The Continuation of The Moment

The life I live is assorted with feelings and thoughts that my brain captures from soundbites and smiles from strangers. A wave of emotion can arise from an ordinary event viewed from a perspective of pessimism or optimism. If realism were an option, perhaps I'd be guiding my life with a clearheadedness that was free from all bias. However, with human life being filled with ideas, wonderment, doubt and fear, the excitement and rush of being caught up in a story that we've held to for days or years has to me been an easy way out of charting a new course. This new course doesn't have to be a new direction. It can be the choice to continue on with a new, integrated perspective that opens the door to new experience.

Is my world more than what I see with my eyes? What about the birdsong I hear through the windows screen, the friend who offers us a tight squeeze when I've been feeling the other tight squeezes and stresses that aren't so comforting, and the whiff of a flower's aroma right as we see the colorful blossoms? Life is a multisensory kaleidoscope in a way that is miraculous as it forms out of the endings of past moments. If in a circular pattern, beginnings are like endings and endings, beginnings, where are we going? Does it matter if we're caught up with the rest of life that is on a different, but interrelated network of experiences? What do I mean by caught up anyway?

I don't have to model action for action and possession for possession those I long to be like. It doesn't have to be an experiential "keeping up with the Joneses." I can instead take pages from others' books and and frames from others' movies to help discover meaning in my own place and time. So when I have felt lost in thought about what I am not, then maybe I am also thinking about what I am, in perspective of how I view what other people seem to be. What a multi-faceted experience that is never quite comprehensible!

To seek to understand, to discover one's life and those of other's can be rich and unceasingly fascinating, but to seek to do one's best to connect with the source of one's inspirations. How could I forget the excitement of living my own life while others do the same with theirs. I live for experiences of brief connection where we are less alone and more together. I cannot try to let others live my life, but to live my life with my senses and thoughts, learnings and doings, all in the flow of the universe, the spirit, and the life that embodies what I can experience, and what I seek to experience through understanding and listening. The violets from earlier left their aroma in my life to form part of a new journey down the road. What will come of that?

The Sum of Everything

Many parts of life can seem like the movement of water as it cycles through different elevations and forms.  Some occasions can cascade like a waterfall with a rush of emotion through our hearts with surprising motions that make us experience wonder and excitement either along flowing streams and collected pools or slow drops change surroundings  that comes with time.  With water rushing down our faces, covering us with grief supplanting the future for the present that we need to experience in order to find our way through a storm with acceptance of the changes of the day. With so much change, the present never stays for eternity. What's the point if whatever we do and live through doesn't last?

There are shifts and changes every day that are almost inevitable take the future by the hand if to say welcome, you were coming, you are now here,  and now it is time to find what you mean to us. I write as if this is directed to myself and an other, person or group. When I write words about a collective, "we" and "our" or "us," I mean that I've experienced them and I think that you in reading this may know and recognize these feelings as well. I want to speak of us as experiencing them all together either through storytelling or actual experiences that can be remembered and recalled,  even if I have never met you or experienced your story in your way. Even in reading and writing, one word is read before the next one is found in completing a sentence or paragraph or essay. Life is always moving, even when we seem to be standing still.

The Earth revolves on it's axis bringing light into it's atmosphere from the sun and the moon that are our guides in this place in the solar system we live in. We live our lives amongst all the other peoples that are currently in this place in time with us. Our friends, family, neighbors, gather and live as we together find what we're doing for tomorrow with what we have had yesterday and today. There are interactions in this light, in this day or night that we have had that have brought us here. Moments that we cherish and hold dear to our hearts through photographs, songs, and remembrances become something more, they become our life.

We grow into our lives one day at a time. We make it matter through what we do with one another and on our own. As nothing stays the same, nothing changes if we don't act as we are able. Two sisters preparing a meal from eggs laid by the chickens I tended with them, friends dancing to music that sings in their soul and flies through the years to connect generations, neighbors gather to remember and honor one of their own at a funeral that bridges the past to the future with the present. How we share what has been brought to us, like a tree growing from each day through each hardship and golden peak of sunlight, is how we live. It is finally, not what seems to end so soon that matters, but the sum of everything that we make together and on our own in a discovery of who we are.

Where A Day Becomes Our Life

A day that's full of color grabs at us. There is so much to stimulate the senses and make it easy to feel fully alive. Sunrises begin our daylight hours and sunsets finish the hours where the sun is fading and starting a new day in other lands. It is a wonder how white light forms all the color that we can see, how six notes create all the music we know, and how each day connects us to every bit of time that has been lived and is being lived. People are out there living tomorrow in Australia from my vantage point in the Northeastern United States.

