Much of my journey through 2011 in this blog has been an inner one. Oh there were days when I left the inner soul in peace and simply wrote about life around me, but mostly my writings dealt with listening to that inner voice we all possess, but gets locked away and never heard through the din of that life all around us. These months have been a quest to unearth that soft place in the heart. To not let it close and harden as a result of my pain. I feel I have done that.
This year I was hurt more than I’ve ever been hurt in all my years put together. The emotional pain was so bad, that at times it was physical. I felt betrayed by God and people that I trusted. One year ago I stood there and watched myself dissolve into nothingness. I spent months just standing there staring at myself in a smoking heap on the ground. I didn’t know where to start to put myself back together again. I was in shock. I couldn’t move, either mentally or physically. But then one day, like a lone shoot of green grass poking up through the black ashes, I felt that soft place deep within and I knew I possessed all I needed within me to move forward. Forty something years ago I developed a deep faith in God that I spent all these years cultivating. He reached out and saved my life. Just like He promised He would.
I was so scared on many days that this experience was going to cause me to snap my heart shut and never trust or let love in again. That would’ve been so against the nature of who I truly am. I have always been an open and trusting soul. I love everyone and trust they feel the same about me. That’s precisely how I get myself into situations like this. Being open fosters a certain naivety, but if I had closed up, forming a hard shell around my loss, I probably would be carrying the same pain with me into yet another year.
Throughout this journey I have learned lessons of stillness, surrender, deference, patience, calmness, faith, and endurance. These things have changed me radically. The one thing that didn’t change was my openness to trust, love, understand, forgive and accept. My soft place is still available. Today in my morning meditation, Julia Cameron stated:
“In order to move through loss and beyond it, we must acknowledge it and share it. We must be alert to flag and mourn our losses.”
The day I flagged it – realized I was mourning a loss – was the day I began to take the first steps toward getting to where I am today. Then I shared it with you in this blog. Together we walked through the pain of loss and came out on the other side still intact.
And so, as another day goes by, I realize the crack in a broken heart is the passage way to that soft place, and….I have written.
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