Blogging has been a part of my ongoing rebirth for as long as I can remember.

So here's what I have to tell you today:

Healing happens, and Lord is it beautiful.
Exactly the right people cross my path at exactly the right time.
I am getting stronger in the moments I feel weakest.


While it's been an ongoing question for years and years, I've had to ask myself over the past week or so - who am I, really?  What are the stories and moments that make ME?  What do I have to share, and what do I keep in my soul?

Thank God for all the years of Kristen who have discovered the answers to that question, slowly but surely.  Finally, blessedly, I know when it feels like my own soul talking to me - there's a rightness deep inside.  A feeling of familiarity and warm greeting...."Hey, self.  Good to see you.  You're pretty great."

(This sounds like it's turning into a Jack Handey skit.  Might be.  One never knows around here.)

Me:

Worship in all its forms.  There is something fascinating about the way human beings seek spirituality - together, individually - and all the gorgeous results of that.  A mural strikes me as just as prayerful as incense; a perfectly imperfect neighborhood garden conveys just as much faith as a cross.

Art and how it comes to be tangible or perceived.

The goodness of people, or perhaps why their lights were hidden for a time.  I crave people's stories - what makes them who they are on the inside.

The written word ~ where I will always communicate best and most true.

 Coffee, wine, and great food.  Never to be underestimated.



I am becoming exactly who I am meant to be.  And it feels so. good.

Now I’m right here, and I’m right now
And I’m hoping, knowing somehow
That my shadow days are over
My shadow days are over now

John Mayer, cliche though he may be, has somehow hit the nail on the head.  This feels hopeful to me...and speaks to the knowledge I am slowly finding of what it means to have a life rich with both joy and deep pain.  There are strata to this life of mine...a layer of hope, a layer of love, a thick and brittle layer of dark hours.

I gave up the hope of making the relationship work this week.  I still dream, secretly in my quiet places, that someday she will get better and come back to me.  But slowly the response to my own self becomes....there is no coming BACK anymore, honey.  She was never where I thought she was to begin with.  And so I find myself alone, yet not alone.

The label "alone" has scared me so badly for so long.  Who will want me?  Who will I be if I am by myself?  What if I'm a - gasp - LOSER?  As if....as if my presence on the face of the earth is somehow validated by those who believe I am worthy of their love.

Good heavens.  I'm asking myself, does this really go all the way back to childhood days when the cool kids had boyfriends and girlfriends?  I suppose it does, now that I think about it.  Oh, sheesh.  Grownup Kristen has just flipped her hair knowingly.  We're a big kid now; we've discovered that validation comes from good coffee at sunrise, wine with friends and deep belly laughs, the good we do in the world, having a strong work ethic.  None of those are predicated on having a "someone."

Thank God for blogging.  I'll come back and read this when I need to remember what beauty I hold all on my own.

A love all for me.

I'm a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I've loved ~ some folks just have one, others they have none

I'm not a man, but I am lucky to have loved so truly and so deeply in my life. As I pack up for yet another move, I'm finally going through some of the detrius of my 30 years and seeing evidence of so, so much love. Letters from this one, scarves from that one, earrings from all of them. As I begin to confuse which of my loves adored the freckles on my shoulder, I realize how much I love having this open heart.

Last night's yoga practice brought an epiphany -as yoga often does. Our teacher gives us this beautiful gift of song at the end of each session, and last night was "Blackbird," from the Beatles....but she sings it slowly, mournfully. Somehow, the line "take these broken wings and make them fly" made it hit:

For many years now - 10? 15? 30? - I've been pushing my inner soul, my love, my heart, on a death march toward forced happiness. Your dad died? Onward, find a boy. That one really loves your best friend? Onward, find another one. Try and try and try to make it fit the mold of "supposed to be." Doesn't work out? Onward, find another one. He really wants your roommate? Onward, figure out this love for a woman. She's taken? Definitely onward, as in onward across the country. Find someone totally inappropriate and unavailable. Big surprise, that doesn't work out. Marry the man who brings some small peace to the soul. Wrong gender, eh? Maybe ya shoulda listened to the heart sooner. Anyway, onward. ONWARD! Oh, she ain't quite right either.

And here I find myself at nearly 30, exhausted far beyond years or reason.

There were moments of breathing in there, in that long march - moments that forced themselves upon me. But they were few and far between, and certainly not by choice. And in all of those people I desperately attached myself to, not one was exactly right. The man I married came pretty close, if only he'd been a different gender.

So, with my yoga teacher's sung advice to "take these broken wings and make them fly," I got an image of my inner self - not quite a little girl, not quite an adult woman - with broken limbs and bruised skin, and I just keep beating her onward. A bruise appears and all she wants is to rest, and I force her to keep going, find the next person. A bone snaps under the pressure, and maybe I let her sit down for a minute, but then we keep going, looking for this elusive happiness I have been taught to believe comes from couplehood, from the other half of me.

And she keeps trying to tell me....Kristen, we can run as far and as fast as we want, but happiness is not over that next hill, around the next bend. Even if it were, could we see it, feel it, if we're so battered and bruised by the time we get there?

So. It seems to be time to rest, now. Let that inner me pause, and breathe, and sit, and heal. It doesn't mean aloneness, or not-being-coupled, forever. But I'm so exhausted I don't even know how to pour into another person anymore.

So I'll heal.