Monday, January 22, 2018

Closer to the ground

When you have brought yourself down,
When you feel you have been beaten -
Have been exhausted of your power,

Remember;

You are not in a position to give up.
Rather, you are closer to the ground
so you may regain your strength
to rise again.
You are cultivating energy
to face another you.
Take your time,
find your footing.
You are in a great position
to do so.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

The Gap - Seth Godin


There's a gap between where you are and where you want to be.
Many gaps, in fact, but imagine just one of them.
That gap--is it fuel? Are you using it like a vacuum, to pull you along, to inspire you to find new methods, to dance with the fear?
Or is it more like a moat, a forbidding space between you and the future?

Friday, January 12, 2018

How Can I Love You Better?


An article by columnist Omid Safi

The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, a living sage who was nominated by Martin Luther King for the Nobel Peace Prize, recommends that we ask those closest to us a simple and powerful question that has the power to transform our relationships:

“Please tell me how I can love you better.”

It’s good to remember that the greatest truths are often simple. This simple statement touched my heart. I wonder what it would be like to have this as a basis of our daily interactions, one person at a time. What a powerful, simple, and humble gift to offer one another, and our own selves.

These days, as there is so much pain and suffering in the world,
What’s outward shows up on our inside.
how can I make you feel loved today?
How can I love you better?
and maybe I don’t know
yet
how to love you best in the way
that is best for you.
I love you.
I want to know: How can I love you
Better?
But better love.
I want to learn yours.
You are a cosmic mystery.
Secrets written in your eyes that no word has ever spoken.
Songs in your heart that have moistened no lips.
I know you.
I know your heart and soul so well.
I want to be there for this mystery.
Let the unfolding of the mystery come, when it comes, how it comes, as you would want for it to come.
Teach me your language of love.
Teach me the way that you need to be loved, today.

So many relationships are filled with turmoil, tension, and resentment. Individuals, families, communities, nations, the world community, the natural cosmos, are all filled with tension. We need peace and harmony in our own hearts, and in our interpersonal relationships as we need peace in the world.

Yes this I know: We are not doomed to live like this. More and more, I find us yearning to be whole, be healed, and live in harmony. But not knowing how.
I speak not as one who has found the answers. But this much I know: Something magical and beautiful happens when we ask each other this magical and loveliest of inquiries:

My beloved,
Tell me, my love,

Here is the part about this question that I find so touching: the asking. The vulnerability to ask. The openness to not only put another heart before us, but to put the way that our beloved would like to be loved ahead of our own sense of what that loving has to look like.

My love, I adore you,

You know this already:
Not even more love
We do have different languages of love.

Some of us need to be held, touched lovingly, and have love glances into the window of my soul. We yearn for a touch that possesses not, and only comforts. (Show me if this is how I can love you better.)

Others need to be loved by having the lover give them some space, room for solitude. Some of our beloveds have hearts that cry out: Being around people, even being around you my beloved, is draining for me. I need to be alone to recharge. Can you hold space for me? (Show me if this is how I can love you better.)

Others need to be shown love by doing things for them. So many understand love through acts of service. Fold the laundry. Do the dishes. Bathe the kids. Take all your love, and put it into a home-cooked meal. (Show me if this is how I can love you better.)

You are, my beloved, a mystery to me.
Teach me, my love.

Lead me to trust you, trust that you know your own heart, that you know your own heart’s needs. Let me practice humility, not in how I want to love you, but in whatever way is best for you in this very breath. Let me learn your language of love, whether it is spoken words, cuddles, silence, space, or service.

Teach me, learn with me, whatever poems my eyelashes should scribe on your cheeks.

Let us let go of attachment to how I want to love you, and trust that what matters is you being loved, when you want to be loved, how you want to be loved, how best you can be loved.
Let us trust this flowing cosmic river of love, that how you need to be loved today may be different that how you’ll ask to be loved tomorrow. What matters, all that matters, is love, not the language of love.
Let us be lovers that learn each other’s language of love.

So my Beloved, how can I make you feel loved? Or better yet: how can I let you know, light of my eyes, that you are already so deeply loved?

Tell me love: how can I love you better? How can we love each other better?
Let us begin here. Let us change the world for the lovelier. You have already changed my world. For you are all the worlds to me.

Monday, January 1, 2018

2018

2018.
It's here.
I'm in it.
You're in it.
We got here together, well done.

One breath, one step, one day at a time, we manufacture our stories. Every day we have created a world for ourselves, one we expected to be one way, but mostly turned out completely different than we could have imagined.

I wonder if I'll ever find something steady, without wanting to upset the balance and shake everything up all the time. I never know what I want. I never know where I want to be. It's tiring, frustrating, and energy consuming to try to figure out why I do this to myself. It's also heartbreaking and upsetting for the people around me who are intertwined with me, whom I've wrapped myself up in. Unravelling from a loving relationship - one I didn't expect to so suddenly need to unravel - is the most difficult thing I've ever had to do. Hurting someone is the hardest thing I could ever do in my life. No matter how existential my crisis, those outside of me have much more power over my heart than I do. I am nostalgic. Nostalgia only ever remembers all of the beauty. Why did I do this?

I came to San Pancho / Mexico in hopes of shaking up my reality. So that I am shocked into knowing why I did this.
Who the fuck I am and
what the fuck I want.

Excuse my language.
2018, here I come.

What are you facing?

Granularity

You can't make an hourglass with a boulder.
But break the boulder into sufficiently small bits of sand, and you can tell time.
You wouldn't want to eat a baked loaf of ice cream, mustard, fish, bread, capers and cheese.
But separate them into their component parts and you can open a restaurant.
It's tempting indeed to build the one, the one perfect thing, here it is, it's for everyone.
But one size rarely fits all.
The alternative is break it into components, to find the grid and to fill it in. Not too small, not too big. Grains that match what we're ready to engage with.
- Seth Godin