DAYS WHEN YOU FEEL LOST

I haven't written for a long time.  Or so it seems to me.  I have almost forgotten how.  The words lately have been stuck.  The thread I string these words on has become frayed and tattered and slack.  So have I.

 

I find I am losing touch with myself all too often.  The person I was once upon a time seems to be battered and ever so weary. So what do we do when we feel this way?  What do we do? You ask questions of those you care about deeply and the answers should come easily, but they don't.  You hear no response and you feel even more lost. 

 

Those you love have left you.  Or those you thought loved you.  So you turn to the only thing you know to do.  Sitting at a computer and pumping out your soul to people you probably don't even know.  Some of you will read this and think well here she goes again and others, more likely, will understand because perhaps, just perhaps they feel or have felt the same way too. 

 

I sense it is a human thing.  A human condition.  We want the perfect life, the perfect everything and upon closer observation find that not much about it is perfect at all.  The things, events, people, situations, occasions, times become unfamiliar and lost.  You sometimes wonder who you are and what is your purpose here. 

 

 

There is that mountain I want to sit on and hope that the answers come, but in reality they probably won't.  What is it when you ask the questions and nobody answers or even acknowledges you asked them, or sadder yet doesn't seemingly care.  What if time is short and running out and that one thing that would bring you joy keeps disappearing further and further away.

 

Don't misunderstand there have been amazing parts of my life that I now look back upon and wonder at the time if I realized how truly blessed I was.  Sitting on top if Mendenhall Glacier after leaving the helicopter I remember the color yellow. The color of the rain gear I was wearing.  I remember horseback riding in the high mountains of Montana and seeing, through the horses breath, the most incredible double rainbow at the top of the peak.  I remember red raspberries I picked at timberline in Colorado. I remember walking five feet from flowing lava in Hawaii, and I remember amazing breathtaking adventures in Portugal, and Yugoslavia and France and Switzerland and Hong Kong and Japan and Thailand and Taipei, and dancing on a table in Corfu, and living for 2 years in Seoul, Korea. Now suddenly it seems to have disappeared.  Where has time gone.  What do I do with what is left. I feel stuck.

 

Maybe I need to learn to speak softly to myself and realize there will be better days ahead. I should tell myself that I really am extending my best effort.  I need to console myself and my wounded soul and tender spirit with the previous successes.  There have been far too many failures of late. But as has been said by Mary Anne Radmacher, one of my favorite authors, "Sometimes you just have "to recognize that on certain days the greatest grace is that the day is over and you get to close your eyes and hope tomorrow comes more brightly."

 

But how do I find the way back to me? Abraham Maslow says, "perpetrate vast goodnesses on the planet. Go ahead and cry. Let your tears teach you, tears can be stepping stones to your renewal."  I shall try. He also says what stabbed at me like a knife, "...let go of governing the actions and attitudes of others."  Unfetter yourself. That just may be my answer. 

 

"The other week I said I was an eagle behaving like a pack mule.  Have the courage to forgive yourself.  Have the compassion to forgive others.  Forgiveness is a healer.  Holding on to resentment, hurt, and blame knits wounds into your bones."   

 ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

 

So perhaps to answer my own question I paraphrase Radmacher, this evening I write words to myself of support and tenderness, I will give myself the words I need.....even if no one else does.  I will reach deeply and pick the rose I planted in myself so long ago.

 

I will become an eagle again and not a pack mule, carrying everyone else's problems and burdens.

 

Moving forward into my own life makes me wish there was a guide book, or a recipe, or 'mapquest' on this journey of healing and grace. But perhaps the journey will hold the answers.