belle

my favorite kinds of things are the ones that make my soul want to explode. the kind where you can literally feel your soul pushing up against your skin aching to get out because the feelings these things give you are much bigger than a body can contain.

it's like when you are eating so much food, so much that it makes you want to cry, but you don't stop because you would rather be fat than give up the taste. so you keep eating and the tears are threatening. so it is with the best of things. but it's okay to let the tears come because maybe that's how your soul can express best without exploding.

have you ever felt that way?

the feeling of a need to keep feeling it even though sometimes it makes you cry and you can't even talk because you just need to feel and think. kind of like when you finish a book and your whole world has changed because of it but you feel strange because every thing around you is the same. where you begin to question yourself and are able to dive down further into your thoughts.

?

ahhh. i know what i am trying to say but i can't quite get it out. i wish i could pull a little bit of this feeling out of me and copy and paste it onto here. so that if ever i, or you, should forget about such beauty and need to find it again, it will always be here.

music. movement. art. film. words. perhaps romance as well but i have not experienced such an intensity with that yet.

i wish my soul was always on the brink of exploding.

yet again my life is about to change, i haven't quite figured out this whole thing of what i'm supposed to do in life and some days i think i never will. but i do know i want more of this feeling. i want to make moments like this in a world that can be so cruel, moments that remind people of all that life is and can be.

?

why do we do it? this endless torment of pain and suffering. all of it being self-inflicted.

it's us. over and over and over again. history teaches us nothing. we never learn. how the heavens must look down on us with such sorrow and disappointment. i do and i am here, in one tiny part of the world, unable to first-handedly see the effects of the world's rage, but confused and agonized about how to make it better.

every bit of the news is filled with terrors, but i am sure you already knew that. 

maybe the problem is that we don't see ourselves as we. the world tries to divide itself up so that the blame does not hit us directly, but can be pushed aside to another sub group. maybe we can't face the fact that we are the only group. and why do we lash out at each other? whether it be as grand as attacks on paris or as small as hurting one's feelings. perhaps there is a void in all of our lives that our concious is unaware of. but how wrong are we to think that any form of hurt will be able to fill it.

"darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
-martin luther king jr. 

i believe that the world is filled with so many people so that we may be able to see the light when everything can get dark. we have families because at least one point in our lives, we will inevitably be hurt by someone or something, but the most luxurious thing life offers, is those people who will always be there for us, blood related or not.

why do we forget?

quite possibly it is naive of me to dream of a utopian society but i hope it is not foolish of me to wish it anyway.

however brutal the world is, with deaths and stealings and liars and cheats and every other form of cruelty, i hope to see the world as the place it was meant to be: beautiful with endless possibilities. i hope that we don't ruin such magnificence for ourselves, because if we do, it will only be us we are hurting.

presence of absence

i spent my evening looking at the super blood moon. and as i was looking at it, i couldn't help but feel small. not small in the sense that i am not important, but small in the sense that some things are so much bigger. 

the last time this kind of eclipse happened was in 1982 and won't happen again until 2033, but even so, hardly anyone in my neighborhood was watching it. i guess some people aren't into it, which is fine, but what a shame for them. and then there are people who come take one photo on their phone and go back inside. 

here is the thing about taking photos like that. are you really going to look at it again? really look at it? no. because it was one second of your life. one second that has no thought. but the picture itself is not important anyway.

i was sitting there staring at this gorgeous moon and people were not out there seeing it. the moon doesn't matter. the experience of being present and sitting and thinking and being mesmerized by something so simplistically beautiful that humans put no effort in to achieve is what matters. 

how often it is that i pass moments like this by. moments in which i can realize that a lot of things i stress about or over-think, DO NOT MATTER because the world is beautiful and i need only have the eyes to see it.

sometimes my eyes are blind. and a lot of times my eyes are presently absent. 

i also thought, some things do in fact not matter in the grandeur scheme of things, but they do matter in the scheme of this moment. more often than not, i worry about plans, and how my plans never work, and how my original plans didn't include the almost-always event of never turning out how i planned, but i still try.

time always goes on, whether or not there is a plan. things will continue to happen even if they happen 18 years apart like this moon. 

maybe there are people out there staring at this same moon who feel the same way, and maybe there aren't. but isn't that nice to think about? 

all from one evening with the moon.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kerismith/1815099426/in/photostream

