Life is hard.
I can't be certain, but I'm guessing even Ghandi or Buddha have had moments of self-questioning. There is, however, an amazing wisdom in recognizing the gift of accepting your shadows.
I've always been in tune with mine, but only recently have I learned not to self-deprecate or buffer other people's discomfort levels with jokes. I've stopped minimizing about the sh*tty moods, moments and mess that comes along with me and with my life. These things shape us, make us, can break us and ultimately, if we are lucky, leave us wiser.
I'm one person. I'm not saying I've figured anything out or have the answers beyond what I have learned from, personally. I am saying: I see you -- the dark and the light, and frankly, it gives me permission to be the same.
"It is the very stuff that allows for disarming, authentic relationships that matter and respect for our scars as well as our shining stars."
These things I know:
- There are moments in life when the day's air feels still and pungent with the smell of nothing.
- There are finer levels of awareness when all feels lost and hopeless in the gravity of meaninglessness.
- There are seconds that the flash of guilt is so strong that your body quakes in the after shocks of its recognition and you can only pray that seconds won't lead to a minute of that feeling.
- There are times when time is elusive and evasive and impossible to manifest into productive thoughts or actions or even accomplishments of duty and the mundane.
- There are people who will always, no matter who you are, find fault either in your perceived lies or brutal honesty, for they want only what suits their own... in both areas.
- There will be a look in his/her eyes when you know you've lost the light that once sparked the champion within him to fight for "it," for you.
- There comes a day when forgetting isn't possible and forgiving is too hard, so you fester in the places that you seldom allow to present themselves. Forever won't keep them locked away and today was just that day.
- There might be hugs that break your soul into cold sweats in the preeminent knowing of the loss to be felt in the future, near or distant.
- There are comments that will cut your self-belief in half just as swiftly as the words cut air falling from a loved one's mouth.
- There is an aloneness that pervades every inch of your being like molecular vacuums, hollowing out all that was filled of fragrant with presence in yourself.
Focus on what matters. Focus on what YOU can change.
It is within us , the power to destroy and create ourselves resides.
It is of our own accord that which we can choose to be overcome, or to overtake.
It is with full heart and open eyes that darkness must be absorbed, seen and accepted to bring the chance of dawn and brighter risings.
It is the orphic dream, the elysian beauty that always has and will exist within us.
The choice, the day, the moment or second is as worthy as the others but it must be felt, seen and heard for what it is... a passing of emotion and a perception for which only we give it permission to stay or meaning to hold.
It is within us -- the power to create. It is without us, nothing more than nothing or everything, depending on how you (we) choose to perceive it.
Choose wisely, and choose often. Choose again and again to love your darkest as you love the light. You are intrinsically the numinous, ever-fluid being that exists in a balance of acknowledging both.
Meditate on that, Monday! (Oh, and laugh... and have another cup of coffee.)
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