Happiness and the ripple effect of purpose-driven living

This is the best video I have seen this year. Very much on theme with my life and truly resonating with the space I am in physically, socially and internally. I love it!

When you act on your God-given, in-built nature and talent, the weirdest things happen. People show up that are excited by you, who buy-in to you and your dreams and inspire you to follow your own North Star. Even more astoundingly and far more rewardingly, your presence makes other people's lives better! When I wasn't doing what I loved I was miserable and sure of only one thing: that I did not sign up for this version of life. When I started pursuing only that which I loved my life suddenly felt meaningful and every day became one in which I had fun and relished every moment. Even the tough times are great and valuable. Even the scut work is fun and meaningful. Even the unfamiliar spaces and unknown territory feel like home - they feel right! Strangers have embraced me warmly. My literary heroine said she was honoured to be approached by me and offered to review my writing. What a time to be alive! Somehow, by doing what I love, I am helping people, showing them that they have value and bearing witness to their struggles and triumphs. I get to listen to people whose stories blow my mind and I have the honour of telling those stories to the rest of the world and somehow, just this simple state of feeling heard leads to profound healing in people. Everyone just wants to be heard, to be acknowledged and to be told that it is okay, it will be okay and they are not alone.

I know now that the real me is unrivalled. I know that only I can know what God put inside me and the part of Himself that He seeks to express through me. Only I know the dream He had when He conceptualised me and then created me. I am now only answerable to a quiet voice inside me that is connected to eternity, that knows and has always known what I was put on this Earth to do. It's so empowering that I can't even deal with how powerful I am right now as I send out warm ripples of love and open up to receiving the same during the brief speck of time I have been granted on Earth. This is true happiness. Hazzar!

Introduction: the beginnings of freedom

This is about collected things. Words, poetry, thoughts, music and images that I have stumbled upon, uncovered, marveled at and given place of pride. This is about cherished things, discovered and collected over time. It is about ideas, the kind of ideas that form organically after quiet observation, voyage and contemplation and slowly fit together like drifting continents revealing themselves to be a more honest version of the struggle of life. Because that's what it is, an exertion against the laws of nature from chaos to order and hopefully the highest level of existence: true freedom. So this blog is about collected things in my journey to freedom.
So where do we begin? We begin with a lesson on resilience; we begin with dandelions...

Dandelion Thinking 

Dandelions
don't care
that nobody cares
to cultivate dandelions.

Dandelions
don't know
that everyone knows
they grow everywhere.
Underfoot. In cracks.
Extravagantly. 

© Monica Cromhout 

I love this poem by the Zimbabwean-born Monica Cromhout because the vast majority of us have not had ideal conditions to nurture our development. Our leaders fail us, loved ones leave us, hunger, illness and natural disasters plague us, we blunder and fall. It's a life of hard knocks. But look at us still, dreaming, growing, learning, discovering and loving "extravagantly." Dandelions are those among us who are described by Paul in a letter to believers in Corinth a couple of thousand years ago as "regarded as unknown...beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich". Dandelions have nothing, yet they possess everything. 

Dandelion thinking is the beginning of freedom.

Freedom Square, Kliptown, South Africa. 3 000 resistors converged here in 1955 to draw up the Freedom Charter.

Two dandelions.

Will she make it through the cracks?