#thewildpen

Step into your power.

There is star dust

In your soul,

Dragon fire

In your heart,

Fairy wings

In your fingertips.

Remember

Who you are.

Who you have always been.

Sacred.

Wild.

Untouchable.

You are MAGIC.

Painting is by Hannah Forster

I wonder if the flower trembles

When it's time

To blossom.

If it huddles tightly

In its fragrant bud,

Savoring the safety

Of a velvet hug.

I wonder if it aches

As each petal

Unfurls.

Leaving a gentle cocoon

To stand alone.

Exposed to sun, wind, rain,

And uncertain lovers.

He loves me.

He loves me not.

I wonder if it shivers

With laughter as insects

Alight.

Does it feel

Pleasure or fear

As strange bugs

Find its secret nectar?

I wonder if there is a sense of loss

As each colorful leaf turns

Paper brown.

Without a backward glance

The plant turns to the future,

Leaving behind the flashiness of blossoms

For the practicality of seeds.

Forgotten

Each petal

Falls.

Each tightly furled bud

Knows death in its roots,

And still it

Blooms.

Dear friends,

Heed the flower's

Wisdom.

Tremble

If you must

But always

Blossom.

J

You are allowed to hope.

A world without hope is a world without DaVinci, Michealangelo, and Galileo. None of these great thinkers would have lifted a brush, chisel, pen if it weren’t for hope. Hope that the world could be bigger than it currently seemed. Hope that what seemed impossible could one day become reality.

Hope is the fuel of every ambitious endeavor. It is what caused early humans to plant seeds along the Nile. Centuries later, hope sent rockets into space.

Hope is a defining characteristic of great leaders. A key element of every uprising and global shift. Dangerously powerful. Incendiary. Contagious. Breathtaking. Give people hope and they will overthrow dictators. Give people hope and they will overcome race, gender, bigotry and misogyny.  Give people hope and you will see more charity, compassion and generosity.

We find the ability to love within the experience of pain. Each time our heart cracks and heals, it expands. We become more capable of understanding the depth of the human experience, of recognizing what truly matters. The more we feel, the more compassion we're capable of.

And so I stand open to every experience. I allow myself to risk pain. And when it comes, I greet it with compassion. I feel it all so that I may love it all.

Everyone shows their successes. But what I want to hear about is your failures. If you want to say something powerful, talk about when you were afraid. Weave me a tapestry of how you thought you couldn't and then you tried anyway. I want to know when you took a risk. Tell me about the guy who broke your heart, the loved one who passed, the investment that flopped, the dream that was not what you'd imagined.

Tell me you tried.

Nobody really cares about the successes. About the medal of achievement. We want to know what you risked, what you loved, what you lost. About the ways life broke you and you loved bigger because of it. About the truth that is hard to say to yourself in the mirror because you can't even stand the judgement in your own eyes.

Jayenna Wild

The Earth does not grieve

When the Sun moves

His attention elsewhere.

She knows she is

Too big,

Too much,

Too grand

To be known

All at once

All the time.

She also knows

How to pull

Her warmth inward

And care for herself

Until he returns.

Anyone who has been broken remembers well the incident. It is a moment of complete weakness and humility. There is no pretending. There is not even hope. Just the rawness of complete and utter destruction. All the threads unravel from our grasp and the puppet show collapses. And we cry over the pieces of ourselves. Jagged, shards of a broken mirror, reflecting our fragments. An eye, an ear, the corner of a mouth. A Picasso of a life scattered beneath the feet of passerby. Because people do not stop to notice the broken. In our lowest moment, we are made lower by a world that refuses to look at pain. And there is no putting it back together. As if a little scotch tape could close a severed artery. The shards of who we are, become who we were, ground to dust beneath the traffic of life moving forward.

In this moment, there is nothing to hold on to. Only phantoms that seem foreign and strange. Memories of an alien life from ‘before.’ A world where we did not know the pain of our own limitations. Where we lived in the illusion that we were the hero and that our adventure would lead to great things. In our broken pieces, we finally see that we are all the things. Hero, villain, sage, innocent, explorer, novice, mother, child. Countless faces, more than we’d ever imagined stare up at us, each with their own story in our lives. Each with their own role in our destructions.

And as these many stories grind down beneath the forward movement of life, a beautiful thing happens. We still breathe. Our eyes are gone and yet we see the people hurry past. Our ears are powder and yet we hear the symphony of life.

Because when everything you are is destroyed that is when you can finally become. You didn’t even know you were trying all this time to become. That beneath the layers that life had piled on top of you, the layers that you’d piled on top of yourself, beneath the need to stay safe, stay familiar, stay home, that beneath all the fears, hopes, dreams and things, you were really just an egg, waiting to hatch.

I wonder what it feels like for the phoenix the first time it bursts into flame. As the pressure builds and the temperature rises, it must feel absolute terror. All of its growth, its feathers, bones, talons, eyes and beak, all of its investment in life comes to an explosive end and it must begin anew.

If you’ve broken, you know this. If you are in the process of breaking, you know this. We resist and resist and resist, grasping at the strings of our puppet show. Desperately needing the world we’ve constructed to go on turning. To stay the same. To stay safe. To stay known. Because exploding into flames is terrifying.

I am grateful for the things that broke me. In my resistance, in my terror, in my grasping, and in my naive desperation to keep life small, I broke. In spite of myself, life happened. And I am grateful. I can finally become.

-Jayenna

Happiness is not found by reaching a goal. It is not even found by overcoming life's struggles. You find happiness right where you are. Right in the midst of the battle, the struggle, the pain and the failure. Because life is struggle. Life is pain and life is failure. This is not all that life is, but this is a big part of life. Sometimes, it even feels like it is our entire life.

Relish every experience, the highs and the lows, the failures the victories. Feel the joy of being alive. Learn that you are joy. As a human being, living, experiencing, failing and achieving, you bring the joy to every situation.

Find the joy within your pain and you will find happiness.

J