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Photo by me in Indonesia

There are some days where everything just seems to go wrong and I dramatise my existence as a whole. It’s on days like these that I like to put my life in perspective. I sit in my mat, I move, I breathe, and I go deep, I ask myself; why does all of this bother me? Does it really seem so important? What is it that I truly want? What is it that makes me so angry about this? And in the midst of chaos, I get some kind of answer… What I truly want is connection. Connection within myself, and with the whole. What I want is to be available, open. What I want is to make a difference somehow for someone, especially for my family and friends and people that surround me. I want to help them grow and sustain themselves. I also want to save the Ocean and the Earth and help everyone. I just want to do so many contrary things that I feel divided. I don’t know how to deal with this right now… But I guess it’s ok to be lost sometimes… even though my ‘sometimes’ seems to be for many years now. Maybe being lost is my path. Maybe this is just the way things are meant to be for me. Maybe it’s all my choice and has always been. Maybe deep inside my only wish forever is to BE LOST. That way I can always have something to search for. I always ponder this idea, because it always comes back to me in deep meditation and in dreams. My true life passion has always been to search. I want to search and re-search and know everything. And because knowing is eternal, I always will be a searcher. Searching for what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter as long as the search continues. This is my wish and my curse.

  Photo by me in Indonesia

‘The National’ plays in the background. Works being done around the house. The wind fiercely blowing through the palm trees. The waves breaking on the shore. Everything smells like storm. My soul is already full of thunder. Wildly drawing my destiny through the rivers of my body. Blood pumps, and I scratch and scratch the hundreds of bites that are dispersed around my vessel, my temple. The more I scratch, the more I learn the meaning of impermanence; as pleasure becomes pain, and pain, pleasure again. Aaah… this is life. The uncomfort just reminds me of what I think is ‘normal’… Nothing is normal! Nothing CAN be normal, as NOTHING lasts forever. But then, this eternal ever-changing, ever-evolving soul of ours, is FOREVER. How? How can it be forever if nothing is? Because it changes, it shifts and adapts. Its essence IS change. Its essence is LIFE. Its true essence is DEATH. Death is the true creator. The only way for change to come through and birth new life is by killing what no longer serves us. It must die. It must. If not, WE die. We would never learn. We would never grow. What’s Life then without Death? Nothing. Nothing can BE. Kissing Death as our lover. Loving Death as the bringer of new Life. For Life is dancing an eternal dance with Death, never to be separated. This is the lesson. This is what I must learn.

  
Days pass slowly here. Time feels different, not linear anymore. My companions are the sound of the waves, the sound of the wind blowing through the trees, the sound of my breath. I practice everyday some kind of Yoga; maybe not so much asana/postures, as before, but just being in union with what is. The shadow, the darkness, the knowledge of the Life-Death-Life cycle is everywhere. Nothing to do but confront it every second. When I feel angry or frustrated, I must just feel it. If there is a solution to the problem, I take it. If there isn’t, or it isn’t under my control, what else can I do? Just sit in anger/frustration/sadness until I transmute it to something else. Island life teaches many lessons. Things don’t disappear. They wait there patiently until you face them. There is no way through, but through…. Deep, deep into the caves of our souls. I feel I am growing old in my heart, and it isn’t a bad thing; nothing is bad or good anymore, it just is. My body feels young, like never before, but my soul has the hunger that old souls have; a longing to Be, a longing to come back Home.

Photo by me in Indonesia

Life is so full of surprises. I realised that it’s true, if we are not happy right where we are, where else do we think we are going to find happiness? Happiness is a state of being, it isn’t something that we search for and find, it is a state we choose to dive right into and stay there… It doesn’t matter that I live in a piece of paradise, and that all seems beautiful and perfect. Nothing is. There are a lot of other things that happen daily that get to me and stress me, and I am not always happy and smiling. Sometimes I hurt, sometimes I cry, sometimes I get really frustrated that things don’t go the way I plan… But this is life. There cannot be light without darkness. And even when the light is so bright it blinds us, the shadows are always there reminding us that all is necessary. The eternal paradox of existence is as it is. It is the acceptance of change that makes our lives peaceful. And it all comes back to us, it is our choice.

Photo of me

Today was a hard day for me. Emotionally. This coming back to “the real world” for a few days was harder than I thought. It’s not hard in the sense of commodities and living (here I have even more than I need, and maybe that’s the problem), but it opened my eyes once more to what we think a “normal life” is. How is it possible that the world revolves around so so many things, objects, material possessions that people think will make them happy? What hurts me deep inside is knowing that most of those things are tinted in blood and suffering. And in the end, it isn’t even going to be sold. Most things will end up being thrown away and forgotten. Forgotten the same way as we forget the unjust trade that is behind most of the things we buy. And our Mother Earth??? Is it really necessary to make her suffer this way? Cutting her open again and again, making her scream… and then, we will be the ones screaming and crying in terror asking why she fights back… I don’t know… Today I feel angry, but mostly sad. I feel like my 15 year old self crying all the time because I can’t hold the weight of the world on my shoulders. Sure you will tell me it mustn’t affect me so much, it mustn’t affect me that millions of people are refugees in one point of the world with nothing, not even a country!, while others are just filling their homes with things. I used to believe that too. I repeated for many years ‘don’t be too sensitive’. Now I understand that fighting it doesn’t serve ME personally. I cried today. But I also understood a deeper truth about myself: I NEED and WANT it to affect me. I don’t want to ignore the pain. I want it to be here by my side, suffering and pain, because they make me stronger and more able to fight to make myself, and whomever I can help, a better version of themselves. This pain only makes me want to do something more. And if that is the purpose of my suffering right now, it is more than welcome to stay.