When someone tells you to be a tree, you don't stand around and ask "what kind?". You just BE a tree.
~ Lofty.

Yeah. Life isn't lived by asking questions.

I get jealous reading and hearing of people who are living dramatic exciting lives in some exotic or fashionable sense. I read and listen, then implode to fret about my own little mundane existance. How very shallow and infantile of me. But then I realise that this isn't the case anymore, it's as if I had woken up on some dreary day and thought to myself "Bah! F*** this" and then lept out of bed to seize life by the horns and then wrestled to bring the both of us to higer heights.

The prize was empowerment. The gift of choosing what you do, for what purpose and how. The heightened responsibility and blossoming maturity, all taught me that one's life with all its excitment and drama really only reflects all the excitment and drama within a person herself to start with. I'm glad to be me.

I think I'm up and raring to go.

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I think that if I had told you then that you had made me cry,
We wouldn't be so fucked.
I'm sorry.

To give and be

I realise that building relationships -intentionally- is an intricate task. The questions at hand do not pertain solely to the means as much as they do to the motivations and the perimeters.

I shall not do so on my terms. That is pure selfishness.
I shall not do so on his/her terms. That is pure deceit.
I shall not do so on their terms. That is pure foolishness.

But do so on our terms, and maybe we'll get somewhere.

And in order to do that, we need to meet first, on the same stage.
Or at least, start facing each other.

Slowly.

I'm running out of things to say and the impetus to say anything.
Suffice it to note that I have been extremely busy of late, both in terms of things to do, things to be, and things to ponder upon. And while both my emotional and physical state picks up dangerous speed toward the end of the term, I have learnt to sift my sharing, giving revealing pockets to certain people, at certain times, for certain reasons.

One of which being that i have no energy to engage as such as I used to.

To Joshua and Lyndis: Congratulations and I want to be at table number 2.

Light up again.

If your relationship with God were a marriage, would it survive?

Watching Jabin prattle around the house while Sarah and Aaron parent him, being very real.

Your relationship with God is reflected in your relationships with everyone.

How can I seek to experience His providential grace, if I am needless?

Love it

A lot of talk on love going around these days. Must be the ghost of Hallmark's Valentine's haunting lonely hearts. But of late, I think in the shadowing days of my happy return on Singapore (for a full glorious 8 months no less), I am starting to worry about identity and relationships all over again. In the past 3 years here, I have laughed, loved, lost and cried.

I have made myself a home. This temporal window in Vancouver has had its role in shaping me. And I have gratefully lain roots down in its very, welcoming soil. And I love you all.

So I am going to return to Singapore for 8 months, and it means a lot of things. I am really excited about reconnecting with the Identity that has been granted to me there. I believe that it will require renegotiation. What with all the emotionalism that I underwent with Dennis and giving up my Citizenship, things have definately shifted under the surface. More then I am aware off.

At the same time, it will mean that I hang up interacting with my identity here in Canada. And unlike Singapore, where people stay put. Vancouver is notorious for its transciency, and most of the familiar faces that I have grown to identify with are leaving. To Japan, To India, To China, To Calgary, To America... Mars. And what then of these people who have moved me?
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On a seperate note, I have been revisitng Curt's notion of emotional fornication. This year has been especially bad. While I no longer have emotional one-night-stands with my victims demanding to know why I never call, I have been swimming though majority of my relationships, without commitment or anchorage.

Save for a couple.

So for now, before my energy and spirit finds itself in too many obscure pockets and friendly waves, I will be making an attempt to reconnect with the ones I seek to carry though life, past my university days.
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And while I am trying to find my center in all this, I will also seek to find the truth about myself.

In that, while being intentionally relational, I will be intentionally true.
And that means relearning how to forgive. For my inability to Forgive, both myself and others, manifests in an inability to seek how others can forgive me. And in doing so, I necessarily distance myself from relationships that have potential confilct grafted into them.
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And so it is, just like you said it would be. Life does go easy on me.

Most of the time.

The glare of that much-mentionned brilliance, love,
 Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
 To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
~ Larkin. Love Songs In Age.

All the promises we made.

I've been having a great couple of days. Very full, very alive, very aware. Looping around in the loop. I would, however, like to get a taste of being a silent observer and being comfortable with that. And herein lies the problems associated with roles and labels: you act like you are made out to be. Yes human agency exists, but only with human awareness.
.

'You'd make a great politician'
~ 3 very unrelated people.
in 3 very different situations

I have a question. Are you going to wear your socks high or low tomorrow?
~ Beautiful

Life was so simple back then.

So if it follows then that the reason for our pain, suffering and imperfection is due to our finite natures, then the real sin isn't in what we do, or what we fail to believe in, but in the very fact that we are finite. Or at least, made to me connected with infinite perfection. God. We were made, with the sole intention to be with God, connected with God, expanding gradually into His infinity as we grow in the likeness of Him.

But because we're finite, and that is our crime, it follows then that every good thing we are/have, every positive attribute one might possess is, by virtue of its limited composition, a flaw. Our patience dissolves into passivity, passion into agression, love into idolatry and faith into blindness.

Our strong points, inadvertantly become our weaknesses.

Nothing that we have/are, seperated from the boundlessness of God can be solely good. Therefore, everything that we have/are, the brightest good and cleanest virtures, are broken, dirty and weak. Be humble, for there is nothing good in you that you can claim for yourself. Apart from God, you are but a poor imitation of goodness, worthless like broken glass.

All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
~Isa 64:6