everything shapes us

 “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
                                                                                                               -Brene Brown

 When I was younger, I used to seek answers for everything. Why, why, why. And then...in frequent moments of self pity...why me?? Of course these questions where rhetorical because there were no answers...only more questions + more suffering. The questions were endless and they varied slightly but at the root of all the asking there was a deep suffering and an inability to accept reality. So, that time and way of being was not healthy or productive and led me into even deeper pain and denial; an even deeper separation from my true self. But now...I realize that it was necessary. Now I know that everything shapes us. Especially those lost years of drowning in a sea of discontent and unhappiness. Especially those times.
Now...I am not seeking answers because I understand that these things can change from day to day, hour to hour. What I am seeking is courage.
*The courage to be brave... 
*to live with my whole heart.
*The courage to be seen.
*The courage to love (greatly),
*to do my work,
*to speak my truth.
*The courage to walk away when necessary and
* the courage to stay and fight for what I believe in as well. 
 Now...I am a seeker of the brave + the true. Within mySELF.

 “People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.”    -Neil Gaiman

 For so much of my life...others wrote my stories for me, telling me who I was, what I could + could not do. Now...I have the pen and paintbrush in my hand. I am seeking the courage to be my whole self and to claim (and share) my stories. With heart. With compassion.
With every ounce of my being...I believe that our stories matter...that they truly + deeply matter. I believe that we are all story-tellers, truth tellers and the keepers of our stories. Our lives + experiences are our stories...and they shape us. Everything shapes us.

stories carry us

“The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?”

                                                                                          ― Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Yesterday we went to watch the life of Pi. I read the book (twice) when it first came out and...I was enthralled. An Indian boy and a tiger crossing the Pacific on a raft...add a shipwreck , flying fish + a carnivorous island and you have storytelling at it's best. Was it true? Did it really happen or did Pi conjure it all up because the truth was much more difficult to face?  In the end though...none of that matters. What matters...is the magic of the story. Does the story hold us and ...carry us into it's heart?

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things
Does the story trust us with it's vulnerability...it's beauty as well as it's ugliness? Does it take us to a different place? Because...stories carry us, don't they? They carry us through pain and unimaginable loss...through hopes and fears. They carry us to our best + worst selves and into uncharted territories. Our stories carry us deep into the human heart...where we, all of us, experience the deepest of sufferings and the highest of hopes. Sometimes...they simply carry us when we are unable to stand. Most magical of all, I think, is this...they carry us to the places we have not yet seen, the person we have not yet become.