Solace

I was going to write an entry on solace but then didn't have the heart for it so instead found a small poem I wrote when I was 20 that describes to an extent how I feel today as well. I feel generally fine, but I feel in need of peace. Obviously this is a persistent desire throughout life, well, my life at least. For a moment, you grasp it, you experience peace, solace, grace and then, because we live in a spiritually empty and superficial world, it's gone again. The world won't change. I however, hopefully will. Peace is a beautiful thing. I believe that it is found through honest reflection, meditation, prayer, and quiet...and ironically, peace needs to be fought for. In a way, we must wage small and big wars every day in order to have peace within ourselves. As a Roman Catholic, I believe that peace comes from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. Yet I do not doubt that other people of other faiths or of no faith can experience peace as well. And I do not assume that just because one is catholic or christian that one automatically has dibbs on peace. It is not my place to assume or doubt. But for everybody, peace must be actively sought. And our world is so busy...it sometimes feels quite disheartening.


In quiet...
Where do you look.
How do you find.
Peace.

It has come in the evening.
In the drama that ebbs away.

Peace, you say
Is precious.
Peace, you say
You've found.

While I, in realizing I haven't found it,
Feel calmer.
And I
Begin to love and need the feel of the world around me.

(August 2001)

Quote of the day:

"We have no right to ask, when sorrow comes, 'Why did this happen to me?' unless we ask the same question for every joy that comes our way." Philip S Bernstein

Consulting Crystal Balls

I suppose the title of this entry is misleading as I don't actually consult crystal balls in order to see the future, although I am somewhat of a gypsy in both mind set and appearance at times, but that's neither here nor there...
I am however: making plans, big, huge, fantastic and wildly spectacular plans that will most likely not come into being as they are simply to pass the time and focus my energies on other matters than the one thing I desperately want to happen. I am: reading and formulating columns and columns of baby names...mixing, matching, seriously wondering if some mothers suffer from severe mental lapses and actually do wish to name their babies names chosen from categories like "Cute Gothic" and "Romantic Vampire Baby Names". I am: considering changing my own name to something along the lines of Co'Lle'En just to be edgy and cool. I am: being just a touch sarcastic and blabbering on and on because what I really am is: jittery, (butterflies, the whole works), with apprehension and excitement and nerves, (the good kind of course), wondering what this next week will bring! :)
So good luck, bon chance, and lykke til to us brave souls awaiting our joyful news! ;)

18 Months

The way we measure life. The way we pass our days. The constant references to time that color our speech and make up the pattern of our conversation. We can not cope without it. We can not live in the present...we wait endlessly for days that come and then are over in a flash; we live through days that no one else even suspects the value of but ourselves...if even ourselves.

The following is a verse from P. B Shelley's poem "Mutability", it has always been one of my favorite verses. Those words are so beautiful and the very reason for their beauty lies in the acknowledgment of how finite our lives are, how brief our time is, whether we live to be 95, it probably never seems long enough to have done and loved and experienced all we wanted to.

"The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world's delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright."

Though I have almost never worn a watch in my life aside from when I lived in Germany (where the importance of time takes on a whole other dimension ;) and occasionally when I work, I also measure moments and months...

...The next time I go home to Canada, I will have been away from home for three years and seven Christmases. I have known my husband for 10 years now and been married to him for 5 in October. It has been 10 years since I was a carefree 18 year old spending my months backpacking in what was then, far, far away Scandinavia and Germany...now I live here, funny how life works out.:) It has been 18 months since Per and I began the adoption process.

Those are the bare bones. Minutes, months and years. They tell you nothing really. But they are my measures. They shape me. Each of those periods of time is filled almost to the bursting point with various emotions and experiences...happiness, excitement, discovery, growth, trials, pain, struggle, love, understanding, questioning, confusion, darkness, light and during these times I have been everything: brave, foolish, funny, wise, cutting, unkind, fearful, loving, compassionate, ignorant, miserable, thoughtful and thoughtless...

But we all have our measures, our own months and years. And we all know nothing about one another.