follow the river to the fountainhead

"i’ll lighten up eventually, but lately i’ve been deep diving into the “gift of tears” an ancient belief that some sorrow is sacred. ⠀ early monks called it penthos: sorrow that cleanses, a second baptism. not weakness, but recognition but of beauty, grief, love and loss. a way the soul speaks when language fails. ⠀ i’ve cried lately over kindness, grief, animals mourning their people. and it doesn’t feel pathetic. sometimes it feels devotional. ⠀ they said if you cried during prayer, it meant divinity was near. ⠀ if you’ve cried this week, maybe it wasn’t just sadness. maybe it was holy."

“I’m just, you know, kind of happy in the doing of things. Even just having a great cup of coffee is happiness. Getting an idea, or realizing an idea. Working on a painting…working on a piece of sculpture, working on a film. One thing I noticed is that many of us, we do what we call work for a goal. For a result. And in the doing, it’s not that much happiness. And yet that’s our life going by. If you’re transcending every day, building up that happiness, it eventually comes to: it doesn’t matter what your work is. You just get happy in the work. You get happy in the little things and the big things. And if the result isn’t what you dreamed of, it doesn’t kill you, if you enjoyed the doing of it. It’s important that we enjoy the doing of our life.”

One day you’ll have whatever it is you’re now so confusedly seeking. That kind of calm that comes from knowing oneself and others. But you can’t rush the arrival of that state of mind. There are things you only learn when no one teaches them. And that’s how it is with life. There’s even more beauty in discovering it for yourself, in spite of the suffering.