Bits and Pieces

I was looking through some blog posts and links I put up earlier this year...

Here are some bits and pieces that are poking at my heart this morning:

This cartoon at "The Naked Pastor"

This bit of a poem (from this post):

Bless the darkness around you.
That’s why you’re a poet.
As the night presses inward
you radiate beams of light.
Voznesekií

This line (from this post), written just before I left Malta, which has turned out to be far more deeply true than I could have known:

There are new things springing up within me. Sometimes they scare me, sometimes they excite me. Generally they feel as if they are going to bring both great pain, and great beauty. But I think that all the really beautiful things in life do that.