The post is about the movie The Boy and the Heron, directed by Hayao Miyazakai. You can watch the film here on Amazon Prime Video.
A World Awaits Your Discovery
Hardship can spread just as quickly as the spark that lights the flame. A forced goodbye becomes the unwelcomed hello of a pain you knew nothing of prior to. While the wound may heal, the scar remains as both the reminder of what you lost and who you have become. It is in the movement onward that you discover the path to closure and love is one and the same.
A new beginning bound by pain does not have to be one engrossed in sorrow, rather it may very well be the start of the journey you never knew you needed.
Prefer to listen? Hear my reading of the reflection aloud.
From The Loss You Go
Time, if nothing else, is what moves you forward when you experience the loss of what you hold dear. Pain arrives almost as if a deliberate blow with no choice really given for those in its receipt. A new normal is hard to accept when grief holds heavy both night and day. Intentionally or not, you bring all the more upon yourself, as really, what are you to do? How do you escape what looms continuously? How are you to evade the knockings at the window of your pain?
When you want to hear it least is when it cries the most, piercing through your shrouded spirit tempting you to leave the comfortable dark you’ve grown accustomed to. You vaguely prepare with little understanding of what that might be, with unresolved sentiment serving as both the push and pull into the unknown. What you have yet to comprehend is that of a calling made real by a will beyond our own. And what is sought, is found.
A Divine Power Has Created Me
There is a divinity that exists and can not be resisted. One that moves you towards healing and all you can be. It curates the path that lies before you, the one you never knew existed yet feels as if its always been known upon discovery. A lot closer than you care to think is the path to amendment through a new world. One containing mystery and danger, as much as it is met with awe, worry, thrill, and compassion. You can discover the makeup of who you are in the moments when it matters most, when humility and necessity bring forth your truest self in the presence of good and malice.
The makeup of this world is both cruel and peculiar. A world where those who search for knowledge may very well die in its course. If you don’t swim you drown, with no fight you are left behind. Its normality becomes clear in time and you come to discover there is an order to things. A carefully constructed order in which the most beautiful happenings occur mere moments before calamity. If you open yourself to it, you can come to understand that all things exist with a purpose, one that is to be respected.
When presented with the beauty and suffering that surrounds this world, it is then up to you in how you proceed. Are you to be hardened by the experience that preceded your path or softened by the new sense of living that followed? A choice requiring surrender. Cherish and accept the love you have known, and know you have much more love to give and receive.
Ask Me Why
You may know why things happen the way they do, but you can permit yourself to move forward to all that awaits. Let the experiences provide you with not a singular belief, rather a universal understanding greater than yourself. The journey finds itself bearable and one you want to endure, when you are given reasons to carry its weight. Whenever you heed the heron’s call, face the parakeets, and the tower collapses, it is love that keeps you moving forward.
So don’t be scared of the fires that arise in this life. In every way it is both the end and the beginning. In a world where thievery runs rampant and the good hearted are hardened by time, choosing to venture onward makes for the greatest clarity. The pain you have long experienced will come to pass, not at the expense of what came before but rather an embrace for what you had, and have now.
A new world awaits your discovery. Show your scars, find the feathers, wrestle with the divine, and settle for nothing less than the heart calls. In the end you come to find a heart amended and filled with a love you had yet to know.
To The Believer
There are happenings of calling that transpire by no will of our own. The circumstance that surrounds the ever so quick change of pace is one we come to experience and know all the same. Better are you to sit and gripe, or make known the behest that comes by way of the unforeseen? Do good to keep in mind the Spirit that guides your quest.
“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous, do not be worried nor dismayed, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go”
Joshua 1:9
Credit: Script and select images used in this post are from The Boy and the Heron (© Studio Ghibli / Gkids). Included for reflective commentary and thematic analysis.
This site contains affiliate links, view the disclosure for more information.
This post was all about the movie The Boy and the Heron.
