Happy 4th Birthday Veronica!

Kinda weird to think back at how drastically my life has changed over the past four years. There have definitely been some crests and valleys; few things have remained constant during that period of time. One of them has been my love for you and how you've brought immense, indescribable joy to me, just by being there.

<3 <3 <3

Happy Birthday Veronica! I wish you a joyful, fun-filled princessy day :) I love you very much.

Lunar Dream 01: Sentience.

Like every other person, I can only remember a fraction of the dreams I have. Lately it seems that I've been dreaming a bit more but that's probably due to the melatonin pill I pop before bedtime. Regardless, I forget almost all of my dreams soon after waking, although I do have some very vivid and memorable dreams from over the years that I hope to remember forever.

The moon has made an appearance in three of my most vivid and pleasant dreams. Following is a description of the first dream -- which I probably experienced sometime in my early teens -- to the best of my memory.

I was visiting my mom's childhood home in Quezon City, late on a warm, breezy summer night. Everyone on her side of the family was inside enjoying one other's company, quietly laughing and talking. I got up and slowly walked outside on the front porch to enjoy the nighttime weather, and that's when I looked up and saw magnificence. The entire sky was alive with millions of brilliant stars, clear against the cloudless black sky. But that spectacle was dwarfed by the sheer size of the moon.

Looking back into my dream, the moon itself must have taken up at least a third of the sky. Round and full, it glowed a great bright orange and illuminated the entire neighborhood with light like flames. It was obviously much closer to the Earth because I could discern individual craters, valleys and mountains on its surface. To me it looked only a few hundred feet away.

VASTLY bigger than this

It loomed so large that it almost seemed like it was on a collision course with the planet. But instead of a sense of alarm or fear, I was filled with a profound calm, almost as if the moon existed as a sentinel to protect me. It felt sentient somehow and that gave me a distinct sense of comfort. I must have stared awestruck for a while, rooted to the spot by the sheer spectacle of the sky. Even now the details of that moon -- the rough and jagged surface, the spectrum of its reds and oranges, and most of all its almost-incomprehensible mass -- are vivid in my mind.

I don't remember the rest of that dream (if it even continued past that point), but I don't think I really need to. Nowadays, even just thoughts of that dream will give me a sense of calmness and a little bit of wonder. Honestly, it's one of the best things my subconscious has ever done for me. Thanks, brain!

Two Different Goodbyes.

Headed back to Olathe one more time this weekend -- with Veronica, Gen, Olivienne and my mom in tow -- to finally clear out the rest of the boxes and miscellaneous items from my apartment. All of the large pieces of furniture have already found a good home; it's just a matter of sliding everything else into the back of my dad's Ridgeline and finding space for it here in Hays (not that this house needs anything else stuffed into it, which is why I'm doubly glad that I'm not bringing back any big items). So it'll be a busy weekend of driving, organizing and cleaning before handing the keys back for good and officially closing my experience of living in Kansas City.

This will also be my last weekend with Veronica before she flies back out to Seattle with Gen and Olivienne next Wednesday. These past five weeks have definitely flown by too fast and I can't say I'm really ready for her to go. It's been a wonderful, hilarious and joyous time. I've been continually amazed, delighted and humbled by having her around. It's a powerful way to see a different perspective of the world and my place in it. Needless to say, I'll miss her a lot -- even though I'll see her again in mid-March and we'll Skype regularly until then. It won't be the same, though, and it makes me profoundly sad. That said, words cannot describe how happy I am that she was able to spend time with me.

I love you Veronica! Missing you already.

Happy 3rd Birthday Veronica!

Daddy loves you very much.

The Way It Should Be.

From a recent, enlightening phone conversation:

Starting over is highly overrated. You deal with what you're given and you do the best you can, and it all ends up the way it should be.
- a good friend of mine on life, 02 September 2009

Sometimes the simplest words paint the clearest pictures. Thanks for listening to me, and maybe I'll succeed in applying this little bit of wisdom to the ever-changing Rorschach inkblot that is my life right now.

Sunday Zen.

While reading up on minimalism and Zen today, I stumbled across this passage from Thoughts Without A Thinker by Mark Epstein:

“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over, or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, 'Of course.' When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

I realized that this a much more elegant (and eloquent) way of saying "Live each day as if it were your last."

My first reaction was that this is a backwards philosophy. How could you ever truly enjoy something if you knew that it was bound to fail or break, that your time with it was limited?  Wouldn't that knowledge make the resulting experience bittersweet?  How could you possibly achieve peace of mind if you went through life constantly expecting the end of things?  I couldn't see the benefit.

Though upon further contemplation, it makes a lot of sense to realign your thinking this way.  Nowhere does the passage tell you to adopt a pessimistic attitude about the natural impermanence of life and its experiences.  It doesn't say "Yes, it's beautiful, but it won't last anyway, so you might as well give up now" which is how one might initially interpret it, save for the last sentence.

When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.

The wisdom of this is striking.  I suppose this has to do more with acceptance of the facts that life isn't perfect.  I know that tragedy and hardships are inevitable, but I typically have a hard time coping when things don't go as planned in my personal life.  Inwardly, I tend to see most things (worldviews, relationships, attitudes) as ideal. Maybe if I tried to really understand that there is room for a little acceptance that things are going to change -- and sometimes for the worse, life's journey would be a less stressful and I'd stop bugging out as much.  I don't expect myself to not be disappointed every time -- I think I'm a generally optimistic person -- but if I "hope for the best, but expect the worst" I'd be more prepared to travel through life's valleys.

This is truly a rare moment of personal serendipity because two days ago I had a phone conversation with someone close to me who said essentially the same thing.  "Life is hard," she said, "and you'll always have stress over something.  Don't expect anything to be as easy anymore ... because we've grown up.  But it's how you deal with it and move forward that's important."

It's a difficult philosophy for me to adopt, but absolutely essential in the long run.  Happy Sunday.