Peace

People search all of their lives for contentment. A source of joy. A source of relief. A feeling of freedom. They think that a certain path or a certain destination will make them happy. So they search for it in other people, in things, pieces of paper, careers, a lover, a marriage, a tangible something. When they are done with all those experiments, some of them realize that happiness is something that cannot be defined, bottled, inked, or manifested through something external to one's own mind and heart.

I've learned that the things we get the most excited about are those things that end up disappointing us the most, somehow. As one of the replicas of myself says The air outside the coffee shop felt too much like what she’d left. Always deceiving you with its lazy glamour and promises of paradise. She’d fallen into that trap once and found herself hating what she’d once loved. That's the thing about anything external. It can't live up to promises that the soul wishes to keep.

So the only thing we can do as humans is realize that happiness is not a temporal feeling or something that we can find, or seek, or capture. It is something that is already free, something that already exists and yet cannot be touched, or seen, or realized unless we stop seeing what we see. It is internal. It is peace. It is contentment. It is calm.

It is the place that we never leave, the person that we know and smile back at, the mountain that we only think we have to climb. It is that illusion that we chase. That illusion that changes each time we change. Peace and contentment are not horizons that we imagine we will someday become a part of. They are things that Nature does automatically. Simple breaths. Simple acceptance. Simple Being. Not as what it thinks it should be, but as what it already is.

That elusive thing we humans call "happiness" is an illusion because it can only exist within each of us. It can only exist in how we see.

Butterfly Colors Continued

You’re going to have to choose. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But eventually, you have to choose. It isn’t easy, that choice. And people wait. And people hope. For us to choose. For us to say yes. So that we can start living. And realize how precious time is. How precious those things about life are that we can’t grasp when we’re not sick, when we think we have everything, when we believe in only what we see, when we aren’t forced to tell ourselves the truth.

Some of the paths that we choose to take look polished, pristine, and safe. Some are ambiguous because they're a little narrower, are comprised of gravel instead of blacktop, and curve around the shadows of things we can't see unless we keep following what has already been laid out for us. A few don't exist yet because we're the ones who are going to have to break the ground and carve them out. The few of us who spend the time to envision something that hasn't been done yet, and who might make it a little easier for those who come after us, are the ones that travel alone.

The last stretch of that path was the toughest because the garden was so near. You could say that you saw it without ever walking in it, or sitting on its benches, or touching its orange red flowers, or staring at the city through the outlines of two palm trees, or watching the bird bounce up and down into the valley on a carpet of wind. But that wasn’t what she wanted--a side view or an almost there feel. So there went her left foot, and then her right, and then her left again. She turned on the spicket of water, filling her mouth, her throat, her stomach. It tasted a little like the bronze metal it had come from, but it was cool enough to splash and rub against her skin. Dante’s View, read the sign. Like Dante’s Inferno, she thought. Tricky to get to without a map or a GPS. But like any destination without a blueprint, an adventurous surprise.