succeed and enabled to do so; where I was given the tools to improve myself and expected to do so; and where I could leverage existing momentum to build help my Fraternity grow stronger.  

In the time I was a member of that fraternity, it grew stronger.  But for me to claim proprietorship or credit of that would be ignorant and arrogant.  I was standing on the shoulders of those who went before me and running with momentum for which I was not the catalyst.  I WAS constructing but I was not the architect.

In terms of being an American, I intend to affect my community and my friends to make this place better throughout my life.  However, I will never be the reason that America is great.

We would all do well to remember this sentiment.  We need to remember it as we walk among prosperity.  But most especially, we need to be reminded of this in our times of success.  Success is not perfume enough to cover the odor of arrogance.  If I am arrogant, my stench will poison my friendships, partnerships, and my vision.  The world has never known a self-made man.  Similarly, many people have had a profound impact on their communities but none truly acted alone.  The architect needs inspiration, encouragement, and a unique skill set that cannot be developed in isolation.  And alas, even after all these pieces have fallen into place, he relies on the construction workers to erect the vision.

As I have spent time over these last weeks examining myself and the years I spent at college, it has occurred to me that life is cyclical.  With each passing season, the tides rise or they lower.  It has also occurred to me that this is a fact that is much more difficult to accept within a moment than it is when we have the opportunity to look back on it.

I was lucky enough to have an office on campus for a short time of my college career.  I cannot tell you the number of nights I spent alone in that tiny, windowless office, tucked away in a corner of the Student Union, until after the sun would rise the next day.  I would work with the harsh fluorescent lights with no sense of time or community.  For a person of my personality, this was close to prison.

There were times that the very same office, however, would have eight friends packed in.  They would sit on the couch, the desk, the floor, or would lean against the wall, and we would laugh and joke and tell stories and reflect.  Or sometimes we would close the door because we had something super secretive to talk about.  In any case, those were the moments of bliss for me.  On these days, my office felt more like a tree house from childhood memories.

And when I compare those times - alone in the wee hours of the morning, and packed in the afternoons with dear friends - I remember that each of these times came in seasons.  There would be weeks of sleepless nights followed by a month of afternoon talks.

Just this evening, I was talking to a junior in high school at the church youth group I volunteer for.  As he sat playing the piano, I sat on the piano bench next to him and asked him how he was doing.  “Well, I’m doing alright,” he said.  “Finals are coming up next week. Other than that, though…”

We continued to chat for a bit.  Later on he said, “You know, I’m doing much better now that it isn’t winter.  I don’t… I don’t really like winters.  I don’t feel right.  But now things are changing; summer is finally here.”  In that moment, I will tell you that he was being as vulnerable as a young man of his age and personality can be.

His life works in seasons.  Summer follows winter; relaxation follows months of distress.

And while we don’t all follow the calendar, each of goes through these same phases.

As I think about life being cyclical, there is one thought that refuses to be quiet.  When I consider our lives moving up and down, I keep replaying how hard it is to recognize this movement in our lowest moments.  Or - to put it another way - during hard times it is sometimes impossible to recognize that things will get better.  We call these times our darkest nights or our deepest valleys.  These are the moments when it seems that the sun couldn’t ever break the darkness.  All of us have been there.

What I wish I could say to myself in those moments - or, more frankly, what I wish I could believe in those moments - is that none of us are cursed.  Each of us follows a path that goes up and down at times.  This same path, though, always moves forward.

One of my very favorite movies is Friday Night Lights.  When I was watching it a few weeks ago, a line resonated with me that I had never particularly noticed before.  Mike Winchell, who is the senior quarterback on the football team, ask his coach:

You ever feel cursed, Coach? Like, no matter what, inside your heart you feel that you’re gonna lose. Like something’s hanging over you, following you like a witch or a demon that just… I feel like that all the time.

There were times over the last few years that seemed this way to me.  No matter what I said, I hurt a friend.  When I said nothing, another was hurt.  I made the wrong decision, couldn’t pass the test, and forgot obligations like a CD on repeat.  Or maybe it was one bad choice that seemed to ripple endlessly.  In the movie, Coach Gaines responds to Mike’s question like this:

Fact of the matter is, I believe that, uh, our only curses are the ones that are self-imposed. You know what I’m saying?

Playing back the scenes of my life that seemed the darkest or loneliest, it becomes clear that much of the reality in those moments was self-constructed.  These times were not without end and I was not cursed.  But, our self-fulfilling prophecies can complicate things.  When we feel like we are going to let everyone down, we’re much more likely to do so.  When we feel like we’re going to fail that test, flop on that project, or fall short - it’s very possible we’ll be correct.  Or, as Henry Ford said it, “Those who think they can, and those who think they can’t, are both right.”

I hope these are lessons I carry with me into the frustrating parts of the future.  When life seems to be unraveling I should remember that there is another side to that cycle.  Also, we often perpetuate our own darkness. 

As the sun sets, so also must it rise.

When I was a freshman in college, I pretty much had the world figured out… Just ask 18-year-old Kyle.

In retrospect, some of the things I said and did as a freshman leave me with nothing to do but scratch my head.  I wouldn’t say that I regret most of them, I just can’t believe how little I knew (or how much I thought I knew).

One statement I was known to say as a freshman is that I was going to live my life without any regrets.  This was a sincere statement, and it was well-reasoned with the information I had at the time.  Also, the statement was dual edged.  First, living without regret meant that I was not going to let the frustrations and failures of my past weigh me down in the present.  Secondly, living regretless meant that the decisions I made in the present would be ones that I wouldn’t look back on and regret.  Each of these tasks seemed pretty reasonable to me.

