WHAT DO FEELINGS AND APPLE TREES HAVE IN COMMON?

There is a powerful saying in the world of writing.  "If you can't feel it you can't write it!"  Agreed!  Our feelings are so much a part, a valuable part, of what it is to be human.  And sometimes our feelings run so deep that it hurts to express them verbally or even in writing. For if you do then they become real. This is much like another statement, "Love can only spill from a heart that has been broken."

I have struggled, am struggling, daily to overcome feelings.......feelings based on 'stuff' that happened a long time ago that defined the journey I have taken in this life. And feelings that have happened in the past 4-5 years that have changed me and then more recent feelings that have altered who I thought I was and where I thought I was going.  It is almost like 'unlearning' a lifetime of mistakes not of your own making.  But mistakes that altered the path you find yourself taking repeatedly.  Then you slowly begin to wake up to who you really are and what you really want, taking all else out of the equation.

 

It may not always be the popular route but it is your route. You may hurt feelings but then you have been hurt enough.  In life, we do things. Some, we wish we had never done, and some we wish we could replay a million times, but they ultimately make us who we are, and in the end they shape and detail us.  We would not be who we are today without all the mistakes of yesterday.

 

I worry about time wasted.  Then I replay the tape and see all the good that I have done for others, forsaking myself. So perhaps the bottom line is that we just live. We make mistakes and have some wonderful memories. We should never forget who we are, where we have been, and more importantly, where we are going.
 

A friend told me this week, after I had yet again been betrayed and hurt by several people who I was trying to assist to help our wounded warriors,  to just 'pull up myself by my bootstraps and keep on going.' But boy it gets tiresome.  Sometimes you just want to scream and hurt something and not swallow the grief and drama inflicted on you by others.

 

But ultimately you can't be protected from life sometimes breaking you.  You have to, no matter what, love and feel.  For that is the reason you are on this earth.  You are here to risk your heart. And as Terry Hershey wrote, "You are here to be swallowed up.  And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.  Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

 

Now all I need is the apple tree and angels sleeping on my pillow.