i am the ocean

Source: a fine sea bird

creating beauty

Just as there is an ultimate Creator, I too have my own part to pay in Creation.  The choices I make everyday help to create the beauty and joy in my life.

I'm thankful for the privilege.

trusting

How does one trust their heart, really?  Your heart can take you down smooth roads and bumpy roads that end in cul-de-sacs of heartache.  I always thought that even if your heart took you down a difficult path, there would always be some deep purpose or lesson to come out of it.

Yet I've taken such a path recently.  In the immediate, I don't see a deeper purpose in the bad decision I made-- just brokenness that needs fixing.  Does a difficult road always need purpose?  I always thought it did.  I guess I don't think so anymore.  And if nothing else, I've become a richer person for my experiences.

After all when you examine the meaning of life, sometimes there's deep purpose and sometimes there's meaninglessness and pointlessness.  That doesn't make it good or bad.  It's all part of the experience.

To answer my question: How does one trust their heart?  We don't really have a choice.  If you can't trust your north star, your compass will always be broken.  We just have to... no matter where it takes us.

dreams

Original image by sholgk. Collage by MANA

Source: Flickr / sholgk

life report

[David Brooks is publishing a series on his blog of autobiographical essays written by people over 70.  Below are a couple excerpts from Marguerite Wolff Hessini's essay.]

"Sometimes I feel I have not lived one life, but many different ones within a 79 year lifespan so far.   Having known several different historic moments in different geographic locations, within different social and political contexts, I have a sense of fragmentation, yet there is an ongoing, uninterrupted thread that characterizes my life and links it to the wider human experience."

"Now, what have I learned through all this?
Despite appearances, real choices are few in life for most,
and circumstances beyond our control may determine our options, if any.
Still, there is our inherent aptitude for adaptation, for creating new possibilities within what seem, at times, impossible situations,
and that is an incredible force we can claim for ourselves and use constructively and creatively."

for when things get hard...

I wrote a list of things for myself to remember when I was going through a tough time last year.  I came across that list yesterday and thought I'd post it here.

FOR WHEN THINGS GET HARD:

• There will always be challenges.  How will you deal with them?
• What is going to help you move forward?
• Don't forget how far you've come.
• Today will be what you make it.
• There will always be things in your current situation that you may never find again.  Take advantage!
• Embrace your personal growth.
• Look for God... in all things.

 Sometimes I try so hard to do good things, and I can get kinda down on myself when things aren't better.  However, I've come to realize that my story is not mine to write.  My job is simply to be open, accept what comes to me, and work as hard as I can when given a task.  That's all that can be asked of me.

human superheroes

Everyone has the potential to do great things.  More than the saints and superheroes can apply for such work.  After all, we are all human.  And we are all capable.  We just need to believe we have something worth giving.

This gave me hope.

"Beyond that, it seems self-defeating to want our heroes to be perfect, because we aren't perfect ourselves. As Sides says, 'By calling our heroes superhuman we also let ourselves off the hook: Why do the hard work of bettering the world if that’s something only saints do?'"

marketing

I recently got a new job in marketing, so I've been thinking more about what exactly it is.  Marketing has changed quite a bit in the past few years.  It's more about building relationships and taking part in a conversation.  Marketing is so critical to many of the things we do and participate in.  I read this blog post earlier in the week by Michael Hyatt.  He gives a quick overview of marketing in today's world.  Worth reading :)

new humanism

Recently the NY Times columnist David Brook's wrote an article entitled New Humanism.  He talks about the new insights we have into human nature and their potential implications on politics, economics, and our own self-knowledge.  He highlights three of these insights.  I particularly liked the second two, and the are that:

(1)  Emotions are dissenter of our thinking.  They assign value and are the basis of reason. "Reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom."  (2)  "We are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships."

Instead of  looking at things like IQ, degrees, professional skills, he also suggests new ways to measure human capital.  This list contains:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

In his article/speech, he lacks ways to practically use this insight, but it's all definitely something to think about.  He also discusses these insights here (if you can get past the bad jokes in the beginning)...

the phoenix

Everyone has trials and tribulations at various times in their lives.  That's nothing new.  Most people know this.

