too much to say

it’s all coming out too depressing. delete, delete, delete.

what do you do when you write how you feel and your brain says it’s garbage because you’re smarter than that and makes you delete?

intent

i was told to put my intentions out there.  to say them out loud.  to write them down.  to declare them into being.

‘i intend to run a 5k this year’, or, ‘i intend to marry my best friend’, or, ‘i intend to love the ones i’m with,’ …etc…

they matter, right?  my intentions?  i would like to believe i can change my(the) world with my intentions.  think of things that aren’t as those they are, in order that they may be.

what about when we do not intend for something to happen, yet it happens all the same…?  for example, ‘it was not my intention to hurt your feelings when i said that harmful thing.’ or, ‘i did not intend to have that affair with a married person.’  eh.  intent.  so, if i did not intend to hurt your feelings, just what was i intending?  did i imagine you would possibly think it was funny, what i said?  i’m sure i know by now my tongue can cut like a knife with the harmful words i sometimes choose.  so, why do i choose them?  what is my intention?

should i expect forgiveness for my good intentions gone awry?  do i really ever have good intentions?  i sometimes feel as though it could be a lie when i say, ‘but it wasn’t my intention for that to happen.’.  not because i think i had alternate intentions, but because there really can not be truly pure intentions.

a dear friend of mine says there is no such thing as a selfless act.  the more i think about it, the more i agree.  it also applies to intentions.  i can say all day long it was not my intention, but i had to know the road i was traveling, the inevitable outcome, and consequently, the pain and grief i would cause myself and those around me with my ‘good intentions’, or, i suppose, ‘not intentions’.

we’re all just as full of the possibility of failure as success.

we’re all fully capable of harm as well as healing.

we all need grace and forgiveness.

may your intentions be pure,  but if they fail, may you have the requisite forgiveness from your friends and yourself.

pocket change

so i heard it’s easier to love the people that are easy to love, and quite difficult to love the people that are difficult to love.

yep.

i also heard that words are cheap. action costs more.

too true.

i’ve also thought ‘love the one you’re with’ was a good rule of thumb.

but what about those people? you know, those people that we think were most likely put on the planet only to irk us, and do not really add value to our lives? and just how far to we interpret ‘with’? are we really ‘with’ those people, or are they just existing near us?

i have always said i wanted to be the best me i can possibly be. i really do believe i want that somewhere inside me. it could be the part that enjoys feeling good about myself, and not the part that does the actual work of loving the people that are difficult to love. it is really easy to say i want to be better. it is a much more difficult thing to realize this person i encounter existing near me is most likely near me for me to love, regardless of my feelings, wants, desires.

is it ever ok to tell a person you don’t know how to love them? i just do not know how to love you. it implies i’m the one with the problem, right? which is fine with me, since i actually am the one with the problem. my love, this overflowing love in my heart just does not flow over for you. it’s not you, it’s me. do i really want to be the best me i can be if i am so entirely unwilling to love this person i’m ‘with’? can i just tell the doorman on the way out of this life that even though it may have seemed as though this person was actually in my life, it was a mistake–i wasn’t ever ‘with’ them, only near them. only near. not with.

i’m pretty sure that just isn’t going to cut it.

time to suck it up and love. regardless of feeling. regardless of the fact they don’t do life the way i do life. regardless.

the only way to get there is through.  here’s to messy life.  here’s to making it through to the other side.

the other side

sometimes i think i would like to just be on the other side of the sun, without having to go through all the pain and terribleness of love.  but the only way there is through.  you have to go through it.  i have to go through it.

it reminds me of what lewis wrote: ‘To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the perturbations of love is Hell.’

how can i keep from the pain of love and not love?  i don’t want to lock my heart up again.  it hurts too much.  it all hurts too much sometimes.  may i let the creator keep my heart viable.  may i really begin to love the way i was created to love.