^^^

i have a lot on my mind. but it's so full of thoughts that they all kind of cancel each other out so when i try to explain what i'm thinking, my mind becomes blank. as i sit here in my dark room staring at this vibrant screen of light that is probably ruining my eyes and killing my ability to shut off my mind and sleep, all i can think about is sleep. and dreaming i guess. do you ever wish you could control your dreams? sometimes i try to. and do you think dream interpretation is for real? and do you think people that are in your dreams are there for a reason? or is it just that our mind was subconsciously thinking about them? because i have dreams about people i've never met, and people i've barely met.

and still i'm thinking. thinking about this week. thinking about mountains.

oh what are men compared to rocks and mountains?

nothing it would seem. but things are never as they seem.

it has been a while since i've blabbed on here. i didn't feel as if i had anything worth saying. but this week is a fork and maybe if i try and de-tangle the web inside my mind on here, i will get the smallest amount of sense.

so i've been trying to figure out my life, which i have said before, yada yada yada...no one cares, ariel. but literally this week i have opportunities of seeing two completely opposite directions that my life could go. how cray banans is that? i'm not going to say what they are so all my followers (aka all like 1 of you with probably 100% being my family) STOP ASKING. because i don't know what i'm doing 4 SHORE. just test-driving. also, you already know.

but maybe this week i can move a mountain. or probably more like a hill, maybe just an ant hill. just so. even so. movement is movement and making a decision is the first step is it not? so this week, while on a test run for two different life paths, if i am so brave to have an inkling of which decision to do, i will begin to move my own mountain, cutting a new path of my own future. and if it turns out that it was the wrong one to try and move.... well hopefully it was a nice view while it lasted. and if not that either, then i'll have something to smile at while reading my journal 50 years from now.

ahh, the smell of adventure.

how to fertilize a soul

i've decided to make a recipe on how to grow an exuberant soul. i feel as if my growth has been lacking a little bit lately, the activities i have been involving myself in have been slightly soul-sucking.

1. know your soul: or i guess i should say continually strive to get to know yourself because as i mentioned in my previous post, life is constantly changing, therefore so is your soul.

2. treat your soul with kindness: the best advice i ever heard is to treat yourself like you would a child--precious, because it is, be on your own team

3. treat other souls with kindness: kind of self-explanatory

4. engulf your passions: as long as it is good, it will bring you happiness (of course this does not include such things that would book a ticket into prison and/or some other kind of involuntary confinement)

5.  love: whatever--people, animals, books, poetry, music, dance, art, science, grey's anatomy, whatever

obviously i don't know everything, i'm only 23. but life is meant to be beautiful, even with the unfortunate mets of grief. as with most recipes, adjust to fit your taste. suggestions welcome.

"whatever is good for the soul, do that." --anon

cheers.

life is in session

life changes really fast. especially when you don't want it to. you know that quote, i don't know who it's by, but it says something like, "isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?"

i feel like life for my family has flipped a 180 four times over. not that it's a bad thing, it's just a thing. like lots of other things are just things. and that's the way it is and always will be. but change is a strange thing. it just happens and then suddenly you realize what all is happening and you begin to see that this is your life and everyday will be different and because of that, you are different, and the world is different, which means the people around you are different, or at least the way you see them because you have changed. and your life. and i think it's important to embrace change if that change is a good thing. but isn't it crazy how if you hit pause for just a moment, and look back one year ago, you see such an evolution. sometimes i try and put myself back a year ago to see if i ever would have predicted where i would be now, and i don't think i could have. i knew my life would be different, but not in this way. which makes me think, where will i be one year from now? or two? or ten or thirty-five and onto fifty? and where will the world be? and my family? and my dear little dog taking up half of my bed whilst snoring and twitching. but then you must hit play again; for life waits for no one. oh what a difference a year makes.

my baby sister is a senior in high school. my sister just older than that left for college, in hawaii. rough life. my sister just younger than me passed her one year wedding anniversary and has a runty dog that runs sideways, and my older sister has been married three years and has a rockstar husband. i am still floating in this vortex of life still deciding which new place to stop and settle for awhile. i don't know when all this happened.  

this post should probably be a new years post but why wait? "LIFE IS IN SESSION!" (bless if you know what that's from). besides, like mentioned in previous posts, i am a large percentage abnormal, so why wait for december 31 or january 1 when you can post here and now on september 22 at 1 something in the morning? plus, if i waited until the end of the year, think of all those months of waited anticipation for such nonsensicality (word?) when i could post this now and gift many more absurd and useless brain waves to the internet that enter my head beginning september 22 at 2 something in the morning. it's a public service, really.

so although i have no idea where me or my family will be one year from today, i have some hopes. i hope each day i will be a little more brave, a little more kind, a little less selfish. i hope my family, through all our difficulties, will cling to each other, i hope the world has a little more happiness.

so embrace change, because exciting things are happening.