I.spit.creativity

Her story is one of broken hallelujahs. She was the brightest star in the bunch and left a legacy for everyone who knew her. She loved to laugh, and if she wasn’t smiling she was making everyone around her smile. Her life was full of struggle. Being born first generation here in The U.S. as the first female child in a traditional Mexican family was like trying to knock down a brick wall with bare fists. She and her siblings were challenged from the start of their entrance into this world.  To cope with all the challenges life had placed she decided to challenge the life around her right back. Even as a child she didn’t let people mistreat or ever take advantage of her. With her soft face and wild hair she’d look right into their eyes and tell them to go to hell.

Bertha was the name given to her by her mother whose name was Bertha Maria, and as a junior she was called just that. Her siblings called her Beth, because to them she was the softer version of their mother. Those outside knew her as Marie because this was the face she used to be fearless. Marie was the shield she had put on to withstand the world around her with beauty, insight, and adventure. She had a passion for the wild and free life that was not given to her at home. My grandparents were hard workers and demanded a strict ethic and morale from their children. Their sense of ethic and morale was one of the late thirties in a rural state in Mexico. By the late fifties times had changed and the life they worked so hard to change was doing just that, changing. Los Angeles was booming with freedom and liberality and the sixties began to soar. She was a child of free love and had a soul so far from being trapped it was almost running away with the movement of the times. She showed her sisters how to be strong women here in the now. She gave them the tools to live without chains and guilt. She showed my mother how to seek the passion that drove the forces we all hold within, a great lesson that was later passed down to me. She loved so greatly, and when she gave she held nothing back. She loved the quirks in life and held her personal belongings close. She wore an array of gorgeous rings on her fingers and each ring was for a different lesson in her short-lived life. I think she found different sources of strength in her rings; I use them in that same spirit and feel the strength each one holds when I wear them today. She held her worries back and always devised a plan to make any given situation better. When people think of her now, they still see her smile. She had such a big personality that when she surrounded herself with others she couldn’t help but shine.

1. Now is a place and time I don't want to be in. (Granted people have been feeling this for ages but does it come from a  sense of living in this moment or actually not having a clue what will be in the future?)

2. Now is the present. (Taking the word pre-sent and literally acknowledging that this now might actually be something that has been given rather than stumbled upon.)

3. What am I doing now that is different from my past and will be different in my future? (This question is not a statement, but day after day we challenge ourselves to be better people. In our egotism we encounter that we are always craving change, so essentially are we uncomfortable with now because we want it to change?)

4. I live in the now! (Well DUH! We all say this at one time or another but do we really? Isn't life just a series of comfortable events we create that have us continuously linking day after day or is it really spontaneous events that combust together forming something that reminds us of who we are everyday?)

5. Now is the time. (This statement can be dissected in a few ways but I'll go with the most intriguing. We also say this one and even think it when we need to make an immediate decision but would't it actually be that the now is not the time but the mark and the time could only become the future. So really if one were to say now is the mark then we might actually believe in the importance of now.)

6. Now it's better. (While I'm all for the better times and the golden road ahead I often think that this statement was devised by the devil if he existed himself. Now is the same. You might have just now gotten off of Facebook or been looking through work emails at 2 am. Now is just as meaningful as your first kiss or that time you decided to jump into the ocean off of a cliff. This now is just a fragment of the moments that make up your life and if it weren't for the now's you would have nothing.)