Circling Back Around

It has been a while since I have blogged or blogged steadily. A conversation with a dear friend on a recent morning reminded me of a post I wrote 7 years ago. I went back, read it, and heard the very thing I needed to hear. After that post, I looked at another and another from years past. Besides getting the message I needed, what also struck me was the judgement that I can’t write like that anymore. “You’ve lost it” is what she says. “Maybe I have,” I say. But, there was something so fulfilling about reading those posts that even if, now, I can’t write so articulately, with such intentionality, my will has been fired up. She is determined to make a go of it. It feels, suddenly, necessary.

I wrote then because I had to. It was life or death at the time. It kept me alive and not just alive, but growing and moving in ways I didn’t even know. Maybe I am at that point again. Not life or death, at all, but maybe I am, once again, at a place of growing into knowing myself. Maybe the words that need to be said will come again. What I can see, in how I used to write, is the very thing I was speaking about in Sunday night meditation. That in “naming” what was alive in me at the time, I got some space from it and could see more clearly what was there. I could make explicit what I knew about it, what was true for me. I could make sense of it. I never thought about it before, but writing can be another another tool of mindfulness.

I am in new place, yet certain themes circle around, like the planets around the sun. “Yup, this one’s back…” There is that annoying saying that we get presented with the same life lesson until we learn from it. It circles around and around, not at a dizzying speed because each visit needs time to digest. But come around…it will. This is what I am getting to understand…each time it comes, it is different. A little less painful (emphasis on “liitle”). A little more interesting. Just as perplexing. Of course it is. It’s perplexing because we are exploring another aspect of it, another nook and cranny we didn’t know was even there. That’s exciting, really. Another opportunity. Why else are we here if we are not learning and growing more into who we really are and sharing from this place, from our true selves - even if the whole process is painful.

A pandemic will set into motion all kinds of ripples. Waves more likely. I am letting it move me. Do we have any choice? I suppose I could drop the anchors and try to stay in place, but how dull would that be? Besides, my ship will only get battered and no distance will have been made. Why not let my ship get battered, but arrive somewhere new?

“Here we go,” I say to myself. Write I will. See you soon.