Some Days I Write Cool Shit.

From 11/20/17.

It's wonderful how and when teachers and lessons present themselves. I'm sure they're always there, just waiting to be seen and then taken up.

"One thing that awakens people to change is trauma." -Ram Dass

Sometimes you realize the world is smiling. Maybe it only seems to smile when you do. Today the colors are brighter, the sky more beautiful, my eyes are wider to take it all in. I acknowledge it won't last, but that doesn't make me sad. I'm grateful for it all the same.

The journey reveals itself in the most quiet, yet fascinating ways. In the midst of much grief and anguish, it's hard to recall that you'll breathe again and smiles will make their way back to your face and you become a stranger to the heartache and distress. Then you go back again and forget the happiness. Back and forth and back and forth. Exhaustion and energy, vitality, wisdom and stupidity. We're always a bit of each and you can't fully know one without reflection on the other. One magnifies the other.

Dumbledore and trees and Ram Dass. Those are my teachers today.

I am grateful for moments of relief and perspective, for freedom and the language to speak and eyes to take it in.

Healing Life Forces

The joy. People, places, things, and moments that make you feel like you're in the presence of god/universal life force/oneness-of-us-all and help you feel a bit more grounded and comfortable in yourself. Those are the people/places/things/moments I aim to seek and embrace and cultivate. Being with the right people, in the right place, doing what feels so right in your soul is the stuff of necessity. Of life. I'm not a religious person in the secular sense, but sometimes I feel the spirit, the oneness of humanity, and so clearly am in awe of the beauty that is existence. To be sure, there is ugliness and pain and heartache and degradation, but throughout that, goodness abounds. I'm finding the good and learning to sit with what is. Not changing, nor demanding another outcome or reality. Chugging along, breathing in and out. One step at a time, forward or back. The life force that is us, that is you, that is I. Brilliant.

"You look happier than you have in years," she told me.

Another thought-- no one really warns you that healing can be painful. That healing is the long-haul, but the only sustainable path. No one gives you a book of rules, you make the ones that work for you. Maybe I knew that and it is what has kept me running and scared for so long. But through healing it's not only pain and sorrow, there is so much joy and freedom and release. Now I know that. Freedom can be ours, in so many ways.