Silence doesn’t have to be awkward. If given the chance to experience it – embrace it. It’s only uncomfortable for a short moment. I promise.

Embrace the silence with every breath you take as if your life depends on the harmonious mixture of oxygen and stillness…

Connections are important in this lifetime. So why are we all distracted by things that don’t matter? People are afraid of getting close. Being open. Existing purely for the sake of unconditional love.

When you walk past a tree, or gaze up at the stars, do you look at them with as much admiration and love that you do for the people in your life?

Unconditional love. Humans could stand to learn something about this subject from the trees. A tree never withholds its love from anyone or anything for any reason. Not even those who chop them down, pick at their leaves and branches and seek to destroy them. No, a tree will provide shade unconditionally until the last moment possible, never wavering.

Don’t you think we all ought to strive to be more like the trees? After all, remember that we need them to survive – but they don’t need us. So who’s the higher species? Humans? Or Douglas Fir?

Connections. Everyone has connections with others in their life. Every connection is different – and it should be. We all need a wide variety of people in our lives to feel complete. One person cannot be everything to anyone. Ever. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll never find it.

The problem people have in relationships is that their insecurities compare them to everyone else, and rather than just experiencing what they currently have with someone they long for someone else’s connection.

Don’t they know that they are perfectly capable of developing their existing connections so much more deeply than they already are, and that they have the capacity to develop something wonderful that transcends even the other connections they long for? Connections are built, not poofed into existence. All you have to do is concentrate on what’s in front of you. Don’t look to the past; don’t look to the future. Just look straight ahead. Look at your feet if you have to, to keep your attention from wandering… eventually you’ll be able to adjust your focus… and sharpen your view. Words to live by. FA SHO, FA SHO!

But seriously, people, the connections you have with people in your life are all going to be very, very different. Embrace that. Don’t compare yourself to other people! Don’t compare connections! You can’t, it’s just going to drive you crazy.

Sometimes people have deeper connections with others in their life and you will never have a connection with them on that level but realize that’s okay! And it doesn’t make those connections any less meaningful. Instead of being depressed about not automatically having a deep connection HANDED to you by God, look at it as an opportunity to DEVELOP that deeper connection. You know, make the effort?

Stop distracting yourselves. Embrace the silence. Embrace the awkward moments and realize that you don’t have to fill the silence with meaningless drivel. You don’t have to entertain each other constantly. Once you experience the depth that silence has to offer you’ll experience something amazing.

Absorb the people in your life, don’t just keep them at an arm’s length. Pull them closer. Make the effort. Don’t ignore your instincts and don’t be afraid.

I have something really incredibly wonderful with a few people in my life and it’s all because I wasn’t afraid to pull them closer.

… people are so afraid to lose what they have that they try to chain down what they love. People, things. They chain everyone around them down until finally they start gnawing off their own legs just to escape…

Don’t chain down or clip the wings of those you love – allow them to fly freely and follow their own life path. Enjoy the time when their path intersects with yours. When their spirit soars across your night’s sky – embrace that beauty and express that love and appreciation freely… but realize the moment you chain them down is the moment that beauty will disappear.

Think about it.

If you stand in awe of someone because of who they are and you admire them while they’re on their life path… once you chain them down to yours, they can no longer walk along their own path. Tied to you, they can only be dragged across unfamiliar terrain by their necks. And where is the beauty in that?

By chaining down someone’s beauty you will lose it. As long as they’re in your chains, you’ll never see their soul glide across your night’s sky. Isn’t that what draws you in?

Selfless love. Love is selfless. Selfless love is being able to admire someone’s beauty, their path, their passion – and support them in whatever direction they want to go in – even if you’re not included in their master plan. Love for the sake of loving. Not for what you may get in return. Put aside your wants and needs and think about it. Pack up your chains. Pull up the anchor. It’s time to set sail…

Carry each joyful moment with you as though it hasn’t passed; but do not allow your happiness to depend upon your ability to recreate those moments – you can never recreate them and you will die trying.

If you set conditions on your happiness – “I’ll be happy if only I could experience -this- once more, or -that- for the first time” – you will spend the rest of your life trying to relive the past — and the present moment — the Here and Now — will escape your consciousness as though it is your final breath on this Earth.

When you experience something wonderful and amazing – the healthy way to hold onto it is to continue to allow yourself to feel the way you felt while you were in that moment – without the pain of wishing to be in that moment once again. You don’t need to be in that moment to feel its joy. Be as joyous now as you were then.

