Love and only (true) love

There has been many years when I did not allow what is natural to flow. Until one day, I decided to write, not just write, but share what I have written. Then I realized, not only was I holding myself back for all those years, I was also holding back every single person in this world.

I had to share life. Life as how I have chosen and how it has been my teacher, my medicine. Did I always do life right? Hardly. What I wish to share about life is, it could have hardened me, and I have chosen many experiences that point to the road of big time hardening.

There was a spark, at times although so dimly felt, not because it is small, but because of my own self neglect and choice to not want to feel it, yet throughout my life it is always there within my heart. This spark, is my connection to love.

Did I always know love? I have always known love, but I did not always live it. Knowing love and witnessing myself not living it, is one of the greatest pains I have ever felt. Did I give up on myself? Almost, I almost bought into the guilt that does not fail to debilitate and cripple, because I have given my power to it.

What I did not envision after that was the beginning of truly living love. Not speaking or fantasizing or intellectualizing about love. But truly, responsibility, seriously, playfully, commitedly, consistently living love. This has nothing to do with being flirtatious or sexual with anyone else, but it is about being love and making love with myself every moment (again, nothing sexual is implied here). Making love every moment of my every day, what does that even mean? Imagine waking up, the first thought and the accompanying action—is that me being love, first and foremost to me? Am I being gentle to myself from the every mouthful I put in my body, to every word uttered to another, to the choices of what to select and put in my shopping basket and consequently carrying home? Am I putting love first when in a situation where emotions attempt to take over? Do I feel and honor every being in this world knowing we are all equal? Are any of my subtle expressions conveying separation that even I am unaware of? Can I continue to be love if everyone else chooses differently?

Am I being “hard” on myself for attempting not to harden in life, you may ask. There are no rules in how I live. I do not abstain from eating any foods because I don’t allow myself to. I do not go to bed early because I have to. There is nothing in life I have to do. Every single action though is a choice from my heart, knowing it would support me in being love. Why is love so important? Who would even notice if we slip once or twice, and not be love to ourselves or to others? My body would register every choice of love and lovelessness I have ever made, and I am always responsible for all the choices I have ever made and will ever make. All diseases as well as incidents/accidents in life are a result of all the choices I have made. I cannot avoid the consequences of my past choices but I can always choose new choices from now on.

Why I am sharing this is, life is constantly a learning. I have not mastered anything in perfection, and I never will. Every day I may make an unconscious choice or I may override the knowing in my heart for convenience, but it is also I who has to suffer ultimately, sooner or later. And writing while living life in love, knowing it is surely and truly a discipline, in steadiness and consistency. And the first love we show ourselves is to be more accepting and less critical in what we have missed. In-truth, we are already there. We are already enough. We are ready. Don’t let the imperfections of what entails a human experience cloud truth. Truth can only be felt within the heart.

Without honesty and responsibility, there is no true love. And knowing love, and allowing ourselves to feel the love within us, the spark which I mentioned earlier, is actually a blazing flame. And no matter how far from it we have tread, its warmth and light will always be there for us to feel, if we decide to return.

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Let life be our art

A child can see and hear multitudinous more than a grown up, sometimes.  For we are all born with eyes and ears, nose, limbs and tongue, inside our hearts.

As a child I can feel so much going on, is not it.  It is not truth.  Simply because it does not feel right within my heart.  Yet, as a child, having such natural feelings can overwhelm, not so much because of feeling them, but more so how to communicate these feelings to a world, and be understood, when the world does not communicate in this way.  From very young, I have made up my mind, that no one would understand.

Yet, feeling I continued.

Growing up, my ears could hear so much more than what was spoken, all the honesty unexpressed, but niceties wrapped up in sugar and honey was how we communicated.  So I stopped speaking.  Because I do not know how to not speak truth–the truth of the reality that moment, and the truth which is absolute in my heart.

For many years I felt distraught, but never did I give up on the truth that my heart knows, although sometimes I chose to not heed it.  Not knowing how to otherwise, I began exploring this in art, (without studying it–my degree is in chinese studies) where possibilities are endless.  Art is an arena where beyond that of “reality” can be expressed freely, although, I was actually only wishing to express the reality that most have forgotten to be true.

I began taking pictures, from a second hand automatic camera.  I wrote and wrote and wrote to allow all the conflicts that I felt but have not expressed throughout the years to flow.  No coincidence that I got myself a job with no experience in photography or journalism, in a magazine publication.

I did not want to “create”.  I am not interested in making up something that I feel may be better.  I know there is a better.  And this better simply begins with being loving to every single being. I only wanted to express this in all ways possible with this vehicle.

And thus, life, has become my art and my medicine.

Mediator

A hybrid of a firey heart and a self effacing personality, the body acts as mediator.

This moment, I have no words or desires but am prostrating to this vehicle in utmost respect and humility, its agreement to take on one of the hardest tasks, and yet have over and over again through its compassion and wisdom, worked endlessly to bring back harmony, to constantly teach and learn to incorporate soul into what is not of soul.

I

Am

Too humbled

For words.

Eternally

Learning with you.

Meeting Femaleness

To find oneself, many times we first deny who we are.A child at 12 being innocently denied of her openness to love and to share her love, grew up embodying all the religious connotations of what it means to be proper with her body and her sex. She breathed and lived guilt with each step in life. Yet the life within her refused to be denied. The more it was repressed, the harder it wants to express. The child was too tired to fight and too scared to speak out, repeatedly her life was snuffed and her voice disappeared. She was ready to give up life. At 12, she died symbolically in a car accident, miraculously surviving with barely a scratch. It is not her time yet, there is still much to learn and share.She grew up in her teens still in conflict, confused, fighting. Her heart wants to open but her body is frozen. When her body is ready, her heart is two steps behind. She is broken, fragmented. There is no harmony. She does not feel worthy enough to take up space, she is unsure why she is here. She has misinterpreted that to be loved you need to give all that you are, and even more than you have.

Her fragility misled her to believe that to be whole we must seek completion from the outside. Yet all the searching, seeking, discovering, told her otherwise. Nothing and no one can complete us, without ourselves first realizing the fullness within.

Therefore, broken, in heart, in body, she returns within. Fragmented, she pieced the soul back together with bleeding hands. She finds that some pieces cannot be found and others will always be imperfect, but now she can feel her heart again.

The woman within her is vibrant and dynamic, strong. She is fully open and totally in femaleness to receive. She is love in stillness and compassion. In every heart beat, she continues to tread on the path, simply for her own survival. Although without much angst, the rebellion is there, silent.

With each step she walks, she also holds the hands of all the women who have been experiencing similar. She strips her roles, after being in all of them—the virgin, the whore, the dakini, the lover, the daughter, the wife, the mother, but none of them can fully express her. She rather just calls herself, a woman, an eternal symbol of the moon.

She can feel every heart of every woman. All the madness, the lack of self-love, the feeling of unworthiness, the pulsating desires, the suffocating jealousy. She may not understand, but she accepts. She cries in pain but she accepts. And this acceptance has led her where she is here now.
She will continue to walk on this path, with her arms outstretched. And in her heart, she knows the beauty, the grandiosity, the breath-taking grace and deep inner strength she feels of the female race, will be honored in much greater magnitude when we begin to see ourselves truly, face to face.