After my divorce in 2011, I attempted suicide by locking myself in the bathroom of a neighbor's and slicing as many major arteries as I could knowing all the while this was a cry for help and not an attempt to end my life. I was inconsolable knowing the restraining order my ex had filed meant that now after having traveled 2400 hundred miles from home after losing our business I would have to start over in a place with which I was unfamiliar and without a partner, my three children, or our ten bedroom turn of the century mansion a friend allowed us to live in rent free for the winter. The next two years were a wake up call to say the least. It turns out I had done a stellar job creating a convenient reality and for the first in my life the woes of the World wouldn't allow me to look the other way. After moving into the homeless shelter I met my boyfriend who did his best with what life had given him in place of what he needed but nevertheless his emotions got the best of him and several times beat me within inches of my life. I quickly started an addiction crack and pills and had no issue selling my body for drug money until we both found work at the same machine shop where after a particularly violent night my boss informed me she wouldn't allow me to die under her responsibility. After insisting I give her my Dad's number she managed to get him to agree to allowing me to live with him in California while I got back on my feet. The next morning after my boyfriend went to jail I was on a plane to San Diego and shortly after arriving home and seeing the pictures of my kids on my Dad's email I realized they were thriving and this was a weight off my shoulders like I couldn't believe. Within weeks I realized my life wasn't over, that my kids had a chance at happiness they might not have had growing up with two people at war, and that I could actually be happy. The next few months having literally no plans or responsibilities my mind managed to feel free enough to ask questions I learned not to in childhood and the following couple years allowed me to fully understand how unresolved trauma in childhood impacts EVERYTHING we do as adults and that sooner or later the past WILL come back seeking answers. Take nothing for granted, and everything seriously. Don't ever dismiss something out of fear and always know there's everything right about what you do and think - it's just a matter of applying further research - little in life is ever simple or black and white but that doesn't mean life has to be difficult, painful or uncertain. It just means we have to change our approach from being a passive afterthought to being an adventurer. Today I'm pursuing my teaching credential and am about ready to transfer to a university to obtain a Bachelor's degree in education. The last two years studying early childhood education has reignited my love and enthusiasm for young children. I can't wait to interact once again with life's most innocent and insightful people - the littles ones!

“Life, According to Keats” “Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave” Keats is marveling about the gift that is life. And goes further by specifying what more a gift is the life not yet having come into existence, much like the elderly marvel at youth and honor with admiration and envy through their gems of wisdom, having incurred the battle wounds that often accompany life’s more poignant milestones - or simply, the stolen moments whilst in the company of youth, innocent and still unrestrained by the demands the maturation process unwittingly imparts. “Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,” If a melodious tune represents young life or simply life, then the “spirit ditties of no tune” refer clearly to the promise of life still to come. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter… “ Further into the poem when the tone turns towards melancholy and urgency, once again we are rescued by Keats’ reminder of love and that it is cyclical and eternal, why, remember what a gift is the idea of life to come? The knowledge that no matter what, the promise that life goes on will persevere and the dichotomy like a fork in the road, and as we often refer to life, that arises in our thinking thus separating the theoretical from the unavoidable demands of physics, lies at the heart of this poem. Keats goes onto promise that when the ravages of mortality on the heels of old age threaten to swallow us whole, we can cling to the growing understanding of eternity and love driven and dependent upon mankind’s commitment to immortalizing what we hardly understand yet of which we are a part, perhaps even created. How cannot comfort during our darkest hours, those before life’s end not be derived from the understanding we can only ascend once we pass on? Therefore, revel in life and all of which it is comprised for there exists nothing about which to languish and lament, knowing love lives on… And what better way than through artistic expression, for example a poem such as the one this essay attempts to interpret, decoratively adorning a beautiful piece of pottery conventionally used to store the remains of a loved one having passed through to the spiritual realm, which can be nothing other than a fulfilling tribute to the meaning of life both as a process and as a finished work - perfectly conveying the duality of life – the process, or the “act” of living and the meaning behind it, poetry or an “Ode” representing the transient act and the Urn, the meaning or the finished product - hence the title, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Towards the end, five words reference a revelation of sorts, perhaps referring to writing and literature, an art form which effortlessly immortalizes life and the memorable milestones from birth to death and chronicles our evolution since the dawn of civilization to the present, ominous and succinctly expressed by the words, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Much like life’s inevitable qualities become easier to accept the more experience we have submitting to it’s unwelcome demands. so to does the main point or theme of this lengthy narrative of sorts not surface quite as boldly as until the last line. Upon closer examination two well known words the meanings of which suggest vastly different but compatible concepts together yield a different concept entirely. Besides offering a valid and plausible reason for why we are born and why we live to begin with, the marriage of “truth” and “beauty” produces something different altogether - beginning with the suggestion that how to live may just be why we live… Truth and beauty may be the image from which we have become “mankind” and also what we should always cling to during our conscious exploration of “life” as the vessels into whom life is placed.