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?

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.

           

Dogwood and Trillium

   

With crickets chirping to one another through the trees and cornfields nearby, life is happening and changing in every moment. Where is the flower that was here yesterday? What will I look like tomorrow? How can I overcome this habit I've had for years? Does this moment mean anything on this lazy summer day?

If I strive to be present and mindful of the very minute I am in a certain location, I'll recognize that the passing days continue to form weeks that gradually multiply into months and years. What was once a stem, is now a bud, and what is a bud today will be a flower tomorrow.  If by taking this moment, and realizing it's potential, I can change or grow where I've seen something promising sprout out of the darkest ground. Overcoming this darkness takes the courage to break free from a familiar place and further reach unfamiliar terrain that can nourish and challenge the growth occurring.

How can I be still enough to enjoy and experience what I need to in this moment to take that next step? As reminded by a teacher this morning, I cannot leap forward without taking time to be in the place I am presently. Being mindful of the crickets chirping, the honest place I am in, will pull me back to all the swirling activity that has and will happen if only I am ready to take this opportunity to live and create the moment I'm living in.

Finding Hope

In a journey of life where days are sometimes filled up with exhausted hope and unanswered questions it often becomes harder to look forward to any of the days ahead or smile within the time we are living, the present. Despair seems to build in the midst of doubt and hurt breaks along fault lines in our fractured hearts. These seeds of discouragement can be watered by tears of sadness, resentment, regret and are important feelings in acknowledging the challenges we face and know are real. Life can be a burden where so much sorrow can seem impossible to overcome. If we indeed are the commanders of our fate, there is much to see in a full picture of reality that is really life.

What can come from sorrow that arises from within our souls? Can hope and love emerge from the pain breaking along the fault lines within our hearts? Even though these moments of pain shall pass away, the scars in our hearts and psyches can rest with us for longer. When we're walking along through these stretches of road accompanied by emptiness and grief the days seem to have lost their meaning.

Somehow the resilience needed to return to hope isn't that far away. Hope in the depths of doubt, in the woes of fearfulness, in the fear of helplessness. It can grow as we extend our hands in openness to our own lives, to each other. It is surprising how vulnerability takes us from our fear and towards community. Despair cannot be overcome at once, but as the sun shines, a flower blooms, as a rain drop falls, a rainbow arcs across the sky. Appearing out of nowhere, hope emerges, like flight, sudden and lasting. A moment becoming eternity. The light shines as time moves our feelings to understanding that together as a song breaks the silence and silence captures our fears in an encompassing journey of weaving the threads of heartbreak and tenderness together.

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.

A Story Told Is A Life Shaped

One of the first gifts we are given is our voice. It is with our voice that our individual place in the history of humanity is understood by others and hopefully, by our selves. With the voice we're given, we forge an identity that becomes our very sense of what we're going to bring to life over the years we walk across this planet. As children, we are often exposed to the ways others live, the environments of our world, and the people who are our family and our neighbors. It is in a story we find others, we find life, and maybe most important, we find what we connect to.

Growing up, I heard stories that were illustrated by people acting out the actions that tell something about life and as I fell asleep while they were being read by the tender baritone that my dad was given to share with others. During this time, I connected to music that had lyrics formed into stories told as they were sung to a guitar strumming and a banjo twanging. It was the music that had its roots in the soil of gardens, its range across the heart of humanity's experience as the sun rose and set, and that found me connecting to others that are part of life with me.

In a story, we can grow with characters, hear the rhythm that pulses daily in our hearts, recognize our dilemmas and struggles, and continue to ask questions that lead to discovery. We tell stories to children so they can expand the images they have of life in their minds. Imaginations are formed through what we tell them through expressive, vivid, imagery that broaden a perspective and permit a new understanding to form and later be shared to the collective experience that is humanity.

Once a story ends, our place that we put in it, doesn't have to. A part of the story can light a flame or plant a bulb that we can kindle or nurture until it becomes a deep inspiration. We can sometimes only see other parts of life through story. In words spoken we can hear a story in harmony with illustration or in the rhythm that connects our lives to others.  The stories in our hearts from families, friends, other cultures, give meaning and color to the very purpose of life. Their essence touch our soul, reach our minds, and give depth to what we reach for when we sing together to unite as one people in a shared, similar experience, or awareness of what we can do to share life and a light through for each other.

In the story, we see the journey becoming the pages we illustrate. How we use our voice allows us to tell our story as we travel together. We need not tell the whole story of our lives. We can tell the parts that make us who we are, where we are, as we become alive as we relate and understand in new ways in new light whether it's firelight, flashlight, fluorescent light, sunlight, moonlight, or candle light. This is the light of a story, no matter how dark, that we begin to speak out of as our voice becomes part of our stories.

A story can be our bridge to the meaning of our lives built from imagination,
connection to reality, and new understanding.

The Creativity of Humanity

"Somewhere in a burst of glory, sound becomes a song" That's Where I Belong - song by Paul Simon

This lyric always strikes me when I listen closely to this song by Paul Simon. It creates the realization many of us notice when we see how things come together to create art. It is the joining of inspiration and media or the music notes that form a melody and shape a harmony that leads to something unique.

Creativity shows us how other people view the world we see and how they want to shape the future of it. It isn't a moment that stops us, but it influences us. I continue to be amazed by how people form works of art from the depths of themselves that reach my own depths and resonate with my own experiences. And sometimes it doesn't even have to be from art, but from the creation of a moment that is intended to be unintentional or a design that is merely functional. 

Pieces of life come together in color and expressive touches from line to shape and many more features. In walking down streets and taking in the work of people around me, I often wonder about the origins or stand looking, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching something curiously striking. The arrangement of flowers in a garden, the mosaics of tile spelling out letters of a destination on a wall, the drone of bagpipes, the spicy radish in a summer salad, and the feel of marble in a national memorial often created from what we see, what we know, and what makes us most alive. It is what stops us in our tracks and makes us notice that something beautiful has been shared with us or that something beautiful has come from our lives and ways of seeing.

If someone says they aren't creative, I doubt their statement. I believe everyone has their own way of expressing their creativity that is emotive or personal that is unlike someone else's. They may wish that they were creative like someone else, but that only minimizes their efforts to create what means something to their lives. I am often inspired by colors, lights, water, textures, flavors, and arrangements of objects in displays. If the glory of life is found when sound becomes a song, it can also be noticed when the inspiration becomes tangible and emotive as we share life and notice our connection to ourselves, to others, and to the moment that can be shared as a piece of one's life that is left to experience. 

Creativity throughout New York State in the subjects of the photographs, not the photographs themselves.

Reflection of neon light -  Rochester, New York

Stone wall in Central Park - New York, New York

Twin spires of a church in Buffalo, New York

Memorial in Clinton Square  - Syracuse, New York

Colorful mural in New York, New York  

Supports of  a railroad bridge - Schenectady, New York