Thursday, July 25, 2013

I would compare my life journey of finding myself to falling out ofareally tall tree and hitting every branch on the way down...

I have finally come to the point in life where I am no longer at the age of believing I know everything. I have now come to the point of realization that I don't really know anything!! However I am fascinated by the capability I have to be aware of the changes I am going through on my journey to becoming myself. I love seeing the ways in which I have grown as a person, and understanding why I am the way I am and what sparked that within myself to be that way.

Now that being said I come to my purpose of this post. One thing that I have discovered about myself and I find it to be such a fun transitional point for me at the moment. 

First of all I grew up very poor, and along with this poorness level I was raised in extremely tiny towns. Usually no more than 500 people for a great part of my childhood. This leaves your imagination open to explore such fascinating things like dirt, rocks, exploring nature. You don't really realize there is actually a gigantic world out there with hundreds of diverse different cultures and people and foods and art and music....you are too busy building yourself an imaginary castle on the side of a dirt mountain, waiting for a leprechaun to make you rich so you can have a real castle and the first car you want to own is a limo....with myself clueless to the fact that a limo would be worthless without a driver. 

Now for many humans that grow up this way this is typically setting their fate up for them, not even knowing to think about a possibility of something different to strive for. Even if they wanted to they may not even have the tools of where to start. I however moved around alot, it was only all over the state of Colorado, but that forced me to adapt almost yearly to a new place, new school, no more friends, always starting as the outcast and forced to learn how to get people to be friends with you. Now this came at no trauma to myself because in reality it was normal to me. I didn't know of a world where you were just stable in one spot and allowed to just grow. So being a little odd, not having any sense of fashion or music or passions because I was always set onto a new path. Once I would become comfortable with one thing, it was time to move onto the next. I would consider myself a late bloomer of learning how to actually become cool. I remember when it all changed. It was a pair of lime green jelly sandals. My best friend of 5th grade got a pair....I needed a pair of these, I needed to fit in and understand why they were so amazing to have. They came in all colors. I got a blue pair. I loved them! I was so cool!! All thanks to my friend showing me they way. She introduced me to my first couple of bands. Spice girls, backstreet boys, and Nsync. We were all a spice girl and we envisioned dating a backstreet boy! I then realized that all my clothes were colored leggings and I was pretty dorky. I needed jeans, although nobody told me about the anti hi water rule, which later led to my unnecessary need to have my pants at least 4 inches longer than my legs. When I realized that all my friends had it so much easier than me, it became clear to me that if I wanted what they had, I was going to have to get it myself. Wasn't a problem for me though, I wasn't upset about my less fortunate situation.

This experience gave me the drive to conquer life. Although I had no direction in which way to begin, so I just started running. I started babysitting, and pulling weeds and cleaning, and then I got my first real job. At a glorious run down pizza shop. The start of my working career. It was an amazing place to work as a high school student. A place that you got to hang out with your friends, eat free pizza, and have food fights in the kitchen, and getting paid to do it!? Paradise was found!! I did happen to be an excellent employee, I was just also highly skilled at having irresponsible fun while working. Now going from having no extra money for various things like your friends have, especially at that teenage age, once I got my own money I bought shit. I could buy all kinds of shit now. And let me tell you the things I would buy were literally just that....shit. I had become entangled within the consumerism mindset to spend my money on things, and more things, and different colors of things, with not much thought to it aside from buy, then toss aside, buy more and get rid of. It is actually kind of sickening to think of how incredibly wasteful I was with my money and the resources of earth. The problem with consumerism is many things, but my specific points to the issue are as follows. It supports large corporations who under appreciate their employees, put little care into whatever is produced, and generally has no soul. This is also reflected in the way people value their items, someone involved in consumerism does not value their items, they get the "thing" and once the newness wears off from this soulless item, they are onto the next thing. Sometimes this becomes such a problem that they start to value their people and relationships in this way. This is the recipe for a very miserable existence.

What I have transitioned into become now is someone who holds value to things. I want every piece in my collection to have soul. Either something that resonates very deeply with me, something that was giving back to a charity, something that was hand made from an artist. This makes me value everything around me. I now think of every piece of furniture, my silverware, the artwork on my wall to have a deep soulful  purpose. This expressionism I have now recognized is a little like what my soul looks like on the inside. If you put your soul into the items you surround yourself with, it gives people a tangible substance to experience what the inside of you looks like. I have come to realize that this in itself is an expression of art.

This is a point where you are actually able to experience life as being a magical mysterious place. Things are in fact how you believe them to be. It is the truest form of power of the mind. If I have now come to a place where I can look at the world in awe of the human imagination, it changes everything around me. So much to the point that I can look at something I find to be boring, or ugly, and recognize that someone had to have come up with it at some point. Everything you look at is the result of human imagination and creativity. This starts to make the whole world start to glisten in a way not seen before. It is so abstract of an idea to see the world this way, but then again human imagination is in fact abstract.

Every where I look, I can see how someones mind exploded into that moment, and that was the result. When you see the world around you, that was actually inside someone's brain at one moment. That is fascinating to realize. To really imagine as if you are seeing substance of vision. It was the result of all the prior experience, influence, knowledge, family life, and all the past history that led up to that point, and cr
eated that one specific building, piece of art, iPhone, storage container, etc.

Everything that ever existed in history that came from a human being, was the result of imagination. Humans are creative beings, and even the most dull human has their expressionism they use for their outlet. No one is better or worse than the next, it just happens to work for whoever is using that medium.

Make a goal in life to start looking at the pieces around you to enhance your inner artist whatever that may be. Collect this to inspire your soul to do greater, even down to the people you keep around you, they are all their own works of art. Beauty is everywhere in the ugliest forms, if you allow yourself to see it.

This concludes the journey I have taken that has transformed me from my prior consumerism being, into the way I see my soul now skipping through my life experience collecting found pieces of it as I go.