It can take losing everything, to find everything

And then I realized, as I stood with my world, my life crushed and broken at my feet, that thing I'd learned months before but forgotten. I have a body, a heart, soul and mind and this is the place on which I need to rely. Not on the shaking, shifting superficial realities, but the deep core in which I've been afraid to look. Deep in that place where I am not perfect, not necessarily beautiful in any way or successful, but a collection of human, raw, real unshakable strength, ordinary like the sky.

Whatever governs this earth and the laws of gravity also governs me, and so with this adversity I understand that deep below the beautiful blue oceans lies a fiery lava, violent and unstable, and the perception that the universe is calm is a fragile myth. And I am a particle of all of this, a fragment of something large, violent, colliding, spectacular and much larger than my own limited thoughts.

As I shook, my earth shook, and exploding, destroying is not necessarily always a bad thing, as I watched all the things dear to me crumble to my feet, I was left standing. Clearly alone, which was both sad and powerful, like stepping out from behind the curtain to see I was my own Wizard of Oz.

And as sad as it was, my feet are strong enough to carry me across any sand, or rock or earth across which i need to travel, and so long as I can breathe and think and feel, I will do everything in my power to make my life and dreams real. I will not allow any illusions to steal that fuel from me. And I will not settle in temporary comforts, as inviting as those warm yellow windows look from a cold black night street, I will not trade.

No, Beneath my fears of losing it all, I always was the one standing underneath myself, holding it all up. And the foundations I believed were firmly under me, were really great dead weights balanced on thin porcelain arms, plaster dangerously close to cracking. So, I let go of the world and watched it all tumble to the ground and crumble off of my strained arms, my tight muscles and I finally relax. Just stand. Look around at what I still have, however little it is and I take one step barefoot in the dirt. In the sun. Perhaps without everything I need, but with myself, which is the strongest foundation. And from here,I build.