Comfort and Love: a stream of consciousness piece

     A warm bed on a bitter cold winter's night, sitting by the fire's glow, cozied up in a warm and fuzzy blanket with a mug of hot chocolate, cuddling close with a hug from someone you love: there's just something about comfort.  It's one of the happiest feelings, a feeling of safety and belonging...a feeling of love and warmth.  If only the world could focus on comforting and loving one another instead of the terrible need for greed and violence.  Because deep down we all have the same basic desires in life: to love and be loved, to be accepted and to feel that we belong, and to be comforted and to comfort others. 

        Born from love, we were born to love, not to hate.  Hatred is not true human nature.  It is something that is learned, something that we need to stop teaching.  Jimi Hendrix states it perfectly:"When the need for love overcomes the need for power, there may finally be peace."

        Everything is love.  Even things like war and other violent, greedy acts originate from a love.  In the case of war, it could be a love of one's own country, and for other violent acts it may be a love of getting one's way (selfish as this is, it is still a sort of love...a love of oneself).  These kinds of love can be good in some contexts and bad in others, just as everything in the world can be.  It depends on intention.  But inevitably all originate from one source of ultimate love: Our Creator.

          I think that love is the meaning of life.  Our life begins and ends with love...the very first humans were created with love by Our Creator, and then they reciprocated this love by loving each other and producing a child from this love and providing love to this child as well.  Likewise, our own mother and father loved each other, and we were products of their love, too.  Throughout our lives then we should honor this gift of love by continuing to pass it on to everyone we meet.  Love is the greatest gift of all: a gift that keeps giving and never runs out....and the true meaning of our lives.

Flux and Flow: a stream of consciousness piece

I randomly roam the roads, wandering wherever my heart takes me.  Nothing is as it seems, but everything is beautiful.  Perspective defines things as otherwise, but deep-down everything is perfect—perfectly itself.  Glowing, glittering, gardens of goldfish swirl about in the ponderous pools of my thoughts, bringing sweet, thirsty thoughts to my mind, to my soul.

                The soul: never-ending, “changing but never changed, claiming but never claimed,” one’s soul is always one’s own.  It may be affected on the surface by life’s experiences and other human interaction, but within it is never the same.  And there’s nothing more amazing than that.  What a wondrous world we live in.

                Jellyfish lazily drift about in the ocean surf as I gaze in awe at the beauty of this coral reef.  Color explodes around me, this busy, boisterous world of so many dazzling creatures, all interconnected in the chain of life.  One creature cannot exist without the other, like fire and ice, good and evil.  Dualities are needed; without the opposite of one thing, there can’t be the other.  Good would not exist if there was no evil, no fire without ice.  To know both is to better know the world in its entirety.

                Philosophical conundrums thrashing through my mind, turning my brains to a mush of confusion.  There’s nothing certain in this world, except the fact that everything’s uncertain…but maybe that’s what makes life so fantastic and incredibly unique: the fact that nothing is certain, that anything can happen.  The sun may rise and set each day, the seasons may go by every year in an unchanged progression, but no year, season, month, day, hour, minute, or second is ever the same (even though it may feel like it some days, especially when you feel your life is stuck in a rut or you’re in a winter that seems to never end).  Regardless of your internal stasis, however, the world is always different and changing. 

Even internally you’re never truly in a stasis.  Every day changes you: makes you happier, sadder, better, worse, more depressed, or more joyful.  The psychology of your mind itself is amazing: at any instant your mind or whole outlook on life can change just by a mere thought that runs through your mind, a mere sensation that you feel, an event you see/partake in, or a person you encounter.  Up and down, flux and flow: human life is like the tide.

This may be why we feel so closely connected to nature when we stand on the ocean shore, feeling the tide pulling at our toes, gazing out at the infinite azure of the sea.  When we’re at the sea, we are connecting to our own souls, souls so interconnected and similar to the sea: perpetual, always shifting and changing, and ever-beautiful.