Fortitude

The truth is that I'm not lucky. The truth is that I'm not living within a fantasy world of naive machinations. The truth is that I once met the darkness of my soul and yearning in a pool of hopelessness and pain, and saw one spark of hope that compelled me to address the hollow lifelessness inside of my heart to seek the glimmer of light, begging for my attention and demanding that I never mire within my own shallow needs. Ever. Again.

The truth is that even within the midst of heartache and pain, I knew my own responsibility and choices - those that pointed to a decision to remember that life, itself, is a gift and not an idle miracle for a select few; that tragedy is for the bitter and disconsolate and not for the pure in heart. To realize that even casual breaths of oxygen are not just a reminder - no, they are a sacred edict to not only reject negativity, but to rise up within bravery and the resolute determination to meet and receive every miracle in whatever form they might deign to arrive. And, more - that the discovery and acceptance of responsibility will always, always reveal limitless joy.

Destiny and Divine inheritance are there to be had if we would only but be open to receive them.

The truth is, I knew that as a mother, my first responsibility before personal emotion, was to see to the welfare, joy, and success of my children; to never give up as long as my history and wisdom could provide sweetness, strength, perseverance, perspective, and the balance of grace in the shaping of their lives.

The truth is that when lies of toxic turbulence from anyone - partners, loved ones, well-meaning friends -- or even those whom we may have once trusted - none of these have to be accepted. None.

Ever.

In fact, it is mercy to reject such things. It is mercy to release others to their own processes, misery. It is mercy to let them wallow in and discover why they must drown in their own pity. And to leave them to it -- in gentleness, nonetheless.

We are all perfect within imperfection (I can't say this enough!); and yet we are also living within a world fraught with comparison, exacerbated by portended rights, and subsequently stripped of individual awareness. And while knowledge, compassion, trusting, vulnerability, and eagerness might be all evidences of buoyant youthfulness, today's social structures seek to manipulate against personal responsibility, while condemning, alienating, undermining, and vilifying anyone else's success.

It is little wonder the rampant dis(ease) of depression and demise so prolific within our communities and across social media, academia, and even government: self worth swindled and misrepresented, artificial highs sold at top dollar, marketed for gain, denying the inevitable lows, yet guaranteeing an aftermath of perpetuated jealousy and anger against the world at large.

Every time.

I maintain once more that we are, you are, they are: breathing, seeking, being, searching, learning, fearing, enduring -- yet worthwhile. Counted. Needed.

Needful.

So, you. Yes, you! Who might feel the sting of familiarity and displaced disgrace: Shake it off.

You are worthy.

Don't assign someone else's perception of your path where it doesn't belong. We're all here to journey for ourselves, in our time, as we learn, because we can. It's ours, and ours only, from a loving Father in Heaven.

So, square you shoulders and hear my voice. Hear my heart: hear my longing. Hear the sighs of loneliness I once felt. Feel the intensity of my aching when I once I gazed up into a Colorado night, tears sliding down my cheeks because I felt lost, helpless, stuck. Done.

Yet, because of this, I unequivocally know that God is aware of each of us now as we are, where we are. How we feel, and what we need.

But timing is everything. Please, trust this.

Believe.

Don't hurry the end, for you'll miss the process, insight, understanding, direction, and a multiplicity of other blessings.

Don't be hungry for love, for it will come; and it will be the kind that will sustain you, move you, inspire you, champion and invigorate your senses. It will unleash your spirit and lead you to see life with a measure of exuberance and fire, unrestrained, and fully engaged.

I moved hundreds of miles away -- across three states, to be exact, and have what I have now. My life turned on a dime. It makes me think of how foolish it is to guarantee tomorrow as if we'll live forever -- or more ignorantly, move about in morose malaise, inconsiderate of such a miracle.

So, rise up: accept, relish, and glory in everything that you have, experience, and are now. Yield to what was, for it has given you the promise and direction to discern and consider your thoughts for the morrow. Disallow all negativity, blame, and anyone whose sole purpose would malign your soul for their own misbegotten justification.

You are. And not only ARE you - living, breathing, seeking - you are blessed. And will be. So stare up at the sky now, not in sadness, but in expectation; for your heart and soul, wants and needs, are painted within the myriad of hues of an insistent and brilliant dawn, and it will magnify the course, direction, and consequence of your mortal existence when your mind meets completion under the shining brightness of the noon-day sun.

When you are ready, you will become. And you will recognize the magnificence that is within you.

So for now, let the lights of night dance upon you. The stars will light the way, thought upon thought, until you are ready for the day.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl

Aggrandizement

Life is what you make of it. Fear, denial, blame, or anything else that would portend to mitigate itself against personal responsibility, will always come upon a reckoning. So, what do you really want? I say: live that -- and live it with integrity; for, regardless of whatever whisperings of negativity might wish you otherwise, truth endures.

Oh, something not just to casually remember, but to contemplate unto just understanding.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl

Tranquility

It is the unknown that bears more truth than any present circumstance might ever pretend to suggest. Does an unfinished puzzle complete its picture? Does fear, faltering, or unnecessary machinations change the inherent landscape, portrait, design?

No, for however many the starts or stops, shelved plans, or concentrated efforts -- no matter how blurred, or difficult the detail -- perfect knowledge comes in a sudden thud of humbling awareness as the final pieces come together. Hindsight, intuition, belief, hope, fruition.

