After eight years of being with one person and thinking of my life within a certain context, I find it challenging to begin again. There are days when I am not sure who I am or what I am doing with my life. It is not that he was my whole world but my life formed itself around that relationship and without it I feel this freedom to be something different. Sometimes it is overwhelming - being faced with the question of what to do and how to be.
Sitting at my kitchen table, surrounded by things that are an expression of what I love in life helps me to define this. Art - by others and my own, music, great food, fabulous coffee, my brand new little herb garden, books. . . I can look at these things and know what I enjoy about life.
But sometimes I still feel lost. I went out last night and walked around town, alone. Walking helps the thinking.
Someday I will look back and it will all make sense.

how do I explain this. . . .

I cried more tonight than I have in months. He terrifies me.
The things he asks of me are more than I have ever given to anyone else in my life. Complete forgiveness when I would rather hold a grudge. Trust when there is absolutely no reason why I should trust him again. These emotional battles are the most challenging things in my life now and maybe ever. . . so far.
Giving my heart and soul into the care of another, I have never done this with anyone. He brings so much joy into my life and it was a shock to realize I could be so happy with anyone. Dinner with a guy who I have eaten an uncountable number of meals with and I have a million butterflies inside at the idea of seeing him. After everything we have been through - that you still make me feel this way is beyond my comprehension. I was with someone for 8 years who never affected me this way.
When I was 20 years old I met someone who is a truly wonderful person. We started spending time together and really liked each other. Then we started dreaming together, we created all these dreams for our life and what we would do, what it would be. . . then I ended up married to those dreams. When it all fell apart, I mourned the loss of those dreams.
I realize now that relationships are not made of the stuff of dreams. They are made of those tiny, breathless moments and in the best relationships, they happen over and over again. What we have leaves me breathless, over and over again. Every moment with him is timeless and amazing. I have never had this before and I am not sure that I will ever find it again.
Can I walk away from this and live my life knowing that I decided not to give him another chance?
So when he tells me that he is sorry for everything, that he is sorry for being afraid, that he is sorry for being his dad, and wants to do whatever he has to do to be with me, to heal this, to get back to where we were and then keep going all I can do is sit, with his arms around me, and cry.

talking to my "big brother"

I don't have a big brother. I grew up as the oldest with just one little brother. I don't ask him for advice - it is not how we are. So when I need big brother advice, I find that I am stuck.
Tonight I called a friend of mine, he is just a few years older than me, and I asked him to be my designated big brother. He has a way of listening, asking questions, and giving advice that I imagine to be what an awesome big brother would do.
Our conversation boiled down to this:
"Life is a coin. You can spend it anyway you wish, but you can only spend it once. Can't remember where I heard this but it couldn't be more true. Don't be afraid to get your heart broken, if it happens time will fix it."
I think my big brother gives awesome advice.

it's my birthday, bring the filet mignon. . .

My phone rang on Monday and it was the last person I expected to hear from. I felt ill. What does he want? He calls me after a month of absolutely no communication and wants to see me that very evening. Why? Why could he want that and why would I agree to it? My birthday. I agreed to spend my birthday with him. We spent nearly four and a half hours together when I had planned to give him no more than two.

"I am so sorry." It was the first time he has apologized. The apology was unexpected. It was honest. It was out of desperation. He is not happy. How can you be happy when you walk around trying to be the person you think everyone else wants you to be?

He is so stubborn and arrogant (as am I) that there had been no admission of wrongdoing over the past four months, all along defending his actions as his process. I have done this very same thing so I must forgive him for it. It is the fact that he was, by his own admission, intentionally deceitful that pains me. We made agreements and spent months building trust in our relationship and it took him less than two weeks to destroy it. Can I accept that it might happen again? There are so many things to talk about, so many questions.

The truth is that I love the boy who hides under all the bullshit. I know the person he keeps hidden away from the world who is so passionate about food and wine, the boy who wants to sit in his garden on Sunday mornings drinking english breakfast tea, the boy who lectures me on the molecular structure of organic solvents when I wonder aloud about rubbing alcohol removing ink from my fingers.... I love how we finish sentences (correctly) for each other and laugh until we are rolling on the floor. There was one night I thought we would get thrown out of a favorite restaurant because we were laughing very loudly about something that made no sense at all. ("I have a monkey, bring the filet mignon" whatever that means.) The hostess kept rolling her eyes at us and I was sure they would ask us to leave. They didn't and we just kept laughing.

