Sunday, April 19, 2015

Perspective - Creating the Positive Picnic Basket

Picnic Basket
Charmaine's Past and Present
Fort St, Victoria.
G. Cornwall, 2012.

Life doesn't always feel like a picnic but if you are prepared to have one anyway, looking for the positive in every situation, life does become more simple. 

The unexpected turns of life, the potholes on our path, the barriers of our own creation, can be our demise or our opportunity to shift our thinking and our way of travelling through life - for what are we without these challenges. 

Stillness may bring us peace, opportunity to rest for a time, but in the long run we must shift in order to grow. Even as my bus driver takes a wrong turn causing delay, there must be opportunity. I see it as extra time to write on my way to work and, as one of the elders on campus once said, "You're not late unless everyone has already gone home."

It is not the perceived errors in our life that define us, rather the way in which we mitigate them. How do we face change or loss? Is there loss if nothing is held tightly? Like all things, like thermodynamics, we will move to where there is space for us to be. This is how we grow and learn and gain perspective.

Do not fear the fall. Prepare yourself for it by living a life of gratitude, in peace, accepting that change will come and that all is well. Accept each breathe as a blessing in which to be present, an opportunity to live and to love with an open heart and an open mind.

A poem on perspective:

I elevate
I reach
beyond that which I believe
the land of exploration
the sensation
the bold and brave new world.

I search
for another way of being
something more freeing
with more meaning
where a hand reaches out 
for another hand.

For if we truly work together 
there is enough for everyone.

If I take away desire
-for stuff brings strife-
and focus on the stuff of life
If I let love be my fire
and make true
the path between me and you,
then I elevate,
I reach
beyond that which the world believes.

If I live a life of gratitude,
not servitude,
If I feed the world 
with my soul, my light
then I will know
what it means to live free, to live right.

-Gillian Cornwall, c. July 7, 2013.
Re-posted here: April 19, 2015.

Big Island - Parker Ranch
c. Gillian Cornwall
Oil Pastel on Paper, 2007.
$200.00

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