Begin Again

I have tried to write a new blog post for weeks.

I’ve written thousands of words.

All of them lead nowhere or everywhere or somewhere in between.

I want to make meaning of the things that are happening.

The loss of my mamacita.

The cruelty that snuffs out life at churches and schools and our paralysis over finding a collective way forward.

The waters that swallowed my sweet hometown of Columbia, SC and what it has done to people’s lives.

The individual devastations that people I love are suffering.

The collective brokenness we are all trying to reconcile.

So I write, trying to discover what I know deep down inside.  And, as it turns out, I know nothing.  Or perhaps more precisely, I am still healing and grieving and need more time and room and space before I can know fully what my understanding of these things are.

I am in a period of noticing, distilling, lingering, considering, fine-tuning.

Occasionally, a word comes to me while I am in that place of pondering and I know it has something for me though I don’t yet know what.  And so I write it on a turquoise sticky note and place it on my wall.  So far, I’ve accumulated:  abundance, astonishing, exuberance, spaciousness, bold, brave, bliss, simple, awe, mojo, alive.

I don’t know what’s coming, but I also know that I cannot force it to come.  It needs room.  I need room to do the deep, dark soul work that allows for clarity.

And so I am letting myself off the hook.  I do not have to find profundity right now.  I just have to make way.   In this space, way may look like lists of questions I am asking or books I am reading or songs I am singing.  It might look like found treasures or the telling of little tiny moments (like this one I just shared with Happy) or the naming of possibilities.  The daily-ness.  It is not the sexy part of creativity or personal development or life.  But it is the marrow.  And so I am settling here for as long as it will have me, sitting at its feet with one simple message:  I am listening.