I have clinked my way up the steepest coasters and been flailed into free-falls, turned inside loops so tightly that I let my limbs go and just smiled in submission to the wind and tangled hair.

I have abused drugs so that the world felt a fluffy pillow and so that the trees made me laugh. I have experienced the ecstasy of otherworldness, orchestras in my chest, the calm of a pill in my pocket.

I have fallen in love with beauty, looked so deeply into the grayest infant eyes that I found myself swimming in oceans, hurled into visionary states.

I have read aloud and written poetry that has made me weep in public, in front of strangers. I have wanted to die at the sight of dance, two bodies so in unison that the very hairs on the back of my own neck electrified at the slightest movement, precision, calculation, magic.

I have bent down on my hands and knees and crawled on my stomach and elbows to the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, my head 701 feet above the Atlantic ocean, the gusts cutting at my skin, the eyes unable to focus at the distance below, the spirit vertigo so strong that I soared outside of my body on salty sheer winds.

But nothing compares to the rush of security that comes with knowing I’m following God, pillow of cloud by day and Fire by night who knows the song of the morning star and the shouts of angels and the womb of the sea – what it feels like to want to make Him pleased, the fear at His just feet.