Thursday, August 20, 2009

words to live by

The Four Agreements®

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean.
Avoid using the word to speak against yourself
or to gossip about others. Use the power of
your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you.
What others say and do is a projection
of their own reality, their own dream.
When you are immune to the opinions and
actions of others, you won't be the
victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions
and to express what you really want.
Communicate with others as clearly as
you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness
and drama. With just this one agreement,
you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from
moment to moment; it will be
different when you are healthy as
opposed to sick. Under any circumstance,
simply do your best, and you will avoid
self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

On freeing oneself

Life can be brutal at times; especial when we are too young to understand that pain can be passed forward without intention. All we hear are words, and not necessarily what they are saying. We know only how to interpret those words from where we stand, how we hear them, and how they reflect upon our own being, not from a place of understanding anothers suffering or how those words are really a reflection of the person speaking them.

We wear these words like tattoos across our hearts that surface and rupture, sometimes when we hear them spoken, but more often the breach is by interpretation. In other words, we may hear – You are stupid…you are pathetic…you are wrong…you will never…you can’t…and you won’t; not because they were spoken out loud, but by one’s own perception of what they think they are hearing.

Some people live trapped inside these translations and are never able to free themselves of what they think they hear. They spend a lifetime defining themselves based on how they believe people perceive them, rather than how they perceive themselves. But then again, their self perceptions are often times so distorted and damaged by years of misconception, that to rise above it would mean reinventing oneself. I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM… or more to the point…I AM NOT WHO I THINK YOU THINK I AM.

To live a full life we must know who we are. We must BE who we are, without excuses, or apologies or explanations as to why. We must free ourselves from the words that hold us back even if it means losing a few people along the way just to drown out the noise.

Friday, August 14, 2009

in loving memory



in loving memory of one of God's angels

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

art by vk

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

so that's that about all that

I actually posted this on 6.27.09 and then promptly removed it at 2:00AM after this sudden feeling that it was just TOO MUCH. (but not before at least four people read it…so those of you that read it can skip over it).

Today I reread it and because I am about to reinvent myself, I decided I wasn’t afraid of what I had to say.

So here it is again.

My favorite book is EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE by Jonathan Safran Foer. I keep the book on my night stand and open it to random pages periodically. Inevitably I find a passage to underscore. I have literally hundreds of passages underscored. I imagine one day the entire book will be will one continuous underline.



And once again Jonathan spoke to me. spoke to the person I once was before all the hurt, before I turned off the oven and stopped baking bread. Everyone used to say I was just TOO. Too intense, too dark, too loud, too angry, that I cared too much, I thought too deeply, I was simply too much. So I turned it off. what they didn’t understand at the time was that it meant I had to stop caring about them too.

From time to time since then I have opened up my heart, only to inevitably be met with the same after the period of enchantment wore off. So back inside I would go. My partner J however, stayed for the long haul. we are in our 15th year together and she can still smell the bread even when I’m not baking. I will love her forever.

I am also lucky enough to have more than a handful of people in my life that in spite of not having been able to take me in at the time, continue to love the person I was, and see me even today for the person that I am. I try to listen to their words now and believe them when they tell me…the thing they loved the most about me was that I was TOO MUCH.

Today I am in the process of letting go of things that have held me back and I am on course to returning to myself, because frankly I preferred myself when I was just too much.

So that’s that about all that.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

let there be children


Thousands of children in the Gaza Strip sought to break the world record for kite flying in a rare moment of respite from the war-battered enclave's daily life