When you find that person who is such a joy to be with, how can you be stubborn and angry and unforgiving? I try to be that way and I fail. We all have our bullshit in life and somehow I am willing to forgive him for all of his. I do not know if we can be together but I know that I forgive him.

I asked him, "what the fuck do you want, what happens now, why are you here?"
He responds, "I'm in love with you and I want to have you in my life. Can we just spend some time together, maybe we can get together and cook. . . just start there."

How can I deny him this? I love to cook.

vomit in her hair

He told me that his x-girlfriend was an alcoholic. He spent two years trying to save her. Two years of holding back her hair when she vomited. Two years down the drain.

He told me that I can't fix someone. They have to decide they want to change.

I know this, I tell it to other people all the time. I told him that I know it and he accused me of being blind to it in my own fucked up relationship. He asked me why I would even bother with someone who treated me the way that this guy had, why do I think I can change him? Why would I sit around waiting for him to change?

He is right, again. I make excuses for my behavior because. . . well, I am not really sure why. Actually - he told me why. He called me a nurturer and said there is nothing wrong with being that way but there are times when it is misplaced.

How is it that it takes an almost stranger to make me see that I am trying to force change upon someone else? How is it that he completely destroyed this delusion that was consuming me? How does the universe make these things happen? I am amazed.

I am reminded that I can live my life and be happy but that I can not make someone else better or happy, that it comes from within. There are folks out there who think the same thing and I need to spend more time with them.

Overheard something the other night that went sort of like this - 'I'm doing fine, working through some stuff, there are people in my life who want to stop me from being who I want to be and I am not going to let them. . . ."

what? really? oh my. . .

I have these moments where I have to wonder about what I am thinking. I reflect on the things I would rather ignore or imagine to be a different way. I had one of these moments earlier this week.
It was so odd, somehow a nearly complete stranger sat down and asked me a question that I felt like answering honestly. I sorta know this guy but we are not close friends by any means and to have him spend the next hour discussing some of the core issues in my life was shocking.
He rattled me. Every word out of his mouth was the truth. The advice he gave was intense and personal and every bit of it right. I don't understand experiences like that. It was incredibly cathartic. I left feeling ripped apart and by the time I walked a couple of blocks, I felt this sense of relief and lightness that I have not had in months.
I have to say that he was incredibly open about his life and the stuff he was going through. We talked about jobs and relationships and life.
He called me defeatist and made a reasonable case for why he was right. That I believe that no matter what I do, no matter how good something is, it is doomed to fail. The goodness of that particular thing can not last.
He is right.
I also believe that in the face of all the crap, the only thing to do is find something to bring joy into your life, the smell of flowers in the air or an exceptional cup of tea. . .
There was something about hearing the truth. Perhaps my friends can't see this truth. Perhaps they are unwilling to tell me. That's okay though, because he said it and I listened and it changed how I look at the world a little.

atheistic tendencies and hedonsitic indulgences.

there are things that i know about life. with absolute certainty. things that are human nature and to deny them would be delusional. i had this great conversation today with steve about practicing non-attachment. that we humans feel pain as a result of becoming attached to an idea of how we think things should be. we expect a relationship to be a certain way and when it is not - we hurt. this is manifested in anger and sadness.

for lessons in the way of non-attachment i must thank a boy I know. you know - seriously man, way to convince me that things are a certain way. getting me to believe something that seemed absurd to begin with. you had me. and then you rock my fuckin' world and it is beyond me to understand how any of it is possible but clearly i became attached to some expectation of the person you are that was not realistic or true. obviously we both have something to learn about life and pain and thinking things are a certain way when they are not.

all of this reinforces my agnostic and atheistic tendencies. on the agnosticism - i don't know. ever. i experience. what is happening now is real but there can be no belief in an understanding that transcends what is happening at this moment in time. if we are walking home together or cooking and eating together, or fucking - these things are real and relevant in that moment that they occur. i can not expect that you want to fuck tomorrow. i can not expect that you want to see me ever again. there is pain in reflecting on this.

the atheistic tendencies tell me that i create my reality - that i make meaning in my life and so this is how i can cope with the fact that i exist. thankfully - you are not the thing that makes my life relevant. you are the ultimate accessory, the thing that sets it all off. there is value in who i am and the life i live has meaning - to me and to other people and so i create this stunning reality that makes it all worth doing. you bring happiness, make it all more intense - to the point that i question if i should spend any time with you.

