Reflections

curated by Annette Fleur de Lis

My thoughts are not my thoughts.

They visit. They echo.

Some arrive like silk. Others—like blades.

But they are not me.

The formula for everything real begins not with effort,

but with intention.

Not with force, but with presence.

And always — with connection to the divine,

in the form that speaks through silence, beauty, and timing.

There are two types of fullness:

Iham — the fullness of matter, form, fabric, wealth.

Param — the fullness of spirit, vision, vastness.

When they are braided — a woman becomes a temple.

And yet,

the world of the inner is rarely peaceful.

We shift between light and shadow, tenderness and terror,

depending on the path our thoughts begin to take.

But the mind is not the throne.

It is only the instrument.

It is the mind that spins, doubts, fears —

not the self,

the self that watches, always still, always whole.

We often believe others are the problem.

We react. We ache. We rage.

But every rejection is a mirror.

We see in them what we cannot yet bear in ourselves.

When I tried to change another, I shattered.

When I began to sculpt myself,

love became possible.

I no longer fear discomfort.

I recognize it as an invitation

to sit with what I once disowned.

When we meet our own brokenness with precision and grace,

we no longer need to hate it in someone else.

That is when the relationship changes.

Not because they have changed —

but because we have.

This is not self-sacrifice.

This is self-reclamation.

This is not karma — it is creative authorship.

And this is what I now know:

What we reject in others

is the part of ourselves we haven’t yet held with love.

But when we sculpt within, not around —

love stops being illusion,

and becomes truth with form.

— Annette Fleur de Lis