thrift store shopping

have you ever lost something you didn't think you could live without?

i used to work at this thrift store in a small farm town. every day people brought in boxes overflowing with musty smelling clothes, oversized garbage bags teeming with shoes, books, lamp-shades, paper towel racks, rusty old hangars and other completely unidentifiable odds and ends. sometimes i would hold my breath as they dragged in pile after pile of curious objects.

as i'd begin to sort though the mountain of hopeless junk i would almost always find one or two items that would uniquely capture me...a colorful picture frame that perhaps once held a snapshot of a precious moment in time, or a magnet shaped like missouri -- possibly commemorating a special adventure.

i guess we will always stumble upon treaures. jewels that will capture us. perhaps they are filled with meaning or they inspire hope. for awhile those items might even define us, but most often there will come a time when they will get tucked in a drawer nearly forgotten about until someone is looking for a paperclip and happens upon your valuable keepsake. oh what a painful thing it is to be reunited with your lovely treasure! its meaning and memory might be as fresh as yesterday but is it really necessary or is it clutter? ah. the age old question ;o)

it is good to hold on to that which is truly necessary. but i suppose it is painfully beautiful to give up those things which you are holding onto for fear of losing something you might not be able to survive without.

i am told that the Lord intends to heal our wounds and bind up our broken hearts. it is to this promise that i cling as i stare - in utter disbelief - at my open, empty hands and wonder..."whatever will i do without?"

tears of joy

yesterday i disposed of a tear-filled tissue in a trash receptacle at the park. on the trash can someone had written "you are what you leave behind."

right now i guess i am teary-eyed.

there are many reasons for my sadness, but i guess i am learning that there is still joy in the small things. there is joy in finding hope -- whether its a coffee shop that plays your favorite music, a spring flower bringing life or maybe a penny left behind by some stranger who seemed to have better luck than i.

the viz

this is my school.

well, not all of it but this is a really big part of it.

it may not be that much to look at but there is a lot of stuff going on here that one might not notice at first glance. in the left hand corner you can see a girl resting on a bench. she might be there taking a break from the maddness of her class schedule or she might be a vistitor who came to walk on the foot reflexology path but it is most likely that she is studying her pharmacology.

this is our on-campus pharmacy!

i think it might be very difficult for someone to conceptualize what it is like to go to school here unless they are truly in the thick of it...in fact sometimes i don't think i even truly know what it means to go to school here yet ;o)

just today i passed a guy in the hall with a blonde ponytail down to his mid-thigh (carrying a three and a half foot sword) with jay-z blaring in his oversized headphones. that was right after one of my friends finished explaining to me why i must have died from a trauma to my feet in a past life -- and must therefore suffer through the pain of my festering blister a few days longer. i suppose that would make sense considering my aryuved instructor noted yesterday that one's kapha personality has a tendency to settle in the feet -- i really should cut back on the soy ice cream!

it is wonderfully strange to sit in the same classroom where we learn about biochemical pathways, prancreatic enzymes, sympathetic nervous responses and thoracic outlet (inlet) syndrome only to later sit with my classmate and evaluate his energetic field in sync with my own...as obliquely deformed as it is.

i cannot really put into words what this journey has begun to teach me, but i am loving every terribly mysterious step of the way -- and i find myself daily falling more in love with the fantastic Creator of our universe Who has sprinkled beautiful creativity into every last crook and cranny of our crazy world!

tasty veggis

today i learned that one truly does reap what they sow...

thank goodness for those subconscious moments when we do the right thing ;o)