t h e j o u r n e y

En hoe wild het was alles te accepteren zoals het zich voordoet. || And how wild it was to let it be.

[thejourneystarts]

Where the cold actually warms up my heart

Honestly, the days before I left, I was doubting the decisions I made that led me to get where I am right now: Canada. I spent my last week in Europe in the heart of Amsterdam where I learned a lot about myself. It was a very spiritual experience and I reconnected with some great people who made me realise I could do this. Well, I knew I could do this, but somehow I knew this experience in Canada would be different. Today, while I’m writing this, I know I was right and I know that this experience is the next step to get where I want to be, even though where ‘I want to be’ isn’t defined by a sentence, but more like a ‘feeling’ and my gut feeling is telling me I’m on the right track.

I was surprised by how I thought I knew what this life would be like, but every day is a surprise, every day is like a mirror that forces me to look at myself in a different way, because that is what is happening, I’m evolving, changing, constantly. 

The Canadians I have met here are so positive, so real. I’m surrounded by beautiful people who want me to be myself even more, while I thought I couldn’t be myself even more. I thought the cold would be the worst, but it doesn’t bother me (sounds like an edited quote from Frozen).

I’m working every day in theatre over here and it’s intense. I got to be the assistant stage manager of this amazing play called ‘Bone Cage’, which is a Canadian production and makes me feel even more connected to this beautiful country. It’s all so new and fresh and I’m learning every day by working on monologues, auditions, my portfolio, my acting, my body and myself. I’m in my power over here even though there has been some tough moments as well, but that’s part of the creative process. You question yourself, but you pick it up and those questions turn into answers. I’m really becoming the artist here that I want to be, the things I was lacking, I am gaining here in Regina. I’m my own artist with my own vision, with my own perception of my reality, and the reality I am in at the moment is just so inspiring.

Bethany, Bjorn and Mikko: thank you, you people are proof that it doesn’t matter where we’re from, but where we are in the present.

We’ve been here for 3 weeks now, but we’re each other’s little crazy family.

[thejourneystarts]

The problem with actually finding yourself

I always thought that one of the biggest challenges in life would be to discover yourself. To be true to the identity you connect with, but somehow I have to disagree with myself. I don't believe anymore in the extreme difficulty in getting to know yourself, because knowing yourself can be extremely lonely. It's empowering at the same time, but yet, we can not expect from our surroundings that they are at the same level. The journey of searching doesn't end with discovering your true self, but it continues since you have to find the right people that also respect the way you really are, and it's really hard to find these people, 'cause let's be honest, people are horrible. Itms scary in a way to open up to someone without any security that they accept the uniqueness of a person, their truth. People are awful, yet beautiful, but definitely awful. Every one is on a personal journey, so be careful when two people intertwine. Dealing with other people is more exhausting than dealing with myself.

[thejourneystarts]

See, now that I see Now that I breathe Now that I feel I feel what it does when something takes my breath away. When the pillars of my sense of self are away, I realise that I didn’t build it in a day. A day overpowering my usual way of seeing, breathing, feeling, overthinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Staring at windows. Reminiscing about the lows. The highs, when high doubtin the choices that got me right, here. Where I stay or go, nowhere near.

Samuel Valor Reyes

[thejourneystarts]

I just want to say that I love your style of writing, but, uh... It's 'bear in mind', not 'bare in mind'. Sorry!

Alright, thanks for the compliment and correcting me :) x

[thejourneystarts]

I can't help but envy the person you are. You're everything I've always imagined myself to be. I feel to be nothing but an ordinary part of humanity. You are art.

Listen, you need to give yourself more credit, we’re all ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, as long as you live your life according to the things you set out to do, you’ll never feel like you don’t belong somewhere and ordinary becomes extraordinary. You are art, so come out to me and be part of my art :)

[thejourneystarts]

THE CHANGE // PART 1

05-07-’17 - One ought not to long for what has passed away, nor be anxious over things that are yet to come. The past has left us, the future has not yet arrived.

And there I stood. Looking up, to the sky and her almost full moon. Upwards, because that’s where my vision of my future told me to rise to.

(This is the story I wrote in my diary on day 5 of the meditation camp. Bare in mind I was here 3 years ago in November 2014 when I was only 17 years old. Now I’m 20 and I’m returning to the place where I found myself through sustaining silence for 11 days, sleeping on a wooden pillow, 2 meals a day, waking up at 4AM and being separated from any electronics and any form of communication. Being alone with your mind only, and of course mother nature and her mosquitos. This is day five, a day I changed again.)

