Why We Need New Beginnings

Northern California at Sunrise -

Photography from the back seat of a car heading through the hills of the Pacheco Pass toward Central California....

A new year begins and I wonder if I filled the last one with everything I should have. Last year is now gone, and if I keep wondering or worrying, I'm not living in the present.  And all we truly have is the present.  










The sun shows its glow, but does not yet show itself -  and it's strange the way a captured moment can look like it is both sunrise and sunset at the same time.

The first time I saw the sun rise over the hills of Northern California was about ten years ago after visiting an Orthodox Christian monastery with friends. I never forgot that morning or how purified my soul felt as we left there. The last time I saw the Northern California sunrise was not so long ago - the sun was both pink and yellow shunting its warming rays on the chilly, tired earth, the hills soft blue in the distance.

So many times I have prayed, asking God, "Where are you?"  or

"Why aren't you listening?"  or

"Why won't you help me?"

And I have finally begun to look back on my life and see how many of those seemingly unheard prayers were being answered incrementally, slowly, then exponentially.

It often happened the way the sun rises so seemingly slowly when you are waiting for it, the way the darkness of night seems so reluctant to leave. Yet we are traveling around the sun at over 66,000 miles an hour.

Morning goes by and noon comes - the sun is full in the sky above us, covering us and our surroundings with 360 degrees of light. 

Sometimes when I see the sun rise, this unexpected peace comes over me that everything is going to be okay - even when a hundred unfitted puzzle pieces lay around waiting for their place in the short term, I know in these moments that the bigger picture will be beautiful when those pieces come together.

Still, we wait for those pieces to come together. And this is why we need new beginnings - because of all that goes wrong in this broken down world. We need new beginnings so we can once again have hope that all those scattered puzzle pieces of our lives will eventually fit together. We need new beginnings because we mess up, because we misunderstand, because we are misunderstood.


Many mornings in my life I did not see the sun rise in this life because I was focused on the scratches on the window.

But the sun continued to rise,

again and again.

Here's to new beginnings, here's to all our dreams coming true - even if not as soon as we would like them to - even if just moment by moment, even if it all happens slowly and incrementally, may it all happen exponentially. 

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(c) 2015 writing and photography by Chloe Koffas, all rights reserved

The Fall of the Berlin Wall - 25 Years Ago Today

25 years ago today was when The Berlin Wall fell. The falling of the wall was one of the biggest international events, if not the biggest event, to happen during the formative years of Generation X. 

I had always wanted a piece of the wall of my own.

Having grown up Generation X, we saw pretty much everything crumble around us, from what we watched on the news, to our families and society in general. It was an era where a lot went wrong. That is why I clung to God throughout my childhood - everything fell apart around me and it was clear that nothing was going to be consistent. I took that faith into my adulthood as I've struggled with the larger questions like:

1) Is God really there?
2) If so, does he listen to our prayers?
3) If so, does he listen to me?

From the third question came this thing that I do every so often: I pray a prayer that would be mathematically impossible (or the odds would be astronomical) for these things to randomly come true - only possible for it to be answered by a Higher Power capable of anything. In other words, I ask for something incredibly detailed, profoundly specific, and extremely random so that I know that that if the prayer gets answered it is not just a coincidence but really God.

Since my connection to my generation is very important to me, and since the fall of the Wall was so important to the experience of my generation, this was my prayer that I prayed a few years ago:

"I would like you to give me my own piece of the Berlin Wall. I'd like it to be given to me by someone who was there right when (or soon after) the wall fell who chiseled it out themselves so I know it is the real thing. I would like that person to be a Gen Xer. I would like them to bring a large piece with them to my house, and then break off a smaller piece for me to keep so that I can see the larger piece it comes from and so I know it is 100% authentic. I'd like this all to happen right before the 25th anniversary of the falling of the wall."

Right as I was about to move away from Portland Oregon last spring, some friends came over to visit. One of my friends told me she had a gift for me - it was a poster she had bought on the street in Berlin shortly after the wall fell. She had kept it all those years in storage in her Portland house. She also had brought a piece of the wall to show me, and all the sudden she unexpectedly felt the inspiration to break off a piece of her piece to give to me. She borrowed a hammer, took her piece to the floor of my garage and broke off a piece for me.

I was in shock - the prayer had been answered down to every detail.  I grabbed my camera and took photos of the poster, the hammer, my piece of the wall...

What I learned from this experience:

1) We are all connected to something much larger to ourselves in a way much more substantial and tangible than we can imagine.
2) While we struggle with how much our prayers are heard and why some do not seem to get answered, prayers do get answered.
3) We are loved far, far beyond what we could possibly imagine.

The dust from the Berlin Wall sits in the seams in the cement of the garage in my old house in Portland Oregon, because there was a moment in space and time when the whole universe bent down and bowed before me so something extraordinary could happen.

The most consistent thing to happen in our lives - the lives of Generation X - was a constant crumbling of everything around us, and the biggest international event to happen in our formative years was the crumbling of a giant monolithic wall. As we head from one year in time to another, may all the walls of our lives fall - every wall that keeps us from something good - every wall that keeps us isolated, every wall that keeps us believing that our prayers go unheard...  

...our prayers are heard. 

For H.P. 

 (c) Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved. If anyone knows the photographer who took the picture for this poster, email me and I will credit them ~