Dancing in the Fog

Friday 4 July 2008

I have gone for at least several weeks without at some point of every single day wanting to be dead. I think one would say that this is a good thing, right? In fact, right now, I am so happy, I feel like giant chunks of my own soul are being born and reborn right before my own eyes.

This last decade, not so good. Chronic health problems invisible to the eye which stretched me so far I really don't know how I didn't snap. Marriage breakup, heart breakdown. Then falling for someone because it felt so right to me, and yet was a land I couldn't enter anyway. Like some kind of blocked drain, piece by piece, all of my shit has come to the surface over the past 10 years. If I could have seen down through them, seen through the past decade and out the other side to here, I would have put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger without hesitation because, as dramatic as all this sounds, I have never thought I could go through so much pain in such a compacted time and still be standing up at the other end. I can barely write about all of this stuff still. I imagine I shall need a good five years or so to disseminate it all, to let it all absorb, to have some unreeling years in between to get a good feetplant.

And yet in the midst of all of that - joy so intense that my heart feels like it's going to pour out of my chest. A cracking open, and out of all of that, greater love, and no one but me will know how painful and horrible its been and no one will know how much more I cherish myself out of the birthing. And, in some kind of crazy way, a renewed ... awe for God, that he lets us go so close to the wire. Seriously, he is serious about getting shit out of his kids, and he won't stop even when we scream, defy and deny. Sometimes I wonder if he's not insane ;)

Yet I look about the world and my suffering pales in comparison. Not to minimise my stuff of course. Indeed, I make no apologies for any scrap of joy I get out of the rest of my life because I know, on some kind of cosmic level, I have said yes to God curetting, cutting and scraping, because I want it, this unnameable thing, the great Yes. I can taste it even though I haven't tasted it before and I can feel it even where I've never felt it. And I want it because I know it's worth it. I know it's that pearl of great price except I don't know how to refer to it except in analogies 'cause I've never been there before. But it's home. I know these things in my bones. I just know.

This is hard for me to write. I'm tempted to delete it. As crazy as it may sound, being I'm honest and open and out-there, I have a corresponding room in my soul where I find it really hard to speak my own truth, 'cause in a lot of ways I got taught by the significant males in my life that there were shameful reasons to hide my own truth away. I can't explain this to many people. I think they think that because my main front reception room is bright yellow that I don't have any black rooms but I do, and they have been hidden for so long, and it's only now all the shit has come to the surface that I really finally feel like I can start speaking my own truth. And that feels like some kind of amazing healing thing.

It's the weekend, in the middle of Winter, and I feel good and my heart feels more whole than broken, and as I write this I've got tears welling in my chest because life is so raw and so beautiful and so fucking painful, and the world is reeling to and fro, and somehow, despite how ridiculous it all seems like, God's got it going on.

10 comments

  1. thank you for refraining from hitting the delete button.

    So many things popped into my head as I read this and yet I have nothing to add...

    This speaks volumes...and nothing needs added to this:

    But it's home. I know these things in my bones. I just know

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  2. Thanks, Kent. I find it hard writing about this stuff because, as painful as it's all been for me, there is a part of me that has always minimised it. And also too because there are so many people I know whose baggage and pain is far greater than mine. That's why I wanted to hit the delete button.

    I often feel the same way reading your posts - so much goes on in my own head, and yet nothing needs adding :)

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  3. Sue, comparing pain, especially emotional and spiritual pain is will often cause in us what you described. It leads us to say "Suck it up...others have it much harder than I do."

    What ever pain we are in is "our" unique pain due to our experiences and often it feels about as bad as it could get. It's another one of the common comparison we do that isn't ever helpful to us.

    It's a tricky thing that feeling of "Well, maybe it's not that bad...it could be a lot worse."

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  4. I guess there's a spectrum for being stoic, isn't there? On the one hand, at times, it's good to just suck it up and get on with it. At other times, it's just an excuse to avoid feeling your own pain.

    Oderous comparisons. Do you think there is ever a place where comparing your stuff to other people's is ever anything less than something to make you feel dissatisfied about absolutely everything in your life?

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  5. I have no idea of how to answer that other than I think comparison is something humans just do and will continue to do in the areas of our lives that aren't free.

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  6. Yep. Absolutely and totally. When I compare the areas of my life that are free and the ones that are bound, in the freedom I am free to really be myself and to let people really be themselves and there is a distinction and no necessity at all to compare my reality up against other people's. It's a very interesting human trait.

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  7. that it is and one I want to be free of because it stands in the way of living loved and loving.

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  8. so glad you did not hit the "delete" button. somewhere in there i thought of my little piece over at "lucy creates" called 'let your joy flow' :-)

    sometimes rivers of tears and gunk ultimately turn into beautiful streams of joy. don't know how that happens, but somehow it does. i have witnessed & experienced it time and time again and it appears that you have, too.

    you're absolutely right, "God's got it going on!"

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  9. Sue~

    I'm glad you didn't delete, either. Hmm.. I have often felt my stuff wasn't much compared to others, too. But giving your story a voice that others can hear is healing. For you and them. ;-) (If they will really hear.)

    It is amazing the wide open place of scary freedom that He brings us into when we let Him walk us through our shit - our pain - and get it really dealt with, not the way the church would have us deal with it, but the way Truth would have us deal with it.

    Happy Independence Day!

    HUG
    Katheirne

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  10. sue,

    i found this very encouraging. thank you for sharing it.

    big grace-filled blessings,
    rob

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