Thoughts on a bus

                      

Hello dear You,

Sitting on a bus on my way to Helsinki, I feel like writing in English. I was supposed to do some planning work but I've been more fascinated to watch the day get brighter and the sunrise fill almost all the windows of the bus. As it has gotten from dark to brighter I find myself thinking that yEs, life presents itself in shades too.  Healing happens in shades, learning to live with loss or sorrow, learning to grasp new challenges in life - all happens, one step at a time - or like a colour fade from one to another - we are always on a journey of learning, of growing, letting go, receving. I feel so happy to receive the sunrise in the bus this morning and being reminded of letting myself live through all the different shades that pass through me, my heart. 

TO BREATHE with all the emotions that either read or write my heart out to a new chapter to live. Today. From the bus window I see another kind of bus, a plane in the air taking people to other shores, other destinations, other grounds. How is their perspective of sunrise different from mine?   Yet, no matter where we are, high or low, we see the world through the windows of our eyes and hearts. As much as we have opened them.

                 

I dedided to sit on the back of the bus today, for the first time. I see many windows and realize there are so many through which to look and see my own life.  I've been stuck in some for too long, I know. Where is my inner sunrise today, my light and colors to greet the dark? How much we really need them both, there is not one without the other. 

Arriving soon to my destination, I wish you a day, a week, a month, a year, and  life of a beautiful journey of discovering your own shades and colors. Live your own sunrise. 

With love,

Rina

Here I am...with you

Hey there, dear YOU! Sharing this Earth with me, my heart...


Oh my, oh man, gosh, this blog feels like from another shore....decade... yet I know it's my life, my dear precious life....but oh, the journey has been long, and short, deep and yet again bubbling. I know you believe me, without me going in to details this time.

Today I mentioned about this ancient blog to someone, and actually few months ago I remembered I had once started this just to write somewhere, to someone...and this place in me, where I want to write, well, it's alllllllways been there but I realize more and more how much it is like my LIVING ROOM - the place where I find the true life beating in my heart, my soul and energizing my body, painting my mind with colors that I want to paint with words out to the world....or more likely, to You. To You.

At the same it is so much like " I write to know what I'm thinking" - I wish I'd remember who said those words I love.

And so here I am after hmmm- how many years!  And I'm not sure  really whom I'm telling this to because I don't think I've really had anyone much following this blog because well, I've never much told about it, ha, that's helpful isn't it!

I realize now that has happened with much of my life. For well, I love to be on my own and think and well, I do love to have deep conversations and sharing with people but that's never been that simple..

But A-ha, I've been learning I must say this!

And to realize that, how good does that feel! Darn good, indeed. I think I've got myself off the shore at age what, how old am I now, hmm...40+ 2 or 3 I think. Does that matter. Really not. But it does feel good and scary but more beautiful, to finally be more off the shore, knowing who I am, trusting myself - and more importantly, trusting the journey, life itself.

I'm an entrepreneur these days, have been for over two years now. I never thought I would have done it - at the same, know what, the image was so clear in my mind - even my reason kept sweeping it away time after another, it remained and came back - and I believe the very fact that I saw it "inside myself" even in daylight reality I could rarely see myself up to actually do that, it is as the image inside me started painting my outer circumstances bit by bit. And I think that is the true gift of imagination, of tuning ourselves to creativity mode- where we really just let go and let our dreams play for a while...and then play a little more... aren't we supposed to become (or just try to remain really) like children in our hearts?

Over the years I've learned to trust the correspondence I have every day with life. I write in my mind, and life replies to me and we keep moving as much as we are ready to do so...

This is a sudden corner again, and life brings us those all the time, with questions written on the street signs - are you ready to take the turn to a new path? Are you ready to follow your heart and listen to it's whisper growing to a blaze of fire in your heart?

I don't have any roadsigns to send you, but as I find myself all of a sudden writing here ( I was already going to bed but something brought me here)  I know my heart is full of encouragement I want to send to you ---- "...stop....pause...be still..." and listen to your heart. Everything you will ever need is right there. But  do find quiet, do find peace, do find a space that allows you to really sit down with yourself and look at yourself as you would look at yourself through a window.

