But here's the thing, my fingers have been getting itchier by the day to reconnect with their long-lost keyboard friend. I have been reading like a fein lately and whenever I read more, I write more as well. It gets the old juices flowing I suppose you could say and this past month has been spent devouring every book I can get my hands on... and has resulted in me missing writing. A lot has been going on in my life in the past several months and I suppose the reason I've had such an incredibly difficult time capturing anything in words is not because I have nothing to say, but because perhaps I have too much to say. Too much to fit into a few neat, focused blog entries. Too much to say that might cause more hurt.
This is my life today: there's a sink (and countertops) full of dirty dishes in my kitchen. My toilet is about ready for a scrub... and the dog probably too. I am swamped at work and the to-do list grows longer by the day, the bare minimum ever feeling like it gets accomplished. I have exactly $1.19 in my bank account currently and have eaten more PB&J in the past few months than I care to admit (or desire to ever eat again). The dirty laundry is piled in the hamper in my corner and I am down to my last clean bath towel, my last few clean pairs of underwear and my last clean (matching) pairs of socks. Sadly, I couldn't tell you the last time my carpets were vacuumed, which is a frighteningly scary thought considering I'm pretty sure my dog sheds about ten pounds of dog hair every day. Oh, and speaking of the dog, I think he's been wearing his cone, or as I like to call it, Elizabethan collar, for months now. His allergies and OCD and chewing and skin infections have cost me hundreds of dollars at the vet and I live with endless, endless guilt about how much better his life used to be when he had two mommies caring for him instead of one who is alway burning the candle at both ends and feels on most days life she's almost, almost about to completely unravel. Speaking of hundreds of dollars, I think I am up to about $1500 in car repairs in the past month and a half. The holidays are coming and I am trying to get a team of about 50 people ready to prepare, package, organize and sell hundreds of thanksgiving dinners. Oh, and then there's Christmas after that. My hair is getting shaggier by the minute and sticking out of the back of my hat that I wear about six days a week, is what appears to be a mullet forming. I literally haven't had any sort of social outing with a friend, or group of friends, in several months and on many days, find myself quite possibly lonelier than I've ever been...
And yet, despite all of these things... on many days... hope abounds. I have fallen, quite unexpectedly, in love you see. It all happened at an alarmingly quick rate, one which several people in my life find unbelievable, but which nevertheless really did happen almost overnight. It's amazing how when the heart is able to love and give love in a free, trusting, and joyous way, how all of life's other trials and tribulations can seem to shrink down just a little bit. It's amazing really; I think God knew that I was on the verge... on the edge of something... of a breakdown of some sort... and that I needed and intervention to give me something, anything, to redeliver a few small bits of hope, a reconstitution of faith. And as luck would have it, grace reared her beautiful head when I least expected it as grace so often does, and along came love. A friend of mine and her husband just had their second child earlier this month but not so many years ago they met for the first time in the Peace Corps and eloped only a few months later. When I first told her about my new love she said to me that people at the time she met and married her now husband, people thought she was crazy but "when you know, you know," and she just knew. And well, as did she, so do I; I know. Of course, this is real life however and real life well, is generally not easy, nor that neat and tidy. Especially the things which are most important to us. We have to work for them, we have to wait for them, we have to pine for them and pray for them and work some more for them. As for this new love of mine, I wasn't looking for her or anyone to love really; I was quietly working on my own insides, on my own spiritual growth and really, still reeling from the ending of my previous relationship and reeling from the friendships I lost along with the lost partner and reeling from the negative numbers that came to my bank accounts because of said loss and reeling from a gaping loneliness and reeling from feeling abandoned or discounted or judged by some friends because of said divorce and there, out of the blue, in a completely unexpected time and place, came this person who seemed to know me and understand me in an unspoken way... and I her. And well, the rest is history. Except of course for the fact that she lives in another state, halfway across the country; this is that part about life never really, even in it's grace-filled and joyous moments, being completely neat and tidy. The past three months have been us making the trek back and for to see one another and today I am counting around 58 more days until I will see her again; she's coming for Christmas. Because of both of our career and housing situations, its virtually impossible for either one of us to pick up and move our roots to where the other is and so we survive on text message and phone calls and facebook chat and Skype and we miss each other and we have sad hearts and we ache and we cry... and yet and still we love and we say thank you to God and to the universe for the gift of the other and we keep the faith that someday a sign will come and the cards will fall into place and we will know what we should do and who should go where and how we should proceed so that we can (what feels like finally) begin the rest of our live's together.
This blog entry... and many others... has been a long time coming. I was scared to write a word about my life these days and about my new relationship for fear of being insensitive to the woman from my past relationship whom I still, despite her absence from my life, love and respect dearly even if she no longer does me. But at a certain point we all must, with our crumbled hearts in tow, move on in honesty and in forgiveness and in hope and in faith and in compassion for those we love and have loved. My life has changed in the past few months and in the past year in ways I could have never and would have never imagined even only a few years ago and aside from the sudden death of my mom, nothing I've gone through has been so heart-wrenching and lonely and feels as guilty and as not guilty, as right and as wrong, and as sorrowful and as joyous and as everything this past year has.
