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