Rust is my Muse

A place to hide -clw

Life is in essence an energetic exchange. The world is vast and varied in its temperament, with lots of broken parts to examine.

It is the variety and psychological fragmentation of differences that brings about the beauty of humanity. It forces the fight to find something pure within chaos. This is what inspires artists to create, mothers to procreate. And nature to pollinate.

We are designed to develop more readily through stages of adversity as a system, as a society, as a family, and more importantly as an individual. The oak grows strong in contrary winds.

We advance as we fall. We evolve as we fail.
It is darkness that brings contrast to light.
It is the learning how to manage the up and down, side to side pendulum swing of emotion and environmental effects that brings necessary growth to surface.

Despair, disappointment, heartache and loss are divine lessons of pain to jolt enlightenment. To know thyself a little deeper; the excavation of psychological discovery.

It is the cycle of grief that brings birth into existence. The initiation unto a new layer. In order for life to flow we must let go of expectation.

Holding on to how society should be or how someone should behave or respond promotes attachment to negative thought. Find the education in your suffering. Let pain be your guide towards greater awareness.

You are, in fact, strong enough, beautiful enough, capable enough to endure what is happening before you and wiser for what is to come.

-clw

Written by: Cheryl Lynn Willis
Copyright © 2018

An abandoned dumpster has a way of speaking to me. He tells me his pain, his past, his story. I empathize with its secluded nature.

It's filled with trash and treasure that once meant something. Crammed with parts that once belonged to something whole.
It is strong and holds the memory of a home, of a structure. The reminiscence of a place that once secured with forgotten items that are of no use anymore.

Even as an empty metal tank it is sturdy on its own, yet hollow and desolate without holding those deconstructed pieces of the past. It vibrates a need to be charged, to be of purpose; to carry, to hold, to contain the recollection of its story. To give without speaking. Those remains become his identity.

As I walk upon the seemingly deserted staging of its eerie gravesite the dumpster immediately invites me in to observe, and I begin to scale his exterior. The top ground soil spreads softly between my toes as I inch closer to the vibrating decay. He knows why I'm there; to find a story within his suffering and neglect. I am summoned to celebrate the scars and scrapes that are somehow overlooked by everyone else.

He asks, as I respectfully investigate his external layer, "How do you see my beauty?"
"How do you know my pain?"
"I am just a dumpster..."
I lovingly say to the dumpster,
"You are so much more!" As the smell of his decomposing waste becomes more prevalent, the inspiring message of this narrative rises to surface.

You are beautiful in your purpose... Maybe unappealing to most, but understood by me.
Allow me to celebrate your condition, and photograph the state of your existence.

This is unconditional love.

-clw

Written by: Cheryl Lynn Willis
Copyright © 2018