It's peace for your weary heart.

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.

||I'm waiting for something||

I always feel like I am waiting for something, waiting for the trip home, waiting to come back to school, waiting for the next deadline, waiting until I have all my chapel credits, waiting for the man I will love to walk through the door, waiting... Not to be confused with Ferlinghetti or anything. It seems that his waiting was much more poetic than my everyday existence, maybe it was because he was allowed to embrace the tortured artist within.

I read Jack Kerouac for class today; I'd read some of his beat poetry, thanks in part to John who had a great little pocket beat poetry book, but I never checked out his work from the library for fear of what others would think of me... Oh, just some girl being inspired by drunk, lunatic, sex-crazed hobos who paved the way for the hippie movement. Never mind the spiritual aspect of their writing, and their desire to have a meaningful/loving community with humankind. Never mind the love, and the fact good writing often flows from people who endeavor to be creative to go out on a limb and write or paint or mold something that wouldn't be created naturally.

As I was reading Kerouac's The Vanishing American Hobo I made an exciting parallel. Kerouac begins naming off all of the historical figures he maintains were hobos: Benjamin Franklin, Whitman, Johnny Appleseed, W.C. Fields, Teddy Roosevelt Beethoven, Einstein, Jesus, Buddah. A hobo is something that "has to hide, the cops are looking for him." No one want a hobo, they are painted to be scary, something to be shunned or excluded from normal society. Anyway, as I was reading, something clicked. The Parallel. Aside form Kerouac being a physical hobo, he was a spiritual hobo; his loyalty was somewhere between Catholicism and Buddhism, like most of the beats. They flowed with the tides of the time. They never had a solid spiritual foundation; except their writing. Their writing was their Saviour, but it was something that left the unfulfilled, because it was also their outlet.

In my opinion one thing that makes an artist an artist is their ability to feel. I'm not saying that I am an artist, but I feel. I feel things deeply. Occasionally, I have to force myself not to feel as strongly as I do about things, so I will not trouble myself to the point of agony. But as writers go, something that makes their writing good is their ability to come out of their suffering, to rise about what they are feeling, and put it all down. Unfortunately, they often drowned their suffering in their guts with hard liquor.