rebirth

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).

THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape.When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man.She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street.For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel__ apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit.She couldn__ get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.

Life will hack off your head and shit down your neck every chance it gets. I've found that consuming drugs and booze, listening to music and always having an excuse in the best way to tip the scales.

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,And his sheep are straying on the hillside,And he didn__ even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him.No one had loved him, in the end.When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:The great valleys full of the same green as always,The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.(And once again the air, that he__ missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.(7/10/1930)

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

Life's just a dream. It isn't real. I know that you can't see that yet. You want me to wake up but in my death I did wake up and I saw you were still sleeping.

Live for what you love, and die for what you're unwilling to live without...

We search for happiness across every landscape, if only we knew that the seed in which it first grows, is planted within ourselves...

I thought I would die without you, in reality I was reborn...

Even the Sun gets tired of rising, but he does it out of love for the Earth...

The reason as to why a human cannot give birth to himself is because he needs someone to help him. We are altricial, or helpless at birth, because we have to depend on others so that later in life when we are capable, we help those in need. And this is very much part of the circle of life.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been." _Mark Twain (Author)

All the pleasure of sin cannot be compared to the satisfaction with sweetness of life in the spirit.

Redemption in Christ Jesus is the grace rebirth.

Rebirth is born of God.

This is the secret of the golden flower: if the heart can die the flower will bloom, die as you are so you can be reborn.

Break open your heart so that I may enter it.

Her eyes stung from crying for so long and having some tears dry on them. Her body was weak from the exercise but she did not feel better. While she was crying she had wanted someone, anyone to come and hold her. She had crawled into her closet, hoisted herself up onto the shelf that had duvets and bedsheets and curled herself among those. Now she knew that no hug could erase her pain, no sort of embrace could bind up her heart. She needed a new heart it seemed, her old heart was beyond repair.