reflections upon coming back

My little brother told me today that Native Americans sit next to one another, one hand up and the other hand down. One hand is always giving, the other receiving from the community.

"Life can dry up because you’re not off on your own adventure."

As I am coming back to blogging, I am thinking a lot about what I want to share and what I want to get out of it. I am awake at 1:49am, anxious about the upcoming school year, mulling over just how I can restructure my small pocket of a cornfield to feel less claustrophobic, where I can soar more freely. Some of the things I have found that have kept me the most grounded: running, cooking, dreaming of traveling, freedom from technology enslavement, and --most importantly-- family.

I hope this new version of the blog reflects turning over a new leaf that has been slowly recuperating over the summer through thousands of miles on the road, hiking through 10+ national parks, and soul-searching.

I want to learn to let my life speak in other words, looking for those open doors to borrow the wise words of Joseph Campbell.

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. […] 

We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth. […] 

Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and political activities, or get drafted into a war that isn’t the one they’re interested in, and it may be difficult to hold to this umbilical under those circumstances. That is a technique each one has to work out for himself somehow. […] 

But most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns have the capacity that is waiting to be awakened to move to this other field. […] 

I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked. […] 

The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive. […]

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. […] 

There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.

quote via {brain pickings}
image source {instagram}