Whinings and enjoyablenesses

Friday 5 December 2008

I had dinner with my ex last night. It is always good to see him even though sometimes it is very painful to. We watched the present he bought me, a DVD of Hawthorn's finals campaign. Fun times. He is off to Sydney this weekend with his girlfriend, to go to a music festival. He apologised last night for not cooking when we were together. It was nice to receive such an apology. He has grown so much and changed so much. I am glad he is having such an enjoyable time in his life. I am even glad he is in love and that he is having such a great social life. Even though I am jealous. I am tired of the hurtfulness when I compare our lives. When is it my turn, Papa? I'm so tired of this season. If you don't get me out of the mire soon, I will be stuck here like a pig.

My latest Richard Rohr book was inside my letterbox when I got home this evening. Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of St Francis in an Age of Anxiety, co written with John Bookser Feister. Just the ticket. Mr Rohr speaks to me like few others, and I need some of his vision this weekend. It's been a bit of a slog the last week or so, entering in to some of the more unsafe places in my soul, acknowleding their existence even though I don't want them there. I am tired of acknowledging my vulnerabilities. I want to return back to my old self, the one that doesn't exist anymore, the one that sickness stole.

She doesn't exist anymore, but I still do, whatever that means, and so this struggle goes on, realising the latest steps I need to take to do whatever I am seeing I need to do, which in this case is learning to counterbalance those pockets of unsafety while trying to embrace them at the same time. It has been distracting and upsetting, and to begin the return to some sort of Goddish equilibrium to start off the weekend via Mr Rohr is just the ticket.

I took a blanket and some pillows outside and lay and read. I even had a Nanna nap for 10 minutes or so, until the cooler weather blew in and across my bare arms and woke me up. Like a kiss. There was a certain sweetness about it, being woken like that, and just the combination of the Rohrian words and the Spirit breath and I felt a bit more enlivened. Walked Lester after I woke up and then came home and treated myself to some takeaway and some drawing with watercolour pencils. All small things, done in mindfulness, in some sort of way to restore myself back to a level sort of field. I feel like I unravelled a bit this past week. Or maybe I got put back together a bit better. Sometimes I can't tell the difference because sometimes those two things feel the same. I'm sick of growing. Really sick of it. I want to move on in my life and have some fun. Is that possible?

I know I know less than I thought I did at the beginning of the week, and that despite the fact that I am one of the strongest people I know, this only means that those unsafety pockets have been able to hide themselves away underneath. I am tired of slogging my way through these sorts of things. Sometimes I wonder if I am simply stuck, and stuck in a moment I can't get out of. Where is God in all of this? Is there a method to all of this madness, or am I simply trying to read meaning into things which are just the way life is? Perhaps it is too much to expect that I shall get out into some sort of more rarefied air where my hurts aren't hanging off me like rags. I don't even know who this bloody person is. It's certainly not the me that I have lived with for ... well, all my life! Maybe this is just detox talking, I don't know. Maybe I'm playing the comparison game and coming out losing. Maybe I've just lost perspective. But right now, I just don't know what the hell my life is all about and if it's too much to expect that it shall get easier in some ways. I am finding it difficult to see God working in my life at the moment. And if I could just see that, it would make all the difference.

6 comments

  1. Sue, Hope Against Darkness was such an important book for me during a time of transition....(minus the reviving Catholicism part)

    I really feel for you with where you are at. As I write that I hear the words of a few people who walked with me during my painful frustrating time saying to me that their freedom didn't end up looking like anything they had imagined it would be. I can so relate to their words today.

    Remember the explaination I sent you from one of those friends about the tangled ball of knots created out of a single string? Papa knows how to untangle you in such a way to not break that string. I'm praying for you.

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  2. Thanks for the prayers, Kent. I guess today, at least, or this last week, at least, I am doubting whether untangling the ball is what God is doing, and whether there is any point seeing it never seems to end. So that's my defeated standpoint today :) I'm tired of it all, really getting very close to the end of my tether, so thank you for the prayers.