Such it is with adversity. Trust the peaks and valleys of sojourn and trial; appreciate the gentle whisperings of resilience, strength, tenacity, and perseverance. Believe. Ease back; it's not a race. The best is now because it's built from yesterday and sees the possibility in tomorrow.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl

Trailblazer

Break out from the shoulds that often come through misguided peer pressure, criticism, or opinion; follow your heart and let it be the searchlight for your soul. Embrace your talents and put them first.

Shoulds yield to a selfishness of crippling thought that is walled-in by stress and mortared by fear. Authenticity, however, seizes personal value, rejects comparison, owns intention, and dares to follow its singularly beautiful, inspired purpose in unabashed, uninhibited abandon.

Authenticity drinks in the sunshine and rides upon the exuberant wind as it whips through the grasses. Authenticity idly notices, with a sweetness of pleasure, the kaleidoscope of other flowers blooming throughout the valley -- so many hues, rippling together in one windswept plane of laughter -- shining in their individual beauty, but living in collective glory.

Authenticity invites freedom but encourages growth. Authenticity dares to live in Joy outside of popularity. Authenticity stands on its own but basks in a rebellion of giving. Authenticity rejects the darkness to bloom under a sunshine that would spotlight us all.

Authenticity is life uncharted.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl

Cascade

Perhaps that's what I love most about life - the myriad of stories and souls aching to be written and waiting to be heard. Oh, write! If not in words, song; if not in song, in laughter; if not in laughter - in the slide of silent tears wherein no human sound could offer utterance, and the rhythmic inhale and exhale of breath and hope, longing and feeling, understand, absorb, and convey a poetry like none other.

To be vulnerable, raw, open, ready: a pureness of self amenable to past and present, yet boldly willing to write its name into the future.

So, I ask: What book inside of yourself do you have to write? And how will it be written?

Is it in word, conversation, artistic expression? In purpose, passion, beliefs, or family? Is it in serving, listening, solitude, or communication? Oh, so many possibilities, avenues, representations -- all limitless chapters of equal and meaningful consequence.

I say that life is only as large as the intimate awareness of our unique and inherent designs -- a sustaining knowledge, gentle peace, sure purchase, and steady witness that, through opportunity and experience, brings us into certain cognition as to the sanctity of being. Every moment, as it comes, offers up morsels of insight and volumes to write: tender, worthwhile, venerable, true.

Our stories are meant to be shared as much as life invites us to live; for we are all First Editions in various states of editing and yet all worthy of the press.

Print.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl

Clocks

I work with the public in both my jobs, and it's incredibly humbling to me how many personal stories I am privy to, as well as how much every single person, regardless of how they present themselves, has a story.

I see all levels of people - from impeccably dressed and impossibly wealthy - to the poorest, and unassuming. As I see humanity clearly reflected from each of these faces -- when I look into someone's eyes and their soul belies the glitter on their fingers, the dirt on their clothes, the rolls of hundreds clutched within well-manicured hands, or those that are stained from toil -- I feel the call inside of them to count. Perhaps not needfully, but to count, nonetheless.

Validation can be disguised in so many different ways; but this I know: everyone is of value and has infinite worth -- everyone is equal and yet sacredly unique. The basic wants and desires of human need is something that can level every single one of us once we truly, deeply absorb it. Such rumination makes my heart search and expand as I examine my own needs, insecurities, viewpoints, and outlook. It has me exploring my soul, heart, opinions, and nature. It defies me but to define, consider, and open up my spirit to the worlds of people who populate this planet.

And so, I say: pray for someone today. Pray for yourself, pray for peace, direction, empathy, wisdom. Simply, pray.

In everything you do, seek supplication and direction. No want is ever shunned or disregarded, just as no heartache is ever unnoticed. The smallest of miracles are available from even the tiniest behest.

So, believe.

Make the request. Make it.

When individual will stubbornly refuses any consequence of consideration toward another outlook, struggle is guaranteed. It simply is.

The quote, "Pride goeth before the fall," surely exists. And has been repeated century, after century.

And so, I say that the truth of joy in this life begins the moment we critically assess our own insecurities, goals and wants, and yet see them come into a multiplicity of being when we recognize and embrace the synchronicity of learning among our fellow men.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl

(My Grandad, Charles H. McConnell, as well as a grandfather clock that chimed on the hour, perfectly, every hour. Gregory Peck, much?! Oh, my. I miss you, Grandad.) I miss you.

Journey

On the other side of anguish lies a silent calm which yields truth. Listen.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl

Glory

I am obsessed with old buildings; I want to know the stories of how they evolved, died, were reborn, and then were ultimately abandoned. Historical buildings are more than a dead past; they are witness to breath and death, hope and divide -- they are bystanders to the before, now, and what may come after, for all of us. They are as much a writ of declaration as they are poetry: anthropology evident in the silent beams and weathered siding unwilling but to yield their voices in the telling of at least one tale.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl

Significance

My heart is filled, yet hungry; sustained, and yet ravenous all the same. Why is it that my spirit can echo soundly, in a kind of frolicking joyful abandonment, while at the same time I am also helplessly caught within a reverence of cognizance that absorbs the miraculous powers which rest within personal choices, honesty, transparency, and thought?!

Sighs...

Gratitude surely can be found from the smallest things; for gratitude shifts with comparison, encounters compassion, recalls experiences, affects interaction, and then lives to serve.

Simply. And always.

True Living!

Oh, how humbling! To rise up to be, to receive. To Give, to love, to honor! To forgive. To confide. To cherish. To become.

And then to meekly come to understand the subtleties of such finite surety and thus enter into a space, time, and threshold of prosperity that unequivocally recognizes that anything is possible.

Anything is possible.

Think on that.

Living Joy - This Carman Girl