The roots of our lives that grow into what we see, what we hear, and what we do, create, feel, and know become much more when we bring them together. Like a meal filled with new and favorite foods, a dance with live music brightly playing the rhythms and harmonies, or even a sporting game where two teams compete for the goal of completing their task of winning against their opponents there are places we have in bringing our collective experiences into one place, where the kaleidoscope and panorama of memories form, and where a day becomes our life.

Anyone who has savored the sumptuous flavors of meal brought together from scratch in the company of loved ones may have felt how the variety of textures and voices provide a moment of joy in the midst of all of life's happenings. There are the tales of old, recipes, jokes, hopes, and memories, all forming an assortment of smiles and wonder. Gathered together on holidays and week days, our lives form from what we fill them with. In days where we are reminded of the shock of human suffering inflicted by hands and lives nearby, we need to be alive to one another by being present to our needs for friendship and love. So as we meet our neighbors and friends, try to understand our family, and hear what today has brought, we can see our wounds that have fragmented our neighbor's lives and embrace with the hope that cannot be made alone. We can be together in understanding after we listen, as others may have been there for us, so that we can continue to make a way out of our experiences. This way begins the vision of courage of creativity formed from imaginations and memories to hold the world.

It may be that days before us that make us who we are today, but the present can give us most of all a place to dream, feel, and live in ways that matter to us or ways and those that we want to give a try. I've recently been reminded of the warmth inside that can tingle when the cool air rushes by as I spend another wintry day in upstate New York. The sharing of these ruminations feels like a rambling engine as my experience spins out like yarn being knit or crocheted into something more; a fabric of memories filled with color and connection. In the reaches of any period of time shared, time can disappear, flowing through our hearts as it becomes stories; our way of preserving memory and our connection to the future.


                                        

Hope When It Is Dark

"Why does it take catastrophe to start a revolution?"  - Jonathan Larson

As I write this post winds and rain chase the landscape into a tumultuous flurry of hurricane and storm along the eastern coast of the United States. The potential and expected damage created is a source of uneasiness and uncertainty that strike at different moments in our lives. There can be wonder and curiosity in the midst of great suffering and loss. Devastating emotions or events can remind us about what we hold dear to our hearts, or challenge us to think about what is most important. They can shred our stability and hope into worry and fear, panic and anxiety that make us wonder how we'll ever get through.

How can this suffering be beautiful? Tears fall across our faces and our hearts continue beating with emotion that is fully raw and fully alive. How can this be beautiful if we are left alone? Where is the goodness in life when we are shackled with grief and the seeming never ending presence of calamity? Even as the storm comes and with it, expectation of and then the physical reality of damage we can find hope from the disaster. Some storms come with less warning and then change the course of the lives affected. Still how can any of this create hope, instill love, become strength, or be something positive?

We often light candles after the power goes out and it gets dark. The shining beams come through places of destruction and despair to offer hope and a way through the darkness. The candlelight we illuminate inside provides more than a symbol of promise; it creates a way to see what storms have done, and what can be done together when we share our own lights, our own stories of reality. The light we have may sometimes flicker, but if we trust it with those close to us we will not be alone. We will begin to trust again and stand together as we prepare what has been lost to grow new beginnings and new memories as we all are strengthened by togetherness.

Painful realities are hard to bear especially as suffering seems to grow and affect multitudes where communities fall apart and homes are ravaged. We often question whether or not we should stand strong and work to overcome when afflictions may appear to come more and more often. The candle we lit may go out, we may lose our voice, our heart may become overwhelmed and life may change with tragedy and wrongdoing.

Disaster may strike, but if we light the hope and the way or find someone that has already done so, we can stand together in friendship as our candles can warm the lives of those around us, as our candles light our hearts so we may feel ourselves giving and receiving in the unity that comes out of brokenness. It is then we can remember the continued strength that is found when we trust ourselves enough to rebuild and grow stronger from the scars and the pain that we faced in understanding that pain will always affect humanity. This is how the night ends while hope and love become the new light of dawn. With a song that comes from one heart that reaches our souls and becomes a chorus of light and hope from the soul as we empower one another in times of human need.