Through the window you could see me at home, sitting at the kitchen table. The evening is getting darker but it is still light. I just cleaned up the kitchen with my daughter. It was her turn but we did it together, and it made me feel good. Also, the recordings of many sweet encounters from today at my creative Art Café Intola make my heart smile. And the flowers and small olive trees I bought today as a sign of Spring. Growth. Green. New life. How old trees create themselves anew every spring, how the grass starts to shine green and I'm so in love of the colors, the blooms, the breeze of hope that I also have the ability to grow new beginnings, and find my roots deeper and deeper in the soil, making me stronger. I'm supposed to grow strong and tall, find my purpose and bare fruit! And yes, I so want to! Let no winter of life (or Finland ;) be so cold or so dark that it would color my inside so dark that I would forget the colors painted inside me and lose the sense of my true purpose and the road I'm called to travel every day I open my eyes...

Last time I counted, I calculated having the amount of about 62 diaries that I've written throughout my life in my own solitude and many phases of life's journey. Letter writing has also been a hobby so dear to me when I was younger and I think I am here today, because I want to continue, start again these letters "to anyone who's out there", who ever wants to receive them, from my heart to yours...

I know I can write to the people I already know. But I choose to write to you because to much extent I believe, if we really are tuned into our hearts, we already know one another, too.
I don't think you are really a stranger to me even if I don't know anything about you.  I believe to a big part we are all drawn with much of the same colors to different forms. Your shape and form hold a heart just like mine. One with dreams, with hopes, with fears and challenges. A heart yearning to love and to be loved, in all the colors and their many seasons.

....From time to time we're better off without an audience.
- and other times it's so good and necessary to open up and live out our hearts. That is where the treasure is, yours and mine.

So here I am, with you, glad to be. Glad to share.
Thank you for the walk you walk every day to try to be the best YOU can be.
I don't see you and still I feel I can. Somewhere. See. You.
Trying your best. Fighting a hard battle of life, maybe. Beautifully knitted together with life's golden unbreakable thread. Crying. Smiling. Growing. Perhaps letting go, opening up the sails of your heart and singing to your piece of sky, let me fly....!

I believe You can!
See it,
I believe you already are!


Darling you, good night, sleep well, and sweet dreams.
I send you my love.

From my corner of the world,
Rina

Good morning, for once! (usually I've been writing good night times)

I think I will not be able to write all I want in the little time I have before leaving for work but I shall begin. I feel so overwhelmed somehow that I could cry and then laugh again, realising that laughter is there.

For about a year I've been processing the thought of centering myself from myself towards the outer world and people around me.

Yesterday was my birthday and I set myself to the challenge of doing 38 (ooops, is that my age? ;-) acts of random kindness. This thought nailed in to me earlier this summer after I had given a peony from  my garden to a stranger on the street. You see we have the most beautiful peony in our garden, that was the only plant we didn't rip off when we moved in here and didn't then yet know what it was but it seemed like a plant worth keeping and for the three summers we've lived here, it's brought me so much joy!  Last summer I missed the blossoming because we were in France so this summer I was even more anxiously waiting for it to blossom... and when it did, I was drunk with its beauty! :-D And so much that one day, I felt it overflowing in me that I have to share it - and so I took one flower and decided to just give it to someone on the street in the center of town. As I was driving to the center of town, I started thinking all the possible places I could take a flower, a nursing home, hospital...

I kept my decision however to give the flower to someone on the street and so I gave it to a woman outside the library. She was surprised, confused and thrilled at the same time. Just afterwards I went to the library to get some books and was looking for something but ended up in the "wrong" book aisle but there was a book standing looking at me with a title Creative Mind. I looked at it and felt IT was a peony for me - I took the book and read it in two days. It was so much for me, so encouraging to my writing process, as I had thought to write the whole summer and finish "a book" I've started - and I've written NOTHING the whole summer and felt like a lost writer from the words that well up in me in aching to come out.

Anyway... I had been thinking it for some time. My desire to be more courageous, to come "out of me" and to be open to where I am. I mean that when I'm going from place A to place B that  I just don't walk in a tunnel as there is no other purpose for me than that direction between those two poles, but to see with whom I'm maybe standing in line at the grocery store, or if there's someone I could give a hand to, or share a word...

