Christmas...

It's the crazy season. The season of stress, of overfilled malls, and maxed out credit cards; of fat men in red suits, of Christmas trees and a few seriously overplayed songs. It's also the time when people smile in the street, your grocery checkout lady looks you in the eye and for a few short weeks people's worlds appear to expand before rapidly shrinking back down to size in time for the boxing day sales.

Before you go and call me the Grinch I need to say that I love Christmas. It's the season of traditions and love; of looking past yourself and finding joy in giving it to others. The reason for my mixed feelings is knowing that even with all the good going around at this time of year tomorrow someone will still be lonely and the world will still be falling apart. The death's and births, joy and heartache associated with living will all be there. And for the majority the only hope this world has, the only hope this worlds needs will be standing in their front yard, wrapped up in Christmas lights hoping that one day we will notice.

i am more

i am more than painted lips in a dress,

i am words and thoughts, secrets and dreams.

i am more than images on a screen,

i am body and soul, spirit and breath.

i am more than face and weight and skin,

i am heart and mind, passion and lungs.

i am more,

i am more,

i am me.

Author The Dust Dances Too 

Balancing questions...

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A lot of my life is spent trying to strike a balance and missing.

I want to do and be so much. And I want to be good at it. I want to truly love and be loved. I want to be a good friend, daughter, granddaughter, sister, cousin, niece. I want to be a star student, an indispensable employee. I want to write something wonderful. I want to be intelligent, educated and informed; I want to travel the world, read all the books, newspapers, magazines and journals I can. I want to be healthy, fit and pretty. I want my home to be cozy and beautiful. I want to take photos, cook delicious meals, go to parties, have meaningful conversations, watch films, climb mountains, walk though galleries and gardens. I want to listen to talented musicians, surf waves, learn to dance and play guitar. I want to have a golden tan, flawless skin, perfect hair and stylish clothes. I want to impress people with my political insight, my emotional intelligence, my progressive ideas. I want to help those in need. I want to find my kindred spirits and let no one ever leave without making them feel better and happier and do my bit to make the world a better place.

I simply don't know how to do it; how to strike a balance I feel is missing and I'm wondering is there enough room in my life for me to be and have all of those things or does something have to give? And If something has to give; what is it that I am willing to sacrifice?

The stories telling...

The story alone is not the answer. For the answer itself lies hidden in the telling. Like words written on forgotten diary pages or lyrics lost in the melody. Pictures; words painted with emotion, so vivid they reach inside, grasping at some deeply held thread hidden for fear of daylight. A persons search for answers cannot end in another life's telling, among dusted pages and lyrics score. Your life's meaning can only be found in the mystery, your questions in search of the answers. Answers only to be found in your stories telling. The story alone is not the answer. For the answer itself lies hidden in the telling.

“Writers cannot provide The Answers, but we can bring a lot of other things to the table. Reaching inside and drawing out truth, from our own experiences: deep-seated shame, broken-heartedness, soaring love, secret longing. And then we can share the things we have done that have made us feel better, given us some comfort, sprinkled our lives with a little sweetness.

Better yet, we can concentrate upon telling the tales of what comes before the resolution. The sadness before the happiness, the storm before the calm, the shame before the self-acceptance. Because it's in the confusion, the fear and the failure that we are all united, and where the truth is momentarily revealed. Sometimes it's enough just to know that there are others exactly like us, feeling exactly what we are feeling. Often, answers masqueraded as The Answers just make us feel more flawed, and alone.

A story that leaves us hanging is one that leaves us thinking. Wondering, ruminating, looking to piece together the puzzle for ourselves. That's just how life goes; the mystery is never truly solved, the story never truly ends.”

Laura Valerie

Doubt of today...

Sometimes I wonder if there is any meaning to anything. I wonder if faith is real or just some cruel ruse played on small minds. I wonder if I'm where I'm supposed to be. I wonder if my dreams are my own. I wonder if sanity exists. I wonder if I am of worth. More than anything I wonder if any of it's real... God, life, purpose.