E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many, One

Sometimes I look at the lives around me in the depths of reality today, the depths that come from the places I walk, I hear something quieter than the breeze. I hear a heartbeat that beats on a day that takes its place in a string of years and seasons that have created me to help shape the experience of today. I see the inspiration that struck wonder as it filled my eyes as a child and feel the shiver of joy that life is greater than my own experience. It sometimes shapes the spirit of the experience of a team, a country, a family, a friendship, that together we are one, and together we can be alive and make the future out of this. A future that can be harmonious if we dream and act together, if we hear the heartbeat of our neighbors and trust them to hear our own.

The trust and vulnerability in connection from community to friendship is fragile, yet precious as we feel or begin to sense the togetherness that helps us feel our embrace. It is difficult to know this depth even imagine when we have often known fear, despair, loneliness that has been bred from disappointment, discouragement, and exclusion. We know that exposure may take us further down the road of pain that we've known. So how can my life and your touch a life where we may see the hint of a smile? How can we build community and friendships when we have only been disappointed?

I think hope and heart can be grown from vision and feeling. Feeling that life isn't always the sunshine of smiles and laughter, but sometimes the numbness of past trauma haunting our present. Sometimes it is the continuous rainfall that floods our feelings and overwhelms us with discouragement and washes out the work we have done together. When a tragedy caused by human hands shatters our community, does it fracture everyone irreparably, or does it give birth to healing?
Healing that creates a scar to help us remember what we have gained, what we have grown, and taught by one life who's ripples still touch our lives as the memory of a life is carried always. We can sing and hold those close to us, and even those we have just met, to continue to build on memory and what we have.

These are the roots that can hold the soil where we grow together. Roots are the friendship and connection where we grow. Tears of remembrances and sunshine of continued hope and an embrace grow and help enrich the community that has blossomed from shared memory. Fear is real, but hope is true, where we hear the voices we have together. Voices from the soul that we feel growing from scars and wounds, and also from new beginnings, from forgiveness and from our lives shared with friends. There, barefoot, we can feel and hear the melody with the rhythm of our heartbeat join in community. The spirit of unity begins with one heart, one friendship that is shared over a lifetime, and one collective experience of unique perspectives and beginnings that are always the continuation of our growth.

Feeling the Heartbeat of our Lives

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." Helen Keller

There is a rhythm that exists in each of us, beating like a drum, ringing like a bell, circulating and moving together with every living thing. What is felt with one heart can convey the human experience. The idea of the human experience may be cliche, but the experiences are real and felt in powerful ways. It was recently on a walk with a friend that I saw again how the actions of others ripple past the immediate interaction that took place in any given moment. The walk itself embodied this, and the understanding of human pain and joy that together in paradoxical ways form our lives. It is hard to understand how sorrow is part of the darkness that fuses angst, disbelief, and sadness to the moments that we wish we could hurry and leave behind. These adversities can be pivotal in helping us feel the warmth when cherished and held with a tapestry of connection.

In the heartbeat of life, we can think about the place we are living in. It isn't always happy or sad, angry or fearful. It usually is a mosaic of the feelings we have about our lives. Minutes become days and moments become memories. Life is a combination of such things. Walking freely with the wind with those who have chosen to encountered life's beauty with me alongside. I've found that in walking, conversation becomes more fluid as it incorporates the passage and change of time and life everywhere.

Laughter from the heart comes from the places we realize and know. As we understand our shared, collective experience as people, we live. Gathered together we can hold hands, for none of us has experienced what another has, but each of us may be listened to and cared for and in turn be a light of hope that beats together if we take the risk to step beyond our grudges and listen. Barefoot we feel what is shaping us, changing us. Barefoot we arise and walk over to the beginning of the next moment. May it be the wonder that makes us cry with hope that together we can build something for the future of our lives and those we love. So it may be these feelings that hold us to the moment to create, shape, learn, live.

A Path For the Heart

The road less traveled is often quoted when one is proud of the unique path they have chosen. To blaze a trail or follow the way with less footprints often gives us a journey with a more complex landscape. If life were a musical composition, we could either follow the melody line or expand on what is simple and elaborate on the tones and tempos as the music notes rise and fall. This is more than taking a short cut to make something easier, this is taking a path from what opens our lives to creativity, connection, and challenge that helps us live a little bit more and understand that sometimes it is the path to hearing our hearts and our  history.

We often have to take a detour from the path we were taking because life is always under construction. The detour can also be our choice as Robert Frost's poem explains. When we take off our shoes and creep forward towards the frontiers of our comfort levels, we become pioneers discovering how surprisingly beautiful a life can be lived when it isn't always planned out. To some this might be wanderlust, others improvisation, and without both we cannot chart new waters in our lives.

