Poetry Heals the Wounds that Life Inflicts

you are as young as your faith,
as old as your doubt;
as young as your self-confidence,
as old as your fear,
as young as your hope,
as old as your despair.
When the wires are all down
and all the innermost core of your heart
is covered with the snows of pessimism
and the ice of cynicism,
then you are grown old indeed.

But so long as your heart receives messages
of beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur
and power from the earth,
from man and from the infinite,
son long you are young
Samuel Ulman

Awakening...

Your vision will become clear only when you
can look into your own heart.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

 C.G Jung

One night when I was away this summer, I looked at a sky darker than darkness and studded with stars so big, so luminous that I could reach and  pluck them up like diamonds for the diadem of a goddess, and I felt awe.  I felt an energy surging inside me that was both exhilarating and humbling. Some people would call it religious.

I sat up and wondered when in this busy life of mine, in the strife for knowledge, career, and accomplishment I lost the innocence, the enthusiasm, the imagination of the child I used to be.

When I was a little girl I used to look at a similarly mystical sky, but the stars then were not celestial bodies with lives extinguished millions of years ago, they were valiant warriors felled by the hand of a powerful, jealous god. They were lovers to whom the gods granted eternal life in the sky after death. They were Orion and Aphrodite and Perseus and all the heroes who fired my imagination and gave wings to my soul.

The truth is that I missed that little girl terribly. So, I made a promise right there and then: to find her again and bring her back because at this stage of my life, awakening and renewal and purpose come from looking inside and finding the child who knew how to dream.