fuck. you are such a hedonistic indulgence. there is nothing good about becoming so absorbed in someone else and the moments you spend with them that you can not live your life and get the things done that go beyond them. you are so fucking intense man. it is addictive. i want to be with you every moment of every day - even now - with all your bullshit - i want to immerse myself in you. what a totally shitty feeling.

you told me to go out and find someone better than you - someone who deserves me. i have done that ten times over in the last couple of months. my life will move past you. but i will always - ALWAYS love you and that is something that hurts me every time i think about it because i will never be able to give all of me to someone else, you have claimed a part of me that is all yours and no matter how much i love someone else - there is this tiny and significant piece that is all yours.

it is a terrible and beautiful thing.

finding balance

laughing woman told me that i will always struggle to decide between my instinct to being a mother and all the energy i have to be out in the world doing and having a career. they are similar in a lot of ways. . . i create, i guide, i lead, i make decisions, i organize, i plan - but one is very personal and the other quite externalized.
i feel this everyday - my son is beautiful, i love him very much. i have found a way to be with him and love the time we spend together. but all the rest of my energy goes into the things i do out in the world.
sometimes i wonder if the two things are at odds with each other. by being a mother i have learned patience. i have learned how to say the same things again and again, in different ways, until i am heard. these are things that serve me in my life when i am not parenting.
i think what i take away from her comments would be this - i create a separation between these two things. in the context of my life they become opposing forces. but there can be balance. my challenge is to find that - not to choose one or the other.

what was i thinking?

sometimes i look back on the three years of my life that were spent living in a dirt house and i wonder what went wrong. how did that happen?
do you have things like that in your life? things you believe in. you think you can do it and your whole life is absorbed by it and then it just fizzles.
a lot to learn from it i know, but i can not see it yet.
the only thing i can see about it right now is that there is nothing you can do to ignore who you really are and what you really need in life. nothing at all. try to lie to yourself about what you want and unhappiness fills every nook and cranny.
i knew right from the start that it was not my path, it was a beautiful idea but not my life work. building houses out of the earth, living away from people out in the country. . . not my passion.
i managed to know what i don't want and there must be something to that.

sometimes music makes me weep

i love music. it is a huge part of my life. i spent many years training to be a professional musician and my heart was broken by the reality of what that life would mean for me. i decided that i could not emotionally withstand the life of a classical musician.
the intensity. traveling, competition, isolation.
my friend steve called me up one day and told me he had gotten a job and i started to go on about how great it was. . . he said it was in Tokyo and he didn't think he was going to take it.
Tokyo is a long way away.
the choice to let it slip away was hard - letting go of dreams, well that is never easy. i don't think about it often but sometimes i will remember and it makes me weep. sometimes i hear a piece i played or something that reminds me of that part of my life and i just cry and cry.

i still love music. all kinds of music. i am always looking for something new. lately I have been spending a lot of time at Daytrotter - and tonight i found something i feel like sharing. they are playing in bloomington on March 31.

big, scary world

i wake up each morning and drag my ass out of bed knowing that it must be done. i would rather stay under the covers, i would rather hide away from the big, scary world but it is impossible.

so i do what i must. i go out into the world and try to be excellent. i try to exceed my own expectations. there is so much potential and possibility for each day and i struggle with realizing even a small piece of it.

i walk to work each day, and as i put one foot in front of the other i tell myself that it will be a great day. i tell myself about all the things i will do, all the people i will see, and how great i will feel at the end of it all.

it works. i make it through my days and back to my apartment where i paint and write and blog. sometimes i go out and make new friends - another big struggle because i have trouble believing that anyone wants to talk to me. but once i start it, once i put myself out there it is not so hard and i am proven wrong.

lately i have started to notice that it seems easier to go out into the world and do what i must. it has not felt like such a terrifying thing. i wonder if someday i will stop thinking about it, will it just be the way i am.

distractions

sometimes i think these 'feelings for someone else' that you keep talking about are how you avoid whatever is really going on. they are irrelevant to me. i don't believe in or care about the excuse that you create. i care about us and what is really going on in our relationship.
talk to me about that.
tell me about us and what you think about,
what are you afraid of, and why do you create this distraction rather than dealing with what is happening between us?

