Strangely, it feels like Spring this November. The Sun is shining bright in California, and the fields outside my house are green, alive with flowers. Even though it's oddly unseasonal, I'm grateful for the respite.
I feel the fog lifting from my life, I think, I hope…All this year, we’ve been dog paddling just to stay above water, as life continued to throw us one curve ball after the next. Well, it was more extreme than curve balls…it would be more accurate to say we’ve been dodging bullets.
But now I am exhaling…I feel the change happening. I believe the storm is over for now, and I’m ready to rebuild. As I am walking through the tattered emotional wasteland of my life taking inventory, one of the things that got hit hardest was probably my faith. Faith in what?
Exactly.
I’ve just been trying to survive. No time for contemplating, musing. No time for meditation and centering, although it’s what I needed most. Yes- there were some frantic prayers bandied about…to the great unknown. And at times I felt I was being looked out for. By who? I don’t pretend to know.
But now…I miss that part of myself. The part who is hopeful and optimistic. The part who believes that there is a benevolent reason for all the things we survive.
I have no idea what I believe or how to get back to that girl I was before everything got so crazy. But I think prayer is a good start. Prayer to who? To what? I have no idea, but I’ll just throw it out there and see what happens…
I don't pray or believe in God. I just relish in life itself and what it offers good, bad or indifferent. It works for me. I take walks and with my artist's eye I look at the negative space between things and see wonders. Find what works for you. I know you can and will.
ReplyDeleteI think when you've been through the wringer, it takes a while to get that peace back, that hope and optimism, that ... faith. When you are on your new and wonderful path, you will look back on this time and see how it all resonates, how it's all interwoven and essential. It will make sense. After some of my worst times, it's taken years to get back to the hopeful me, but I got her back. Wiser and more wary, but stronger and much more faith-full.
ReplyDeletexo B
The Middle Ages
Faith is a tricky thing. For me, I grew up Catholic, so there's a lot of guilt that comes attached to that. In the last few years, I've realized that having equal faith in yourself and whatever it is you believe in (even if it's nothing at all) can provide a lot of solace in daily struggles.
ReplyDeleteRecently, I came across Tim Pond's Three Insights, which offers a lot of good points in terms of how success and faith can coexist.
Anyway, keep up the awesome writing!