Eden’s Garden

We use this one word so often, yet it contains in it so much power, 
Good-bye.  It is probably one of the hardest words to say on some days and the easiest on others.  It can be used without any passing thought when you are done having dinner and get up to go, or when you leave work or school, and although it can be said carelessly, there are times when it requires all the strength you can gather to utter this word even just silently to yourself.  In these situations, saying good-bye is coming to the reality that life changes rapidly and out of our control each day. 
We say good-bye when a person dies, when we loose touch with people, when friendships end, when we change jobs.  We say good-bye to struggle when we finally conquer it, when the cancer is finally gone. We say good-bye to the way things used to be, for they are always changing. 
This has become a powerful word to me, because for me to be able to say good-bye, is to forgive, and most of all accept things the way that they have played out.  As much frustration and hurt change can bring, it happens and most of all is happening.  Powerful healing comes about in being able to realize that there is an end to everything and in some cases you encounter that end face to face.  Its like we feel all this pain, but the moment we realize that we can’t travel back in time and change it, is the moment we are able to find peace in moving forward.  There is something so remarkable about the human ability to move forward, even when terrble tragidy occurs.  We somehow are able to draw the conclusion from all of the pain, anger, and loss we feel, that there is more and we push on.  The first step for me has been in saying good-bye, not with clenched teeth swearing as i walk away but as one whose very aware the the time has come for me to move on.  So I move on aligned with what I know is eternal and unchanging, lightening my load by throwing bitterness overboard, and off to wherever the wind takes me.  For from what always seems to look like a permenant end, the very seeds of life grow, easing the pain of the good-bye, by anticipating the hello closely following it. 

I write and rewrite, and what I want to say doesn’t seem to come out.  I feel as though I’m stuck in a square that I’ve built around my heart, painted on the walls the word “safe”, only to hide the bricks beneath, bricks of fear placed next to bricks of doubt.  Its funny how the things we use to keep us safe oftentimes we end up hiding behind and hinder us from living.  I guess these are the conditions in which I find myself living, or to put it better not living.  It is easy to live a life of caution, many people do it.  But to live a life of passion is something that is not often heard of yet it is something remembered, that kind of life conquers the boundaries of time creating a story unforgotten.  Think of the people who have lived passionately;Martin Luther King Jr., William Wallace, Patrick Henry, Thomas Edison, Mother Teresa, Jesus.  These people broke free from the shackles of mediocrity and we cannot help but pass on their stories.  It leads me to believe that we are so moved by lives of passion because it brings hope, something we scarcely allow ourselves to have, hope that the enormous amount of ability passions and potential for good that lay bottled up in us can, if we allow them to, come out and change or influence something.  Is it possible that the thoughts and ideas we have could change the world, or the state we live in, or on a smaller scale the city…our families?

This is just something I keep thinking about.  My hope for all of us is that impossible will be accomplished in small ways each day, and in large ways each year.  That the walls will slowly fall, and days that could have been lived in timidity will be lived in courage, and those days all together would make up a life truly lived and a story worth remembering.