READ THIS LETTER OFTEN

A letter to my children

To the 3 beautiful souls I helped bring into this world…

Liam, Mila and Keller, all three of you, so beautiful, such big bright beautiful smiles that can light up the darkest of days, days that I hope you never have to see and experience ever.

I hope when you awake every morning, and greet the days with the same vigour and determination that the sun does every day.  Without fail.  I hope you take time out on the rainy days to reflect on how, just like the sun needs to shine, the rain needs to let go of the weight it’s been holding onto.  Take those days to read, or write down how grateful each day that comes and goes makes you.  Write!  Learn to jot down everything that happens to you and feel the release and comfort it brings putting feelings on paper.

Play.  Never let your playful side deteriorate as age creeps up on you.  Play games, make jokes, do pranks, whatever it takes to keep your body and mind moving in a playful manner. 

Laugh.  If ever you stop laughing, you stop living.  I urge you NOT to try this.  Laugh at life, you never get out alive anyway.  Laugh at your siblings because no matter how mad they make you, remember you share the same DNA, laugh at your parents because most of the time they have no idea what the hell they are doing.  Laugh at yourself, because if you don’t other people will.  Never stop laughing.  Never stop showing your teeth to the world, and embrace the laughter too in others.

Learn.  Remember, learning is the mother of all gifts you can give yourself.  Learn and take in knowledge on just about anything.  Even if you don’t take an interest in the given subject, learn about it anyway, you’ll never know when you can give your two cents worth and maybe help someone in need.  Your brain in super powerful and you’ll be surprised how much information it can store.  And no, it won’t explode even though on some days it may seem so.  Your mind is one of the most important things on you, and a knowledgeable mind coupled with your beautiful personalities will be of your utmost prized possessions.

Cry.  Yes, cry.  Not like you’ve seen mommy cry because that’s way too much.  Cry when you are happy and by all means cry when you are sad.  They say crying is a means of release, and the release you feel after a good cry can be just what the doctor ordered.  But don’t cry too much, you have to know the difference and distinguish when the cry is normal and when there is something else brewing.  Learn to know that difference and take action quickly before it’s too late.

Celebrate.  Celebrate whenever possible.  Firstly, celebrate every day.  It’s a gift.  Life is short and we need to be celebrating much more than we do.  Celebrate your birthday, for without this given day, at that given time and the unique alignment of all the planets, the sun and the moon at the exact millisecond you wailed your first lung’s capacity is a very special blue print of who and what you are, only you will ever have this moment to yourself always.  Celebrate your accomplishments, you deserve it.  Celebrate your failures, without them you wouldn’t know what you really excel in.  Celebrate all special occasions without turning them into disasters later.  You will regret it and so will everyone else you were celebrating with.

Make lots of friends and few enemies.  It’s a given, not everyone will like you, and make peace with that.  Not everyone on this planet can get along, and know when you do spot a gem in the making.  I have a very odd way of making friends.  They had to grow on me.  I have huge walls that need to be ventured over first.  You don’t need to follow in my footsteps and plead with you to give people a fair chance, just like you will want people to do for you.  You will make many friends in life, those that vibe with you no matter how many times you think they must be crazy to stick around, yet do.  Those friends, you should treasure forever.  And don’t be sad when friends drift apart, that’s also part of growing up.  But never stop making new ones.

Understanding.  Not everyone is able to understand things from your point of view.  It is your duty to try and talk and convey your viewpoint so that people can understand it from where you are standing.  And don’t get mad when they can’t.  You also need to have understanding for others.  We are all different, we are all from different walks of life and not everyone is the same.  Thank God for that.  Can you imagine the boredom?  Take an interest in developing your understanding for things beyond your control and how to handle it in a calm and understanding manner.

