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The new world collides with the old.

I sit at a cafe drinking a cappuccino d’orzo, one of the many new discoveries that I’ve made with my new-found, open mind. My new-found mind sits in my new-found city, Rome, where I lived once before, just shy of 2 years ago. And I sit here with the contemplation of having just collided with my past, my new world with the old.

Both the fortunate and not so fortunate have jobs today, while I am both fortunate and unfortunate for not having a job, so I had nothing to do and no one to do it with, and so I walked. Really, I was suppose to look for a job but my legs started walking and quite plainly informed me that they didn’t intend to stop anytime soon. And so I walked around a lot. I let my heart lead the way as I always do and I realized that I really hadn’t explored this city enough on my own because of my fear of getting lost. However, I’ve found that in Rome, you are never too lost to find the center. I can’t wait to realize what that symbolises but let us not digress. So after a while, I found myself walking along the tram tracks that lead to my friend’s old apartment where I stayed for a week upon first arriving here. I  walked along these tracks, and then I walked some more. After what was about an hour, I decided that I didn’t care so much about going to my friend’s area but that I wanted to stop following the tracks and turn right along some street. And after I do, it takes but a minute or two before I realize that I’m, in fact, walking along the street to her house. I’m starting to want a break to stop and consider if it’s time to turn back or not when something tells me to find her apartment, that it’s symbolic. I could just barely find her apartment two years ago but when you follow your heart’s desire, you never get lost. And so I find it very easily.

The last time I was here, I didn’t really like it. It reminded me of Queens, where I grew up. I didn’t like Rome in general at first until I settled down and calmed my nerves. But now that I’m walking here in this moment, with my positive energy, I love it and realize that, perhaps it was my fear of this place that colored it ugly.

Just two years ago I arrived in Rome. I had always wanted to travel and live my life abroad among many places. But it is so much easier to talk than it is to walk and so, when my friend started her internship in Rome, I decided to take advantage of it by way of using it as a means of motivation to actually put my talk into motion.

What would be begin was a difficult journey through an awesome, foreign city by a girl who was pret-ty terrified and lonesome but who had some pretty wonderful experiences and met even more wonderful people.

Sometimes when I was really scared and lonely, before falling asleep I’d lay in bed and, from my future self, I would thank my then- current self. I’d thank myself for all that I was enduring and for all the lessons that I was learning in order to grow into the person I would, and on some plane of existence, had already become.

Alas, that journey didn’t call for success and I had to leave after running out of money and not finding a job. What would follow would be my journey back to Rome. A Journey with equal difficulty in comparison but a journey, too, that would reveal who I was and a journey that continued even a couple of days before my flight to Rome, where I’d begin my new journey feeling much more whole and liberated.

In this moment I’m in super high spirits. Just a week ago I was really scared and felt like I was repeating the past until I realized that I wanted to find a job a little more fulfilling and helpful to others than waiting tables; that I wanted to teach English. After this realization, doors started opening and thanks to a friend of mine who put me in touch with a school, I have an interview at a school tomorrow for a position. It seems that when you finally realize what it is that you want and what it is that the Universe wants for you, you will find that it is already waiting for you. And whether or not I get this job tomorrow, I know this to be true and I know that I’m on the right path, where that something lies in wait, waiting for me to discover it.

And now I’m back here anew. And as I’m walking up her really long driveway to her apartment, I can feel my spirit from two years ago walking along as well, frightened and in a foreign place, only, she doesn’t know I’m there. And as we’re walking along, we may look like the same person, but we are not and I know that tonight, before I fall asleep, I will thank her for all that she has endured and for all the hard lessons learnt in order to put me on this path that I walk today. And even though nothing is certain and my journey has just begun, we have travelled a really long way to begin it.

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Rise and Shine

I lay asleep.  I am awake just enough for a moment to check the time– check if it is time to wake-up.  But the hour is young as I am and I decide that I have more time.  Time, still to be with my dreams and away from life’s responsibility, away from the rejection, the pain, the unpredictability and routine melancholy.  I stay dreaming, nestled in my safe space where the worst that could happen is a dream gone bad– the kind of dream that one can wake-up from, where there is no harm done.

I recall the elderly always telling me to wake-up early, not to waste the whole day.  They are the same people who tell us that youth is wasted on the young.  And while I heard, I never once listened.

I see you, too, in your own universe of dreams.  I see you glancing at the clock, thinking, ‘it’s okay, the hour is young, I still have time.’  I hear you silently questioning just how young it is, thinking maybe you should have been up by now.

