I’ve been lightly looking into Vedic astrology these days, and I have come to see that both Venus and the Moon have a strong influence on my life. Venus is the mother of creativity, she is the force that sends sparks of inspiration to me. That’s how inspiration feels to me – little sparkles that I try to capture and write down into a long list of ideas that I want to bring to life one day. Some days these sparks seldom come, other days it feels like I am on fire. I’ve noticed a true and deep connection between my inspiration and my spiritual practice. The more consistently I maintain my spiritual practice, the more my day is filled with fireworks. I write in my blog much more when I am connected to my practices, when I am living my truest, most authentic life.
Life has been floating by. I stopped writing and I stopped taking photographs. I just couldn’t find it in me. I think there was too much to feel and be a part of lately.
After Mia’s due date passed, I couldn’t quite come back from it. The day itself was as difficult as I had anticipated, but there was a heaviness in the weeks to follow that made life slow and tired. I feel forever changed, touched by death.
I spent a short time with my parents in BC. One afternoon I said to my mother “I am to you what Mia is to me. You must love me so much.”
My mom just smiled.
Slowly, I find myself coming back to my words.
And I wrote something about my daughter. It was too big to be a poem, and too small to be a story. So here it is, rough, but loved – a little piece of writing from my heart.
I waited for you, for a very long time, since the beginning of the winter, since the beginning of time. You promised you would come one summer, and that one day we would meet, one day we would fly together, and my heart would be complete.
I really needed to take a break from studying for my exam on Thursday. My brain feels like a ball of fuzz.
The other evening, I was in the living room with Sean, my roommate. And in my sleepy-brain-fuzzy-haze, I put the lights out in the room and then casually sat down to eat dinner (in the dark). Sean got up and put the light back on. I felt like something weird had just happened, I asked “Did I just….put the lights off?!” It was so funny! We laughed about that for a while. The strangest thing is that I did it AGAIN later that night! Haha.
So, given my history of doing weird things when tired, I think it is best I do take a break from studying.
Instead, I want to share with you some of my most loved quotes and poems by the Sufi poet/mystic Rumi.
This collection moves me and speaks to parts of me that are unspoken. That is poetry. It is interesting to me that while I love to write and document my life through prose and journalling, some of the most beautiful or haunting things that have happened to me are best expressed as poetry. I wonder why that is.
Sometimes I feel that so much of our day-to-day life has been digitized these days. And words, they have value, they have a purpose. Sometimes it feels like when you write on the internet, the words you write just evaporate. But when I hand write, I feel like it is a conscious act. The words, they live and breathe on the page. And because you are limited by space, ink, hands, every word has to count.
During the summertime my mom found a few of her old diaries from her early 20’s. We sat on the bed and read through them together. It was so wonderful to read the words of my young mother. I think back to my memories of my mother when I was small. I always picture her the same way; she has long thick black hair. Her face is young and glowing. Her eyes are big. She wears a long sea-foam blue skirt that dances in the wind. She used to wear skirts all the time back then. She laughs and plays with me. She pretends that the vacuum cleaner is going to eat my feet, and for a moment, I am truly delightfully terrified. She sits on the couch and reads really thick novels. I remember the covers of the novels clearly. One of them had a picture of a yellow meadow on it. She had a lot of books like this. Romance. Inside, the pages are thick and coffee stained. She used to read a lot.
This is how my mother exists in my memory. I often tell her this and she laughs and says it was not always this way.
But that’s how she existed in my 5 year old mind.
Anyway, we read these diaries together and I read the story of my mother’s life. I felt that it was such a valuable experience for me, as her daughter, to have. I was grateful for her writing.
I wonder what traces of myself I can leave for my own family one day. Or will they just google me and find the blazing trail I have left behind me on the internet?
No, I want something else to happen.
There are so few opportunities to handwrite these days. But I try to make it a point to handwrite when I can. And it has made all the difference.
Here are my notebooks.
What about you? Do you love to write? Do you love stationary too? What kind of things do you handwrite in your day to day life?