Perhaps one of the most unfortunate things about being alive and one of the things that I have learned again in technicolor this year, is that in life, weather we want to or not, sometimes we hurt people. That in order to truly fight for ourselves first, sometimes we have to be selfish and sometimes we hurt people we love and adore even when we don't want to. I am not perfect and I know that I have hurt people, I know that I have caused pain and sorrow and confusion in the hearts of people I love and that I have caused them to not love me anymore and this is a hard reality to live with. About a year ago I tattooed something on my arm where I could see it everyday as a reminder and as a way of holding myself accountable to myself. It is a Hindu meditation mantra that roughly translates to "honor the divinity that resides within." To me this meant following my own inner voice and heart first and foremost and taking steps in my life to realize the potential and possibilities of my existence. To get out of or adjust relationships both personally and professionally that were not healthy for myself and others and to search for new ones that were; to continue my religious and spiritual studies and work toward becoming more humble and honest and courageous in my words and my choices. And so my relationship ended. I left a job I was relatively successful, but grossly unhappy at. I changed my diet to reflect my personal ethics. I made it a point to fight for more work-life balance and to spend more time with me myself and I and less time with the rest of the world for awhile. And in doing these things, I hurt people. And it was hard... and it still is. But here's the catch; I can see a light today that I couldn't a year ago. My dreams for my life have slowly begun to reappear. I feel on (most) days like I am living again rather than just surviving. I am living my life on my own terms and I am being the best person and the most compassionate person I know how to be. And I know that the person I am today, and the person I was a year ago or three year ago or six years ago, isn't good enough for some people... but I am trying to be worthy of more than God's love; of the love of the people in the world around me, the people that I do love and care about. When I feel downtrodden and like I have disappointed too many people and lost too many people who were and still are, even in their absence from my life, dearly important to me, I think about my mom. I think about her leaving her marriage of 26 years to chart new territory for her life. I think about the selfishness of this decision and the hurt that other people experienced in it's wake... and I know without a shadow of a doubt that it was the right decision.In hindsight, years later it was apparent to everyone upon the sight of her glorious blooming after having made this choice to search for new ways of being in the world, how silently stifled she had been. I don't say this to justify my own actions but merely to remind myself of the happiness that having such courage to change herself and her world brought her; to remind me that when she died she left this world deeply admired and respected for being so truly authentic and true to herself... even from people she had hurt in the past; to remind myself that staying true to oneself's heart first, or honoring the divinity that resides within, almost always pays off in the end. Sometimes I think about what she would say to me today as I make minor and major choices in my life and I know, I know that despite the hurt some of my choices have caused in others, that I was at a point where I had no other choice than to chose to live differently. And so I did and even if there's not a soul on this earth proud of me, or even really pleased with me, somewhere my mom is quietly smiling.
I have been reading a lot of Anne Lamott's writing lately about her life and about finding Jesus and about grace happening in our life. And while I don't personally follow Jesus as my lord and savior, I respect many of his teachings and his words as prophetic as I do many other religious and spiritual folks of the past and present. I appreciate very much Lamott's vulnerability and her courage to say how very un-perfect and sinful she can be and also her recognition of those moments we don't have words for when the music of the world seems to come together in one unanimous, lovely note and sing something, if even for a moment, more beautiful and true than we could have ever expected for hoped to hear; those moments when grace happens. As in Lamott's life, I have found it equally true in my own that many unexpected moments of grace are experienced during or after some of our lives most heartbreaking times. The death of my mother has been, thus far, my life's biggest heartbreak, the failure of a ten-year relationship I thought would last forever, a close second. And yet when I look at these two things, at what I have learned from each experience, at the courage and strength I have gained as a result of them, at the stretching my soul has been able to do and the spiritual growth that has happened as a result, I see grace. It's hard to appreciate and recognize life's greatest and simplest pleasures unless you have been witness to some of life's greatest tragedies and survived them. In reflection I also look at my former partner and at, despite what I'm sure have been moments of heartbreak and sorrow and of deep sadness over our absence from each other's lives, I feel greatful. I feel happy and I feel encouraged by my choices in seeing the happier and healthier ways that she is living her life... even if it's without me in it. And as much as I miss her sometimes, I feel so grateful to God that she is getting to blossom and bloom in such a lovely way and I feel so proud of the courage and strength that she has shown and can only hope that she feels as strong inside as she appears to those of us who know and love her from up close or in my case, from afar.
This year I have felt sad a lot. I have felt depressed. I have felt melancholy and hopeless and fearful and exceptionally lonely. I have felt guilty and I have felt ashamed. And I have felt humbled. But I have also felt strong. I have felt deeper wells of compassion than ever before in my life. And yet, at the end of the day, after all has been said and done, in many moments I have just felt brave because I have survived. I have been through the valley and have waded through the world's and my own ugly muck and have at times thrown myself in the mud and wanted to quit... yet I have always, somehow, gotten back up on my feet again and slowly, slowly continued to trudge along. I am not out of the woods just yet and many days are still hard and are still sad and are still lonely... but I can see a future, a happier, hopeful life out there for me. I can see possibility again. I can see the absence of some people I was sure would always be cheering me one, but I also can see a few folks out waiting for me to come back to the world, mainly ones I never would have expected like my father and stepmother. And I have survived.
May we see in all of our lives, amid beauty and brokenness, surprising moments of sparkling, heart-stopping, joy-inducing, soul-filling, divine Grace. And perhaps more importantly, may we see inside of ourselves and each other, amid our ugliest moments and in those of beautiful humility, that just by being here, we are all survivors. I think after this past year, in the loving spirit of life and all that is good and holy and redemptive, all I'd really like to say is, we made it. May it continue to be so.
Namaste.