As I matured and learned more about myself, I began to understand where this idea had risen from.  When I was forced to examine my greatest fears in life, regret was number one on the list.  I had - and in some ways, still do have - a very real fear of regret.  A great deal of this fear has its basis in my personality and my tendency to dwell on things for a great amount of time.  While other factors play in, the bottom line is that I was deeply afraid of regret.

Now think about that statement for a moment.  Fear and regret are each incredibly powerful negative emotions.  Fear often drives people to do otherwise inexplicable things.  They may be very subtle things about how we live our lives day-to-day, or they may be very profound decisions we make, but in either case fear can leave a deep crater in the story of our lives.  Similarly, regret will gladly keep us up at night, paralyze us from facing those we’ve wronged, or prevent us from fully engaging ourselves in the present.

So here we have these powerful negative emotions which are perhaps - in many ways - mirror images of each other, and they are intertwined in my head.  When you combine two negative things, they can often exponentially affect one another.

When I came to understand that it was fear that fueled my regret-avoidance, it triggered a great deal of internal dialogue.  I asked myself if I was missing out on things by letting fear take the wheel and drive.  I asked myself if I was masking fear with regret, or vice verses.  I don’t have much prophetic advice from this soul-searching, but I am much more comfortable with both emotions now than I was before.

When I look back on my college career, there aren’t a large number of things I regret.  I don’t regret my naivety freshman year or my bold stance on regret.  By and large, I don’t regret the way I carried myself, the choices I made in my social life, where I spent my money, or how many football games I missed during my college career.

And while I say this, there are lingering regrets that I can’t ignore.  One profound regret centers on the way I dealt with a friend in a very public setting.  Another has to do with opportunities I refused to pursue.

At any rate, I am left to wonder about people who say they live with no regrets.  Is that possible?  I don’t think it is, but I don’t know.  Are they fueled by fear, too?  Would they rather cope with fear than regret?  Is that an easier, or more familiar, road for those who say they live with no regrets?

Regret does not define my life.  As I said, I regret only a few choices I have made.  I have also come to know that everything is a learning opportunity.  This revelation has healed many of the wounds that were once consistently reopened by regret.

And as reflect on these things and move into the future, I know full well that some pieces of my past are tinted with a shade of regret.  I have a healthy understanding of this.  These pieces I carry along with me, neither glorifying them or ignoring them, but recognizing them for what they are.  In doing this, my regret has lost control over me. Regret - for me - is like most fears: once we recognize what it is, and not what we are making it out to be, it no longer holds power over us.

1,751 days ago, I arrived in a town I had only been to a handful of times to begin a new chapter of my life.  The time since then has contained more pain, joy, laughter, heartache, and discovery than I could have possibly imagined.

As I look back on the years I spent at Kansas State University, I am overcome with a sense of contentment.  I have a peace about me that is very difficult to explain.  But in this, I suppose, we find one of the most meaningful things that I discovered: Peace from pieces.

My time in college is something I remember as being fragmented.  Perhaps this is just human nature.  For all I know, everyone remembers things in pieces and there’s nothing abnormal about it.  But when I  play back the last 1700 days, as I have done repeatedly over the last several months and the last several hours, it is a film that keep skipping from one scene to another.  The film skips from my dorm to Africa to the football stadium to the Big 12 Room to my car to the library in less than a second.

A better way to describe it is like an image mosaic.  Have you ever seen one of those?  When you look at it from a distance, it looks like an image of something.  But as you get closer, you realize that it is actually hundreds of tiny pictures that make up the larger image.  The larger image doesn’t actually exist; Instead, the larger image is only a perception from the distance.

I have a picture mosaic of Michael Jordan.  I got it when I convinced my parents to buy me a one-year subscription to Sports Illustrated for Kids from one of those Scholastic Book order forms we got once a month in elementary school.  From a distance you see the quintessential image of Michael Jordan: suspended in air, arms and legs extended, basketball in is palm.  He is about to lay down a dunk.  The image is probably the same one that Nike used to make the silhouette for their AirJordan brand.  Anyway, as you get closer, you realize this image of him is actually hundreds of ity bity pictures of Michael Jordan taken over his NBA career.  All of the tiny pictures make the one big image of Michael Jordan defying gravity and capturing the attention of the world.  

When I try to play back my years in Manhattan, I see a big image that is calm and peaceful.  It’s hard to describe exactly what that means… Maybe its a beach or a sunset.  In any case, the exact image isn’t important.  What is significant is that, as I examine this time more closely, there is a great deal of chaos in the tiny pictures.  While a few pictures seem peaceful and bright, others seem dark, or busy, or lonely, or confused.  Some of the pictures are of me and some are of the people I’ve met along the way.  Each little picture - one tiny piece of the bigger image - has its own story.  Each of these stories plays into the bigger story.  Out of those times, places, people, and spaces - as diverse as they are - I have come to a place that is peaceful.

Out of hundreds of fragments I have found tranquility.  From my pieces I have found peace.

In an effort to understand how all this works, I feel like I need to write.  I never know how things are going to end up when I start writing. Sort of like that day I arrived at college, I don’t know what’s in store yet.  I just feel this need to explore those stories that have brought me to where I am now.

Via Twitter: “As the chapter of my life that I called Manhattan ‘home’ ends, I drive into the night with a heart full of memories & a deep sense of peace.”  9:10pm Saturday, May 12, while driving to KC from Manhattan.