"Be the change you want to see in the world."

The sun, old friend, has come around again, cleansing the wintered lands, making me feel younger than I am. The season of spring is like a crank with one end punched through my heart, winding, winding up my wanderlust. The puffs of palpable breath that flowered from my lungs in winter air have disappeared, the pale appearance of snow substituted with sprightly shoots of flora, and I could almost swear that these bones, this flesh, couldn't keep my heart from bursting with this bliss.

And it's the shifting of the seasons that stirs up within me a longing for revolutions and radical alterations. Sometimes we're ravenous for change, sometimes we shy short of it, however, how often we all seem to stand and proclaim that we wish to change the world, while we say to one another, and our beloved, "don't ever change".

We cannot let our souls be as if bottle corks aimlessly bobbing about in the sea, no, we must swim, limbs looping through the tides that transform, or sink with the weight of idleness around our ankles like brimming sandbags. For we are, in a mammoth amount, what makes the world, and thus, to mend the tears in the earth's woven ways, we must also tend to the tapestries of our hearts, and live aligning to our wishes for ourselves, for the world. If we want change, we must show the way.

And I wish not to waste away the days in the name of engraved green slips of printed papers. Currency can only buy what will be lost; possessing and buying merely bears forth an euphoria like an injection of heroin, addictive, enslaving in the way it can saturate your soul with synthetic shots of ecstasy. Love them, these rectangle folds of paper, these fabrics that fit over your frame, these jewels that drip down your collarbone, love them, these luminously lit screens, these luxuries, love them, if you will, yet know that they can never return your love.

And I wish, most of all, to do all that makes me feel alive and joyous deep down inside, the rest - the money, the expectations, the scorn of society - be damned. If settling in amongst the social norms, and climbing cooperate ladders, and clocking-in and clocking-out, if whatever it is you do, isn't what makes your veins ripple in trembling happiness, then cast it far away, into the deep of the galaxies. Don't let change intimate you, summon it up from within you, evolve, become it, for if you can change yourself, you can change the world.

What do you want to change in yourself? What do you want to change in the world?

Title Quote: Mahatma Gandhi

Photo Credits: Marlena Shores, Cerlo, The Darling Child, Cari Wayman, Logan Jackson, and special thanks to the fantastic Matt Caplin for graciously sending me his photograph in a higher resolution, for this entry!