It has been right around a year now since I started this blog, entering the journey of falling into the heart with every moment, every breath, every thought, every action. Last fall, I sat on my porch, allowing myself to give my attention to the world around me, to the trees moving in the wind, and the light in the sky, and to my own internal wind and light and motion. Little did I know that my whole life was getting ready to shift in ways that I couldn't have imagined. My heart was getting ready to break, and my understanding of life would be called to the table again and again, and I would be stripped bare of everything that had previously brought me to experience comfort, stability, and assurance.
Sitting here on my porch, a year later, many things seem the same. The same view, these beautiful trees and this blue sky. I am still myself, and my life still resembles the life I had one year ago. But there is a depth of knowing and understanding that has come to me that speaks beneath this moment of sameness. In this year, I have indeed fallen into the heart. And in the process of falling out of the mind, there were bitter, harsh, brutal periods, internal turmoil, anxiety, darkness, despair and hopelessness, and fierce resistance to what felt like my own annihilation. I spent months wondering if I would survive it all. In truth, part of me did not survive. The part of me that was keeping me bound up in a life that was small and controlled, a love that was conditional, and expectations that anything at all must happen in the way I want. In falling into the heart, I have fallen into the truth that there are no guarantees of anything at all. Waking up in the morning and breathing and going about my day are not a promise, but a sweet blessing that I now receive with a level of gratitude that I couldn't have imagined one year ago.
I have spent much of the last year in touch with my story. The story that has defined my life, my persona in the world, the way I respond or react to circumstances, and how I integrate those experiences into my life are all things that have come up for consideration. And I now see how much of the way that I have chosen to interpret those stories has brought me suffering. I see how my own emotional reactivity has created more pain than I needed to carry. Thich Naht Hanh once said that when we allow ourselves to "therapeutically" express anger by shouting or beating the sofa with a bat, for example, we are practicing being angry, as opposed to letting the anger out. And I see how I've been doing this in my life. I've been expressing anger, fear, insecurity, pain, loss, suffering, sorrow, hopelessness, and despair for so much of the last year. And now, I see that through the vehicle of my own words, I have been practicing the very things I have longed to move beyond. There is something in this process of writing about my life that has taken me away from the direct experience of what I feel. And in the several month hiatus I've taken from blogging, I have found a deeper, renewed sense of connection with my own inner being through sitting silently present, witnessing what simply is within me, free from any need to interpret, describe, or define. And I am feeling that this is much more what I need at this time.
Which makes me consider where this blog will meander in its second year ...
I am still deeply committed to speaking my truth from a place of vulnerability and honesty. I am still very much interested in exploring life through the written word. But I am seeing how vulnerability and honesty are possible without allowing my life to bleed forth with such abandon onto the page. There is a fine balance between surrender and abandon. There is a fine balance between vulnerability and exposure. And there is a fine balance between honesty and personal integrity. The balance is what I hope to navigate as I move forward. I have fallen through the rusted funnel of my mind's darkest labyrinths, and I have found my way through the maze to the sweet space of the heart. From here I begin, renewed.
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