New Beginning

So I've decided to start using this blog. I don't know how long this new resolve will last, but I'm going to try. I'll probably just post small little updates most of the time, things I find interesting or some of my thoughts. I would'nt expect amazing things, but check back here now and then okay?

Thanks.

For now, there's a few quotes that I've come across lately that I'd like to share.

First is from Thomas Merton, a man who left normal life to become a Trappist monk in Kentucky and evidently wrote some pretty cool stuff. I want to pick up one or two of his books soon if possible.

"As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you will lose your peace of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities, and there is no joy in things that do not exist."

This grabbed my attention because I think it points out something that I find myself doing too often. I think I have a sort of imaginary self that I think people see me as being, and sometimes if that image is in danger of being broken or altered in a way that I don't like, I get really defensive about it. But that image isn't really me, it's just what I want people to see. I'm realizing that there are very few times when I've felt like I've exposed myself as I truly am, without trying to uphold any false image of myself.

Here's another one from Thomas Merton:

"Many poets are not artists for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by the circumstances of their individual lives.
They waste their years in vain effort to be some other poet, some other saint. For many absurd reasons, they are convinced that they are obliged to become somebody else who died two hundred years ago and who lived in circumstances utterly alien to their own.
They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems or express somebody else's spirituality."

So yeah, this guy seems pretty cool to me.

I close this one with a short comment on today.

This morning, when I got out of the shower and had dressed in everything but my shirt, I saw myself in the mirror. To my surprise, I saw my heart beating in my chest. It was just there, pumping away beneath the skin. I just had to praise God because I'm alive. No matter how good or bad anything else is, I'm alive.