Tag: healing

I’ve always been, and at one point realised, that I am a person who loves watching at the clouds in a sky – early autumn afternoon seems to be a sweet spot. Something about how the clouds can give scale and perspective in an otherwise plain blue sky, how they can reveal the scale and the vastness of what lies above the line of our horizon. This third dimension that clouds can introduce to a rather plain sky is something that seems i haven’t managed to ever wrap my head around – the beauty and the awe i feel from it.

An afternoon drive this Friday coming back home from the beach house, with a perfect sky full of clouds, of movement and structures, made me feel like a little kid in a toy store, feeling the urge to make everything mine by taking pictures, risking my safety in how I drive for an opportunity to capture this beauty, the contrasting colours, the vastness of the clouds, the perfect light. It was so stimulating and at the same time so overwhelming and made me think ‘have I ever experienced this before?’, ‘can I stop trying to find ways to limit this experience and how I am feeling by taking a photo but rather just to experience it?’. After a few seconds of managing to quench that thirst and calm down from all the visual stimulation I thought, oh this is a topic I could write about in my blog. Surely this experience being so intense albeit not new in some ways will be able to inspire me to express myself, to draw insights, to present and eventually conclude on something. But the more I am thinking about it, including reflecting on it with the help of chatgpt’s superior processing power, the more I realise that an insight or conclusion is not something I have at this moment and would be something forced, something fake even.

What I can say however is that I have caught myself in the last few months, maybe even long before that (imperfect memory skewing the data here), being able or being in a position of appreciating the calmness, the peacefulness and the beauty of things, of how the light and the wind can transform or elevate the visual experience I was getting from looking at a palm tree, at the lemon tree in our back yard. Can I say that this has to be due to more mental space that I can notice smaller, simpler things? Am I becoming wiser and more open to what’s happening around me and somehow manage to nourish myself and ‘brighten’ my day? I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that I’ve been consciously aware of experiencing such beauty more and more lately, a beauty that my brain reflexively wants to assign a meaning to, to create a lesson learned from and to use this stimulation to alchemically turn into kinetic energy, into creative productivity to record a guitar piece, write in my blog. It definitely often feels, by the way, that posting a photo on instagram is not enough of a direction to release this energy.

So what I’m left is with the experience itself, not being able to turn the stimulation and dopamine into more stimulation and maybe that’s a lesson in itself. To be present enough and courageous enough to experience things in that moment as they are, through eyes, not through screens, and let my body to be nourished from it.

This peace I feel is the absence of highs, the absence of lows, the new ‘makes me feel alive’ kind of state that reminds me that this is not to be taken for granted, that my good health and painless experience is all I can wish for – a foundation that is sought out and once it arrives, it seems it always was here, waiting patiently until I became sober from all the chronic and instant troubles, to reveal itself.

This peace, this stillness, asks for nothing more than presence. It is a mirror for what I’ve always been – no performances, no justifications, no promises, no hopes and no fears – everything is exactly where it should be. Despite the courage and strength that this peace unveils, I hear reluctant whispers that can become much bolder if I indulge in the thoughts they provoke: “How can I make the best out of this state?” asks the productive self wanting to control the outcome and put lightning in a bottle. “Surely, this will not last. It is not sustainable.” says the self that has been conditioned to believe that good things are meant for other people and that good times are just good luck, a candle light flickering before it dies – a short-lived warmth.

But, this peace starts to feel like a new home, a home that I will not be asked to move out from or be told that I don’t have the means to maintain. I will be audacious enough to accept this new reality because maybe I deserve it – maybe the soil is fertile enough, accepting enough, of the goodness, of the compassion and of the kindness I have in me, that I can start offering to others because I have offered it first to myself.

This peace is a privilege and a blessing – a state that I’ve allowed myself to deserve.