A weekly dose of dauntlessly dealt reality from the What It Is Wednesday Blog Carnival…
I haven’t written on this hop in ages, and I hesitated to, today. I’d already sent out my newsletter this morning and I didn’t want you to hate me. Also, I’ve not written for Wednesdays because life’s just been too damned real to write about it. You know what they say–time and perspective, neither comes quickly.
The last two days have been a weird study of my life, seeing it as largely characterized by times of healing or creating. I never realized that duality before.
I can honestly say that I have never been elated to heal anything. Relieved, confident, humbled, though not once ever happy or joyful to undertake that rot. Maybe some people are; not me.
I’m talking about healing the deep down, ugly, fearful, primal, pre-verbal personal truths that set in before we were aware that we’re aware. The stuff of our childhood nightmares and shapes unconsciously our adult everything–that.
Truly, gods help us all.
For those of you who may not know, I had out-patient surgery last week, which in and of itself, went well. Complications after have been anything but. My personal hell isn’t an understatement.
I am doing okay with the triggers, though only because I’m at another survival point of, “What choice do I have?” If I do anything other than realize those far-reaching truths of my childhood, when all of my physical issues began, I am not surviving.
Seriously–fuck thriving. I don’t even know what that is, right now.
Plus, my kids are watching. I’ve always said I want to be real with them, so that they understand how to cope when life knocks them over. I’ve explained what’s happening on a level they can manage, and they’re still catastrophising. I know they see beyond their level, no matter what comes out of my mouth.
All I can do is let the dregs howl when they need to, which is exactly what they do. They have no words. They are a deeply embedded child me who comes in moans and fits of tears, and I just let them. I breathe them completely through, from the second they took life in my child brain, to the pain that slices through my adult body. I tell them I’m here, that they will be okay, and all we have to do is now. I can’t comprehend what’s ahead, because if I do I will be consumed with worry of momentum lost on writing projects, practice-building, being present for my family. Shit, you should see my house.
I can’t comprehend the vulnerability of One More Thing that requires me to viscerally respond. I can handle a crisis. I can handle two crises, maybe even three. What’s going on right now is a shit storm of monumental proportions. I’d love to lighten that load, but certainly no more right now, please.
That’s the gold that shed the light on the epochs of my life.
I always thought the things I had to heal lay in opposition to what I really wanted to be creating. I believed this: healing, or creating. I anguished over all the things I could have been doing if I wasn’t busy mining the shit of my soul. And as NAC (New Age Correct) as it is to say, “Our healing is our creation,” and, “We are our life’s work,” fuck that. There really was a whole other life out there happening, and I so very often wasn’t part of it. I was inside, breathing, howling, and checking for more.
Then there were the zeniths, in which some sync of trajectories found me free. The quietest, yet most vibrant times of my life were when I was creating something–a poem, a painting, a book, a relationship, a class. In those times I wasn’t within. I wasn’t without either, cos that’s way too far outside the lines for me. But I was straddling a gorgeous balance of beholding where I’d been, where I was, and all the things that had to have gone right to get me there–even if I couldn’t vividly see them. While I wasn’t feeling the backlogue of what remained to be healed, I was always aware it was there. Creativity was its distraction, my guilty pleasure in eloquent words, scenes, parables.
Those, I was elated to undertake, and I begged for them to take me. Not once in my life have I ever had writer’s block, or whatever it is that artists get when they can’t make things do. If anything, I have more going on in my head than I can ever commit to creation. The only interference has been what needs healing.
It was always one or the other–healing or creating. Active, passive? Doing, processing what’s done? Some guru on an image quote taught that closing the gap is a goal. Is it? Life can’t all be work any more than it can all be play. Distinct, necessary bits of process, initiation, realizing one from the other without choosing, maybe? That, I get. There’s context.
Right now all I’ve got for furthering that narrative is feral accounts in the rough, the play-by-play of life in animistic trenches. Sometimes it’s poetic, it’s always healing–this I do find in the moment. I’m still not happy about it.
I accept, now, that I won’t arrive at some neat sequitur. Neither state will go away, nor will they fully merge. And one likely wouldn’t progress without the other.
The pattern is.
Coded into all of Nature is timing.
I cannot say with any sincerity that I will ever like any of it, or that I’ll even try to. I just know that fighting it or my own process creates more conflict.
That, and may we all find our way, uniquely, authentically, and with as much awareness of our own fucking divinity as possible.
If You Want to Be Real on your blog, visit the inaugural page —http://www.soulintentarts.com/what-it-is-wednesday/ and follow the instructions there to share your reality with the world! Read other blogs in the carnival, below:
