Nice to know you...

Hi everyone!!

It smells absolutely incredible outside this morning!! Ya know that "dirty/wormy" smell that sometimes comes after a rain...yeah, it's not that...it's a fresh, clean scent..almost like how my clothes smell right after I wash them...it is SO green out there and even under somewhat dark skies, everything seems so "happy & bright." While taking a smoke stroll outside yesterday, I noticed that one of my bunches of little blue wildflowers (the ones growing out of the step on the left side) looked a little droopy...it seems that they are at a disadvantage as they don't get much direct sunlight, they kinda sit in the shadows...and they even looked a bit parched...so out I went with my watering vessel to try to perk them up a bit...it would be such a shame to have them just wither and die on me...so it is up to be to take care of them as much as it is in my power to do so.

Hmmm...disadvantaqe..where we are placed...withering..nurturance...back to life...on that line, I had a couple instances yesterday where I was called upon to make some sense of someone elses struggle and give encouragement. One was a family member, and another was a friend. Both of these struggles I had myself experienced (the surface means of its onset may have differed, but resultant root was the same). One was of smaller magnitude than the other to be sure...but each very LARGE to the person experiencing it. The ages and life-experience were also of significance...the younger of the two was what I would term a self-limiting "obstacle" in the road, while the older of the two had fallen into the hole and was buried....but within each of these struggles, a message is contained. Each had unwittingly expressed an outside "reason" or object of blame that initiated this process within themselves, and one was more accepting of what I had to say than the other...as you probably guessed, it was the family member...who also happens to be the younger of the two and whose struggle is more a slight tweek in her attitude, a less-invasive LOOK inside, and a trust that has been built in my words by "knowing" me her entire life. But the other...more life experience, more indentity built, more belief engrained, and less of a relationship with me....not to mention, jumping a hurdle is way easier than digging yourself out of a hole when you have no idea how you got there and no digging utensils to help you out...it gets suffocating down there...it is cold, dark, and then the deprivation of light starts to mess with your mind. As I had mentioned, I had gone through BOTH of these myself and sitting on the other side of these issues, I KNOW that each can overcome...I'm living proof.

Concentrating on the latter of these two scenarios because it is my most recent transcendence and the largest and most difficult...I would like to term what my friend is going through as a "dark night of the soul"...and the name can be misleading as the TIME element of the discription cannot be measured by OUR time..it is instead "spirit" time...so this can last as long as it HAS to but in this dark night..you experience a COMPLETE emptying of everything. You begin to question yourself to depths you NEVER thought you would ever question..it splays your identity out onto a cutting board and begins slicing it very THINLY--much like a diagnostic MRI...at an almost cellular level, you PICK YOURSELF APART...there is immense confusion, you feel STUCK with no way out...the usual "pros and cons" approach has absolutely no place here because any element of understanding or placing reason to it does not apply at all...and there IS no way out...UNTIL THERE IS (the appointed time). You are there to EXPERIENCE it..and quite frankly there is no way that you CANNOT...because it envelops you, won't leave you alone..You can almost feel a drawing nature to it...something has LED you there for a reason...but because we are also HUMAN, we have this DIRE need to place some sort of logic to everything, and I am sorry...in this particular phenomenon...there is none when you are in the "confinement stage." But rest assured, this DOES come later. What I did not know at the time (and what my friend at least has my experience to draw upon) is that it was a preparatory phase for what I would later emerge. And as I sit and think back...its quality is much like a physical conception. Nine months CONFINED in the dark with no thoughts...just feelings...no preconceived notions, just BEING...DEVELOPMENT...a preparatory phase for the moment of BIRTH, the moment of true freedom, but one has to stay until the appointed time in order for everything to be at its maximal capacity to SUSTAIN and continue to develop past this period of confinement where it at some point all becomes a very distant memory. This is a time of spiritual rebirth...and those who HANG ON through it, persevere, and let happen AROUND them what WILL.... emerge with the strength, veracity, resilience, and resolve that each of us did when we took our first breath of freedom outside of our mother's bodies. As much as you feel during this time that you don't know what to believe anymore and you begin to even mistrust yourself in the decisions you make, you feel your vision had never been clear to begin with....DON'T GIVE UP. This is a process of development where we are made to face our DARKNESS, our UGLINESS, our shadow. You have to stay a while to get fully acquainted with this part of yourself, but if you TRULY are LOVE...you will come to accept and love this part of yourself as well and integrate it into your whole being instead of separating yourself from it by repressing it...which is what causes this entire phenomenon to begin with. If you OWN yourself, there are the not-so-attractive parts that have to be owned as well and deserve to be loved...repression is NOT your friend...but we all do it..if we are to be ONE, we first have to be whole..and to be honest with ya'll there are USES for this repressed shadow...it quite possibly holds the virtues of "toughness" that turn that wish-bone into a back-bone and holds the hand up and says "ENOUGH" and it begins to work WITH you instead of against you...DIG IT MY PEOPLE? If it is likened to its physical counterpart of conception, confinement, development, and birth...you have to take this as "remembering where we came from" in a spiritual sense...right?? Right!! For every physical function and manifestation, there is a spiritual parallel. "Perspective pries your once-weighty eyes, and it GIVES YOU WINGS."

MUCH LOVE...big, big bunches!! Now get ya asses outside and love up some of this nature!!

"There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known."~Luke 12:2.