Heart times presents

I was reading back on my Italy travels through the "Em in Italy" (Liang, 2012) and I felt a load of emotions and memories and...well just feelings.

Reproducing the order of the feels I got is sort of like trying to describe what you're tasting when drinking wine...

If i had to try and describe, well...the first flavour that hit was sort of a massive nostalgia for Italy intertwined with an even more massive nostalgia for a time when my heart and soul was falling in love with discovery of a new world; a world that was a place and a way -- a place so completely different and a way of going about the world where I was so independent for the first time in my life...free to fly and free to roam in a country and culture unknown (though i must thank Macaroni Grill & Restaurant in Cerritos for some magical bathroom italian language lesson moments). Italy traveling was such freedom both terrifying, sobering, and life changing.  It was where my buried romanticism was unearthed and realised. Hard work in the hot sun, but enough cold gelatos to balance it out...the sweetest buttery italian cookies for breakfast but an acidic and bitter black italian espresso to dissolve all that sugar; it was just enough calories and caffeine to start the work day getting greeen crusty fingers from tomato picking as I simmered under the hot sun.  Dinners cooked on the farm with fresh ingredients, laughter and curse words in italian bellowed into the darkening sky...Louis and Ella besides us singing on the turning record as we ate under the stars drunk on wine and living.

That was Amore...as they say and truly offered in Italy. A place with its heart on its sleeve. And so there i learned to put mine as well.

So yea, getting lost in the taste of that old Amore was the first part of reading the posts...but as I went deeper in (blog wise)...really hopping from day to day, unfolding the weeks that I had been in italy. I revived some words that really drew out that true flavour that my experience had embodied.
" Life is goooooood " is one of them (yes, with that many 'o's exactly).


This was a blog post talking about the passing week and all its gooooodness. How one of the hottest days led to a hilarious water fight...that I still remember to this day. Only I didn't realise that I had started that fight. Proud of myself now. And in clicking through "Verona" and "WAH" (onomonopia for leaving the farm)...and "Cinque terre" I felt the full unfolding of life till now.

 OH the time travel. The strange feeling was that everything is the same and different simultaneously--
my messy messy room, my motivations and ambitions and energy (though perhaps more an even more stubborn and brute energy then), and my pattern to direct it all spontaneously...wanderously...wondering and wandering.

Its different because it was a different time and place...but its the same in that all these times and places are gems along my journey...a journey in this body and soul.  The aftertaste of this teleportation found me at the same place under the same stars in the same universe within the same body and soul with the same God placing these gems all along my road. Cheesy as it may seem, the cheese is in front of me. And when the cheese is in front of me, it is not ignored. Basically I was just suddenly taken with salty tears and felt the presence of God...i see and feel myself (both now and then) in his endearing, thrilling, and challenging scavenger hunt..in which the 'hunt' is for my self. wow..yah that's the inception...there is some deception. Its not about the outside...but the inside. But the inside sits in the outside so we tend to see outside-in instead of inside-out. Riddle me that...riddle me this..

In one of my later Blogs through "Always getting better" (Liang, 2015) a sadly small populated and shortly lived Blog) there was a poem..part of it said,
                                                                 

"on a new year with my sister
I have full sight
a-head
with stitches, literally sewed up
a cut
too deep, too up front
I'm no longer a pretender
I'm a member
recognition of fragile
life
live it
dense
live it
intense"

This was a couple weeks after i had split that part right between my eyebrow and eyelid..I was still recovering from my voice loss. And I was sick of being sick. I was sick in so many ways sometimes all I remember is my dim room in Gayley 715, I lived in the dark when i played guitar, when i did homework, when i...
thats why i always went outside i suppose. But even then i didnt turn the lights on...i needed noise to shut out the reality.

If there is something you can't NOT do 

than do it 

21

you wont get out of bed 

knowing the path thats ahead 

but you don't 

so just pick a direction  

and just go on ahead  

I think this is perhaps when I started to DO DO DO. This is when i started to find myself making things ...braising things...building things. I see where I am is with this attitude of taking what is there in front of me and not thinking too much. I think that's how Glasgow and Australia came to be...

Anyways this all leads me to the present in which i am striving for a new direction. I feel like yes i don't know in the 'external' world what this path looks like but i do know what direction i want to head now.
I used to think it was places and things, tasks and careers, dreams. And yes this new path that I've decided to take will include all those things indeed, but they are not the north of my compass. They do not hold the magnetic force.

I have been praying ....all my life though that sounds strage eben for me to hear myself saying.
First i prayed for God to help me find things when i lost them. That was when i was teeny tiny. I lost lots of things...i lost pencil boxes, i lost individual pencils, assignments, essays. Praying for my parents to come home safely while i was home alone with val or with the Grandparents...was also when I prayed.

Then i didnt know what to do other than this kind of praying...getting into good schools, doing well on tests, protecting my family.
I prayed but i didnt feel like Heidi or Afraz. I wanted the faith that they had in God....I wanted it but part of me was saying "that's not for you" thats for them. Or where to begin?

My spirtitual journey is taking shape in front of my eyes...not like i had ever imagined but also in the only way i know how.
Each learning moment has been peeling at my layers and revealing where God is inside me and of course this whole time. Its like the spiritual version of Shrek (no wonder why I love shrek so much).

Saint Augustine of Hippo has said,

“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.”

It is suggested that murking on events of the past is simply dwelling in a time that does not exist. So what has happened to me I suppose is that I have stumbled into a portal called the Blogger in which is though written long ago is that continuum of my present. the layers that are in me.. the layers peeled back, and the layers still to be exposed. In other words I am in eternity  still simply praying to God to help me find something; it is me. And in the eternity that we call "today" i cried happily feeling He, a part of me, was seen by me in me. I am happy.

This is my confession...that I am trying to get rid of motivations; those short term drivers that arent the real goal. I know that..i've been there. I've been up fake mountains and quickly back. So my confession is that i am searching for the courage to rise to my aspirations rather than fall to my motivations. 

Help me God. In sitting here many weeks craving to spill out my spiritual struggles and thoughts...I have yet to do it until i have read my old blog. I have been having hesitation in where i should write. Paper or journal, lines or digital. Drawing color or water. All these come from fear of confession i suppose. But when I saw myself reflected here today, I felt impelled to once again do the same. 

It is that satisfying doing. When I made a post nearly every day. And i kept it simple but i kept it all the same. And my images did not get lost along with the lost and broken phones or sim cards. I feel this is the right direction towards a completion of something that my heart has been calling for.

God I pray for the courage to aspire for you. I pray that i have the wisdom and courage to love you with all my heart and soul and to give myself completely to the journey. To this infinite present. 

For this is a direction where my heart whispers is where I long to go. Give me science and reason but those have all been and will be disproved. My heart is the one thing i carry that i can trust and in it is you. 

ps first day i use my tagine for healthier tum times

 and me in my new glasses striving for healthier eye times

Love, 

Em