And for some, the problem is that they don’t dream enough.  Because dreaming is not bad.  It is, in fact, good, only not when it is in the place of living.  The problem is not dreaming, the problem is not being awake. Sometimes we only wake once nightmares take the place of dreams, saying, ‘Okay, you win, it is time to make it right.’

It is so much more comforting to dream than to live.  But do we sleep away the chore of the day or do we sleep away our own inner power to do what we are here to do?

Awake, not by alarm but by the sun, gently coaxing your eyes open to see the beauty that is uncovered by her rays, beauty that your dreams haven’t the ability to do any justice to.  The sun invites you to stop hiding in the confines of safety so that your beauty, too, may be uncovered by her light.  And you did not understand because you were not listening– everyday she has told you, beautiful one, to rise.  For only when you rise will you finally shine.

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A child frozen in time

No one ever tells you that you will stay a child forever.  They never tell you that while you will grow and look and become an adult, that you keep sheltered a child suspended within you– and with them lay all of your fears and all of your traumas.

When something traumatic has occurred in our lives, our mentality during the trauma freezes within us.   It is a scar that reflects a past infliction but, so too, reflects our age.  Once you know this, it is a comfort to know that this child you have sensed within you, perhaps subconsciously, while very much present, does not define you.  They are a mere fraction of who you are.  For, to this child, you are also the mother or the father keeping them safe.

Take care of these children.  They have been through a lot and only you know how much and to what extent.  Shelter them consciously.  Comfort them but also tell them it’s time to let go and release their security blankets.  Thank them every so often for the lessons they have learned and the traumas they have endured so that you may be who you are today.  Show them how strong and wise you have become.  These children, they wait, frightened for a mother or a father to comfort them, to tell them it will be all right.  They wait for you.

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Forgiveness: The death of one idea gives life to a new idea.

It was a place that I had been inching towards for years, a place where I was always meant to arrive.  It was my sister’s kitchen, though it was almost like another plane of existence that we had been floating in, one of safety and guidance by the people in our lives who are no longer here.   And whether you’d like to look at it as an actual place (a kitchen) or as a metaphor (a conclusion of the mind) you would be right because it was both.  It is here, in this time and space that  my sister and I learned what it means to really forgive.

If there is one thing that my sister and I have in common, it is our parents.  If we had nothing else in common and didn’t get along, our mother alone would have kept us together just out of sheer solidarity.  Though my sister and I did have much different experiences at home on account of our age and personalities, our childhoods still had some commonalities.  We grew up in a broken home, she was 7 when my mother left my father and I was 2; we were both fiercely neglected; and we both lived with a mother who was very delusional and just not quite right nor all there.  Suffice it to say, although our experiences were different–I was the black sheep of the family while she was older and took on more responsibility–we both endured a lot of pain. Years later, after we were both  moved out for some time, the occasions of speaking to my mother were few and far between, for my sister especially who spoke to her for the first time in years so that her 1 year-old son could meet his grandmother.  I tried to always stay in contact with her just because I felt that I should know what is going on in her life and because for the most part, I was the only person linking my sister or my father to her.  It’s also because I’ve never blamed her for her limitations; I’ve always seen her as a sick person who I wished the best for, despite my inability to show it.  But after a couple of instances of my mother making it entirely too difficult to continue being in contact with her,–one instigated by the fact that I broke my foot quite badly, leaving me unable to walk for 3 months and leaving her completely unsympathetic– I let a lot of time go by without contacting her.  Later I would move to Italy for 3 months without telling her and come back with a new phone number.

It had been about 1 ½ – 2 years since we last spoke (or rather, a few months ago) when I would start thinking about her incessantly, wondering what was going on in her life, if she was okay, if she still had a place to live.  And so, after a couple of weeks of bracing myself, I emailed her and gave her my phone number.  She called, and without asking how I was doing, she asked when my sister and I would visit  her so that she could see the baby.  I said I’d get back to her on that but my sister and I decided to take our time.

It was in this time, since she had taken shelter in my head, that I surprise myself with thoughts of sadness about my mother, sadness that I thought I had long since risen above.  I began to fantasize of her funeral.  I did not wish her any harm, I didn’t even particularly wish her dead, but in these fantasies I was finally awarded the closure that I so longed for.  Wasn’t it I who always said: “I can forgive my mother for what she’s done in the past but not for what she will do in the future?”  But these fantasies, perhaps because in a way she was dead to me already in the most insubstantial of ways, were a place where she could no longer hurt or disappoint me and a place where I was able to properly mourn her absence in my life.

A few months later my mother would call me to tell me that she was moving to Florida.  It was this night that my sister and I would take that destined trip in the kitchen, when we would look at my mother’s actions in an entirely different light.  The actions of someone who, despite delusional cockiness, really is very insecure with the lowest of the low in self-esteem.  A woman whose delusions are the only thing which gives her reason to get out of bed and stay alive.