My husband saw a childhood picture of me with boy I was holding with my arm and he made a comment that " Oh, you wanted to own people already then"  What....? Of course he hit it somewhere right, though its never something concious of me. I've had desire to have best friends though I've never wanted to name anyone that way because I consider myself to have a few close friends which I do not want to put in any order... but I've held the thought much in me of wanting to belong to someone, and I think that is something encraved in us as human. Our need to feel loved runs deep.



.....This letter has left unfinished but I will publish it anyway. Aren't letters that way sometimes anyway...

Rina

Shall i say a few words
funny how life is
discovering
realizing i've arrived somewhere
today is some lamppost on my journey

i like the feeling
looking back how i've made it
even stumbling so many times
i've made it some distance from my younger self
to some

deeper understanding

i am home with myself

and I shall keep writing
changing languages
from heart to head and
to heart again


...


I promise to be me.


<3 R

This is where I stand now

Hello...

It's a rainy day, friday. The winter is starting to lose last of its signs in the nature. The forest looks quite pale today. I'm waiting for it to bring forth the thousand tones of green... oh, the beauty of Spring when it arrives fully! I hope we get to bathe in the sunlight with the growing grass and flowerbuds that are waiting to pop out from the ground.

I don't really have anything to say.

Do you?

And then again, I always do...eventually. ;-)

I've got myself pretty occupied these past few months. Then, just some days ago I paused in a way that used to be my 'livingroom´, just looking outside, listening to the sounds that come from nature or our surrounding. My thoughts going easily back and forth like waves perhaps reaching new shores, perhaps not.

I've realised how my life is full of activity that doesn't often help my creative mind but blocks it. I need b-e-i-n-g like we all do. At the same I've made a notice of myself that I've lost some of that easy being I used to reach and know with less effort. Now there's a long list of things that I feel I have to go through in my mind as to let go in order to just be able - to rest my mind.

But  as making this notice I find myself trying to make more empty space in me for breathing and relaxation. At the same it's funny that even today I found myself getting grumpy about things that are lying around the house, too many THINGS and I wished I had a HUGE VACUUM I could throw them into and then just breathe Oooh, that looks better! :-D

We people (or should I just talk about me? ;-) get attached to things and then realize owning something is not the thing that brings forth that what we really need inside. I have the struggle of needing to create things and getting bunch of ideas from different materials and then I end up with some things that I have no use of afterwards - and unfortunately I don't throw things out fast enough. When we let things be, we somehow grow blind to them until it is removed and we see the difference and wonder, how in the world could I live or breathe that way?

I'm dreaming of simplicity. In my mind. In my body. In my home. And I know of myself that as I dream something I do start moving towards that goal - even though there are times I feel I'm moving one step ahead and then two back again. But even then, in all that frustration and turmoil of mixed feelings I think we get to know who we are - and start slowly changing our position -as in standing more solidly. Standing and not wavering. The trees have roots and in our forest there are some really tall ones that stand tall, unwavering even in the storm. They know who they are.

Maybe slowly I'm figuring out a new layer of myself as in an oignon (hmm, I think I just wrote that word in french -or is it the same in english -but can't get surely the english in my head now :-D)....

I don't know if any of this makes sense to you, I'm just making conversation with myself and you, whom I imagine to be there - and here.

Ha, I also think I have yet to find a true philosopher friend... If you're the one, please register! ;-)

And so again, I got carried off from the topic. Oui, ca c'est moi!

 For a few days I've been thinking if I should start yet another (3rd) blog, for writing in finnish. I've got myself the courage this spring to call to several magazines to offer my columns and writing but so far I've been rejected everywhere. They always say that we have fixed columnists for a long time now... Today I called the local newspaper and he said the same but then grew curious about what I write and so I proposed to send him a few, as I've done for many others too. We'll see.
At the same I'm not discouraged, I'm glad I've grown more accustomed to making the effort (it took me so loooong to contact the first one) and I believe at some point I'll find my spot...
-but actually that's what I also started to think that maybe I have to start MAKING my spot first in the form of a new blog to give arena to my thoughts and writing. We'll see! The writing course I have has been continuosly encouraging for me and ta-daa, I'm happy about that!

OKAY.

The rain stopped now so I shall end here my mental gymnastics of the day, ha-ha...

***************************
I hope you are well inside out...
sometimes it's hard to be well....
but to be at least the best you can now

Let's stand tall
there where you are
here where I am
be it sunshine
or rain
let's stretch out our roots
and keep growing
***************************

Love,
Rina