I'm b-a-a-a-a-c-k

I couldn't resist posting at my favourite blogging time, Saturday morning, seeing I missed last week. Hey, everyone! Good to see ya!! I missed ya :)

This week has been very interesting. I spent a reasonable swathe of it feeling empty, along with some moments of clarity, of creativity (I feel closer to the concept of being able to write a short story, for example - did you know that for the past seven months the only fiction I have written is a couple of poems? This week I also did some journalling and made a crap collage :) But the main feeling of this past week has been a feeling of emptiness. One of those times where you can't enfold yourself into the presence of God because he is standing one step away, calling to you to walk a step towards him.

Lucy describes well how emptiness is not a bad thing. Making way for the Lord, and all that. A fitting feeling to have at the time of Advent. Emptiness feels bad though, no matter how you philosophise it. I don't know if we ever get used to the feeling, being made as we are to be filled to the brim. Sometimes I wonder if we don't feel most empty at the very times when God is moving in those inward parts of us most bruised, most distorted, most twisted and most singed at the ends. Moving and denumbing us.

Fasting is a good thing. I haven't done a great deal of it in the past. These days, I can't seem to stop :) It is a strengthener. We are stronger than we think we are (insert whatever other Diane Warren/Jim Steinman-esque type quotes you think applicable here ;).

All I know is that I am 37 years old. I am most likely not going to have children (at least not in this life. I have put in a request to God that if all the babies that are unborn in this life require some sort of looking after in the next, that I might get some nursery duty :) I want my life to count for something. The past 8 years in the backside of the desert have been priceless and I wouldn't even trade them anymore. I've fallen off the tracks and realised that I don't even want to get back on again. I don't want to be anywhere but on the fringes. I just don't. You can see
clearer from here, and you get to miss out on great big blobs of the bullshit that sucks us into living fruitless, pointless lives devoid of meaning (the stock-standard Empire fit life, all shiny on the outside but as filling and nutritious as a bowlful of sugar).

I don't want to live that life. I could very easily spend the rest of my days stuck in front of the television or the computer screen every night. But Mein Gott I really don't want to. This is where praying dangerous prayers comes in. It's to save me from myself. I don't know where my life is heading. But praying dangerous prayers means that maybe I don't need to :) I used to think that praying that kind of prayer would mean God would send me somewhere where I could continue feeling like a square peg in a round hole, somewhere that I would get to use none of the gifts that I had and would have to squelch all of the ones I did. That kind of thinking was box thinking, however. God is just a leetle bit more creative than that.

I also used to think that it was kinda a one-way street of "doing God's will" - of listening and being all passive and getting directives from him. But the directives come slap bang right in the middle of a life well-lived, me is thinking. (What do you think?) And they come from within myself and my own heart desires, and it's when those inner things meet the outward sense of directive that the heartstoppers happen, the "ooh!" moments of clarity that propel you forwards into this direction, not that one.. It is much more of a co-creating of my life with God. I get to fully participate in it. It is fully mine, with him enshrouded and enmeshed and threaded through it until it becomes something beautiful. He is life and love.

I wanna know what those things are he's prepared for me to do from the foundation of the world.l I wanna go out and do them. I think I am really finally starting to heal.

It is raining, slightly chilly. The weather has been wild and woolly the past few days. Flooding rains and thunderstorms. My brother is down from Balranald with his dog. Now there are two dogs petrified of the thunder. I hope it's the last of it for their sake.

I am coming to the end of my latest parasite cleanse. I am feeling better and with more energy than I have in the last month. All bad medicine comes to an end at some point. There is so much change in the air. I can smell it on the wind. But I can't see what any of it looks like. There's a copper hair colour with my name on it on the bathroom sink. A symbolic changing to reflect the wind scent. I don't know what's gonna happen. But like I said, I don't really need to. But sheesh, doesn't mean I don't really want to :)

PS: I have this bad habit of editing my posts for about half an hour after I write them. Is that bad blogging etiquette, seeing some people read the first draft and then you go and change it again? I just like seeing how it looks "published" on the page. I seem to get inspired to change it more once it's there :) Annoying and I apologise :)