You're dancing easily through my dreams...

There's so much sadness all around. I wonder how people who find themselves in devastating situations can pull themselves out of it and find hope in the midst of all the chaos. I wonder how after being diagnosed with a potentially terminal disease, people can still smile. I wonder what this life holds for us all. Although I'm not sure of my spirituality, I'm sure our souls must go somewhere. How can these abstract ideas like love and hope spring from nothing? It's impossible. Maybe I'll never find the answers, but I feel every day as if they're just out of reach, which is fine with me. I don't need the answers, I just need the warmth of the sun on my shoulders on a beautiful autumn day and to hear the voices of my loved ones.

The older I get, the more I feel a tie to my past. Maybe even a past I didn't even really experience. The experiences of my family members live in me. My mom's gentle consolation on the phone when I've had the worst week of my life. My dad's hard to swallow advice. It's all enough for me to realize I'm not the way I am on my own. I feel as if maybe my soul was shaped before I was even born. On a rare occasion I meet people who haven't had the same family experiences I have and I'm washed over with this sense of complete gratefulness.

Through my art lately I've realized everything is a rare abstraction of something much greater. Everything we experience is just a miniscule part of our entire whole. We are all connected through a web of similar experiences, hopes, and goals. We all know blue. We all know yellow. We all know the green of that simple combination. We never remember how we met these ideas. We just know. We just wake up. We just live because that's what we're supposed to do. We run when we're late. We cry when we're devastated. We breathe. We laugh. We admire ourselves in the mirror. We kick up the leaves. We listen. We taste our salty tears. We console our friends. We brush our teeth. We scramble our eggs. We wipe the mud off of our shoes before we come in the house. We have mothers and fathers. We all have 99.97% of the same genes. We categorize ourselves into races and religions. We find beautiful things and frame them. We cut our hair. We put up our umbrellas when it rains. We hang up our jackets, or we don't. We idolize. We want more. We envy. We nap or we run ragged. We remember and forget. We make decisions and mistakes. We're okay or we're not. We all start out the same and in the end we all end up in the same place.

We are beautiful and we are a mere magnification of something we aren't supposed to understand.