the rising sun set

I never cease to find myself utterly amazed by this world in which we live, by its beauty, its enormity, its endlessness. We people, live upon this earth that is itself a living, breathing creature, that sustains all of human life upon its very surface and is forever moving and changing beneath our feet. We are each but merely a minute speck in this infinite universe, yet in that same infinite context so to then is the earth or the sun we perceive to be sitting in our sky, that in its partnership with our planet aids the existence of life. For more evenings than I can remember I have found a magic in watching the sun set at the end of each day. It is however, the intriguing relationship that the sun has with the clouds that most fascinates me. But recently, I decided after a marvelous early morning experience to make a permanent adjustment to my body clock so that I could also daily be witness to the first rays of morning sun; those first offerings of light to a fresh new day, with an innocence that is untouchable. 

The interesting thing about a sunrise, and a sunset too for that matter, is that the sun neither rises nor does it fall. What we are witness to is simply our point of perspective. In fact every moment that the sun and earth move in their eloquent cycles as they do, the sun is constantly 'rising' or 'setting' for somebody in some place or another on this earth. The sun provides us with the light that we need to be able to see, well, to see anything at all. What use would it be having eyes if there was nothing to see? The sun that quietly burns 150 million kilometers away and the light it shines leaves a constant steam of beauty across our planet, a trail of sunrises and sunsets that illuminate the horizon ablaze with life as the sun dances with the clouds so charmingly.

On the days when you wake to cold grey clouds, the sun still shines above them.

Even when we sleep in darkness the sun still burns away; night is but a shadow that the earth casts upon itself when it rolls over to get a little colour on its back.

The sun brings colour to our world, even if some days those colours are all just different shades of grey. I've been teaching my boy that the words good and bad are not words we should use to describe a days weather. We seem to have grown up learning how to let the whether dictate our feelings, although, we have no control over the weather, but we certainly do have the potential to control our own emotions. Just because some days the sun can't shine freely into our individual lives due to a covering of clouds doesn't mean that "its not a very nice day today". When we learn to enjoy every day simply because we get to live it, then a cold, wet, or cloudy day simply offers different opportunities to find beauty in life. The sun never stops pouring light out everywhere it goes, when days feel dark and cold, don't forget there is still always light behind the clouds.

A life full of style - and a style full of life.

The practice of resourcefulness is one of the most favourite parts of my life, one of those things that pervades through all that I do. It is most often by way of having only very little that we might first learn to be resourceful, which in turn aids in the ability to find and have everything we need - or at least this is how I have come to discover the marvelous virtue of resourcefulness. Mind you, it's also handy to have a keen eye and to eventually discover what it is you like, and importantly what it is you don't, so that you can train your eye to know what you're looking for. Using the skills of your own hands to create things that become parts of your life is also incredibly rewarding. Growing plants of all shapes, colours, sizes and qualities from seed and planting them into the earth nourishes the soil, and in turn our lives flourish. Fossicking and foraging amongst rubble left behind searching for forgotten diamonds, to later find our own lives more full of character, unknowingly helped along by those who preserved the precious items from times gone by, to me is priceless... It's as much a way of life as it is a style - and I totally love my style.

What's extra handy about living resourcefully, providing you can be patient, is that you don't have to have all that much money to live in such a way. It sort of facilitates itself, it's by the very means that you come to be resourceful that is the platform upon which resourcefulness can become highly developed. I started out with nothing much at all and by first discovering and then developing the skills that now resonate through all of my life, and excitingly my little mans too, we have the ability to fill our little lives with the beautiful things that colour our journey. We have no greater means to work with now than we have done before, yet our lives have become rich and full. This is not simply by the items that we have collected that now adorn our home, but I have begun to feel a brightly shinning light resonating from within, and I can see that same radiance beam from my now comfortably adjusted seven your old son. I know that such a way of living is not for everybody, modern convenience has become the life for some, but for every morning that I wake to find another day of life presented to me - I couldn't possibly ever live it any other way.

So when I was feeling a little skimped on the secondhand purchases front for the quarter of this year already past, I quickly found a more enthusiastic perspective when I could look about and see what we had actually discovered on our happy little journey over the past few months, and really at very little cost at all. 

It became quickly apparent that with our resourcefulness we had in fact still been colouring the rooms of our house with more of our character-filled and vintage style. It was simply that it has become so much our way of life now that I had briefly not noticed. Apart from buying nice new underpants and the occasional piece of clothing when an accumulation of jingly-coins allows, I actually can't recall the last time I bought something new. Buying items from retail stores is just not something I can bring myself to do, and of course if I don't want to - I don't have to. I think we all at times forget just how many choices we actually have, in fact in every single thing we do we have a choice. Often there are a multitude of expectations before the fact, and both real and potential consequences after - that we allow - to influence our choices. But ultimately everything that we choose to do, or buy, or be, is based upon our belief in the extent to which we are in control of our own decisions. When you discover that you can be all and anything that you wish to be, what could be more incredibly freeing, and at that point you also discover that really.. nothing else matters. Life is unpredictable, and in that we are offered an endless array of opportunities and challenges that we can neither change nor control other than in the way we choose to respond to them. You become the person you want yourself to be - as it is in our choices that we are defined.

It's never to late to start living your life for you, because just like the sun wants to shine out through the rain - you can't sink a rainbow.