Don’t allow yourself to become addicted to conditional happiness. When your happiness depends on any person, place or thing – your emotions will turn into a rollercoaster disaster. Change is constant – people come and go in our lives, our current location changes day to day and possessions disappear without warning.

When you are happy – truly happy at the core of your soul – you can love everyone and everything around you with all of your heart yet love just the same if it all disappeared tomorrow. Why? Because being truly happy is all about living in the moment.

Unconditional happiness. Stop looking for a reason to be happy. Stop looking for a reason to love. Just Love.

Impeccable: flawless, incapable of sinning, perfect.

It’s one of the hardest of the agreements to follow and maintain because of human nature. We all get upset from time to time and vent to other people about the problems we experience in our lives with others. If we misunderstand a situation, or if we are at fault and don’t want to believe it, we project the fault onto the other person in our conversations with our friends. We are looking for someone to justify or rationalize our already incorrect feelings. We don’t really want the truth – we just want to be validated. And most people in our lives take on our projected opinion of the person who has hurt us or uspet us, even if they’ve never met them.

A wise person will suspend judgment no matter what is said.

When someone comes to you in order to vent about a situation or person in their lives that is bothering them – don’t take on their anger and use that to form an opinion about the person who has hurt them.

Anyway, just because I see a situation as unhealthy doesn’t mean I think terribly of anyone involved. An unhealthy situation is pretty easy to spot. But it takes two to tango, and some circumstances in separate lives just don’t mix well. No matter how much we want to hang onto those situations and people… they aren’t healthy situations to hang onto. Sometimes you just have to let go when you can’t fix it.

If you find yourself in a situation where everyone around you has formed negative opinions of people they’ve never met – ask yourself why. Ask yourself to pay attention next time to the way you present the situation – the way you talk about the people involved – and more often than not, you’ll find that you are the direct cause of those negative opinions.

If you constantly talk down about people, parade them out to be horrible people who are out to get you, out to hurt you, and are completely unstable and questionable people… chances are people in your life are going to believe you and form a similar opinion. And when you backpedal and say, “oh wait, never mind, they’re not that way at all!” people will have a hard time believing you after all that you’ve said.

So that’s why it’s important to be impeccable with your word. We all need to practice this. It doesn’t just affect our own lives, it affects everyone around us, too.

All it takes is one person to taint someone else’s perception of a situation. We are all just reiterating someone else’s story. Someone else’s lies. We are all storytellers in this world, and when we experience something we interpret that and reflect it back into the world in such a way that may or may not be real. Then, others take our stories, change them to fit their perspective and retell them. And the cycle continues. There is no such thing as first hand information. Everything is misunderstood to an extent.

Don’t believe anybody. Not even yourself But listen. Listen to them, learn to listen but don’t believe. Everyone is telling a story that is true for them – and what they say may not be true for anyone else. Perception shapes everything. Especially negative perceptions. Your outlook on life is going to shape the way you perceive the people in your life and what they have to say.

When people speak to you, you have no idea who is speaking through them. Is it them? Their heart? Their integrity? Or is it the prince of lies who lives inside their head? The liar that lives inside their head who is constantly telling them they aren’t good enough, strong enough, smart enough, pretty enough… really, who is it speaking through them? Are they angry? Hurt? How much of their emotional state of mind is shaping what they say and who they talk about?

Learn to listen without judging them. Sometimes they don’t know it’s their perspective on life that is causing them to lie.

The world we experience through absorption of energy directly in the moment is not the world we describe to the people in our lives. Words build walls that keep the depth and real meaning from passing through. Everything important seems to be lost in translation.  It’s not possible to translate in whole what the heart feels through words. What is felt must be felt. That is the ultimate truth. All words are lies, somewhere, to someone.

Words are a form of linear communication. Whether they are spoken, written or read silently – their messages are conveyed in a linear fashion to describe events of the past… as opposed to pure absorption of a situation which can only be done in the moment. Not before and not afterward.

Words are always a lie to someone. Words taint the truth. Words are just tools to communicate knowledge and we all know that knowledge is just a collection of other people’s stories reiterated and memorized by other storytellers. Words describe moments which have passed – they can never describe the present moment simply because by the time words are spoken or expressed, the moment has passed, and will never be again.