I felt like crap. My mind was somehow controlling everything and was forcing a negative energy on me. Not seeing people smile was one of the reasons I was feeling worse, even though I realised the people here are focused and the environment is taking its toll on some people, but yet, I feel horrible. My thoughts were getting dark and I am questioning everything: my purpose of being here, the way I’m changing, the intentions of the world and the people I see. I was almost feeling like a monster as if the world was against me and thought I was the strangest thing alive. I see people as something scary and mean and I lost sight of the good. I started to believe that whoever I was, it didn’t mean anything and wouldn’t matter. Everything is temporary and when it’s gone, there will be nothing or no one to care about it, cause being cared about is what makes things matter, right? I’ve been collecting flowers, blossoms, coconuts and other fancy things. I use them do decorate my empty room. I’m in room 208, when I was 17 I cried in the exact same room. Room 208 in 2017. Coincidence? I don’t know? Faith? I don’t know, but it was the only room left in that hall though. The window from my room was getting more colourful every day and it felt like I was IKEA-shopping, but then the jungle edition of it. The men who are passing by my room probably think I’m going mad, I don’t blame them though. They don’t know why and neither do I, or did I? There are two reasons why I’m putting flowers at my window.

[thejourneystarts]

The stranger who told me I don’t need anyone

I went to a fortune-teller today. She told me the truth about myself, about how lonely I am with my thoughts, but what she exactly said is another story. The story I want to tell you is about what my thoughts are, as unexplainable as the stranger who helped me understand them.

You are beautiful, never change. 

As I was walking around the streets of Bangkok and noticed the national sport there is to hook up with someone, I wondered why I can’t. I mean I can, but I don’t allow myself. Someone recently taught me that it doesn’t matter how hard I try to convince myself that sex can be so insignificant, energies get intertwined with each other during intimate moments and my energy, my sense of self is my treasure I hold on to the most. I can not allow that anyone wouldn’t treat my energy as precious as I see it and that they would hurt or even destroy it. It’s a risk I didn’t want to take. The last time I slept with someone was the time I really loved someone. It was extraordinary love if I tell you myself, but that was a long time ago and that’s okay, but before I never thought it would be okay, until a stranger taught me I would never need anyone.

And there he stood. In the streets of Bangkok where it was loud and crowded, but he stood out and looked me right in the eyes. And he smiled, he smiled louder than any noise around me. Draped in scarves of silk as soft as his lips would touch mine. His dreadlocks were a mess, but so was I. He came closer to me and just said one thing: You are beautiful, please, never change.

And he left. That’s all he said. I looked over my shoulder and stood still and thought to myself “don’t go”. I whispered “why are you leaving?”, but he kept walking and looking at me. Hours had passed and the night had been amazing reconnecting with my travelers, but as soon as I thought about the stranger, I saw him again. I went up to him and it the background I heard my friends say “go to him, right now!” My feet were already moving and as soon as our eyes made a connection he smiled again, but I wish I could explain what a smile like that does to you. “You are beautiful, please, never change,” I said.

I remember the detailed fractions of his reaction. The wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled. The curls his mouth made and the way he spoke with his crystal clear eyes and of course that one hair that was sticking in the wrong direction of his beard. “You are extraordinary,“ I heard with a French accent, but we immediately agreed on not telling anything about ourselves. It was now, this exact moment that was alive. I noticed my friends never saw me like that, because me and the stranger couldn’t take our eyes of each other. “Let them be, let them be, I mean, look at them, look at them, they’re beautiful together,“ I heard in the background again. Hours had passed again and we sat down in dreadful chairs in front of each other, our knees touching each other. 

“Listen,” he said, “what are you so afraid for?” I didn’t know if I was afraid of something in particular, but I remember I said 2 things:

loving someone and believing I have to be loved back by him/her

my thoughts creating a reality that will eventually disappoint me

What about you? What are you afraid of? “I love people of the world, but I have loved only one man though in my life, but tonight you’re that person to me,” he said. He smiled and kissed me. In that moment I didn’t really understand exactly what he meant by that. I convinced myself I would sleep with him that night.

We sat down in a couch in front of my hostel while the other ones went to bed. We were there alone and he noticed I got nervous. He smiled again and said the one thing I needed to hear: 

You don’t need anyone, you have to know that, you really really don’t need anyone else but yourself.

Then I realised what he meant. I didn’t have to sleep with him. He didn’t want lust to overcome the purity of looking each other in the eyes in the present, in the now. He struggled with the same thing as I did, but he told me his demons were to not give in to lust. Instead of sitting next to me, he moved in front of me. “I can’t, but I want, but it’s like this eternity of the present would be forgotten,” he said. I looked at him and smiled. “Go,” I said. He took my chin, stroke my hair behind my ear, looked at me one last time, smiled and said: “François, from Belgium.” Kissed me and left. My heart was beating fast and I went to my room, I just dropped on my empty bed with my arms spread out and thought to myself “I don’t need anyone”. You, whoever got to this point of reading, you don’t need anyone else.

[thejourneystarts]

My dreams told me the truth

PART1: What have your dreams taught you?

