Sunshine

The sun shines all over this planet leaving energy for plants to grow and light to illuminate our lives. For an emergence of sunshine is a creative force, cast on the snow and reflected in a glistening light and as rays like fingers reach through the clouds to the terrain of the Earth. It finds its opening in the crags and fissures along the surface of life as a guiding beacon into understanding warmth.

Our eyes open to the first light and close when our body calls upon us for a time of rest and renewal. As the sunshine bursts across the scenes of our lives there is the space to discover what is here in our lives, what is deepened and expanded in every moment. In recent days, I have felt the sunshine of new opportunities in the lives of friends who have danced into the dawn. I feel the gaiety of all we gather in the stories of our days. The stories that begin to glow with the happiness that surprises us as sunshine glows from the places that were once dark.

This is the sharing of sunshine. A dance with a dear friend, a smile with a new one, an understanding nod in an empathetic ear. As we illuminate life with the truth of who we are, we can bear the anxieties and fears that carry our hearts into realms of deepest need. As we hear how we're not alone, as we gather ourselves to trust life at its core, we can begin to soar together.

           

Reaching For Freedom

In the depth of our hearts there lies a place where we can live and find the freedom in that fullest space. It is a space of liberating expressiveness that brings out the fears and questions that plague one's mind with doubt. As a way to take flight, there must be the willingness to abandon that which others expect us to be and do. To live from our lives, we stand up in our experience and step into that place of unrelenting opportunity.

These places allow an intimate connection with life in the most powerful of ways. We evoke the essence of our beings as we honor our own paths with honesty and are changed when we experience the intersection of these places of love, discovery, understanding, openness, and transformation. The challenge within comes from wrestling with the forces that try to make our dynamic lives for us. No one can tell us what to experience when we love. We can only change when we are ready.

So as we venture into life, we find these experiences that free our inhibitions and allow for something almost divine to emerge. What does it take to fully liberate a soul for a moment alone if not a life time as well? To be free from the chains of life? When these freedoms are kept in bondage by discrimination, oppression, trauma, misunderstanding, and fear, a full life cannot be lived. Perhaps a lifetime of moments of walking through the gentle moments of sunshine and bitter winds, amidst the shade of a tree that grew alongside the roads that brought us new and old memories together, and among the breaths that we felt our freedom as a means to overcome our collective fears and struggles.

To be free, we have to reach into ourselves and extend into the heights of our dreams and goals, affirm the shadows standing beside us and grow tall together. To be free, we still will live with consequences and the experience of pain, but it is different when the pain is understood as it is overcome with love and compassion, each day, each life at a time.

Barefoot Friendships

There's nothing like being barefoot in a friendship. While barefooted, or fully present in the moment you're with a friend, your spirit can connect to the depths of the channels you both have experienced in a rush of storytelling and understanding. It can be like experiencing two lives simultaneously while the empathy of your experience brings you closer together.

Friendship, to me, is a story of life forming from its rawest elements: emotion, humor, questions, hopes, wonders, fears, loves. It changes our outlook on life and enriches it with an understanding that nothing is perfect in an idyllic way. It has to be perfect in our own way, that is to say it has the potential to be perfect in the path of understanding a coming together after communicating the centers of our lives, no matter what place they are in.

As in a spirit of camaraderie, therein lies the knowing of not knowing. Life has a way of surprising us, moving us into scary places where our hearts are tense with feeling and rent with disappointment. Together in friendship, our lives form where emptiness tries to pull us apart. Solitude brings us new perspective. Maybe there will be a way through this misunderstanding that allowed me to accept the complex truth of mutual realities. Maybe I can laugh and know the intimate places of my soul because a friend brought me there and loved me there.

To trust is to nurture the freedom of communicated experience with each other. Then we can be barefoot, present, and alive. Alive to really uncover what we knew we could be had we only released the moment we thought we knew how it would all work out.