Relevance II

I'm revisiting a lot of my older work. Collages, writing samples, journal entries, deep sad diary entries. I am proud. I am sad and angry at my own innocence and arrogance. I am enthralled with myself. I am shocked by the fragility and vulnerability that I approached things with. The way I approached life, relationships, my emotions, my ambitions, my inhibitions. It is a side of myself I don't think I see as much anymore. It's certainly a side of myself I try to limit the public from seeing. Gone are the days that I am so willing to bare open my chest, to flaunt the rawness of everything.

I'm not sure if I should be sad or happy or content or nothing about the way I am no longer her. I am not the same innocent, raw, vulnerable, unsuspecting girl I once was. Is this because I grew up? Do I still encounter things the same way I once did? Did I stop feeling along the way?

A thought that occurs to me time and time again: if I met the people I once fell in love with now, will we still fall in love? Will we still have the same interactions? Will the interactions be better? More intimate? More sustainable with more communication and respect? Will they exist at all? Will I still want these relationships to happen at all? Will they like the person I am today? Will I be less fearful in the way I encountered these relationships, these people? I often wonder.

In a yoga class not so long ago, the teacher says it is important to get rid of old patterns. To dig and confront the patterns - the bad, the ugly patterns. To build something new. To challenge where we otherwise may not.

I am digging through my past. The collages are a big part of that.

I hope I work through things soon. There's a lot of work to do. I hope you enjoy the collages. I hope you can still feel some of the emotion from some of my past. I hope she resonates with you in some way. I think she still does to me a bit.

Why is this still relevant?

The Light in Me

The light within us, that roots into the Earth, like a beam, a thread that travels downward into the molten core of the Earth. This light that is connected to everything and everyone. This light that is like the Sun. It will radiate and touch everyone- you, me, the planets, the stars, the Moon, but this will not diminish its own light. It is a flow that permeates all. This light is everything and it will be here after us as it was here before us. It will last, it will change, but it is. 

Krista in class today talks to us about yoga's origin story of the world. It is believed that the world, the universe originated when God decided to become the world, the universe. So God is everything in this world, and everything in this world has a piece of God; an essence of God. The Earth we walk on, the people we meet, the animals and plants we touch. All of this is God. There is divinity in all of us. A small seed of bright light. Because God became the Universe, because there is a piece of God and a piece of divinity in all of us, we all share something as part of the core of our being. We all share this quality, and there is not any more or less of it in each of us. 

If we replace this idea of divinity and put in its place humanity or some other quality like kindness or compassion, I think it becomes easier to understand our world and all the beautiful things in it and that can be in it. All the good that we can share. 

The world right now is in a state of chaos. There is so much injustice, so much death, so much horror, so much unkindness in the way that some of the world is treated. Almost an unkindness to all of us in the way the world is, the way God is in all of us. 

Today she tells us this, and we practice in hopes of experiencing all of what it feels to be human, so we might be better able to see God in each other. 

July 9, 2016. 

An ongoing floral series

March 2015

Moleskine 1