Let Me Familiarize Myself With You

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Let Me Familiarize Myself With You

“Let me familiarize myself with you. I’m not just talking about assorted facts anyone can get to compose an obituary. I want you to know the history of my heart, the tiny tragedies and comical acts of my everyday life.” I wrote these beginning lines of this blog after looking up the etymology of the word “familiar,” which comes from the same root word as family. We typically use the word familiar to mean a casual knowing, but when turned into a verb, familiarize, it becomes the act of getting to know someone, especially through repeated interaction over time. This means that you learn the good and the bad in a person and expose the same in yourself. We create the family feeling through regular interaction in which we familiarize ourselves with each other and we come to know, appreciate, and ideally love the quirks and idiosyncrasies, the beauty and dignity, and even the faults and flaws that make us uniquely ourselves.

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Longing

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Longing

What do you long for? What do long for with such depth and beauty that you know you will continue to hold on to your desire even if the world denies it to you? For me, poetry is such a longing. I have had many dark nights of the soul when I questioned my love of poetry and my desire to write. But, every time, I come to the same conclusion: I must write no matter how well or how poorly the world receives it. I must follow this muse even when the path seems impassable and the work impossible.

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Lacking

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Lacking

This may be the greatest lesson from love: that we need the world, we need others, we need someone beside us in order to feel complete. This need is not a weakness, it is a fact of life. Without love, we are like homeless beggars, living on the backstreets of life, no matter how much we have or what we have achieved. Lacking love is perhaps one of the most panful experiences in life, especially if we come to believe we are simply not lovable. What about you makes you lovable? What can you do to increase your lovableness?

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Deepen My Devotion

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Deepen My Devotion

The Konmari method is based primarily on keeping in your home what sparks joy rather than cluttering your house with mostly and joyless needless things. The house truly is a huge mess now, in the middle of the process, but I’ve got a glimmer of hope it will all come together in the end with clean lines and warm colors, and with enough open space in an uncluttered home for love to flourish.

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Living With Rhythm

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Living With Rhythm

A few days ago, I started the “Konmari Method” of tidying up which is based on keeping in your home only what sparks joy. After starting the process, a reminder popped on January 6, 2019 to read a “letter to future self” I wrote back in March of 2018. It was amazingly prescient! I am often astounded by this uncanny actualization in these letters. It’s a beautiful question to hold as you go into the new year: What sparks joy in your life and in your surroundings?

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