I have lost count of how many times I have watched Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love – and this certainly isn’t the first blog of mine inspired by the movie. Two years ago I switched the words around and wrote an entry called Pray, Eat, Love within the context of my mother’s grief after having lost Daddy. The other night, however, the movie gave me some food for thought and prayer on my new life, the life I continue to struggle with.
There are five words that jumped out at me from watching the movie that I wanted to literally chew on:
Change – I have had more than my fair share of change in the last three years and I am tired of it. It has been a constant companion since my childhood and at some point I welcomed the years where I could actually settle down and not think about moving again. This time around, however, change involved so much more than boxes, and something much more than sorting out treasure from trash. The change I speak of is physical, emotional, intellectual, career, environment, society, spiritual, and above all, internal. In order to change one has to learn to let go completely and surrender to the fall. We hold on far too long to things that no longer serve their purpose and prevent us from moving on, and sometimes we don´t even realise it.
Goal – Having lost all my roles in life at one go, I need to find a new goal to work towards. I keep asking myself what it is that I seek and want to do with the rest of my life. Then again, why think on such a large scale? Change begins with having small goals to achieve and then hopefully they evolve into a series of small goals that keep pushing me forward. My first goal was to find a new house, then to transform these four walls into a home, and then I wanted my home to become my haven, an oasis to escape the outside world from and where I can recharge. I wanted to be surrounded by precious things that reminded me of family and reflected my persona, but then I realised I also needed space to breathe, so my goal was to whittle down until I had the essentials and the most powerful symbols, leaving a lot of physical space for me to relax, reflect and regenerate.
Inspiration – There is nothing worse than being stuck in a creative rut, writers block, or not finding anything that inspired me to use the camera. Then I learned that beauty is not always the best source of inspiration, but pain and confusion. Life is not always about the light, but learning to navigate our way through the darkness well, seeing with something else other than our eyes.
Purpose – This is the most difficult word to write about and live. What is my purpose in life now that all my other purposes have fallen away? I seek a new purpose as a writer, a photographer, a woman, and a person. What impact to I want to make on the world? What legacy do I want to leave behind?
Stability – this is my prayer, my goal, my personal challenge, the purpose of my changes, and a dream. I have no magic formula or wand that will make it appear out of nowhere but I work towards it with ever fibre of my being.
FrogDiva Thoughts 