marla and me

This is Marla. You might have met her a few posts back. Few people have made me as happy as this here little sparkler. I miss her. A lot.

I find that this blog tends to spew a bit much on the loss of innocence, regret, nostalgia... but there's something indescribably beautiful and heartrending about our past. All of our pasts. Some of us have lived many many lives in many different forms in many different places. I suppose it is the great gift of life for us to choose our next life. And the great tragedy would be to find ourselves too complacent with the life we've chosen.

But is that the great tragedy? I look at someone like Marla, tiny as she may be, and see the value of simplicity. In that great, expansive land of Mongolia, in her tiny village, in her tiny house, in her tiny, squeaking plastic shoes, she's found the joy of life in a few verses of a song, in the fluttering of a butterfly's wings, in the scent of a purple wildflower. How can this sort of complacency be so terrible? Sadly, the more we experience, the less satisfied we become with the concept of simplicity. The more our eyes drink in the many colors of the world, the more our palates taste the spices from various lands, the more we dip our emotions into the ink jar of pain blackening so many nations, the more we feel a need to leave our nests and contribute to the history of another's timeline.

And so I go back and forth. Always wondering, questioning which is the right direction, which is the right path. What will it take to live a life joyfully? One's circumstance or one's outlook on circumstance? It's difficult to determine an answer.

All in all, one thing holds true. If we all lived like Marla, the world would be a better place.