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.

Celebration

I live because I am.
I smile because it is natural.
I am here for an impulse within to serve.
I walk across the mountains, carrying life’s burdens, wearing my good leather shoes or no shoes at all.
I dress up every day according to my heart, for that IS the purpose.
I paint my nails because my hands and feet express in colors.
I eat and drink not because of schedules, tastes or conditioning, but how my body feels this moment.
I sprint, I pause, I collapse, whenever it is truly called for.
I teach my eyes to see through the heart, so every moment I am with beauty.
I am the mother, the father, the friend, sometimes all at the same time to my child.
When I am lonely or sick, I humbly invite my soul to be with me again.
I say thank you when I wish to cry.
I celebrate all that I am.

Service

I may be silly to be fully transparent in a public forum space, where it is mostly used to market businesses or to experiment with constructed personas.

I may be naïve to continue to trust that human nature is pure and have things stolen repeatedly.

I may be mad to choose a life that is so close to the edge, that sometimes I cannot tell which reality I am in, because I am not only in one.

I may be crazy to be speechless for days, except with the eagles and my son.

Or care to talk about things which cannot be responded to.

I may be weird to find it important to fully feel all my hurts, without any comforting distractions.

I may be impossible to be working and mothering and cooking and walking over mountains four times a day, and still travel when the heart or a place calls.

Or more impossible to have no time for physical relating at all.

I may be unbelievable to feel satiating gratitude for a venemous snake bite when seven months pregnant.

I may be a fool to not know where my next step will be.

I may be all of the above.

But none of them can deter me from the Fire within my heart and, from service.

Rambling on the 29th night of September

I am not going to lie.

I have never had much interest in the external world. Mastering myself is the only full time occupation for me. I like to journey within myself and poke at all the dodgy and curious places, sometimes they turn out to be quite overwhelming and amazing too. When the world is interested in the financial market or America or ending poverty, I just wish to go to my room and look within myself. This may not be a conventional way for most human beings to live, living in such aloneness and isolation to our surroundings, but it is my way, I don’t know any other way. It is natural for me and call me crazy, but I would be very uncomfortable living in an apartment or working 9 to 5 in an office or watching TV every night. Just a choice I guess.

Most of my life I have hoped to be like everyone else. I have tried many times to do everything possible to remain in my comfort zone. I just wanted to be a cashier or work in a small book shop. However something within my heart, always successfully convince me my path is otherwise. I never plan much what I do, I just know and then somehow I follow through with the immense help of the Universe. Most of the times I do not know how it happened. And before I have time to reflect about it logically, I am already on another part of my journey.

We know that whatever that we resist the most, is usually what we have to learn to master the most. I still have many dreams of being invisible, I just want to hide in my isolated house within the hills and talk to the eagles all day long.

But what I want, and what I feel the most comfortable, is not what I am here to be. I am here to extend myself, to expand into horizons I don’t know existed. I am here to grow more than I have ever had. I am here to serve. Many moments I feel fear is surely going to consume me, and each time I feel this is the definitely the biggest challenge ever, I surprise myself by jumping through another hurdle.

No one says it would be easy, but perhaps this is the life we have decided enough is enough. We are no longer content to keep pretending just to feel safe. The pain of not being who we are is greater than the fear preventing us to move forward. I could only look forward to the moment when I come out of the water for another first breath.

Harmony

I have a story to tell.  This could be your story too.

This particular story is about a girl who was born believing that everyone is somehow the same, in some big way.  Astrologically she is born a Virgo, hence, understanding the mechanics of things is important for her; yet for the bulk of her life she has also been blessed with a strong heart and an inherent trust in life.    This trust has brought her what is of a knowing.  Knowing is not knowledge, it also does not require proof.  Simply put, it is just the way it is.  The way is clear and the heart is still.   There is no wavering, only an arrow-pointed determination towards a goal.

Years ago she felt a knowing in Mother Nature.  She knows she is safe within the Mother.  This is not knowledge, for the girl cannot proof it.  All she knew was she had to return home, to a place where she is no longer fragmented anymore.  She knew she had to return before she can move anywhere forward.

It was such a knowing that brought her back to Nature.  The girl was with the Mother always, she does not wish to be anywhere else.  Within the Mother, there is a mutual exchange of love.  Over the years, the girl has moved many times, changed jobs, met different people;  yet she carried Mother Nature within her, everywhere she went.  The Mother is in her when she moved, danced, sang, wrote, worked; the Mother is also in her house, her body, her clothes, her food.  She breathes the Mother and the Mother flows in her blood.

In truth, the Mother is everywhere, in every cell of every person.  Never had it crossed the girl’s mind that it was considered “unconventional” to quit her job in the fashion industry to go farming, or to live in a remote island where the nearest transportation to civilization was an hours’ walk over mountains.  Sometimes she forgets that she lives in Hong Kong rather than in the deserts of Mexico or on the mountains of the Andes.

Everyone has their comfortable and habitual way of life, and this is the life of the girl.  Every day she wakes up at the crack of dawn to walk in the crisp cool air beginning the morning in communion with Pachamama.  Some mornings the exchange with the Mother is deep in harmony, other mornings there is much discordance.  Yet there is no where to hide within the Mother, only more openings.  In moments of exhaustion or emotional disturbances, instead of stagnation, the girl chooses to continue walking.  Without thinking, her two feet guide while her heart takes a rest.  During thresholds when she is close to either breaking down or turning back, the girl continues walking.  There comes a place and a time, when the exhaustion magically turns into an opening.  It transforms into harmony.

Hong Kong is an opportune land for technology and modernity, and within its financial backdrops and glamor-laced and polluted air, the girl is now at home here.  Harmony can only come from the inside.  Whether on the top of Machu Picchu or at a beach on Lamma Island, the harmony is one and the same.  Harmony is permanent, whereas peace is momentary.  If Hong Kong is the place where she is to be presently for learning and for service, this is where she will be.  And she feels the love of the Mother as immensely here as when she is breathing thin air, hugging the sun and the sky in Peru.

This is what the girl feels life is about, to be who she is from the depths of her heart, knowing that she is in unity, no matter where she is and how each day presents itself.  Honoring her body and be grateful for its ability to sense and reflect both what is happening within and without energetically–individually, universally and collectively.  Allowing herself time for solitude yet also be in union and communion with Mother Nature and all its beings.

The girl knows.  She knows this is all a time of preparation and arduous training; she only smiles because honestly she is enjoying every moment of it, and this is all that matters to her.

Photo: Wini