stranger to my own self

what is it when desire is not quite a want or longing but it is mixed with nostalgia even before you have possessed the thing you so desire?
a thought that feels deeper than fancying something new - it is as though it is a return to something long forgotten, absent, missing. . .
this is a strange feeling - and to face it each day makes it stranger. i do not know myself. it reinforces the lack of connection and meaning that I think we all experience in our lives. so many things depend on an existence that is cantilevered - disconnected from reality - attached to some long removed and imagined thing.
i can't say that i am comfortable with this. i don't know who i am. i don't know where i am going or why i do any of the things i do. it makes me insane to consider it and so i just keep doing. it is the only way i can make it through the day - creating meaning so i can exist.
gnawing. ever present, occupying me.
i sit and gaze at nothing, wondering why, what am i missing?
suddenly i wonder if it is the brain getting in the way - by nature of our human brain we perceive everything through the veil of linear time and three dimensional space. perhaps the confusion comes when slivers pierce the veil and give me a shadow and a shimmer of some other reality that might exist somewhere, sometime.
this universe is full of mystery and i am reminded of it now as i reflect on a few of the many things we will never know. i walk through life with truth obscured and i am both frustrated and thankful for it.
i do not think any of us could manage the complete truth of reality. wisdom, insanity - i think it is beyond us. the truth is full of life and death, lovely and terrifying. the small pieces i encounter each day are enough to bring me to tears, i could not bear it to know the things i sometimes wish i could know. i would regret knowing for it is the mystery and the experience we call life that makes being here something worth doing. what would there be if there was nothing to know or experience? i think it would be empty, isolating. already i lose myself to wondering about the things i know and imagining the things that i can imagine.
it is such a struggle to find joy in the doing - in the simple things of life - when my thoughts are not what i do and i am a stranger to myself.

coming up for air

the insanity of enjoying someone
so much that i lose myself in him

one day i come up for air
i wonder, do i give myself over to this?
do i let myself go?

then one day he is out of reach - out of touch

(i think of the night i wanted a bedtime story
it had been a very long day
he read Beowulf - I was asleep in his lap
so sweet - so incredibly sweet)

i struggle to find balance
the joy of being together saturates my life
nothing seems to matter as much as each moment with him -
i am disoriented by it.

(scares me a bit)

like being on a beautiful beach
where the waves are a little too big.
just as i am standing up, the next one knocks me down.
i laugh and keep my head above water and enjoy the adventure of it -
(he does this to me)

thinking about Camus

life can be magnificent and overwhelming. that is it's whole tragedy. without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. ~albert camus

i think that it is so hard to stay in that space. it is easy to be safe.
it is hard to trust in yourself and know that it is about living and experiencing,
to be responsible for what happens in our lives,
to appreciate all of it.

i get attached to what I expect other people to be and this is the root of any pain. i was so attached to that in my marriage and tried to turn him into what I expected him to be. i wonder why. is it my own insecurity? does his way of being define who i am?

can i love someone and not have an expectation for who they are or what their experience should be like?

to be with someone and enjoy the love and hurt and joy of it.

to be open to what others can teach us - to hear what they say, to be a part of their experience without losing myself in it. . . .

in the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer. ~albert camus

is it what it seems to be?

traveler - alone in the nighttime of a sunny-day fairy tale finds himself (suddenly) in the middle of the queens dark dream and no way out. the scones look good but the black raspberries carry death and intrigue. (why is the cow in the middle of the road?) eating one he finds himself to be a scone and suddenly the queen cow is presented with him for afternoon tea. . . (since when do cows enjoy tea with scones - most certainly i thought them to be salad eating types.)
there is nothing to do in this situation other than to decide if he is happy being a scone - eaten at tea by an unnaturally bovine lady queen or if it is a situation to flee and seek his fortune in other lands among the corsairs and brunching munching sharks of the high seas. . . .

full of it

i am. . .
what is this bullshit i put out into the world
like the world cares
(maybe no one reads this)

nausea inducing - head spinning - drunken on my own bullshit
i thought that perhaps I do this as a form of self expression
what if I put my thoughts out there for someone else to happen across?

now I do it and I wonder - what am i talking about
is this really what I think about?

i am beginning to regret the beginning of this thing.

it would be the introvert - that part that hates to admit that I even exist

endlessly fascinating
observing my own insanity

the path

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road-- Only wakes upon the sea.
Antonio Machado

i think it is a beautiful idea.

this world and me in it

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of your life, and the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.'
-British sculptor Henry Moore

the utter confusion of the human experience.
yesterday, i thought i had a pretty good idea of what is actually going on.
then today, i end up confused - turned upside down and wondering 'what was i thinking?'

and so this is why i leave my house. to be turned upside down. i dedicate myself to the human experience. i create meaning in my universe, i act and react, i laugh and rage and love. i believe and i lose that sense of knowing. with every breath my world flows through me. . . .

i dedicate myself to life and to understanding my experience.