One year cancer-free today. Go, me.
This is a daylog, so I don't have to chain all these random thoughts together.
Why am I writing letters or having conversations in my head with so many people, but unable to write things down or mail packages or pick up the phone? You don't even know I'm talking to you, writing to you, thinking about you, arguing with you, and then I get irritated with all of you that you don't know. Why don't you LISTEN? I simultaneously long for conversations with so many far-away friends, and I want everyone who is in my head involved in these conversations to either answer me, or shut up and go away. I want to sit and drink tea and stare out the window and move so slowly that I can watch a flower open, and the
brainmonkeys keep chattering away and distracting me.
One too many things.
Dear you:
I am sorry to be avoiding you. I am struggling with our friendship as it is, and I don't quite know how to put our relationship on a different footing. So I am hiding instead of bringing up a conflict, since I don't exactly know how to ask for what I want, and I'm worried that even if I do, you won't hear me. I want to be seen and heard as I am, not as your construct of me as I should be, and I don't know how to shft us to that place.
Dear you:
I wonder why I still invest energy in you. You manage to be the splinter under my fingernail that I keep fussing about, yet never quite stops irritating. You constantly disappoint me, and frustrate me, and yet I still give my time to talk with you, when there are so many other people who are far more interested in what I have to say than you are. Please forgive me for assuming you are interested in another perspective.
I have the suspicion your sureness about your own world view is a very comfortable place. Me, I think comfort and being sure about what I think are overrated. In some ways
I prefer discomfort...
I suspect the main issue has to do with your anima - You have the idea that you admire me, but you admire your IDEA of me, not the reality of me. You would love to believe that your idea exists - a gal who can run a chainsaw or jump out of airplanes, but would still fix you a martini and rub your feet at the end of the day. News for you:
she doesn't exist. Truth is, I'm irascible, challenging, grumpy, opinionated, and a feminist. Your complacency boggles my mind.
However, as above, I grow incredibly weary of longing to be seen and heard as I am, when it's clear you're not able to do that. I see evidence that this is unlikely to change. If you choose to start listening, let me know, otherwise I will probably stay quiet.
Dear you,
I am missing you both hungrily, and I don't know why I let the days slip by and I don't say, Come! I need to see you! Distance sucks. I want everyone I love to live on my street. This is why I daydream of that 10-40-600 acres where I can invite everyone to come and stay and build a yurt and hang out and write and argue until we are tired of it, and then everyone goes away for a little while but then comes back soon. I don't want to talk about anything in particular, I just want you around, so I can say, wow, look at this, isn't this weird/interesting/fascinating/disturbing and know that you both will, pause, consider, and engage, no matter how silly or profound or surreal the topic is. I love both of you for transparency, your willingness to be who you are, warts and all.
Dear you,
I recently read a journal entry of yours (livejournal, I wasn't prying..) and I want to, hrm, perhaps not answer all of your questions, but ask you more questions about all of your questions. If that's what you long for, why not stop writing for a while, and dig or craft or be 'the brute' for a while? I go off and run chainsaws or knit or build things or dig in the soil when I run out of words or get tired of them. Maybe growing lettuce for everyone is more important to the community than your words. I don't know, I just know if you are weary of words, you are allowed to take a break from them.
You inspired me with this thought - your reference to our tiny bodies, I think it was.
We are moths, and our world is the light we hurl ourselves against. We are tiny, and we don't make much difference in our little individual works, but I am still I suppose a foolish optimist in that I think my work can somehow improve some little corner of the planet. There are times I long to go off into the wilderness and spend the rest of my life planting acorns, and not have it be any more complicated than that.
Dear you,
Why is it so easy for us to forget about paying attention to our spirits? We tend to forget the rituals that keep us all centered when we get busier, and that is precisely when we need the balance it provides the most.
Dear you,
I am worried about you. Having a touchstone, something you desperately want to make your life's work, but feeling that that work is not valued by those around you is horrible. I want to help - to tell you that the audience doesn't matter, that what matters is you give your time to doing what you love most. Life is too short to spend your hours doing something you don't love. Not just like, but LOVE. I love my work. Is that silly? I don't think it will shatter the Berlin Wall, I don't think I will win a Nobel Prize, but I fix one tiny part of the world, one oak tree at a time.
On the other hand, I envy you for having that One True Love of a thing that you want to do with your life. I have too many to count - paint and draw and ski and plant trees and play music and love and be with my family and write the Famoose American Novel and and and....oh life would seem so simple if there were only ONE...
These oak trees are living in the most ridiculously poor conditions you can imagine. A highway interchange, for Pete's sake. No water, ludicrously loud noise, nothing faintly resembing soil, unless soil can be made out of old road bed, gravel, chunks of concrete and asphalt, and don't forget litter and broken glass. And yet they grow. How is this not magic?
Yet. The best evidence that I have that I am now really "recovered", is that I have started to ask, what's next? A PhD? Teaching? Writing a book? Painting like a madwoman in all my spare time? I don't know. I'm at yet another junction at the moment, and I'm not sure where the next step is going to take me. In the meantime I've grown very fond of
butterfly soup - I really like that falling through the air phase of wondering what's next. And time is short. I think of our
Sumati, who's very name means "stepping our fearlessly into change"...now it's stepping out joyfully into thin air and seeing where I land.
Dear you,
No one but us knows how much cancer is a disease that affects the whole family, not just the person with the disease...unless they've been through it. If I forget sometimes, thank you.
With all my heart. I think you sometimes forget how hard you worked - it's okay for you to sit and drink tea and watch the flowers open as well. Maybe now it's YOUR year to recover from the side effects of cancer treatment.
transparency.
I know, most of this has little to do with being one year done with cancer treatment. Or maybe it does. Blessings.