the pear and the fig

dreams of faces and names.

dark hair and pale skin. you were always out of reach, always one step beyond my own, but we both know it is i who has been elusive.

like a master painter, my dreams elicit colors from memory fragments and swirl them together. the unconscious mind is a blank canvas for all manner of masterpieces both beautiful and frightful. fear becomes a color; entire scenes once experienced but now only barely remembered become mere details of larger scenes that have never actually happened.

not while awake, anyway.

hiroshi yoshida - ten views of fuji: yoshida village

once again i find myself in a place of relative upheaval...

loss and regrowth, all over again.

kōshirō onchi - 湯上り(after the bath)

the biggest conclusion i have made from this is that i have been searching for the wrong result.

there isn't going to be a day when i wake up and magically have found my personal reason for being alive - at least not in the sense that i had been imagining. i was thinking that some career choice, or some other person, or any external factor was going to prove itself to be my knight in shining armor - the ultimate reason for my existence and therefore my reason to get up every day.

how i could be so naive i am not sure. but this is simply not the way.

the external will fail. it will crumble and fall apart. you cannot have as the cornerstone of your life - your life - something unpredictable, something outside of yourself.

my conclusion is that there is no grand overarching reason. there is no treasure of meaning that i have, out of incompetency, failed to find. the reason for being alive is that you are alive, and that is the reason. the meaning is in the act of existence itself. there is no real external pressure to be anything in particular, but there is an internal struggle to accept the simple complexity and complex simplicity and even simple simplicty of the concept - being unconditionally.

to will one's self to be despite external circumstances. to thrive and accept and flow and love.  

to be okay.

that is my reason.