The Wild and the Weak...

I have had a very difficult week babe...HA!  Sounds a little foolish coming off the year I have had but still...it's been rough.

The pain and sorrow I have been battling seem to have crept back to the forefront like an army of enemy soldiers.   After waging a year long war, I had managed to push the enemy back behind a line that let me breathe.  I have needed to catch my breath.  But alas, when I wasn't looking the enemy came screaming back in to the front and brought me down to my knees.  I have been left a screaming crying pile of rubble, I have been brought back to start.

Is this my new life?  Will I forever struggle with all that is left in me just to breathe and get up and do?  I'm not sure I will make it then, if this is it.  I'm so tired.  I'm just so tired.  Playing the role of normal takes away everything that was left inside me when I didn't see you come back to the surface,  when I never saw her signal she made it to safety.  In those moments everything I was left me.  I died too.

I have an old friend from high school.  We were best friends for a time.  Over the years, many years, we lost touch.  She thinks of me though, and the sorrow I live, and from time to time she sends me a token of hope and joy.  She extends a gesture of 'life' that has the power to carry me through a few more moments.  That is huge.  When darkness is all around me and there's nowhere left to turn it is these gestures from long ago friends that bring me to light.  It is huge...it is life.  It is an energizing breath.

Today I received this...

Allow

By Danna Faulds

There is no controlling life.

Try corralling a lightning bolt,

containing a tornado.  Dam a

stream and it will create a new

channel.  Resist, and the tide

will sweep you off your feet.

Allow, and grace will carry

you to higher ground.  The only

safety lies in letting it all in –

the wild and the weak; fear,

fantasies, failures and success.

When loss rips off the doors of

the heart, or sadness veils your

vision with despair, practice

becomes simply bearing the truth.

In the choice to let go of your

known way of being, the whole

world is revealed to your new eyes.

It's in the words, but more importantly it's in the gesture that I find strength.  Some amazing people touch my life.  I am blessed.

I love you David and I miss you in a very big way.

I love you Kathy and your kind heart.  Thank you for the strength of today.

Who is this me?

We are now in the midst of the second summer without you.  Life is so not the same anymore.

In the quiet moments, which they almost all are, I find myself realizing that I feel I no longer belong anywhere.  

For ten and a half years I belonged in AR raising two small children, teaching them how to read and write and do puzzles.  Teaching them about the earth and nature and that life does not exist inside a television set or hidden in electronics...it is outside in the world.  It is in the moments with family and friends.  And so that is where my children and I could be found every single day, rain or shine, snow or sun...outside and with family and with friends.  

Our summers were spent on the river.  I would crawl out of bed at the ass crack of dawn and do all the things that needed doing before packing a giant beach bag full of granola, fruit, drinks, yogurt and sometimes lunch meat, towels, books, water toys and water and dog food. Then, time to wake the kids and start our day.  

Then came you.

You picked me up and carried me twenty seven hundred miles away.  You taught me I was so much more than only a mother, to you I was everything.  I was your girlfriend, your love, your wife.  Our life together was just beginning, it was so brand new.  Now I belonged here. 

I worked so hard learning to balance a new life here while trying to continue to nurture a little life left there.  You worked so hard to let me...to make it possible for me to try.  You worked so hard at learning to share me and be without me.  We worked so hard.  

I never told you, never once, just how difficult all of it was for me.  Leaving my son behind, leaving you behind, it was tearing me apart but I held on as best I could.  Each time I left you was so very painful, but I was learning to live with the feeling of being pulled in two directions.  I was the chew toy in the middle of two dogs wanting dominance.  But still I belonged somewhere.

Now, I don't belong there and I don't belong here, yet here I am.  I don't know who I am anymore. I've no idea what I want or where I want to be.  Recently someone asked me "what do you want?"  and I honestly couldn't answer...what I want I can't have, where I want to be I can not go.

I don't belong anywhere, my path has dead ended, my dreams have died, my love is lost and I am left all alone.  I do not recognize myself at all.

I am so lost.