SHAME

For the first time in a long time I feel no shame. I am proud of every step I tread. I try and read every chance I get. I love the fact that my relationship with my sister and family is the best it's ever been. My bones are uneasy, I feel the excitement building. My fingers want to play the songs they wrote about a girl they loved. They love. It is my belief that love comes and goes, but really it is always there. I believe it just changes. It will change from one kind of love to another. Sometimes it never changes, and you'd be willing to give up everything for that love. Nothing can come close to the feeling you get just thinking about it. I still say my mother will be the only woman that will NEVER fall out of love with me. Music is the love I will never stray from. When I meet a woman that understands that, well, that will be a good start for me. I still love this love I sing about, but alas, I have no time to love this love closely. I can only admire with unprecedented rapture the beauty she resonates. For now, I'm sure that is enough. At least until another boy has the guts to tell her the things I dare not. I've got miles, and miles, and miles in front of me. I hope everyone I sing to gets a small portrait of this love I picture day in and day out. I hope that when I'm done you can see the paint I've left on each road. Splattered from road to road, until one day, you could see her face from the sky. Only then could someone truly understand what I see. I can assure, no one sees what I see. That, in my belief, is love.

As for what I've learned this week. Volcanoes are extraordinary. However, to the early Christian world, Volcanoes were considered to be evil. The complete incarnation of evil actually. This was derived from the early teachings of Christians that Hell was located somewhere in the center of the earth. Volcanoes were considered gateways to these infernal regions. What's amazing is that these beliefs were held steadfast well on into the nineteenth century. In Dante's Divina Commedia hell is described as a vast crater, and in the center of this crater sat Lucifer. They used to say that the sounds in an eruption were actually the moans of lost souls being tortured in eternal damnation.  In 1653 there was a report from french traveler Martiniere. In this report he claimed that the howling and wailing along the coast of Iceland were the cries of the damned whom the devil had condemned to a frozen prison around the island. He did this so they wouldn't grow accustom the everyday fires of hell. However it was just the rumblings of Mount Hekla. Interesting : )