There's a lot I need to say, I need to talk about, and I can't. Not here, not with really anyone. That's not an awful thing, I just need to acknowledge that I am holding a lot, on a lot of different fronts.
This is how this process will go - whichever process I'm in:
Excitement, alarm, refusal, assurance, clarity, calm.
Rinse. Repeat. For everything.
The thing that I take from this, these large grand movements going on in so many different realms, is that I trust me. I trust me to know what I want, what I need. I trust me to say what I see, to state what I know, with kindness and clarity. I may not feel it as I write, but I see it afterwards. No matter how chaotic, I have abiding deep trust in myself. As I always have.
What is fascinating is that I can write - "as I always have." That the core of me has not changed, though it was lost for quite some time.
I began reading a book this morning - Wild, by Cheryl Strayed.* I'd been searching for words, a way to describe what is me these days, what is happening, what it is - see I can't do it even now. But I open this book, and I read these words:
It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along,
one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope.
A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew
I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.
And that is it exactly. I can't even tell you why, and I don't need to. Doing the things I am doing now, the possibilities and openings, it is a way both back and forward, a way to leave the life that has been and come closer to it, all at the same time, and by the same way. I trust me, and that hasn't changed.
.
*reading the author notes today, I find... where does she live? I see. Of course she does.
* I look forward to hearing about all the changes on your horizon. Can we guess on the area of the world you're talking about?
ReplyDeletethere are clues! Tempted to just tell you, but I also like a puzzle.....
ReplyDeleteBy some coincidence, I read an excerpt from 'Wild" a week or so ago. I think it came up on Amazon while I was looking at Oregon and California trail guides (I'll be spending most of this autumn camping and hiking trails along the coast and in the Cascades and Sierras). Agree with the quote you have mentioned. There is a place where certain of us can go to find (or re-find) ourselves.
ReplyDeletematt and I had planned a pacific nw grand tour, including my dropping him off on one side of the salmon river valley and picking him up months later on the the other side, then heading up to banff. Neither of us had been in that corner of the states before, still haven't been. Will look forward to your posts from those trails. May be a year, but I will be heading that direction.
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