2023-06-11 Journal Entry
🍃 Season: 🌷 Spring 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: June 11, 2023 📅 Week: Jun 5 – Jun 11, 2023
Perhaps the best thing about running in the morning is that afterwards, my mind is mostly just silent. I don’t feel like I’m overflowing with thoughts or that I need to sort through a bunch. I’m just a body, and I’m tending to that body over and over again. It needs food, so I’m feeding it. That much feels right, and I don’t worry too much about anything else. My thoughts feel clear — I can look and see and it’s all right here. The words are right here.
Honestly I didn’t even start thinking about making things until just now. There’s a bit of this feeling that sometimes I’m writing for the wrong reasons. I don’t really know why that is — I know the “life of a writer” is one that I want, which is perhaps not a great reason to be a writer, but there’s also this feeling that I want to sink into words and let them roll over me, that I want to know and understand and find clarity. I want these stories to take me over. What would that look like? To give oneself so wholly to the world that you infuse with it. I’m just looking at all the people in this coffee shop and they’re all beautiful. There’s the students working hard and writing notes, the mentor listening and quietly guiding the mentee on the course of their life, the cute barista I immediately fell in love with, the bustle of the kitchen restocking silverware.
These are all pleasant, clear, lovely. I’m not seeing the un-lovely, the difficult. I haven’t learned to love that part of myself yet. I have a great appreciation for beauty, and even in saying that I can see my assumption that in the unlovely, in the parts I don’t notice and don’t like, is un-beauty. I know intellectually that that’s wrong, that the soft squishy parts of me, the parts that hate those that don’t understand me, the little boy who wants recognition, the part longing for an untapped source of genius, those are all beautiful in their brokenness. I can fold them all inside of me, I can still reclaim all of them. Those parts are real, if misguided, and they’re pointing me towards something. There’s a yearning for greatness, for an unfolding of the self into all-things, a desire to articulate the suchness of the world around me. It’s all there, I can touch it. But it’s in that suchness from which everything else unfolds, from which we get love and joy and righteous anger.
What are we so afraid of when we talk about our shadows?
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