|letting the light in|

“The heavy rifeness of honeysuckle,” Faulkner wrote as the boy running into freedom felt the starlit road unspooling like a ribbon beneath his feet.

And now, whenever our feet pass by the honeysuckle in early May and the heavy rifeness fills our lungs, the light pours in with it, because this scent — this arresting fragrance on the air that a body can smell even before the eyes can behold it —

This heavy rifeness, it means boys with hearts still brave despite all the grief and despair and the relentless pull of fierce blood —

Boys who dream of a better way, a better life, a better everything–

Boys who know they are more than their fathers were can still run into freedom, away from the bondage of their forebears and find the way into a brightening morning where the whipporwills call and the sun crests the hill and they never look back.

So we linger beside the honeysuckle and breathe it all in to fill our own lungs and our own hearts with the heavy rifeness that grows our courage to keep running down an unspooling road all this long way Home.