Embracing the Bedfellows

I'm enjoying reading people's 2008 roundup posts. I suppose this is the closest I shall come to doing one of my own. I've definitely been driving in an all-terrain vehicle this last year, forging new territory. I am hopeful, with a shy, tentative, virginal hopefulness of this coming year being one where I can get out of the car and dance in some roadside fields. This feels shyly possible and maybe even shyly probable to me this morning.

Still, I have been humiliated and humbled by much that went on this year. It is tiring exploring new territory, especially when those territories are the twin bedmates bitterness and jealousy. Such difficult things to get grips on. You spy them there in the shadows and large they loom, so you look for a second or two (blessed looking) and then that is enough for now. And so you go and watch television. Those two-second lookings are days of small beginnings, not to be despised.

Until in the end there is nothing to do but to admit these strange bedfellows who have been living in your life hidden away in one of those rooms. Dammit, you knew that opening doors would lead to contents that wouldn't rock your socks, to put it lightly. But conversely, you think that maybe there are secret passages in those rooms, that contain slippery dips, that lead out to places you ... well, you don't know yet, because you haven't been there.

And so then you go for days and weeks and you've opened these doors. And you leave them open, but you go back to the lounge room. It's enough to have the doors open. This too is blessed looking. Because while you're sitting in the lounge room, and the stench wafts down the hallway on occasions, these things are shrinking a little bit further in size by familiarity and humiliation, until one day you walk past one of the rooms and stop and walk in and look around and sit on the bed. And you sigh yes, okay then. I see you live here and you have for some time.

And so you go back to the lounge room, and sometimes the bitterness and the jealousy come to visit you there in your safe place. And the world doesn't rock in its axis when they do, and you realise suddenly that there is another door in front of you, and you open it and walk through, bringing these dragging dogs with you, and you walk on through with these things that you once could not see and were shocked to see so that you were crushed and hated and punished yourself and locked the door to the playroom and swallowed the key.

And now it seems that you have begun to embrace those things and it's like a jolt of honey to realise you can see into them. This close you can see the threads that follow back along wordless roads to beginnings, and sometimes those ibeginnings are impossible to know that you have reached them but something clicks in your soul and you are at peace when you were at war, though more battles will rage. And you realise again how it's a good and holy thing to do this examination of yourself because these kernels of death, that made you flinch and make you flinch, contain down in their husk a nugget and you see that there is always life after death.

And though you know this, it makes you marvel afresh every time you see it in some other place. And there is silence in your heart for half an hour.

Thanks for sharing the road with me this past year, you blogging dudes. I do give you all a hard reading time on this blog, I must say. I don't know how to play it except real. I hope that this next year I get to joy on you and hug you with my words more :) I'm pretty sure I'll be reporting from the trenches of the slough of despond too, but hey, light and dark, right :)