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.

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.

Unspoken Realities

What is unspoken is not necessarily something unheard. What we feel and discover during an interaction or moment with ourselves or with others can still reach through to the heart as it beats out a cadence of what we experience. It then later remains imbedded in memory and feeling when we live and remember. These unspoken realities bring us to deeper places of our selves, of our relationships, connections, and places. What we live and feel in a moment can stay with us a lifetime.

This isn't something that is always good or bad. It is what we make of it now and forever. As meaning and feeling emerge or intersect in time these experiences shape us. These times that are unspoken because they are too deep for words are spoken through expressions and the feelings that fill our eyes. This is how we are changed by our feelings as they fill in the blanks where there is an absence of words.

 First impressions, fleeting glimpses of nature's beauty, nostalgia, evocative creativity, all create these times where we feel with our senses before we feel our souls turning to receive them. What I feel when I smell a fresh pine tree as I walk beneath the boughs covered in sunlight. How the cool air of a summer breeze ventilating a car on a drive along city streets.  Hearing the  echoes across a great hall now empty where memory fills in the people that once danced there.

There are conversations we wish we could return to, people and events that have made us so alive in who we are that we couldn't enjoy life any more fully, and places that trouble us and discourage spirits, anger us at what has been or what could have been. Transformation occurs in these times. Change does happen whether or not we accept it or even notice it.

It has been said that nothing lasts. Nothing lasts except the memories and life that has already been. What is before us now in fondness when we catch a friend's gaze, smile at someone tapping a moment's potential, or briskly walking through daylight that illuminates our way forward. These are the realities where the senses we feel now will guide us back to these moments when we stop to feel them.

Catching A Meteor Though It Falls

As the days pass, the years somehow do, as well. I began writing this blog in part to remember that the presence of each moment in our lives can have the potential to help life become something beautiful and real. This experience can happen anywhere with anything, and is often unplanned and surprising, but also lasting and memorable. Then time doesn't have to go so fast, it can go at the pace of the moment as we live and breathe and take it all in and be alive in its memory after these times have long ended and are returned to in photographs and reminiscences. 

Have you ever waited for something for only minutes or seconds? The time seemed to go slower than when you were living every moment as we looked forward to the rush of life continuing and building with fun and excitement. What about the seconds that you feel something wonderful come over your senses? The moment that we feel that contentment or that understanding that even the imperfection of life somehow settles with the laughter and peace is the time when our life comes together and eases our heart.

Holidays do this for many of us. They serve as reminders while the traditions we carry out on these special days give significance to our lives and memory. The rhythms of daily living can be monotonous and routine without much wonder and excitement. As mundane as things can be, stunning surprises can occur if we are paying attention in the present. A meteor falling only lasts an instant, a beginning of something happens only once, and even as life moments seem to occur in patterns, every day can have a flash of memory and wonder.

At a recital I attended recently, a violin and cello duo reached and soared into the colorful art in the windows and walls illustrating a portrait of the past to present listeners that were able to feel the movement of emotion and life expressed in music. The different sounds harmonized like textures of a landscape bringing me to distant lands and triggered feelings I had never felt. Such an experience would be temporary even though it would always be with me in memory. It also becomes lasting as the quilt of moments grows and colors the soul.    

Every Person Is A Gift

This could also be phrased, every life is a gift, though a person becomes who they are by living their life. It's hard to imagine a world with seven billion people, seven billion lives and so many more that have lived on this giant blue planet. It is impossible to meet every person who is alive during one's lifetime, but it is possible to meet people who will change us, even if we meet them once and never see them or hear their voice speak to us again. When we see how people touch us, we can see how they gave us a new perspective, bring us together, allow us to smile, take time to be there, teach us something or show us part of life we had never seen, we can see what that person means not only to us, but to life itself.

Behind everything we enjoy is a person who helped form a song, a meal, a memory, a hope, or our very existence. There was a person who you didn't know that well who smiled at you. There was a friend who challenged you to do something you didn't know you could do until you did it, and then you realized how much it changed your life. All it takes is one person to realize how life changing another life is. We each have a wealth of experience from different places, different people, and different perspectives. Currently we have over seven billion of these to teach us, laugh with us, move us, and be a part of our lives.

While there are people who have hurt us, betrayed our trust, and threatened our sense of who we are that may not seem like a gift, they have things to teach us about adversity, reconciliation, and strength to overcome and rise above. For the challenges in life have been said to be there for a reason, they ultimately take us to who we will become, and who we need to be for tomorrow.

It is said that life is short, but it can be extended if we live moment by moment aware and mindful of just how exceptional life is. There are plenty of hardships that can make us appreciative of what we have, and show us how we need each other. Even the strangers in our life can offer pieces of existence forming the garden of life. It's hard to imagine, but many times in our lives, we are strangers to many people, and by giving others the benefit of the doubt in conversations we may have only one with them, we may receive something similar in return. Call it karma, what goes around comes around, or kindness, the person you meet briefly tomorrow can be a gift if you let them show you what life is going to be at that time.

  Standing in the water at Jones Beach State Park. 

Sitting in a park along the Genesee River.

The people in the photos above are people I never met, and may never see again. They may or may not have been a gift to me, but I'm sure they are to other people.

What Is This For Anyway?

There is so much wonder to be discovered in life, and it is best experienced from the soul in the present moment. It often happens without us looking for it or knowing where it will be. I want to document such moments, and explore their potential in the colorful tapestry that is shaped by sounds and textures, lights and voids, as well as voices and silences. 


It can be the minute when the light atop a lighthouse hits the water reflecting off it and into the beyond or walking barefoot along the summit of bedrock on a mountain in the alpine zone and it can be reading a book on a porch in the rain. While the experience cannot be fully felt from this blog, it can be here to resonate with someone's soul so that they may feel that the depth of life includes them amongst everything in this universe. 


That being said, this blog is for those who journey and traverse feeling alive in the simple and profound moments that create a life. This way life can be lived and shared as it is being felt and pushed forward. It is feeling the ground beneath our feet as we're running, dancing, sitting, climbing, strolling, breathing...