Change

It happens every year.  Change.  Something different creates a new perspective.  Even if it's just the colors of the leaves on the trees in Fall or the new grass that is bright green in Spring.  There have been so many changes since Taryn left.  So many layers of change.  I do the best I can with it but I still struggle and want to stop the world sometimes.  I want it to give me a chance to catch up with all the change.  I sit here and still feel the sting in my eyes and nose. I watch these beautiful leaves that have been green all summer turn a deep shade of red.  It's beautiful.  All of it.  

I've been listening to The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and it helps.  His words are soothing. His voice is a sound from my childhood.  He's German.  The accent will always resonate inside me as something I knew first.  I was born in Germany.  I heard the German language before I heard English.  It's home to me.  It helps me love his words and his thoughts even more.  There is so much to understand in this life.  So much to let go of too.  We develop these patterns of thought and behavior young in our childhood and spend most of the rest of our lives trying to reshape them into something we can live with.  For instance there's no point in disliking people for hurting us.  They're following their patterns and sometimes have no choice because they are so unconscious in their lives.  

The good news is we can change our patterns.  It takes a LOT of effort and awareness.  That's what the book is about.  Moving from being stuck in the past to truly being able to live in the moment.  Appreciate what is happening in your life right now, right this minute, and realizing that now is all that matters.  Not what happened in the past.  It's given me a lot of peace.  I've been able to see my experiences for what they are.  Learning tools.  That's all.  Just tools.  They don't define me.  Not anymore than the leaves outside are defined by what color they are in any given season.  They are still leaves.  They change but they don't change what they are.  I can change all sorts of things about myself and still be me.

I took a class in high school that I really loved.  It was art.  We worked with clay and a potters wheel.  I loved the smell of it and the feel of the wet clay and how I could mold it so easily before it was baked hard.  It couldn't be broken when it was pliable and soft.  It had this wonderful scent that filled the room.  I would walk into that room and take a deep breath of that smell.  It was the smell of creativity.   The smell that anything was possible.  

I've always loved art.  I went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena once and saw some of the most beautiful paintings in the world.  There were sculptures by Degas and cubist paintings by Picasso.  It was so incredible to stand there and look at these priceless works of art, made by great masters.  Centuries later there I was looking at them with tears in my eyes.  Artists know the scent of creativity.  They can't live without it either.  

We are each a masterpiece.  A work of art.  Constantly changing our colors and molding the clay until the day when it is done and we die.  That's when the work of art is baked and hardened and what we leave here is our monument and put in the museum of memory.  I love her painting.  Her sculpture.  I look at it every day.  It's inspiring and beautiful and fills my eyes with tears.  She did good.