Living in the mirror world

I have started to realize that so many elements of my life \ could be the stuff of books and movies. Not because they are terribly exciting, but because I see them as such. Isn’t that why we love movies and books? The stories thrill us and we long to be a part of them.

Yet ironically, often, those stories are so commonplace that if they happened to us in this life we wouldn’t even notice and would probably complain bitterly of our tedious existence. But when put in the screen of a movie or the pages of a book, suddenly to us they are transformed to fabulously epic tales, and we long to be a part of that world and live in those vast adventures. What changed? Not the story and not the world. Only our perspective of it.


Life is only as remarkable, enthralling, and exhilarating as your perspective.

It is rather like a mirror.

Have you ever stared into your bedroom mirror and looked at the reflection of your room within it? You know every dusty corner of that room; you see the rumpled bedspread and the old stuffed animal lying comatose on the shelf. And yet, when you look at that very commonplace, suffocatingly familiar room in the mirror, it seems so different, so exotic, somehow. It’s a world you long to be a part of, and you wonder what kind of adventures you might have if somehow you could simply step through that mirror into that other world, a world so like your own… and yet so different. Yet nothing changed in that world to make it a new and exciting land—nothing changed, that is, except your perspective.

I think life is a great deal like that. We can see it as the commonplace, everyday, rumpled-bedspread world that holds nothing and takes everything from us. Or, we can see it as the mirror-world, still with all of the same elements and all of the same details, but with an ethereal radiance that makes it the land of a storybook and a place of every adventure possible.

It’s all in your mirror.

The puzzle maker's tears

What does matter, if it is less the task and the place than you thought, if you forget them the moment they leave your sight? It is the soul-being that stays with you every moment, that is a part of you, that you cannot escape. It is your longing and desire to feed your inner fire, your soul fire, what makes you more alive than you thought living could be.

I love horses, but I love life just as much. I want to live in a dozen countries and walk on a hundred beaches. I want to go and move and be and see, always moving. I wonder if that is selfish. It seems like it, sometimes. All about me, what I want.

Is it selfish? Is it selfish to follow who you are to the ends of the earth? Or is it more selfish, more self-focused, to say, “Who is God to have made me this way?” Yet, it is hard to not ask that. It is hard when you feel like two, three, so many different people in one, each seeming to be so desperately, cruelly different from the other. Couldn't you just be one person? Isn't that enough for anyone? But not for you, of course not. No, you look at that, and you sit and you journal and you pray and you stare out the window at the cold, blowing snow and you argue with the universe day after day after day. And you never seem to get anywhere. And meanwhile, life keeps on stepping quietly forward, oblivious of your trying to hold it back.

But God knows. Somehow, he knows. And he will make it right.

What if a puzzle piece laid alone, flat, even in perspective with the other pieces on the marked, rough-wood table, seeing only the colorless gray edges of the pieces beside it, catching mere glimpses, and said, “I must not fit, I cannot be used the way I am.” It changed itself and cut off parts of itself to conform to its far-reaching omniscient knowledge of what the puzzle needed. It cried, it felt so ugly changing itself, but, it knew, it had to be done.

And then, when the puzzle was finished, there was a hole in its heart, where the puzzle piece in its original, beautiful, created state, was supposed to have gone.

And the tears of the Puzzle Maker fell.