Because it's time...

If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that happiness is fragile.  It seems to me like a tiny bird cupped in my hands, almost weightless like cotton, yet so vitally and excitingly alive.  It feels like, with the slightest movement or misstep, I could crush it or damage it.  It’s so amazing to have it for just this one minute, I don’t want to breathe for fear of missing it. 

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in the past week or two, or maybe month or two, a sort of healing came over me.   A lifting of an affliction.  As if a falling away of some sort of spiritual weight had happened, but I had gotten so used to it that I no longer even noticed it was there to notice it had gone.    These sorts of experiences have happened to me before, but I can usually pinpoint the moment.  In this case, I knew something was different but didn’t realize it until I tried to explain that experience to someone else.  In that moment, I realized it had happened again, but this time I had failed to notice somehow, in the din of all the noise that is my life. 

I’ve also learned that in the midst of happiness, I don’t feel as if I am taking that moment for granted, yet so many times through my mind’s rear-view mirror, I gotta wonder if I didn’t miss it.

Perhaps it was what was going on in my mind that makes me feel that way.  Certainly, I do remember great moments that I’m certain that I did entirely embrace.  Still, mingled into the sadness and sweetness and just really great days are the moments where I feel like maybe the essence of it slipped away from me.  Maybe I just wonder if I could have lived that moment with a more determined sense of goodness.   I hope I’ve learned to close my eyes and breathe in the smells and relax against the moment and just be there, right there in that one perfect moment. I don't want to miss it.  

So that’s what I’m going to do with this little bird of mine, I think; hold on.  Perhaps I will eventually crush it.  I tend to be clumsy, with my words and with my person, so it’s not only possible, but it’s so very likely.   I will try very hard to walk softly and be kind.

Just lately, the burdens feel less like great burdens, and more like just the daily living of life.  The troubles aren’t the focus; the relationships are.  The hardships don’t make me cry as much, and I truly have every confidence that I can handle whatever happens without a public mental breakdown.  I’m feeling blessed every day that I can be in a position to bless others.  I can’t promise I’ll still have any of this together tomorrow, but I go to bed most days feeling like I did ok.

Sometimes our Father feels very near to me, and sometimes very far.   Just lately I feel his presence very close to me, guiding me in ways I never could have guessed. 

That having been said, I’m not sure how much further I can take this blog.  Unhappiness will always be part of my life, of course.  It makes the sweet parts sweeter.  But it doesn’t have to be a full-time job.  This here bit of writing was intended to help me and it certainly has served that purpose. 

So if you’ve read all this misery, my misery this far, I thank you, and I’m sorry.  I thank you because writing things, and knowing people read them, somehow helps me.  But I’m also sorry. It really was only ever intended to be therapy for me, and that’s what it has been, but it’s probably not my best writing, and it’s probably not fun to read.           

I don’t take back the words I said, though I’m probably not going to re-read them.  The view through our rear-view mirror can only give us glimpses.  The real action is going on outside the windshield. 

I am working on a new blog, I’m calling it the “Weird Widow,” which will, I hope, be more about the overall experience of being a widow and a granny and a slightly crazy cat lady, maybe a little more about life, a little less about gloom.  It will probably still be therapy for me, because that’s the point of writing, after all.   But maybe it doesn’t have to hurt so much all the time.

I’ll link it to here when I get it finished.   

May YHVH bless you and keep you, may he make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you, may he lift up his countenance upon you and give you shalom.  I pray you be blessed for blessing this widow. 

Rose