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  3. Wow do I EVER hear you today. I feel like I'm spinning in weightlessness, still tangled in the web of trying to be someone I'm not and I can't find which way is up. I just realized it again tonight...and it sucks poo-poo. How the hell does it happen? One day I'm fine and the next day I'm a cliche suburban housewife. Where does the life in me go when it runs away? Why do I try to pretend to be this all-together person when all I really want to do is drink?

    Sorry I'm really cynical tonight, but this is not the life I signed up for. My greatest fear is being boring, and I'm boring as hell right now so now I feel like I have to do something to shake it up. How is it we can sink into a boring, predictable rhythm without realizing it? And God is soooo f-ing boring. Because God means I have to behave and I don't want to behave.

    I don't know if we ever reach the end of that ball of string...I think it's perpetual. Because as much shit as we work through, there is more shit building behind it every day.

    /rant

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  4. "Where does the life in me go when it runs away? Why do I try to pretend to be this all-together person when all I really want to do is drink?"

    ++++++++

    How hard that dies in us, that needing to have it all together. Sigh. This is a good book to read in that regard, actually. I fulsomely recommend it. It has helped me today regain a tiny bit of peace, a realising, a meditating on the cross and realising again that because the god of the universe made himself into nothing, it's given me a freedom also to not have to be everything. Some days, in the middle of all this mess and birthing and groaning, I can grasp it, and see glimpses, and see that he IS working all things to good because that is his nature, he can't do anything but that. It's just that we can't see it yet and we're right in the midst of the crap. But yeah, then I lose sight of that pretty quickly, which really frustrates me, because I need that certitude. I think I need to go back and do some more meditating on that mystery ...

    Yeah, I'm with you on this not being the life you signed up for. Some days I think I've got a grip on that, and other days I fall in a heap. That is interesting, that your greatest fear is being boring. I was wondering after I read that, what is my greatest fear? I was thinking maybe it was being inadequate, but I am not sure if that is my greatest. Where does all these goddamn bloody scripts come from so that we feel frustrated when we're not living according to them, but so often we can't access them?

    Hugs to you, dear Erin. May excitement flood into your life. I'm probably more convinced that God would have that for you than I am about myself, but isn't that the way of it so often. How easy it is to see from the outside, but it's so different when you're the one taking the steps every day.

    Anyway, blah blah blah blah blah. I'm with you. I think these moods count, and they fit, in the grander context of what you were talking about the other day, this moving towards something we do not know what. I think there is so much turmoil in the world, SO MUCH of it, that we couldn't help but get in these despairing, frustrated, angry, bored, apathetic, visionlacking moods because not being able to see in front of you gets rather tiring sometims.

    Anywya, wow, talk about crapping on. I shouldn't blog or comment after 11pm because I just talk verbal diarrhea. I don't know if any of this makes sense, haha :)

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  5. Thank you sis for your words. They are beautiful and life-affirming. A bit better today, not so weepy and heapy. Well, not for the same reasons anyhow...the news about my friend was a bit rough to wake up to, but at least I feel more right on my feet. I would have thought the way I felt yesterday was PMS except it's not. So then I have to wonder where does this emotionalism start if it's not just bloody hormones. And that wondering sends me into a spiral.

    But here's the thing, Sue my dear...we've talked in the past about how I feel like I'm just unpeeling the layers of girdle that have bound my emotions and my true self so tightly...so I just have been feeling it loosen more lately...and one one level I feel so that this is worth celebrating, and on the other hand I crave my stoic self.

    But I'm glad, because it means I'm healing.

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  6. Erin - do the punches we need to roll with never end? I'm really sorry to hear about your friend :( Ahh, the wondering. I don't think we even need hormones to go through all of that shit. The hormones just add a nice little cherry on top - not.

    Layers of girdle. Goodness. What a great analogy!! That's worthy of about 15 blog posts. I totally get what you're saying here. The unpeeling is what we really are thirsty for, because it's actually freeing us up to breathe. But the process of that unpeeling makes what we're aiming for start disappearing on the horizon like some sort of oasis. Yuk. It's so messy. It's HORRIBLE.

    But yeah, I'm glad too because it really does mean you're healing. It's all working towards something, it is. I really believe that (well, most of hte time :)

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