There is something that I’ve known all along, that my sister and I are who we are because of what we’ve endured as children and even as adults, which on this night I will credit my mother for.  Because if my sister and I were meant to go through all of this, which it is in my line of belief that we were, then my mother sacrificed her whole life and sanity for that, even if it is only her higher self and not the person who we know on this Earth.  We decide to see her for her higher self and we decide that she is the way she is because she’s always felt unloved, first by her mother and adopted parents (who we felt in the room) and later, even by her children.

It is this night and under these circumstances that I lay to rest one idea of my mother and give life to a new idea of her.  I forgave her her mistreatment of me when I was a child, and for not loving me enough.   I forgave her all of the times she broke my heart, leaving me a cold and hardened person for so long.  I forgave her for forcing me to be strong, and I forgave her for all of the times that she came out of the woodwork only to ask me for money.   I forgave her all of the times she’s mentioned that I’ve gained weight, even after years of not seeing one another, I forgave her for not caring as a mother should of an injured daughter and I forgave her for not fighting for me, for not caring about my life.

We decide that it’s probably too late for her to ever get better but that, like a parent is supposed to love a child, we will love her anyway, even if our love is not returned.  I realize soon after that this whole time, I have closed my heart and convinced myself that I do not love her, and I don’t realize that I have loved her all along until I forgive her.  And of course I love her, why else would her lack of interest hurt me so much?  In doing so, my bruised and defensive heart lets go and opens up, not only to her but to everyone.

I’ve always heard that forgiveness is not for the person in question but for yourself.  It’s an idea that I believed but didn’t quite understand.  It is an idea, or perhaps a law, that I now understand through and through.  Because forgiveness is strength; forgiveness is the knowledge that you once (perhaps twice?) asked for forgiveness yourself; forgiveness means accepting people’s limitations; forgiveness is sending love to a person who could only afford to send you pain; forgiveness is seeing people for their higher selves and not the mess that their earthly circumstances have made of them; forgiveness is healing wounds and moving on; forgiveness is moving beyond our ego which is our mind’s defense mechanism and so often our downfall; forgiveness is healing and learning to rise above as to make sure  that you don’t make the same mistakes on others that were made on you; forgiveness is the knowledge that the human mind is complex and so often prone to disease and delusion.  Forgiveness is forgiving people their minds because you have one all your own; forgiveness is forgiving my mother my childhood because hers wasn’t a stellar picnic either.

My life changed that day because I became a better person.  I learned to send people love even when I’m afraid I won’t get it back.  And though I wish I were no longer afraid, that in itself is the start of a journey that I’ve travelled a long way to begin.

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Don’t be afraid to put your art out there

I used to be really afraid of putting myself out there, of being vulnerable.  And I know I’m not alone, I’ve spoken to friends who, after hiding all of their lives, are putting their truths out there and I am one of them.

I used to think that it was weak to be vulnerable.  Here is the thing though–the older and stronger I get, the more I am compelled and willing to be vulnerable and to put words out into the abyss that render me naked.  It is because it is not a weakness at all but to the absolute contrary, it takes strength!  And here’s what we are finding: Everything that we thought was ugly, that we hid in a closet buried in our minds, is actually beautiful and not only is it beautiful but it speaks to people.  It is a light that resonates, that pierces through people so that they may recognize the light bursting to break free from deep within themselves.

It is as though it was instilled in us at a very early age that certain parts of ourselves are ugly and ought never to be exposed to others.  But what I now think instead is that to cover these aspects of ourselves is to shackle ourselves.  And we are all easier to manage and control when we are shackled.  But if you un-chain yourself and expose this “ugly” part of yourself, you will find that is actually a beautiful light that embodies power, strength and freedom.

Do not fear how others will receive your message.  If your message is pure of heart there will be someone out there who is nourished upon hearing it.  Art, whichever form it takes, is a language created in order to give a voice to a significant and profound part of us that would otherwise be forced to remain suppressed and silent.  Do not be afraid to let it speak, open ears and bright lights await you.

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Hello world!

Hello World indeed.  It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally here, spelled out for you to read. We are all wanderers of this land and this blog will be an avenue in which to express what I learn on the journey, my side of the story, if you will.  It is my hope with these writings to inspire, to express, to resonate, to teach, to create as well as to learn.  It is my plan to write only from the heart, no matter if the message is happiness, wisdom, foolishness or sadness, it will all be truths from deep within.  I feel that I am at the beginning of a journey, one that this blog may symbolise.  I welcome you to join me and I am very curious to see what awaits me and us ahead.