Mind Explosions

I'm awake. I'm awake, I'm awake, I'm awake.

And I should be sleeping. Of course. I know this. I have class in the morning. But my brain keeps going. This could be because of the coffee that I drank at 8pm, or the fact that I've been watching documentaries all day, and my brain just keeps rolling.

From how beer saved the world to four college kids going to Europe to discover Christianity within themselves and how others view god and faith, my brain has not stopped downloading information. I love documentaries with an alarming amount of passion (obviously, because I have been watching them on Netflix since about 2 this afternoon and it's almost midnight). But why do I love them so much?

They inspire me to go and do and be. Be human. Discover life.

If I'm gonna be completely honest, what I really want right now is a turkey sandwich on whole-grain with mustard and mayonnaise and lettuce and tomato and sprouts. It just sounds good. But I had granola, and I have no money to go buy these ingredients, so the sandwich won't happen for awhile.

So instead, what I'm gonna do is ponder things. I ponder faith a lot. Probably multiple times per day. For anyone who knows me, they know that I'm pretty well adjusted as a person and I'm pretty set within my own faith.

But I wonder about it anyway, and sometimes I wander somewhere and get lost, away from it. Well, I'm glad to say that I have slowly been coming back into it, and I have so many more things to add to it. I feel like, when it comes to faith, you sometimes need to become lost, either within it or outside of it, because it is then that you have so many different experiences in life and within yourself. You find yourself asking more and more questions, seeking answers, and when you return to it, it's like returning home from a trip to another country, or even another state or city. Your mind has expanded and you understand the world a little better, so in turn, you understand yourself a little more. You want to share pictures and stories with your friends and family, share the culture with them. Only, with faith, you share your experiences with yourself. You place your understandings into empty places where they connect to one thing, which connects to another and so on. Your mind becomes more grounded, your heart and spirit more peaceful.

When I first moved to Washington, I had a faith epiphany. A re-birth of self. It was incredible, and I don't want to say that it happened within a moment, but there was a moment that I realized it was happening, and where. It didn't happen in a church, it didn't happen with any family members or any sort of religious guidance. It happened outside. In the rain. Amongst the trees, the ferns, the nasty slugs of the rainforest that is the Pacific Northwest. By myself. I was on a trail at a park, being a hippie artist chick, taking pictures of the moss on a tree branch, and there it was. There was God, life, souls, myself, reality, peace, truth. Faith. There I was. My soul. God. Nature. My soul, God, and Nature. All as one. I knew who I was. I knew that I was walking the right path. I was not perfect, nor would I ever be. I would be constantly changing, I would make so many mistakes that I would sometimes want to slap myself in the face. But I knew life would go on, that I would accept these, forgive myself, know that I had made them, take those to heart, and know that I was still a true and beautiful person. Not on the outside--again, anyone who knows me knows that I tend to not care much about outward appearances--but my humanity, my soul.

Faith is about discovery, and I think many people completely overlook this massively important part about it. It's not just about searching for God in religion, it's about discovering life, because God is life and nature, and life and nature is God. Experiencing all of the people, culture, places, talents, natural beauties that God has placed upon this Earth, discovering what it means to our souls, our minds, and loving every single thing for what it is and knowing in your heart that you are meant to live this path even if you're scared, that's faith. Without discovery, I believe that we truly miss out on the whole of God.

I recently became lost in myself, and therefore became lost in my own faith. I have come back with full force, with a stronger heart, understanding more about life that I can now bring into my faith (whoa, no joke I think I had a dream about writing this post...I have those too, since I was a kid...weird prophetic dreams and feeling the energies of something besides myself within a room, which is freaky, but we can talk about that one later). I have come back as a better person. I'd like to credit this to one question a friend asked me months ago, slightly intoxicated, smoking a cigar.

"What do you think is the meaning of life?"

That's all it took. I didn't know how to answer. I knew it had to be in here somewhere...I just didn't know where. Then I realized...where had my faith itself gone? I didn't even notice that I had wandered away from it. I also realized that I had been worried about how other people would see me and my faith.

Well, maybe I needed to work my way back to it. Since then, I've been letting myself wander back into it. I don't work well with immediate, club-myself-on-the-head, dive-right-in-and-get-to-it faith. Sure, that works for me in a lot of other things, but not faith. I have to poke around quite a bit first. So I've been poking, and my poking had been turning into prodding, and my prodding has turned into throwing the cookbook aside, turning up the music and dancing on the table while mixing the dough.

So here I am, mixing the dough again. Still pondering the meaning of life, or my life, as it were, because I truly believe we all have different meanings, but being one with myself and my faith again. And not worrying about how other people will see it. Other people will see what they want, and interpret how they will, no matter how plain and straightforward you try to make it. Some will take you at face value, and many, many others won't. But truly? You know. And God knows. As long as you are a true, genuine, caring person who accepts imperfections and faults, you are following the right path that God has set you upon. And to me, that is what matters.