beauty is everywhere

I'll have pictures up soon, but someone (God bless 'em) decided to spray paint this on at least two Canada Post mail receptacles here in Calgary. It is absolutely the best part of my pre work morning ritual, passing by this and getting that little reminder that, yes, life is kinda shitty at times . . .

but


you usually see what it is you are looking for, and for those able to see it, there is beauty everywhere.

free

This may seem a bit cryptic at first, but I just want to say it anyway, and I want to say it in universal enough terms that everyone who reads it may find it applicable, because I think we will all hit a point in our lives where this is true of us. Hopefully it won't, but you never know . . .

Finding out that you are the one who has been holding yourself back from something good is humbling, and maybe a but unnerving. To discover that the prison you find yourself in is one of your own making, and you hold the key, is uncomfortable at first, and I think our tendency is to resist that implication. In my particular case, it was hanging onto something that didn't work out (and for very good reasons), and I let my own guilt about the whys and hows of its seeming failure plague me for most of the past three years, with intermittent times when it seemed like I might be able to salvage it.

Death is a natural part of life, though, and shouldn't instill fear. Sometimes things need to die so that new life can spring forth. And though we don't always know the nature of that new life, as surely as spring follows winter, we can trust that there can and will be life out of death.

And when spring comes, it does no good to stay inside like it was winter, pining for the warmth of the previous summer . . . there is new life all around. Time to free yourself of what once was and embrace what now is . . .

dream

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
T. E. Lawrence

I find I daydream a lot - never when I have something pressing to do - I'm not lazy or slothful. Nor are my dreams a means of escape - life is grand, and real. It's got that going for it. But I can't help but find myself daydreaming of the kind of things I would hope to see happen in my life, the lives of the people I know, the world around me.

I know it doesn't seem practical to be a dreamer, and at times it may look a little ungrounded. Why can't those crazy dreamers just exist in the here and now? The answer is quite simple really - the here and now will never suffice. We're made for more than what we have right now, and though this smacks of deep-seated discontent, it is really the longings of a heart that feels out of place where it is.

And so I dream. I dream of a place and a time when "slavery" is an archaic term. I dream of a time and a place where you can't buy kids for sex, where no one cares how much a particular stock is worth, when we stop texting and start actually talking, when all life everywhere is deemed precious, regardless of where it is from or even whether or not it is human . . . I dream of childhoods unmarred by war or abuse, of random acts of kindness becoming everyday life, and of an entire populace captivated by the beauty they see everywhere everyday.

Sure, it's a dangerous dream. If you have any investment in a company that makes millions on the backs of others, this dream is your nightmare. If you grow genetically modified animals, caring little for that which God cares much for, you take comfort that this is just a dream. And if your income depends on how many customers your stable of pre-pubescent kids can service in one night, then your wish is that I and others like me stop daring to not only dream that this world is possible, but make it happen . . .

dance

"A warrior who cannot

dance? Clumsy in both war and peace he is."

―Yoda

I love this quote. I love that the rigidity (rigidness?) we think has to come with efficiency or productivity or whatever is called into question by it.

You have to be able to dance in life. You have to be able to feel life's flow and dance with it, to bend without breaking, to sway to the music of life. Since this sounds a little vague, allow me to give an example.

Let's say you had some kind of rigid expectations about life and love and relationships and how things should work, but you didn't take into account that each person moves at their own pace and in their own way, to their own music (as it were). You would not only set yourself up for disappointment in having your expectations crushed, but you would undoubtedly earn a bit of a reputation amongst any friends as someone who, well, they don't really want to be with.

Contrast that with taking each day one at a time, embracing the moments as they happen, and learning to live THEN, in the present, instead of in the future (where all our expectations ultimately lie). You can't put too much stock in one person - one person cannot be held responsible for making you happy. The ability to create and experience joy in the moment seems a bit of a lost art - at least, it was lost on me for a bit. And so I stumbled, clumsily, through life, having much the effect there that I had at other dances - I made some people trip, caused others to want to stop dancing, and ultimately gave up.

Sure, learnign to dance isn't easy, and you make mistakes at times. But much like my spelling mistake in the previous sentence, they are rarely catastrophic, provided you are intent on learning, on dancing, on respecting other dancers' freedom to move to the music at their own speed . . .

And when you find yourself dancing with someone else, well, THEN you dance together and match your steps. But trying to dance with someone without them knowing? Creepy.

loverly . . . that's right, i said loverly . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0o8JCxjjpM


big fan o the EITS. Also a big fan of not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence and acronyming band names (not to mention parentheses and verbing nouns).

Explosions in the Sky. Love 'em.


Sometimes I need those times where I don't want to sing along to a song, but I want music to fill the silence - other times I prefer to bask in silence. But for times when I feel the former, there isn't a lot that beats these guys, or this song in particular. The staccato guitar bits about 3 minutes in feel like something of the climax of the story this song tells . . . .

Love it.

I don't know :) Maybe it makes me feel like things that aren't okay will be, or that they aren't as bad as they seem. To me, this song just feels like hope . . . and again, hope is not the belief that everything will turn out well, but the conviction that all things will one day make sense regardless of how they turn out . . . hope says that there is something at work here greater than you and I, and says that whatever that is, one day we will see that whole story in all its majesty . . .

i know that I am nothing new
there's so much more than me and you
but brother how we must atone
before we turn to stone

Some random Ingrid Michaelson I just thought of / was reminded of. Apparently today's blog is a quotefest. I'm kinda enjoying writing it though - I had no idea I was even gonna blog today when I woke up, whereas normally I kinda work myself up to it for a bit first. So you, whoever you may be, get to experience the closest thing to stream of consciousness writing that I can produce - I'm limited by my huge fingers though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYOsD8W-G7A

What a difference a day makes sometimes . . . .

chess

It's hard to drive through a section of this earth like East Hastings and leave unaffected.

It's hard to see pain and be able to turn away and not do anything.

It's hard to justify a life of relative luxury and ease, when so many have so little.

It's hard to want to be used to make a difference and be content with feeling like you aren't.

It's hard to want to share your life with someone, but knowing what kind of life you want to lead, to invite someone who knows nothing of living for Someone Else into it.

It's hard to finally grasp that independence is a myth, a lie - that, in truth, we are all so very dependent on one another.

Rumi's words stick with me here - I want to move like a chess piece, my whole life centred around the position of my King. And there are places, physical, emotional, spiritual and mental, where His presence is not easily seen or felt . . . and I feel like making His presence known.

I realize how cryptic this all may sound, but trust me when I say I don't mean to come off like TC in that regrettable youtube video of his Scientology beliefs. I don't think I have all the answers, and I don't think the path I'm currently on is necessarily the best way. It's the best that I know of, and I want to share that bit with others - be a source of good and light in a all too often dark world.

********************************************************************


Vancouver is a beautiful city, and I think I could move there and be happy . . . in fact, all of BC echoes beauty and majesty - I've said it before, and I'll say it again, it has everything I love about Ontario, plus the ocean, plus mountains. I feel a pretty strong pull back there . . .