Anger.  Scrap this emotion totally from your vocabulary.  We are all prone to anger outbursts from time to time but please, and I can talk from years of experience here, do not make anger a foundation on showing the world how mad you are at it.  The world has done nothing to you.  When you feel angry, stop right there.  Remove yourself (mentally) and observe what it is that is making you feel this horrible emotion.  Take a deep breath, take 1000 if you need to, but don’t act on it.  If you need to take a walk, a drive, a swim, whatever it takes you to chillax for a bit, do it.  You will only regret what comes out of your mouth and once it’s out, it’s tickets.  And once those tickets have been printed, the printer can’t unprint it.  The receiver of the tickets will not want them either.  Ticket wasted.

Love.  Love as much as you can squeeze into your heart.  I cannot stress this enough.  Love and love deeply.  Have your heart explode with the best feeling and have it broken into a trillion shards which will feel irreparable.  This will give you respect for the enormity of how great and important love it.  Treat this emotion with respect.  Carry it around like piece of blown glass and protect it as if you might accidentally stumble into an Opera House out of the blue.

Discover.  Discover yourself.  Never stop discovering, never stop enquiring and looking for new interesting things about yourself, other people, and this can go onto just about anything.  Discover new places, discover new likes and dislikes, discover new foods, discover new abilities, discover deep and meaningful things that make your discoveries a pleasant one.  Discover what takes your breath away and discover what makes you want to crawl up into a small space in terror. 

Dream.  And dream big.  Everything ever achieved was first a thought, a dream.  Whatever you do, do not dream without action.  If you have a dream or a goal, go out and do it.  Do it because you can and will achieve anything you set your mind to.  I know you have the ability to do so.  I had so many dreams and yet very little pull through.  Don’t make that same mistake.  The world is for you to conquer.

Hurt.  Hurt, feel what if feels like to be at the bottom pits of a black swirling vortex being swallowed up by the demons that make the core of this earth a deadly place to be.  Don’t stay hurt.  Know who is at fault, if it is you, I’m sorry, you’ll probably have to deal with your mistake and act upon it.  If it’s not by your own hands, you’ll also need to act upon it, but do it wisely.  Hurting is fine, but remember it’s just a pit stop.  Not a destination. 

Remember.  Remember that I love you so much, I want the best for you at all times which I seldom can give you.  Remember that although I seemed sad a lot of the times, it might have been a happy sad.  Or if it was a sad, sad, I apologise for letting you watch me and not be able to do anything for me.  At those times, not even I could do anything for me.  Please know that every time you think I was irritable with you, it wasn’t with you personally, it was with the situation I could not come to terms with.  I apologise that when I needed space and told you to go play outside, that I did not even want to be in my own space and did not want my negativity to rub off onto you.  If you ever wanted to play longer or watch more TV and I never allowed you, I know how important it is to get lots of rest and know that trying to cope on very little sleep will only spiral into a bad habit of insomnia which can let the mind wonder into places that you might not be able to get out of.  Remember that I wrote this letter from the bottom pits of my heart and wrote it truthfully, out of what I’ve learnt so far from my 36-year experience on what I think is a very unforgiving place to be.  Remember that this is my perspective only and remember that I AM TELLING YOU that this is wrong (my perspective).

Lastly but most importantly.  Don’t forget to look up at the phenomenal skies at night.  Take an interest in the phases of the Moon, once the beauty of the moon reveals itself to you, you’ll never be able to look at the night sky the same.  You’ll forever be in absolute awe of the night time skies.  Study the stars and map out the planets, once you know how they work and how they affect you at certain times, you might have a better understanding why things that you can’t explain are happening or affecting you.  Learn about yourself via astrology, and know that, that blue-print I explained earlier on in my letter is of utmost importance.  You are written in the stars, we all are, we came from beauty and we will most definitely return back to beauty.  It’s your duty to make your journey on this strange and misunderstood planet a trip that you will not forget.

May every blessing come your way and may you find yourself, do what you love and live with purpose.  I love you dearly, you were made with love and you will die with love.  And this to me is what is most important.  Be love, be in love and give love.  Always give love.

