I am weary, heavy with unfinished business, inner and outer, with the death of my step-grandmother and the dread of attending graveside services in the morning, with having stayed up until 3 am the last three nights in a row sewing costumes for an upcoming musical, with the knowledge of all that is undone around me in our home: the unmowed yard, the stacked dishes and increasing heaps of laundry. Tonight I walked in the door to discover that lightening ran in on my computer and has evidently fried it. It will not start. (I'm posting from Great Scott's). I want to walk into the dark fields until I can walk no more, then lie down in the wet grass and sleep like a wild creature curled tightly against the world in the warmth of its own fur.
I've been on my knees in front of the bookcase looking for just the right quote for tomorrow: something comforting, something soothing, or perhaps something terribly witty with enough of an edge to hold at bay the crash I feel is impending. I've flipped through the poems of Kenyon, Norris's non-fiction, Chris Fabry's Spiritually Correct Bedtime Stories and Adrian Plass's humor but cannot find exactly what I want or what I need. Very likely the two are mutually incompatable tonight--what I need and what I want. But maybe not. I think I've found something after all:
"...it always seems that just when daily life seems most unbearable, stretching out before me like a prison sentence, when I seem most dead inside, reduced to mindlessness, bitter tears or both, that what is inmost breaks forth, and I realize that what had seemed 'dead time' was actually a period of gestation."
--Kathleen Norris
The Quotidian Mysteries
7 comments:
I am continually amazed at how God uses others to give me the exact right thing at the exact right time. In much the same mood, and the quote is perfect.
Blessings on you and prayers going with you, dear LuCindy --
Beth
Yes. Gestation. Sometimes, indigestion, until you get out a really good burp.
Cindy, I have been in this gestation phase for most of my life...with life piled up around me, the 'void' everywhere. Creativity does arise out of chaos and trauma and loss. I rejoice in the gestative miracle in the cauldron of life.
Beth--Thanks very much for the blessings and prayers. Both were needed. Both were granted.
David--I now have a lovely picture in my mind of you burping. :) Which is likely just as well. Picturing you in the midst of gestation would just be entirely too weird. (Actually, I just started pondering what the equivalent of a mental burp would look like, since mental dyspepsia is a near-chronic condition for me... Not sure it would be pretty.)
Connie--This is not encouraging, to think that a gestational period could last most of one's life! But then, the birthing period does, actually, so maybe I understand after all, or begin to. Thanks for the reassurance that not just survival, but joy is possible in the midst of both.
Kathleen Norris is so very good. I really liked Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace also Dakota. The Virgin of Bennington was ok but at the end I felt it just went on and on. I went to listen to her at a bookstore in Boulder. I enjoyed it except...she reminded me of one of my wife's friends that I don't really care for. That God. He knows how to bring up all those conflicting feelings and emotions and desires. I ramble.
I know the next time I am having a bad day, week or month and somebody asks 'what's up' I'm going to tell them, "I'm gestating."
Beautiful quote Cindy. Grieving has some many faces and I pray that in this place you will find shalom enfolding you.
In the gestation may there be hope, may new life be anticipated, and may the tears remind you that they are the diamonds of the desert times in life.
Ben--Sorry so late to respond. Norris's writing is, yes, tremendous. I envy you getting to hear her , and I understand about writers not being the same in R/L as we'd imagined them. A friend of mine refuses to go to literary readings partially for that reason.
Steph--I don't know that it's been grief so much as deep weariness. But then, maybe that's how mine manifests. Thank you for the condolence and encouragement.
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