Improvisation. As a part of art or comedy or music, I think part of it comes from an inner restlessness that comes from being tired of the same old routines or in other words, boredom. Another part probably comes from the reaches of the human spirit - exhaustion, terror, rage, inspiration, speechless experiences that can only be evoked through the stirrings of the soul that come out in art. It seems to be the way of creativity, the way of reaching into the rhythm of one's body or one's community and moving forward in response to these pulls that guide us down our own road less traveled.

Sometimes interruptions create these forks in the road that give us the choice of how fast our lives are going. Life always looks like it's going fast when looking through the photo album and through the rear view mirror, but that's because we're seeing all that has happened all at once rather than over the time it took for us to experience these things. I'm not saying we have to blow all over the place like a balloon in the wind, but I'm thinking that if we release some of our routine to our senses, our surroundings and feel our soul take hold, we can begin to find the beating drum of our heartbeat. With that we can possibly realize the human possibility where peace and harmony based on each of our souls, pieces of the diverse puzzle of humanity can be real as the riffs we play from our lives.

balloon in the wind

fun with photography

your own path by water

or land

Smiles That Change the World

"I say why all the loneliness and why all the fear,  if it's up to me there'll be none of that here."
Joe Crookston

A smile offers a little bit of sunshine that is not only lasting, it can very often begin or create a connection that can spread to all of us. When words cannot be found for appreciation, comfort, delight, pleasure, excitement, and often hope, a smile can be the expression of our feelings for such moments. It is in gladness the present becomes real, and the present becomes our life forming experience that changes our lives; often for the better. Like a birdsong evokes the first breath of dawn, a smile can be that instant where darkness starts to fade into the light.

It is this mystery that cannot be held, even for a moment. Like water running through our hands, we have the moment to create something that is for the moment. Smiles offer a consoling, knowing welcome, an agreement in unison, or a sign that the fearful have seen a light at the end of the tunnel. Even when despair lingers and confusion swirls into our minds or causes chaos in our lives, a smile is that breath of fresh air that becomes understanding. Understanding that there is more than all this sorrow, loneliness and fear.

Joe Crookston sings from his soul, evoking his desire to leave a better world for the generations that will inherit what we leave behind. He doesn't want what he has seen others or maybe even himself face. That's why he sings and asks why we have all the anger and greed that are the seeds of war and poverty. The injustice that tear us apart rather than bring us together can begun to be reconciled with a smile, with a seed of hope from a hand of welcome and embrace.

Yesterday in becoming better acquainted with one of my neighbors, I felt his warmth not from his words, but from the combination of words of friendship and the gentleness of his smile. Once affected by a smile, we are never the same, we feel it in the roots of our heart as we know our lives matter that we too can take the smile we received, and offer it to another as night becomes day and the moment becomes ours briefly to create a way of healing out of this fear and into jubilation and peace.

The sunlight of dawn reflecting off the water as its light spreads everywhere; like a smile spreads hope.

Outstretched Hands

What we touch often with our hands, we feel, and what we feel gives us our experiences of life. We open our hands to embrace our neighbor who is grieving or our family who is celebrating. We extend a hand of welcome to the stranger who seems out of place. We create and build our lives with our hands. Most of all, our hands are often our connection to the surface and depth beyond what we directly sense immediately.

When we cannot walk barefoot, or do not want to, we sense our touch with the way we use our hands and if we do not have the use of our hands, we compensate with how we hold onto what we need. Our hands can create or destroy and the choice is ours in understanding which we will do. Hands are often a symbol for community when they hold an outstretched hand of another person in their midst or for building community through our relationships and our work to make the world a more livable place.  The dance of life is led and followed as it ebbs and flows through the nights and days we form and create in beauty and wonder.

I was inspired to write this post by what I saw in a compassionate action that could not have been done if we did not value the role our hands have in shaping life. In caring for another person in a more difficult place in life, a friend was able to provide dignity and a sense of cleanliness and beauty to a woman who needed a bath. While doing this, she soothed this woman's skin and provided love and care with gentleness and patience that transformed life for both women. This act in hospice care is simple, yet very important to giving and providing life-filled moments. We can beautify our world by holding our hurting sisters and brothers, picking flowers and brightening a dark day, welcoming a new friend into our midst, tell a story that will change lives, and shape our days one minute at a time as our hands direct the path we choose to live.

Flowers picked to fill the room with color.