Sometimes the only step I can take is the one directly in front of me. The only way forward is to deal with the past. The only way to really dream is to let go of the expectations. And the only way to live is to hope that one day there will be a clear horizon beyond the doubt of today.

"Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we are in fact in the process of change... Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening...”. Alice Walker

Forever? Even longer...

Family without blood ties. People you trust with everything and no matter what happens, where you go, live or how much time passes between conversations. They are still your family. They've seen your best and worst; clutzy moments, morning hair, language blunders and 3am phone calls.

But oh the laughter, the memories this family holds. Like a silk thread of hope on a dewy morning. Beautiful beyond description. It's the best and worst the acceptance that life will happen, you may never all be around one table again. But the beauty of the time you had outweighs the sadness of the realization, the moment's passed from a vivid reality to a whisper in a daydream.

“We'll be Friends Forever, won't we, Pooh?' asked Piglet.
Even longer,' Pooh answered.”

A.A. Milne, Winnie the pooh

What we leave behind...

When a writer dies they become books, photographers continue on through their photos and artists, their artwork. But what of the rest of us? Those of us who have no books to their names or gallery displays. What is it we leave behind?

As everything has a beginning, so too must everything have an end; life is no exception. It is gift, so often taken for granted until the death of someone remands us of it's fragility and value.

This week; a boy I know committed suicide (one of my VFS kids). I don't know how to describe the emptiness that settled in the pit of my stomach on hearing the news or the internal battle as my brain struggles to comprehend the reality; he's gone.

My heart breaks for a life lost; for unfulfilled potential, for loss of his caring spirit, his mind, his talent, his passion and for for memories of a time gone by.

What went through his mind in those last moments I may never know. Could I have done something? Said something? We weren’t each other’s closest friends. But he touched me, during his short life. Maybe I touched him, too. I’ll never know. All I know is what he's left behind.

“Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived.” Picard, Star Trek

Quiet love...

“Love fascinates me. It defies logic, spans cultures, transgresses moral, political, social, economic, racial and ethnic boundaries. Love is all-powerful and all-encompassing. I don't think I am a romantic for saying so. History shows that love emerges from the most horrific of situations. It makes good people do bad things and bad people do good things. Love is everything.

Yet despite its universality, love is surprisingly hard to pin down. And trickily, the harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.

My observations have led me to discover my favorite kind of love. It's the quiet kind. The bragging, over-compensating, facades and performances don't enter the picture. What takes my breath away is catching the inconspicuous lovers in a tender moment, when they think nobody is looking. He tucks her hair behind her ear, she strokes his cheek with the back of her hand. They lock eyes across the room. It's beautiful, because it's real. And it's heartening.” Laura Valerie

Know thyself...

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The ancient Greek aphorism 'γνῶθι σεαυτόν' roughly translated as 'Know Thyself' has had many different meanings throughout literature. The Suda (a massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world) says: “the proverb is applied to those whose boasts exceed what they are, and that know thyself is a warning to pay no attention to the opinion of the multitude”.

In Plato's Philebus, Socrates said that people make themselves appear ridiculous when they are trying to know obscure things before they know themselves. Later Benjamin Franklin observed the great difficulty of knowing one's self by saying “there are three things extremely hard, steel, a diamond and to know one's self.” More recently (or not so recently) the Latin of know thyself: 'temet nosce' was inscribed over the Oracle's door in the Matrix.

"Know thyself" the interpretations are endless yet we obsess over it . It is the basis of the majority of self-help, the aim and basis of many religions; its the sign of being a mature adult. But how do you 'know thyself'? What does that really look like 'knowing thyself'? Is it all about introspection and self reflection or is knowing 'thyself' not about us at all? Abraham Joshua Herschel once said “Know thy God rather than know thyself... there is no self-understanding with out God-understanding.” 

 

In my search to know/understand myself I have to admit that I get slightly confused, lost and bewildered at times. Like Anne from L.M. Montgomery's Anne of the Isle I think I know myself then, myself changes and I have to get acquainted all over again. Is it growing pains or is the quest to 'Know thyself' akin to chasing a rainbows end?