This past year has been no exception for me.  I've faced many challenges, and one in particular that really turned me on my head at the time.  The mess took a while to sort out and the deep wounds needed time to heal.  After this particular mess of poor decisions, for the first time in my life I had an incredibly strong sense of regret.  The struggle and the losses seemed to far outweigh any small benefits of the experience that I could see, but now I'm starting to change my mind.  As humans, we make choices.  Our strength lies in the power of our decisions.  They define who we are and our paths in life.

Before and during our trials, it is impossible for us to understand them.  Only after will we know why they came.  I've seen people in my life hold on so tightly to past wounds, decisions, and experiences.  Understanding leads to acceptance, which eventually leads to recovery.  I've been to the bottom of the bottom at several points in my life, and when I'm there, I'm always wondering, 'When will I be restored?'  I'm learning now that I'll always be restored when I learn to rebuild.  Every time I struggle and every moment at the bottom is teaching me and giving me a gift to carry with me into the future.

"Elijah's cries echoed through the valley to return to his ears.
'Thou knowest not whereof thou speakest,' the angel replied.  'There is no tragedy, only the unavoidable.  Everything hath its reason for being: thou needest only distinguish what is temporary from what is lasting.'
'What is temporary?' asked Elijah.
'The unavoidable.'
'And what is lasting?'
'The lessons of the unavoidable.'
Saying this, the angel disappeared."
-Paulo Coelho, The Fifth Mountain

If you wish to rise from the ashes like the phoenix, you need only to learn how to spread your wings...

boxes

Lately I've been reading In Arabian Nights by Tahir Shah.  At one particular point in the book, the author (and main character of the book) recounts receiving an ornate box with a story written on a piece of paper placed inside for his fifth birthday.  Upon receiving the gift, the boy's father says:

"This box is very lovely... You can see the colors, and the work on the sides.  But don't be fooled, Tahir Jan, this box is only the container.  What's held inside is far, far more precious.  One day you will understand." (173)

As I read this, it struck me how people are so much like boxes.  Our bodies are just containers.  The most valuable things are what we hold inside. 

So what do we hold inside our "boxes?"  Our values, our past experiences, our hopes, our hurts, our ambitions, and so on.  Essentially, we are carrying stories, all kinds of stories.  We're constantly deciding which stories we put in, which stories we pull out, and which ones that we want to carry around with us.  I've also been observing in my own life how the things that I choose to carry profoundly affect the way I experience and live my life and others around me.  I need to be aware of what I'm holding in my box.

I think it's difficult for some people to identify what they carry around in their box or they don't like to (or perhaps even want to) think about the contents for whatever reason.  Instead they distract themselves with decorating their box, taking care of others' boxes, doing things that having nothing to do with boxes, etc.  But regardless, we're still affected by their box's contents.

We only get one life.  We should be pickier about what we carry around in our boxes.

becoming Real

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." 
-The Skin Horse to The Velveteen Rabbit  

No wonder people are scared to be Real.

People don't like to feel pain and suffering.  That's a natural thing.  However, with all of our recent inventions and discoveries to make our lives better, easier, and happier, people try to skip over the hard things in life.  I read an article a while ago about a woman whose mother died, and after a week she started taking anti-depressants to help her feel better.  You're supposed to feel like crap a week after your mom dies-- that's grief.  It's natural.  I think many people today feel that they deserve nothing but happiness and any kind of hardship is unfair.  Life is a cycle and a balance.  You can't have happiness without sadness.  The mountaintops wouldn't be that grand without the valleys below.

Our lives today are so filled with amenities and stuff that take as away from reality.  There are people who are scared to sit alone with themselves or think.  We believe it's safer to stay clear of risk and discomfort.  We believe we'll be happier that way.  However, those cushions are what lead us to static complacency.

If we have hope to become Real, we have to accept the hardship with the joy.  That's not to say there isn't a cost-- you will suffer wear and tear.  However in the end, you will be Real, you will find wisdom, you will grow, and you will be Alive.