APPEARS TO BE ODD - INTRO

APPEARS TO BE ODD

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By Tracy Trace

I’ve been dragging my feet for about 3 years now threatening to start writing. Then I had the courage and drive to do so and next moment I’d cower down because of what I thought about other people’s opinions, people I don’t even know and people I will probably never meet in my lifetime, well, this one anyway.

Who would want to read my story or even more, who would even really care?

I’ve always liked writing, it always feels better to lighten off the load onto paper and I can probably communicate much better with pen and paper than my actual tongue.

Somehow in conversation, the dialogue and thoughts I had fathomed up in my head never leave my mouth in the simplified sequence I had mapped it out in my mind. No Sir-E, it was definitely a given that actual face-to-face communication was not my forte.

Even more so when it came to conflict, arguments or just plainly trying to get a point across to people envisioning my thoughts.

Trying to solve the moon landing would be easier (which of course, to me is totally plausible, do NOT debate me on that!).

Because of this “communication debilitation” I would most of the time retract or walk away due to complete frustration within myself trying to process the information, trying my very best not to get too ruffled and then there are times when I just give up totally.

My mouth and my mind, M&M, and not the gangsta rap artist though, had a constant battle of the bands. Frustrating it was.

We are all given a unique mind and in today’s society a right to voice our own thoughts and opinions, contradictory to this statement we still have to watch our words and actions. This brings me to a topic I can cringe over, PC, better known thanks to the controversial animated TV series Southpark, where they introduced “PC Principal” with his infamous tag line “Watch your PC bro!”

Although being a politically correct know it all, PC Principal ignored the moral fundamentals of basic human instincts like…KILLING PEOPLE!

This is what is wrong with today’s society, everyone is sweating the small stuff and focusing on the irrelevant crap the media shoves down their gullets than actually fixing the real stuff.

When last have you grabbed the latest gossip mag only to read that Kylie Jenner has recently had a massive melt-down but just a few weeks prior to her melt-down she could not get enough media attention trying to make top dollar following in the footsteps of her older siblings?

Is what you’re reading really relevant to you? How did you feel reading that bit of media hyped up gossip and did it change your life? Did it make you feel better about your so-called “normal” life or did you genuinely feel sympathy for her?

In my opinion, meh. Not relevant to me, as I feel media will build you up and break you down just as fast and then gasp in the glory of negative super sales.

A saying I absolutely try to use daily “not my circus, not my monkeys”. My own drama is more than enough for me to handle. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Anyone who knows me well enough will say I’ve always wanted to be rich and famous. This was true when I was in my teens, not so true right now. Yes, more money will always be welcome to live a little more comfortably, but fame…nah, keep that. I will pass.

You want a fast ticket to the grave, adopt some fame.

But what I do want to do is leave my mark on this world, even if it is a handful of people like friends and family it would still be a mark, no matter how small.

You see, even though I’d much love to leave my mark, that mark tends to jump around like the monthly graphs of the stock exchange.

I’m a dreamer, a floater, a bit more of the latter though and had I not been proudly “lazy” I would probably never hit ground level. “Lazy” in inverted commas because saying this, I can be extremely efficient when I need to be. So efficient that I make the time to be lazy afterwards. This up and down scale of living coincides with my star sign, Libra, the scales, there is never a middle ground. EVER. Knowing this too, Libra my sun sign being an air sign and Gemini being my moon sign, also an air sign, do you see my dilemma here?

This right here is proof that my head is 99.95% up in the clouds. Genuine proof. Hence the dreaming, too much dreaming done and not much doing. This makes achieving my dreams and goals almost impossible because had I not been dreaming and focusing on the end results, the red carpet or the award celebrations, I’d actually have time to get down to the nitty gritty and as we all know the nitty gritty gets (for lack of a better word) gritty.

So this is the gritty and I’m finally pulling my finger out of my butt-hole and getting down to it. Although as horrible as it sounds, it takes me away from my usual shit I have to put up with on a daily basis. You know the usual shit we all have to put up with and either sort it out or shrug it off.

It’s my outlet that reboots my inlet…so here I am, giving you my last 3 years or so of the madness, turmoil, swirling hexagons which has become my life.