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Tears gather strength
Plans await courage
Loss teaches freedom
-安天美
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You know how the river behaves when the sky opens its mouth too wide? Water rushes, carries everything from stick to stone to the memory of dry season. Your tears today, they are like this river. Not weakness flowing down your cheek, but strength collecting itself, preparing to carve a new path through the hard ground of your life.
Why do we fear this flooding of the heart? Perhaps because we have forgotten that rivers know their business. They do not apologise for rising. They do not ask permission to change the landscape. They simply gather what belongs to them and move with purpose we cannot always see. This same river that overflows your heart today will become the stream that waters the new ground you are preparing to walk.
Young tree learns to bend in wind, but wind also learns something from young tree. It learns how to dance and how to sing through leaves. Your overwhelm today teaches you about your own capacity to hold many things at once without breaking. This is gift, though it feels like burden. The roots you are growing now, in this season of too much water, will anchor you when dry season comes.
Like the river learning its banks, you too are discovering where your edges need to be. In our village, every compound has its boundaries, but boundary does not mean war. Boundary means: here I plant my cassava, there you plant yours, but when harvest comes, we can share soup. Living with others requires this same understanding. What is mine, what is yours, and what we create together.
You have discovered something important: sharing space does not mean sharing soul. Your things, your quiet corner, your way of arranging life belong to you like your name belongs to you. No one can take them without permission, and you can give permission without losing yourself. This is the same wisdom the river teaches. It shares its banks with many creatures but never forgets which way it flows.
The confusion you feel about sharing everything is common thing for young hearts who have been taught that love means disappearing. But river does not disappear when it meets another river. Rivers join, create something new, but each keeps its own song. The ground beneath your compound is teaching you about foundations. How to be rooted in yourself while remaining open to connection.
Sometimes a task sits in our belly like stone we cannot digest, heavy as the rocks that try to block river's path. Not because task is too hard, but because we have forgotten why we picked up this stone in first place. Your work analysis waits for you like patient dog, but you feel frozen like lizard in cold morning, unable to move toward what needs moving.
This freezing comes from somewhere deeper than deadline. It flows from the same source as your overflowing heart. Perhaps you are asking yourself: am I building bridge to where I want to go, or am I building cage around where I am? Work that flows from true purpose moves like water finding its course. Work that fights against our nature moves like person carrying heavy load on head that does not belong to them.
The Monday that approaches is like dry season. It will come whether we are ready or not. But the river teaches us something about seasons: each one serves its purpose. Monday will come whether work is finished or not, caring nothing for our readiness. But you can choose to meet Monday with whatever you have, like tree meets dry season with roots it has grown deep during rains. Better to begin with one truthful number than to wait for perfect calculation that may never come.
The man who slipped away was like bird that comes to feed at your window. Beautiful while he stayed, teaching your heart about its own capacity for wanting. But bird knows something we forget: staying too long in one place can make wings forget how to fly. His leaving is part of the same current that carries your tears, part of the same season that asks you to find new boundaries.
Perhaps his leaving is not your failure but his wisdom, like river knowing when to change course. Perhaps he recognised that what you offered was too precious for him to receive carelessly. Some people come to show us how love feels when it is growing, like seedlings after rain. Others come to show us how love behaves when it is ready to transform into something new, like leaves that must fall to feed the ground.
Your heart learned something from him it could not learn alone. This learning does not leave when he leaves. It becomes part of the soil where new love will grow. Like rain that falls on ground, love changes the earth of your heart even after clouds move on. You are not same person who met him, and this change belongs to you forever, rooted now in the same foundation that will hold your new boundaries, your brave work, your flowing tears.
All these things happening at once. House that no longer fits, work that resists your touch, and love that asks you to let go. They are like season changing, like river reaching its delta where it must release what it has carried to join something larger. Old leaves must fall before new ones can grow. Your life is telling you: time to shed what no longer serves, time to reach for what wants to come.
The solid ground you seek is not place you find but place you create, the same way river creates its own bed by moving. With each honest boundary you draw in your compound, with each true step you take toward work that feeds your spirit, with each moment you choose growth over comfort, you are building foundation that can hold whatever comes. This is the same ground that will catch your tears and transform them into strength, the same earth that will hold both your rootedness and your reaching.
Remember: confusion is not enemy of clarity but its messenger, like flood that comes before fertile season. When everything feels uncertain, it means you are standing in place where new life wants to be born. Stand still if you must, but stand with faith that your feet know the earth they need to touch, that the same wisdom flowing through river and tree and changing seasons also flows through you.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/backward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/backward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Crazy Demo
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<aside> <img src="/icons/forward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/forward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Moral Goodness
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