Here is what I know about now.

The view from Chalet Bellevue

Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden 

 Deciding every morning to set my feet down there are some days where every part of me wants to walk away from everything here. 

Literally everything. 

 Other days, I'm in love with it all. 

 Here is what I know:

I love to run in a rainstorm more than anything and have looked for these storms since I was 16. I love the exhilaration of working so hard that I'm a complete wreck. I love the loss of all pretense. I love thunder and lightning. I love forgetting what I look like. 

 I love learning, and feeling into what the body knows all on its own before I do. I love a new page, a sharpened pencil, and a fresh start. I love to stack the deck against myself and walk into a room knowing that I am being challenged by what is in front of me. 

 I love the physical. I love touch, movement, breath, and beauty wherever I find it. I want to sit with it, study it, feel it, photograph it, and mull it over until I have tasted it long enough to remember it when it is not there. Every person I've ever met has a shade to me, a pattern that I can see in my mind's eye when I'm not with them - and I love that. 

 I love a walk in the woods; the green canopy, the sense of adventure, the wild, wide road of possibility. I love a walk in the woods with no obligation for the day, with stops along the way, with time to climb, step, cross, and sit. The smell itself is a memory all on its own. 

 I love the voice inside - the deepest most sacred part of our selves, the part that you have to become so very still to really hear. I love that part of me. I love that it is always there. 

 I love truth-telling. Wine, and a moment to see the flush of passion in a person's face. "Dust thou art to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul." Give me the rawest truth; the truth that we are afraid to say, to live. Tell me your story. 

 I love the real people. The ones that I see across from me every day - that open doors to all kinds of worlds. The more I listen the more I see everything that I have been missing: all of the assumptions I have made about who a person is, what they want, what I think ought to happen for them. The more I seek to give, the more I see what I have been given. I believed I was here to make things known or better, but I see now, I am only here to bear witness - to develop a better question. But I love the moment when I see this, and I unclasp my hand... and let it be. 

 Love, is a kind of wonder, a kind of fascination, and these are things that I truly love. Love is awe, and deep abiding respect for the other. Love is a sense of recognition ringing in the heart. These are the things that send joy surging from somewhere dead inside me - like a name I have not been called in years by someone who loved me, someone who knew me as a child.

 The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.  

- Abraham Joshua Heschel