It’s been a long day. I’m ending it with a backache, a headache, and quite content to see this one reach its conclusion. It’s ending well; I don’t want to give a different impression. It’s just been a day that began well, is ending well, and in between…it wasn’t horrible, wasn’t tears or trauma, wasn’t even noteworthy in a way worth noting. It was effort well-spent, small stresses well-managed, tasks completed, begun, and otherwise dispensed with. Satisfying, overall, more or less…I’m just…done. So very done for today.
…finally…evening light.
Funny thing, I suspect the fatigue, perhaps even the pain, stem more from what I’m not doing, than the things I am – or have been – doing today. That ‘conversation with myself’ isn’t going to go away. Taking care of me, and healing, and growing and learning to nurture myself and invest in my own experience, my own needs and giving myself the support and respect I need from myself isn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever undertaken. I’m a handful – the wreckage, the chaos and damage, the ancient pain – it all adds up. Walls built over years keep me out, too. Introspection easily becomes a sort of mental geodesic dome of fun-house mirrors, reflecting my poor assumptions and bad programming back onto myself again and again, splintering, fracturing, breaking up a momentary understanding into confusion and incoherent half-baked wishful thinking, or worse still, fears and insecurities built on enough of what is real to mislead me into self-loathing, or frustrated rage. I’ve had to find another way. It’s a journey, not a destination – I’m pretty sure of that, now.
There is still so very little ‘knowing’, and so many questions. I am a student…of life, of love, of truth, of what is…of what is not…of what may be…what isn’t so likely…and bit by bit my firm certainty in the world reveals itself as an illusion, a defense, a sort of camouflage to protect me from the one person I can never ever be saved from. Yep. Me. Her. Me-at-18, me-at-20, me-at-30… me…then. Let’s not talk about then, shall we?
Mindfulness isn’t about pretending something isn’t. Healing isn’t a score card, and no amount of pretense can will me whole of heart and mind. So…I have to make room in my experience for her. For me. That earlier iteration of chaos and damage that is who I have been. So much chaos. So much damage. It’s on my mind, and it is a distraction from my every day experience, this need to face myself, in a way so honest and so direct that she can not evade my questions with her answers, presses on my consciousness with such force. So now what? I have to find the words…the time…the place…
I’m glad the day ends, and ends well. I need my strength. I am here, now, and having survived and endured her ‘then’, along with her, I know her strength well. I don’t know the outcome…I know she won’t take a dive. I know I can’t afford to lose, or forfeit.
Night falls and I am glad to rest.
Evening Light 