Shattered for Good.

As time shoves us forward into ever-changing realities of life, our traumas overtake our feeble, child minds.

It doesn't matter where we live, what our culture is, or who we spend our time with- our layered bubbles of childhood eventually pop, and we have to stand in the frigid cold.

Exposed and confused.

Even with our storms to weather and jagged rocks to scale, we feel reality peel away at our protective layers of ignorance and naiveté, gradually and almost un-painfully.

We're weathered and scratched at until we wake up one morning to find Guns and Rape and Murder and Injustice and Pain and Obscenities and Starvation and Death and Shame and Blood, all on our doorstep.

And suddenly we're on our heads - everything's upside down, side-ways, distorted, ugly.

We ask:

How did this happen. Why did this happen. What has become of our home.

and We don't get it.

We don't get how our perception of Life gets bullied to the ground.

We don't get how what we KNEW to be true, gets stabbed by lies and hate.

We don't understand how the supposedly trusting adults let our fragile world get. so .out. of. hand.

Confusion escalates to a fearful level as we try to make sense of our new life. We cope.

And our first attempt at coping is to pretend like we never saw a thing. We try to live how we did before. We bust our guts to get back to our familiarity.

But we can't go back. We can't go back to our old ways of content, and obliviousness, and seemingly un-worriedness-- We don't want to.

As much as we lie to ourselves that it was better that way, deep down we know for a fact that it wasn't.

Because with

all of this newfound painfully, heart-breaking repulsiveness

There is newfound beauty.

And our second attempt at coping is victorious- We hunt for and gather all of the tiny buds of joy we can, out of the ash once our existence.

In everything we see, feel, touch, and comprehend, there is this sense of Awe that we could not have grasped before the shedding of our skin.

Our appreciation for the simplicities of life- A stream, a flower, a friend- have shot up out of the ground and blossomed like a giant white rose.

It seems that the more we look for the beauty, the more there is of it.

Because through all of our black ashes and dark decay-

The sparse White Roses reach out for us like beaming rays of Pure White Light, and our ashes get wisped away by the wind.

An Ant

Sunday morning, at eight o'clock, I was sitting on my front porch, staring at an ant. It deliriously, almost frantically waltzed around in what appeared to be a slapdash trail. I internally chuckled.
And as I observed this tiny creature, a thought struck me so hard in the head I thought I heard it aloud- "he knows exactly where he's going."

... and then I watched the Ant suddenly stop, and head straight for a darkened crack in between two slabs of concrete, I thought again, "if he knows where he's going, why would he head straight for the blackened, unknown, cold, hole in the ground?

My question was answered as a few minutes later, the Ant emerged from the abyss with a fallen friend on his back.

This Ant carried his friend back to what I had presumed to be their hill, by himself. And I somehow knew that not a single I-can't-believe-I-have-to-do-this's, or I-have-other-things-to-worry-about-in-my-life's crossed through his small, but determined mind.

How can this small, seemingly insignificant ANT be determined enough and selfless enough to enable himself like this? I'm positive that this insect was aware of his insignificance. I'm sure he knew how puny he was compared to the massive world and works and ideas and people and bigger lives around him.

Yet, he understood his purpose, carried it out, and did it in the most determined way I had ever seen. Nothing else in the world mattered at that moment. Not if he was lost, not if he was afraid, not even if his own ant life was in shatters, Nothing. He just knew his purpose. Or maybe he just chose it.