The fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the significant world events of Gen X's formative years. From where it stood in Europe, it saw many days of cold, gray skies. Now a large piece of it looks out over the Simi Valley to the mountains where the sun descends on the desert and ocean breezes travel over open land. With my hand reverently touching the cement, I could feel a certain hope - I could feel it swallowing up hopelessness.
There have been walls in my life that held me in, that seemed insurmountable, that I feared would never let me out. When I have found the grace and the resolve to walk past those walls, it is has been astounding how those barriers began to seem so small compared to the limitless possibilities around them. Caught up in the problems we are facing today, it feels that things will never change. It's the larger picture that shows us that the potential of our lives is enormous. Beyond that, if we look out on the horizon, even while holding the broken pieces in our pockets of this fallen world that has disappointed us, we are reminded that there is something beyond this, something more than just this.
For those who grew up in a time of unraveling and seemingly endless crises in history, may you live to see a time when you can walk around it, and then past all of it, through the shadows of impermanence, and into the light of what does not fail us.
May the possibilities swallow up the limits, may the hope swallow up the hopelessness.
When our generation's time on this earth is done, when we are finally done walking the expanse of this day and age, may all of us get to that place on the horizon that we can now only strain to get even a glimpse of a place where there has never been walls, a place where there will be no more sorrow, a place where there will be no more pain....
"For believe me, this world that seems to us so substantial, is no more than shadowlands. Real life has not yet begun."
- C.S. Lewis
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(c) 2012 photography and writing by Chloe - all rights reserved
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