"Not everybody lives, but everybody dies." 

-Blue Scholars 

go deep.  get Real.  love profoundly.

direction and being

Over the past couple of days, several questions have presented themselves to me...

What do I want my life to look like?
In what direction do I want to go?

What kind of person do I want to be?
Who is the woman I was born to be?

Where is God, or destiny, inviting me to go?

Essentially, I'm asking myself where I want to go and who I want to be.

Through my experiences lately I've come to a place where I have to ask these questions of myself in order to move forward.  The answers to these questions will profoundly affect how my life changes from here.  However, I don't think this is just a one shot deal.  These are questions that I need to continue to ask myself each day.  My responses to these questions affect and shape my daily life.  I'm continually building my bigger future with the little ways that I live out these answers everyday.  And as I continue grow, my answers may grow and change with me.  

"When we don't know where we're headed in life, we are vulnerable to temptation [and to making bad decisions]." -Donald Miller  I find this to be so true.  It's important to know the direction in which I want to go and to know what I want for myself, so that I'm not the one deterring myself from getting to where I want to go and being who I want to be.  I am the one who holds myself back.

"It is very simple.  What you value is what you create." -Derrick Jensen  Ultimately, I believe I have a job to create the life I want to live (with the help of God of course).  We shape what we do and are shaped by what we do.  That's not to say that there aren't outside forces beyond our control that affect us.  However, we still choose how we respond.  I am creating my life.  It should be the one I want to live.

So, have you asked yourself-- where are you going?  What are you creating?

a walk

I took a walk with little Hajiba the other day.  She's 5, the light of my life, and the biggest ray of sunshine you will ever meet.  I feel like she taught me everything I needed to know about life in that one hour walk.

Originally I was going to go alone. At this news, Hajiba sat down and started crying.  She didn't want me to go.  I was her playmate that day.  If I was going, she didn't just want but needed to go too.  Amidst some tears, her mom eventually said, "Ok, you can go."  When life gets painful or hard, sometimes you need to sit down and cry for a minute, but then you get up and move on. Eventually, in their own way, things will end up okay.

We walked the whole way with her little hand in mine.  When we felt like it, we ran, jumped, or just simply walked at our own pace chatting and singing songs along the way. At one point she got scared by a dog barking nearby.  She leaned into me for protection and comfort.  I was there.  I would have protected her.  As we walked, she picked almonds off the trees not even breaking her stride.  It was a reminder to me that life always provides beautiful and precious gifts.  You just need to look for them and seize them.  But the greatest thing I learned from Hajiba that day is that anything and everything is better when you can hold someone's hand...

poetry?

So, I never really considered myself a lover of poetry.  Even the just the word 'poetry' conjures up memories of elementary school limericks and haikus and ideas of people on stage reading words dripping with emotion or feeling.  Yuck.  Even reading poems in a book just never did it for me.  I never felt like I understood poetry.  When the word 'poetry' arises, usually I try to avoid it. 

However in going through much of my old writings, I realized that quite a bit of it actually is poetry.  Song lyrics are poetry.  Hip hop and rap is poetry.

I have a dear friend with whom I would share much of my writing and read hers a long time ago.  Recently, I read some of her current writings, but before I read them I thought, "Ah, this is poetry."  I thought they were nice, and that was it.  I didn't connect with them the way I did a lot of her older stuff.  But again in retrospect, a lot of her old writing back in the day was poetry.  So what is it about the word and idea of 'poetry' that turns me off?

Now that I'm thinking about all this, I think by definition poetry is words with depth.  However, the type of depth conveyed is different every time depending on the author and the style.  Sometimes it's emotional, sometimes spiritual, sometimes humor, sometimes intellectual, sometimes physical movement, and so on.  I think I'm attracted to certain types of depth in words more than others.  As I would guess most people would be.  I guess I just never really thought about it like that before.  I shouldn't be so quick to judge.  I might actually enjoy it.

Here's a piece of poetry that I'm particularly enjoying today.