mannequin, originally uploaded by Craww.

I came across this most excellent artist, Craww. And I just love his work. Isn’t it amazing?

peace, be still., originally uploaded by -Fearless-.

This makes me want to fly away, to be free from all the gravity grounding me to a reality that is a skosh too harsh right now. It inspires me to cut paper wings and fashion them after all that is light and bearable. I wish to float on the breath of love too far from home.

Piñata, originally uploaded by urdaneta.md.

I’m like a pinata and after all who came before you had their swings at me, yours was the winning one. You broke me open and everything within me is yours for the taking.

I think it always was.

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

We are all composed of every road we’ve chosen, every place we’ve been, every person we’ve encountered. Every choice. Every thought. Every moment. And we are all the better, or the worse, for each little thing. I wonder how I will affect those I encounter. How my thoughts, my words, my actions will change the course of someone else’s life or my own. I wonder if I tell those I love how much they mean to me in a way they can fully comprehend. I wonder if we can revisit a moment in time and feel it as vividly as we did then AND see it differently. If it is possible to love with roots so deep they hold us steady in the harshest of weather and have that love flourish for a lifetime. I wonder if I plant enough seeds if I will leave behind a garden or if I will forget to tend to one and leave behind a weed that grows thick over infinite possibilities, shutting doors or overgrowing paths I could have taken? I hope I leave this world a little bit (or a lot) better than I came into it. And I hope I leave more flourishing than dead within the garden.

I have suffered gut-wrenching loss but I have loved in ways epic love stories are composed. I have been so sick I thought I’d die but I have lived so well in the moment that I have no regrets. I have wept so hard I couldn’t catch my breath and doubted whether I would ever stop but I have laughed just as hard but twice as much. I have been fortunate in this life and I try to remind myself of this every day. In ways most people fail to see. I measure my life, my success in love, in family, in friends, in the smiles of every day strangers. I am a sum total of all my experiences and yet I awake anew every single day and I choose who I will be in this world today. Like we all do. And today, I choose to be. Whatever that may consist of today… I choose to be.

We are none of us finished. We are perpetually moving forward, changing, growing, expanding, shrinking. As time marches forward I realize we can outgrow people as easily as we once fit into them. And this makes sense of all the people left behind, parts of myself included.

“The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.” – Victor Hugo

I feel twinges of regret, lamenting all that has come and all that has gone. I’ve forgotten faces and whole chapters of books I once loved. And yet, this morning, I know for each space left behind an invitation is sent out into the world for something new to fill it. And I am overcome with hope.

Something in the way she moves by James Taylor

This song brings me to a happy place!

Photo taken by Rupert Merlin

It was this tree that saved her with its gnarled branches knotting distant the pain and stretching towards freedom for her. She held fast to the hope one day she’d find a way out. A way to escape the war raging within, cancer eating every part of her, leaving her stranded useless. Her mind wished to climb to the very tip of the tree and fall into life again, to feel the air like dreams bursting past with all the fervor she once felt. If she could just find a way to the other side where life remained and death was not welcome. She knew the secret was the in that tree, the one that reached tall into hope and siphoned it to her when little else could. It stood steady her constant companion reminding her it wasn’t over yet, that cancer had not won, would not win. It was just a bit of a climb to this side of happy, “see…over here, watch me, I’ll show you. To this side of life.” And it would wait patient the days, reliable the nights. It would never give up on her. Even when she felt she could not remember what it felt like to laugh without the lingering veil of diseased truth choking her silent. Even when she felt herself a stranger in happy boots waiting eager to play in the rain once more. The tree sloughed free its leaves to remind her everything will return again, some day. It always does. And so will she.

And so will she.

The mill/ Il mulino, originally uploaded by Max Short.

Where do you think this road leads? Is it somewhere happier? More intense? Slightly jaded?

tin can phone, originally uploaded by K!T.

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme….

There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.

The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.

When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.”
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

On Concrete Mountain, originally uploaded by Wulfus.

I spend so much time thinking myself into a frenzy, thinking myself into a sadness, into doubt, into something. And I have been working on this but it still get me into pockets of unsure. I am tired but can’t sleep. I am not judge of what others are thinking. My gauge is broken. I will snap out of this. I will find my momentum. I am. It is just a work in progress. It took a few years to get into this habit. It will take me a little while to break it.

And anyways… anything that is not about elephants is… in the end completely irrelephant.

Oh. We all have them, don’t we? Me… well, I am a chronic worrier. I try not to be but I think my brain simply will not allow me to not be prepared for whatever may come. Diligence. My brain wants to survive, to make it through things unscathed but it doesn’t make the worrying any less bothersome. I am trying not to do it as much but it is an uphill battle.

I heard this song titled, “Worries,” by Langhorne Slim and thought it relevant…

Worries by Langhorne Slim