Paint my spirit gold

This evening, I found myself in a familiar place - it is the place I almost always take myself to when I am restless and unable to sleep. 

The best thing about this place is that I can go to it wherever I have the music. The above video is Mumford & Sons's set from Bonnaroo 2011. Whenever I'm feeling listless, I like to go back to this music and remember the time I fell in love with it. These men, their music, the words - a sea of flawlessly empathic beauty - illicit so many different emotions from me: joy, giddiness, heartbreak, and nostalgia to name the most poignant.

I fell in love with this music at a time in my life when so much was new and unknown, but I was living in what I have come to realize was a familiar, safe season of my life. If you know anything about me at all, you know that I used to live in Denton, which is a small town in Texas. You also know that I love Denton - its places, its character, and, most of all, its people. It is my home and so many of my favorite memories are tucked away in the sidewalk crevices of the Square and in between the pews of a beautiful church on East University Drive. I've left pieces of all the love I have to give in this town - its places as well as its people. 

I continue to fall in love with the music, which means that this beautiful place will never be left or forgotten. So tonight, I went there in my mind. The place is and is not Denton. It is everything that I associate with the music and with that time in my life. This happy place is not restricted to just Denton, but all the places I went during that season of life. It includes cities all over Texas as well as a few stops along the way in Tennessee, which is where I live now, ironically enough. This place is also the faces that I see in my mind's eye and feel in the recesses of my heart which bitterly miss them. This place is the memories that I swear to carry with me as long as my memory remains with me. 

It is also the memories I continue to make. And, believe me, I am already in love some with some of them. 

For whatever reason, though, this happy place was more bitter than sweet when I came to call on it this evening. I felt the pangs of nostalgia a little sharper than I had wanted. The tears were inevitable and a welcome source of relief. I have so much love for the things that I miss, but not enough brain capacity to tell you how much. This is my curse, but what a beautiful spell to be under, to have so much to love and be thankful for that your heart can literally find no words to adequately describe their worth. 

I find myself feeling more and more hopeful every day. Part of the reason why is because I have come to the realization that I do not have to leave seasons of life behind in order to make way for the new one. In a sense, certain parts of my life are over, but they are never lost. They have done more than merely shape the person I am now. They are inseparably attached to my self, just as much a part of me as I am of them. They come out in conversations with other people, they inform my decisions of the present, and they comfort me on nights like tonight, when my most fervent wish is to go back, if only for a few hours. Nothing can touch the seasons of my life that I now realize do not ever have to go away. Nor should they, because without them I would not be where I am at this very moment in time.