Without words there can be no lies. The only way to experience pure, untainted truth, is to experience each moment WITHIN the moment, silently…

When we absorb a moment in our lives our heart allows us to experience it in full on the inside. Silently. Privately. We absorb every detail. Our thoughts race in a non-linear fashion in ways indescribable to others. We aren’t afraid to think and feel the depth that presents itself to us. But on the outside, other people demand “knowledge” of what we have experienced. That’s what creates the problem. We want to be able to tell others what our heart feels but we can’t for so many reasons. First, we cannot accurately translate feelings to words simply because emotions have to be felt to be fully understood. Words, when expressed to others, will automatically be interpreted based on an individual’s life experiences. People relate our words to their life experience, not ours. So already words become a barrier of complications that actually prevent people from really understanding what we’ve experienced in our heart.

When you love someone in this moment – right now – yesterday shouldn’t matter and tomorrow shouldn’t exist.

Words are what directly cause misunderstandings and lead to the lies we all tell each other. When we feel what’s inside someone else’s heart through absorption, we can’t possibly misinterpret absolute truth. The heart never lies. It’s only when we use words to try to explain to people what we feel that things fall apart. We feel pressure to meet expectations and when we can’t meet them we feel shame, guilt and sometimes embarrassment. We feel pressure to gain approval from others, and, based on the idea that people won’t like us or accept us unless we do what -they- want… sometimes we try to change our behavior to fit what we believe other people want from us. We let others take advantage of us and we lose our innate ability to stand up for ourselves because we become conditioned to please others above all else.

Is it too idealistic to want to have the opportunity to absorb the truth of what is in each others hearts? When are we actually able to absorb the truth the heart speaks? The reality is we don’t always get that chance with everyone, unfortunately. The only way is for others to provide us with that chance – and vice versa. Not everyone is comfortable with that.

When we use words to describe to people what we feel, they become confused if we can’t explain it to their satisfaction or expectations. Perhaps our words don’t match what they view as their contribution to our lives. Not by any fault of our own… but the failure of our choice of words to be powerful enough to convey the depth of what we feel in our hearts might cause people to feel not good enough, like they’ve failed somehow…

Thus exaggeration is born. Telling people what they want to hear. Sometimes honestly believing that it’s truth simply because we want it to be truth.

Daily conversation is just a form of communicating knowledge. Knowledge is always tainted to some degree. It’s as though the world is playing a constant game of “telephone” but there are no operators waiting to help us determine truth from fiction in our own lives let alone anyone else’s.

And once we’ve been conditioned to transform our own feelings, deny what our heart feels, cover up our true emotions… all because other people hold us to impossible expectations and demand words from us… we embody the lie that becomes our truth.

“Whenever I have to justify,

The truth I speak to you becomes my white lie…”

Once we lie, we feel the need to apologize when it is discovered. But what are apologies? They are just more confusing, complicated words. But they shouldn’t be. Apologies should be delivered unspoken, untainted… as pure communication from one heart to another. For most people – apologies are never enough. Why? Because they’re just words.

The best apologies are not really apologies at all and are non-verbal expressions of truth. Once the truth is known, is an apology really necessary? Non-verbal apologies don’t allow us to hold onto our anger. Why? Because once we feel what is in someone else’s heart we cannot hold onto our anger anymore. The direct result of absorption of the truth is that it replaces the past instantaneously.

What happens when someone doesn’t accept our apology?

Unaccepted apologies are a way of saying the right combination of words and actions has not been expressed; our expectations have not been met. We force people to keep trying and trying until they’ve said the right thing at the right time even though it’s never enough for most people. It’s never enough because it’s not real. Words are not real. But when you apologize through absorption and transference of energy – when you speak FROM the heart TO the heart – it leaves no chance of being unaccepted simply because the heart cannot reject the truth of what another heart feels.

Emotions directly affect the physical structure of our DNA. That structure of our DNA directly shapes the physical world we experience.

I tend to forget that these events are a mirror for me to see what I need to cleanse within myself – internally.

It’s not there for me to fight externally. It’s there for me to conquer inwardly.

They’re my mirror; I am theirs.

It’s really that simple.

it’s not just the sound of the ocean which comforts me.

it’s the idea of her depth remaining unknown to me no matter how deeply i swim.

it’s the mystery which surrounds her beautiful tide breaking in harmony with the music inside my head…

contrary to the rest – i find joy in not knowing everything. mystery serves a purpose, you know.

i find joy in sharing beautiful people and experiences with others rather than chaining them to experience only that which exists in my world. when someone makes me feel wonderful – i wish for everyone in their life to be able to experience that piece of their soul so they may feel as good as i do.

it’s time to start over. from the end. because with the end comes a new beginning.

//

Originally published January 18, 2020.

12-year cycle?