I savor the comments you write to me like a delicious and rare piece of chocolate that I may never taste again.  I unwrap them again and again lingering over the words that express beauty and solidarity with me.  Through your words I know I am not alone.  You too are here in this big, complex world wanting to feel a tiny bit of tenderness and healing together.

You share that you are traveling this path and are just a little ahead of me or a few paces behind and that you too are carrying your torch of discovery to illuminate your way.  I am grateful and feel wrapped up by a warm light of love and tenderness that I’m not sure I ever felt or allowed in throughout my life.

Writing, go figure, is turning out to be a way I am learning to love my self.  It is a way I give my self time to listen to that part of me that I have covered up and ignored most of my life.  I didn’t know I was doing that.  It’s clear to me now that I am letting my self hear me, and, that I have done almost everything to silence that voice through almost, if not all, my life.  Drinking and drugs was one way. Being busy and always on the move was another.  Excessively focusing on others was another. Being a good Mom and the best helper at their school was still another.  There have been so many ways I have stayed away from my self it’s no wonder I am in this ‘crisis of discovery’ now.

‘Crisis’ is right.  There is something in me that is shifting.  I keep saying that and hope you aren’t getting bored hearing it.  That’s what it’s like.  Almost like the tremors in the earth that precede a major earthquake, that is what is happening inside of me.  Things in my core are shifting and sifting and settling into new ways of being.  It’s not a huge devastating quake yet that wreaks havoc and destruction, though that’s what the blog The Storm Inside foretold.  Its a series of increasingly stronger tremors that are telling me my ground is being profoundly altered, and I better get used to the new landscape because it will never be the same again.

I think we all have this being inside of us that is the real person we are.  Some people have really good hearing and follow those voices of wisdom with huge doses of kindness.  And then there are others of us who are partially deaf, or simply choose not to listen till a full blown earthquake makes us give our attention to them.

So much changed for me when I stopped using a substance to quiet my self.  So much fell away and fell apart.  Like the eggs cracking open to reveal the nourishment/potential inside, that’s what is happening to me.  I am opening and the shell of me is crumbling and what I am discovering is this person I am beginning to love and treasure and listen to.  It’s okay that it’s taken almost 60 years. Maybe I needed that time to have the courage necessary to fall apart knowing I could and would be able to piece my self back together in a way that was right for me.  Maybe so.  I don’t really know.

The only thing I really know now is that I am ready to listen and I am ready to hear.

Love Lessons