Reflection

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

– Harry Emerson Fosdick

I found this quote the other day on Lindsey Mead’s website, A DESIGN SO VAST. I visit her site frequently to read her beautiful and poignant musings on life, the sometimes melancholic ebb and flow of our daily existence. I loved this quote because it is calming, reassuring and allows me to see my often chaotic and confusing life as an exciting mystery to be understood. This is what I love about writing. A famous writer once said, “Everything is material,” and this is not only true but comforting. It allows you to open your eyes to the daily events, both good and bad, and try to decipher what can be gleaned from these experiences. What can you learn from a fight with a friend, a difficult client, an exhaustion that seems to overtake you? What can you learn from disappointment, heartbreak, fear and sadness? What can you learn from pure joy and exhilaration? Everything has something to teach. Everything. And it is up to us to use these moments. To pull everything we can from them. To suck the marrow out of life and get our hands dirty trying to understand each passing moment. Reflection is key to understanding and accepting the mystery of life. I love that my life is so big and complicated and complex that I find myself trying to understand the events and obstacles that surround me. I love that things aren’t easy, that my life has struggle, because when the beauty comes, when the peaceful, wonderful moments come, I absorb them fully. More than most. I never want that to change. I never want to stop reflecting on this beautiful, wild, complicated, mysterious life that I live. This unpredictable, sometimes upsetting, unbelievably beautiful and never boring life that I live.

Summer is just starting to settle and the days are stretching out before me. We have had so much rain, impossibly cold rain that makes me feel like we are still in the depths of winter. But then we have days like today, when the sun shines so brilliantly and the earth is warm and inviting. On days like this I look around and see that everything is in bloom. The peonies are blossoming with brilliant pinks, the leaves of my azalea bushes are tinged with flowers and the hydrangea buds are bursting at their seams. I take this time to reflect on all the rain we have had and recognize that without the rain, these flowers and blossoms and blooms and buds would not be possible. Without the rain, there would be no beauty.