[thejourneystarts]

12 days of silence interrupted // 12 dagen stilte doorbroken

I had a dream today. Not a dream about the future, but literally a dream-dream. And when I woke up I was pretty much out of balance. It moved me. I saw the jungle, monks meditating, familiar faces and my bare feet in grass. I knew where this place was. A place where silence was so loud. Where my mind had never spoken that clearly. 

De plaats waar ik, op één dag na, 12 dagen zweeg en op die dag verliefd werd op de wereld en zijn menselijke vermomming aan mij geschonken werd. 

The meditation camp is so representative for what the general situation looks like at the moment in my life. It’s steady, but intense. It’s this one day and it’s that one day. 

Is it explainable that after almost two years memories start fading? Not in a way that we forget them, but that they look like an old video tape with some errors in it. The details aren’t too clear, but believe me, if you watch that video tape once in a while, somehow the intensity of how deeply it moves you never changes. What happened back then, 2 years ago, seems so far away to people around us and I do believe it seems far away to some of us as well at times, but the way that journey molded us is so outspoken and clear that it daily becomes the foreground of my mind. Even though it’s so deep inside of me, it’s so loud. It’s probably the part inside of me that screams the most, which is so contradicting to the 12 days of silence.

[thejourneystarts]

What if one day you woke up and realised that whatever you thought you always wanted was something others always expected you to want?

[toxicreactions]

The visions of saying goodbye and why it sucks

Think about it: You’re standing in the middle of an airport. You’re just standing still. Look around you. There are hundreds of people running around and they’re all crossing each other. What has always fascinated me about this is the fact that all these people are not just carrying their luggage, but part of the luggage they’re carrying with them is the stories they created, the life they’ve lived, the history that reflects on their future. All these people, unique in their own way at a place where saying goodbye is a common thing. Leaving someone, leaving a chapter in your life, leaving a place that can be called a home. Saying goodbye is such delicate part of life that defining whether it’s a horrible or a beautiful thing is impossible, since it’s both. The hardest part about it is trying to understand it and especially realising what it is. It can’t be explained since saying goodbye is such a personal thing and even within this feelings bubble up that often are so complicated that words will somehow always fall short. What I want to say is that leaving something behind always feel so double. We realise something finishes, maybe forever, maybe for a while, but a new beginning is ahead of us. And if we say goodbye to something, do we lose that what we once desired in our life? Isn’t it that when we make space for something new and start a new chapter the older chapters are still with us? They didn’t get ripped apart, right? They’re still part of us as a whole until our final chapter is written, but if we think like this, why does is still hurt that much?

I think we can compare saying goodbye to reading a book in the dark. We have one flashlight that gives us a “clear” view on two pages.The ones you’re reading at this exact moment. Imagine you’re in the middle of that book, you still remember what has been written on the previous pages, you still know the story, you can still feel it, because that as a whole has influenced everything you’ve read up till now, but all those previous pages: are they still as clear in your mind as the pages that your flashlight focuses on? They’re not. We forget small details that matter, we forget chapters, but they’re still there, right? 

The problem with saying goodbye is that everything we’ve lived through is still with us, but the intensity of feeling like whatever you do right now is like a small eternity of a unique state that belongs only to you, isn’t as powerful as it used to be. Saying goodbye is something beautiful because our whole life with all its memories are with us, but it’s horrible cause it’s not in front of us, and that’s why it sucks.

[thejourneystarts]

MEMENTO ANTECEDENT Ik ben niet wie ik was. Wat ik was, is niet wat is. Wat was tast ik in de vervaagde letters die ooit zo aan mij behoorden. Wat was blijkt onscherp door de opkomst van de misten in het heden. Wat was omklemt me zó intiem en ondoorgrondelijk. Wat was is de wind. Zo herkenbaar. Met al haar kleuren en al haar krachten. Zo onzichtbaar. Wat ooit was, greep ik naar en schoot zich een baan naar mijn oorkussen. Wat ooit was, zijn de lijnen op mijn gelaat die ik zo in mijn weerkaatsing las.

Neopisiva Tuga || Samuel Valor Reyes

[kweetetnie]

Niemand zegt je als je klein bent dat het dit zal worden. Dit leven stil en donker, waar alleen de gekwelde zielen uit ontsnappen. Om het dan nog stiller en donkerder te maken voor, voor al wie blijft.

Griet op de Beeck, Vele hemels boven de zevende (via chaudeslarmes)

[thejourneystarts]

Hoe wild het is, om alles te accepteren zoals het zich voordoet.

[timppmit]

Everybody has a chapter they don’t read out loud

unknown (via

timppmit

)

e l l o - b b y x

(via ello-bby)

[thejourneystarts]

Fragile.

[thejourneystarts]

What's the biggest struggle for you right now, and what do you think is the solution for that? (PS: I really love your writings)

Well, that's a bit difficult though ... I guess the hardest thing at the moment is being patient about your passions and expectations, that we can't expect to things to work out immediately. So the best thing to do is just stay true to yourself and definitely don't lose sight of your goals. So keep reminding yourself why you're doing what you're doing.