Reifyn: Whatever May Happen Life is Awesome

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Whatever May Happen Life is Awesome

I'VE BEEN GOING through my belongings, trying to see what I can get rid of to streamline for purposes of relocation within the next 6 months, and I decided to look at my old journals. I still keep a journal, which includes little drawings as well as the stories that make up my life and how I feel. In the sidebar is the word 'Hope' with a heart under it; the size of the heart indicates how much hope I've felt that day; and sometime it is quite minute, and sometimes there's a question-mark within the heart. The rest of the sidebar indicates physical health & how much sleep I've had.

Looking through the old journals (which I've kept since 2009) I'm struck by the different periods I went through, which included in the first journal or two being stupefied by what was happening in life. Then, reading how I dealt with my accident & other terrible losses; all the way to when I'd relocated 2 1/2 years ago to my present whereabouts. What strikes me is that I was really living life back then, to the fullest I was capable. What is somewhat disheartening is that the past year and a half or more has been spent surviving, and not very well. I'm shocked at how strong I had been: how even the most terrible of circumstances allowed me to use my own inner strength and recognise, little by little, that I possessed far more than I had ever credited.

The journals were (and are) always titled 'LIFE' followed by a volume number, then the number 1, as this is (to my knowledge) the only life I've had and likely the only one I'll have. The picture here is the pride of the collection, in more ways than one. I recall drawing this freehand with a pen and then highlighting it with coloured pencil after, tearing the edges, then gluing it on the front. Terrible things ensued at the end of this journal's chronicle—yet I chose the caption only after these events: Whatever May Happen Life is Awesome! I wish & hope that I can recapture these sentiments & feel more like I'm alive again. That's worth a good-sized heart in the sidebar at the very least.

How about you? Do you keep journals? I recommend it highly—it will surprise you or even give you hope when life goes very differently than you supposed.

Thankfulness

I think we expect some sort of definitive resolve or outcome to things in life. I'm not sure progress is about that...at least not for me. The spiritual being that has chosen to inhabit these days I call my life chose a very strange path: one where the cards are some of the poorest possible; and where, no matter what happens, there is no obvious resolve. I have only just begun realising what a great gift not having things work out in a certain way is. Not to mention getting handed sometimes terrible things & trying to understand what to do with them. I am thankful that things are complex & difficult, because it makes me know that I must be rare enough to stay in the game with such dreadful cards, and where life is never ever easy & the dice only come up 1s or 2s. So my hope for anyone (as strange as it sounds) is that life will not have easy choices or paths: I find this is the way to powerful change—& that those changes are from Within, & the Without is not as important. -Reifyn

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.

Man...is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.