 

“I do know my own mind,' ... 'The trouble is, my mind changes and then I have to get acquainted with it all over again.” L.M. Montgomery

Yesterday...

Yesterday, how much time and energy do we spend wishing things were how they were? Wishing that we could go back, pause time, make it last that little bit longer. But life isn't static, is it?

“It ebbs and it flows and people grow up and move away and graduate and lose their jobs and people that you love die and some people get married and others don't and some get divorced and some get cancer and things aren't how they were... If you need to celebrate how good it was then celebrate, if you need to remember how great it was when they were alive, then remember that. And if you need to grieve, grieve. If you need to apologize or make amends or you need to do something to make peace with how it was then do it, but then move on.”

Take the memories and look forward because honestly there is a certain kind of desperate, despair that sets in when you believe that things were better back then. Because when you’re stuck back there you can never be fully present here, now, today.

We don't have a guarantee about tomorrow and we can’t ever go back, all we have is today. Some of us live in the fantasy that we’ll get around to it tomorrow, that we’ll get around to them tomorrow. The danger is that we will wake up, and it will not be tomorrow, it will be yesterday and we will have missed it, you will have missed them... we will have missed life. Today.

* This was written after watching Nooma, Today by Rob Bell.

Stories...

Be it of privilege, of poverty, of justice prevailing or not; every being has a story. The first time I saw the above picture I was haunted by it's poignancy, but unable to write about it. Too often it's tempting to travel though life with our eyes firmly closed to the stories people around us may have to tell. We often don't want to be witness to the intricacies of their lives; we don't want clarity or intimate knowledge of where and whom they went home to at night, their joy and their sorrow, their love or their heartache. Because once you know it their lives can become a part of our story.

It's tempting to hide at home reading Alice Pung because she's safe. Her stories of poverty, struggle and oppression, are beautifully written and bound together in book's with a guaranteed happy ending. Stories of triumph, leaving you with the comforting impression that there is a sense of justice to this world. 

But as Milan Kundera once wrote that “... there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

On opening my eyes I find that my difficulty is not compassion; the telling of or becoming involved in a story, that is the easy part. My difficulty is walking away; choosing whose story to tell and whose battle to fight. I struggle keeping quiet, letting go and acknowledging that the world is at times is cruel and unfair and as much as I wish I could find a way to fix everything and everyone's pain, communicate every untold story to the world... I can't.

There will always be countless stories, retold and forgotten in equal measure; I am coming to believe that while I can't fix the world's problems or pay tribute to every story, I can go through life dedicated to keeping my eye's open to the stories of those around me. I can pray for the wisdom to know what stories I am called to tell, what battles I am called to fight and when I'm called to simply let go.

“The planet does not need more ‘successful people’. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture is the set.”

— Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama

Empty my hands...

Career... How much the thought fills my head with a fruit salad of emotion. All through university I couldn’t wait to get out and into the “real world”, start a successful career, make money and prove to everyone who said I couldn’t, that I can. Now, after taking almost two years off I’m here at the beginning trying to find the right place to start, searching for direction and a dream, feeling lost and oh so vulnerable. What if no one hires me? What if I make a wrong choice? What then?

For so long I’ve wanted to be successful in order to prove my worth and while I’ll openly admit that I still want to be successful, my definition of success is changing. Success is not so much about the amount of money I earn or working for the prestigious companies anymore. Success for me is becoming more and more about personal happiness and my ability to contribute positively to the lives of others. I’m coming to the realization that I would rather have an average job I love, a job where I feel valued and supported than killing myself doing something I don’t like, to prove myself to people who don’t care about me.

  “Well, it all comes to this; there's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is to   live in your own. After all, I believe in myself. I'm not so bad and silly as they think me..." L.M. Montgomery

“I let these dreams die, If I lay down all my wounded pride, If I let these dreams die, Will I find that letting go lets me come alive...”  Empty my hands, Tenth Avenue North

Kindred spirits...

