On Taking the Time and Growing Good and Other Painful Realizations

I had a rough week. Of course there are many reasons for this and if you really want to fight me on it I will not push back and say, "You don't understand!" Because, most likely, you do. And perhaps you've had a pretty rough week too. Let's commiserate. In the grand scheme of things, my week was not rough. But in my little world it was. And I am okay with that. And even though I am just learning how to feel feelings (both good + bad) and express them in appropriate ways, I have found myself overwhelmed with how sharply I am experiencing the aftermath of grief, loss, hurt & in some very strange alternate universe, a lingering fog layer of joy.

One thing I am knowing is this: it is okay to feel! I will not go off on a rant about how feeling hard things makes the good things feel "that much better," because that is not my truth. But I do believe that feeling hard things reminds me of my humanity and returns me to a place of humility that I am far too quick to avoid.

Things take time. Good things take time. I mean really, truely, deep down in my overly-sensitive, gentle heart I believe it. Physical time and all the other forms that time takes these days. It doesn't necessarily make things easier or make those not-so-nice feelings less painful, but it is a comfort. And I will not project into the future, because I have not been given that and I am trying to rest in the every day, but people keep telling me that "good things will come," or "things can only get better!" I know they mean well, but sometimes this cheapens the experience of today. Like, this is happening right now! Enjoy it! (Or hate it if it sucks) But please don't forget to be present. People are worth your time + attention + investment.

Be good to them.

"Good things take time."

Things I Wish Would Happen But Will Most Likely Not Be Today, Etc.

Though I hate to acknowledge/these things take time/They cannot be rushed/or fast-forwarded/or ambushed into action/(which is what I'd prefer they do)/Perhaps for now we can sit/Walk the lake/Hope for good things for people who are not ourselves/And maybe "3rd times the charm,"/or 4th/or 5th/or maybe no charms/Just a peace and hope for what is to come/But still trying to be okay with the quiet,/the sadness,/the humility of solitude.

more little things

This didn't leave me with much. Sometimes we don't know what we want until we don't get it. It's like meeting someone for the first time after hearing their voice on the phone--before you met them you'd have said you had no particular image of them; afterward, you inevitably say you imagined them looking different. - Sloane Crosley

Days

I am hesitant to say how I feel about all these things because they are hard and true and real, but have already hurt too much. The gentle truth is that these things happen. Relationships fail. Yes, even this one. Even the best of intentions and most constant of pairings. If we are unfaithful, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself. & life goes on.

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear. -Adrienne Rich

Childhood is a strange country. It's a place where you come from or go to - at least in your mind. For me it has an endless, spellbound something in it that feels remote. It's like a little sealed-vault country of cake breath and grass stains where what you do instead of work is spin until you're dizzy. -Lyall Bush