"We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting space for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you're craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own..."
~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I think it's wholly fascinating that joy and trauma are so close to each other -- laughing oftentimes looks like crying, and the reverse. Sadness is a degenerative state. Happiness is a regenerative emotion. Luckily and sadly, neither one of them are permanent. To me, life seems to melt from solid to liquid, evaporating into gas only to condense back into a solid, usually after a long, hard freeze.

I believe in a higher and all-encompassing power of good. I'm not setting out to convert anyone. But I just know that when I've learned, it means that it's been revealed to me past the bad and into the good -- things like learning the difference between strength and denial. Strength is active, denial is passive. One holds you down in a moldy basement gladly, the other lifts you up to see the stars in the darkness of night. To begin again, you must realize that fear takes many forms -- anger, hate, mockery, repression, apathy, loneliness, pettiness and so on -- in my life, fear equals letting go. I've had to let so many people go, naturally and unnaturally, which is not something I am innately good at. Lately especially, I've had to practice letting go. I replace fear with hope. But still every time, letting go hurts beyond words, years, and sometimes beyond a lifetime.

But I've also learned that replacing fear with hope equals peace. And peace feels like a soft, heavy, warm blanket that sinks down on you and then through you, all the way to your heart.

I am never good at letting go of people I love. I'm not even good at letting nearly loved people go. Which I'm realizing to myself that I "nearly love" a lot people, and I cherish them sometimes more than they can themselves, and I have a hard time giving up on them. It's not something I do on purpose, but I see the potential in just about everyone.

Faith, hope, and devotion: my strengths have sometimes also been my weakness. Even though it all hurts every time, I'm not giving up one, single thing that I believe in today. In fact and despite it all, I will probably add even more things to believe in tomorrow. In other words, I will strengthen through trauma with joy.