This story has been waiting for words for a while, building up pressure and momentum, weighing on my heart as I gather it in bits and pieces.

The stuff of life put under pressure, I hear, is what produces diamonds.  But to put it in such blunt words as carbon and pressure feels uncouth, not grasping the beauty that even simple origins can produce.  So many beautiful things in life have similar simple origins.  A grain of sand that becomes the catalyst for a pearl.  Dripping mineral water that forms fantastic caves of crystal formations.  The little moments of life, stacked, compounded, brought together, until they form a greater picture that in the moments of friction, pressure, incompleteness, and pain can be so hard to see or predict.

Even the way this story is coming together is in pieces.  I’m gathering up ideas like seeds and scattering them into the appropriate chapters whose names are the little signs labeling what each garden bed is supposed to produce, and where I will see if the ideas and memories sprout and grow with some time, water, and sunshine.

I make no claims to see the masterpiece that these moments compose, but I know that it exists.  All I can do for now is show you what I can see.  The grains of sand, the droplets of water, the unfurling leaves, the moments that make the whole.

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Stay tuned for part one, coming next week!