life at the moment

a piece of my heart is missing. the actions of day to day life are incomplete. there is a hole in my life. a hole in my existence. a hole.

the last time i felt this way, my grandma had died. i had family around me feeling the same, and i could talk about my grief. i feel utterly alone in my grief right now.

i’ve been trying to keep myself busy, not to feel the pain, this consistent, unrelenting pain. i’m painting my kitchen today, then i’ll go cut the weeds, and finish laundry, and walk around the house, and smoke a pack of cigarettes, and catch myself crying.

that’s just life at the moment.

in the midst of the forest

the other day, i had this thought…about how i could possibly be where i am today, given many decisions (some good, some not so) i have made in my life. and it occurred to me i could be reaping the benefits of all the years of prayer my family and family friends have given for me. and i also thought about how i probably have only sometimes been aware of that in my life.

and then i thought about rain and the forest. you know how when you’re walking through the forest, and it’s a really thick, tall forest, how you can’t really see the sky? it’s as though you’re in your own little world. the world under the canopy of branches and leaves. the focus is on your surroundings. where to place your foot so you don’t fall. what that noise could be twenty feet to your right or left(or behind). when you are going to come to the clearing you see up ahead. you’re thinking of all of this…and only hearing and feeling what is immediately around you.

then you come to the clearing and realize it’s been raining. raining for quite some time. and you wonder how long it has been raining, and why you didn’t notice.

i think life, to me, is like the forest, and the prayer would be like the rain. i’m constantly looking around me, crouching to look closer to the group of flowers by my feet, smelling the bark on the trees, sometimes falling on a tree root…you get the idea. and then, all of a sudden i get to the clearing, and feel the rain. and i realize i was oblivious.

this is my desire: thoroughly enjoy every inch of the forest, while still appreciating the rain. may you do so as well.

i’ve had glimpses

but they have always been very short – almost too short – so short they made me wonder if they were even real.

glimpses of a calm i could only imagine.  i never thought the glimpses would or could ever be anything more than fleeting.   that’s the MO of glimpses.  they are not meant to last.

you can understand my confusion when i suddenly realize i am knee deep in calm, when i realize  i have been experiencing this quiet equilibrium for more than a glimpse, more than 100 glimpses – for months even.  i didn’t know what was happening at first.  i thought perhaps i had fallen into some sort of complacency.  not feeling.  not anguish, not excitement, not unrest.  i thought maybe it could be indifference.  depression?  withdrawal?  i ran through the list of possible explanations.  i couldn’t find one.

i talked about this to a friend last week and she had a great explanation.  i was pretty surprised, yet not in the usual way i exhibit surprise.  i told her i felt numb, except not, because i’ve felt that before.  i said i felt like i was pretending happiness except that i was happy.  i looked at her, waiting, i wanted her to tell me i was crazy…because surely i was becoming so.

she told me i was at peace.  she told me i had lived so long with all my emotions at a ten(!) – always experiencing everything with every fiber of my being – that of course it would be unsettling (yet not) to feel at a four, because a four is so very calm compared to everything i am used to.

it made complete sense, but it had me worried, well….as worried as i could be at the moment.  i have always thought if i wasn’t feeling everything around me with such intensity, than i was not living.  i used to want to squeeze every moment out of life.  i actually still do but it is different.  i feel so completely changed and yet so completely the same.  does this make sense?  it’s taking me a while to figure out.  i don’t think i will figure it out.  my friend told me to embrace it.

so this is me arms wide open embracing the calm – as new and different and strangely comfortable as it is.

it’s okay.

i’ll have to think about it some more

i have this thing with thinking.

i think i had a dream about this last night.  about starting to write again.  someone in my dream asked me if i liked to write…or if i was good at writing…or something like that.  i think i said yes.  then i woke up and forgot about it until this minute.

is it ok to write about dreams if i don’t get into too much detail?  i have a lot of things to write about so hopefully dreams won’t be an issue.