I’ve always been looking to find kindred spirits to share my life with ever since reading Anne of Green Gables as a 14 year old. But I have to admit that eventhough I'm always looking to find kindred spirits I have this nagging fear of what if. What if my kindred spirits... don't like me? What if, because of my flaws - my shyness, self-consciousness, uninteresting-ness - a potentially wonderful friendship falls flat on the floor?

Sometimes that fear can be personified in me trying-too-hard. Unfortunately my trying often presents a wall; a certain coldness, a front that stalls a real, foundation upon which to build a genuine, heartfelt, rewarding friendship.

I recently read a quote by photographer Cecil Beaton, recalling his first meeting with Audrey Hepburn 1954:

“...without any of the preliminaries I felt that she cut through to a basic understanding that makes people friends. Nothing had to be explained: we liked one another. A chord had been stuck and I knew that, next time we met, we would continue straight from here with no recapitulation of formalities. This was a unique occasion.”

Cecil reminded me that a blossoming friendship is not dependent upon making oneself seem attractive to others. It is about being warm and accepting, and welcoming those who cross our paths with open arms. Shedding layers, rather than donning them. Because it's the not trying - the effortlessness - that really makes some friendship's unique.

"Your heart and my heart

are very, very old friends."

— Hafiz 

Riding Elevators...

Every once in a while iTunes reintroduces me to a song I’d all but forgotten about. A song that puts words to emotions, expresses fears and feelings that I’m too scared to voice or even admit to feeling on my own. In a way it is like iTunes get’s inside my head and made sense of me, then explains me to myself.  

I have some big decisions to make in the next few weeks. Decisions that personally I’d rather not make Janet Fitch once said “I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.”

Today’s iTunes was Riding Elevators by the Danish artist Mads Langer.

“Waiting to put my feet on the ground,

I'm tired of going up and down

But sometimes it feels safer, waiting...

Never here or there,

On the ground or in the air

People come and go 

But I'm still riding elevators”

Happily ever after?

I set up this blog space months ago with the intention of writing regularly once I completed the move from Denmark to Australia. You know a new blog to chronicle a new chapter etc. Well I’ve been here over two weeks. It's been two weeks of staring at blank pages and unpacking boxes.

There are a lot of unanswered questions and old insecurities to keeping me company and the honest truth is, I have no idea what comes next. The one thing I wish more than anything is that I knew, I wish I knew what came next. But I don’t. When I was little I thought I’d have my life figured out by the time I was 20... at 22 I can hear my a 5 year old self scolding me for being so behind schedule. But when you’re little, being grown up seems so far away, so simple and yet so tangible.

When you are little happily ever after is the life you live once you have grown up. Somehow you wake up from a deep sleep (your teenage years) and go on to live your life with Prince Charming, forever unencumbered by evil spells, wicked witches and heartless stepmothers.

But as we grow up we detect that it’s always other people that have happy endings. People we haven't seen in a few years, who on seeing them again or via Facebook profiles, seem to have organically evolved into perfect specimens, with perfect lives, with no trouble, with little or no effort at all. The same goes for people whose lives we look back upon in history books; their successes seemed inevitable, rather than a lot of really hard work.

I wish there was some way to get past this awkward phase, this phase of not knowing what comes next in life to that place where I can at least know something. But the thing I’m coming to realise is that we (no one) will never live, life happily ever after (not on this earth anyway).  Because we actually have to live it. We are here every day. Making decisions every day. Taking baby steps, forwards and backwards. Dreaming. Loving. Hating. Moving. Succumbing to weakness. Rising to the challenge. Applying for jobs. Making money. Spending money. It's never ever after. It's just another day after day after day which, collectively, accumulate to make what seems like happily ever after, to people watching us from afar.

So while right now I know nothing. I’m living hoping, praying and wishing on every bit of dandelion dust and every shooting star that someday I’ll look back with no regrets.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke