I spend a great deal of time trying to fill out my soul, iron it from the inside, eliminate the creases where the demons lie, where old injuries are nursed and the scar tissue calcifies, where the love is balked.
Most of this work is done in solitude, reading and re-reading important books and poems or gazing at the landscapes indoors and out, but sometimes it simply must be done in company. I have to learn to be more compassionate, and sooner in the human exchange, and to love harder and clearer and deeper (though those last two adverbs often contradict each other, rudely and noisily, like kids fighting in the back seat). I hope to learn to catch my errors and omissions in time to repair them, and it's really really hard work.
I know early on when I've missed a crease, or ironed in a new one, and there are days when it would take more courage than I have to go back and fix it, though I know perfectly well that courage is enhanced and glorified by the degree of the risk. I'm never sorry to have been brave enough to amend a wrong, but cranking up the nerve is in itself exhausting, leaving me with, I think, not enough energy to take on the deed after all.
If I could ever convince myself that the possibility isn't laughable, I swear I'd move to a monastery and, I don't know, tend an onion patch and contemplate God. It just seems to be easier than this eternal ironing and starching, buffing and polishing of the all-too-close-at-hand, muddled ME.
Must be time for another nap.
Boy, you are really hard on yourself.....I think it takes courage to say you need courage...this must be a moment after an INCIDENT that leaves you uncertain about your interior, which, if I may say so since I know you pretty darn well, is the truest, most stalwart and honest interior I know. So there....did someone beat you up or something? Let me at 'em.....
ReplyDeleteI wrote back to Susu by email, and then I thought if I were going to be brave and forthcoming in the blog, I "feel like I owe it" (as Dave Crosby said), to post my reply to her as well. Here's what I sent my good friend Susu:
ReplyDelete"There's the little bulldog I know and love.... Thanks, honey. Nobody beat me up, except for me. I just wish to God I were more patient with annoying people -- they are only annoying because they're scared -- and more patient with myself.
I take way too much pride in being dismissive of what I have judged to be unimportant in other people, and yet I am far too hasty to judge myself unimportant. Just bad days, is all. I feel okay, really, but I took this afternoon to do a little reflection, and didn't like everything I saw.
God love you, darlin' -- don't know how I would have made it all these years without your jaws clamped on my ankle."
Dear Julie,
ReplyDeleteWell, I agree about the interior housework - like real life housework, it's "never done."
But one of the joys of growing older I find is becoming more content with the mess, which is after all MY mess. I suppose this is the logical extension of realizing in my early 40s that I wasn't going to live long enough to become as perfect as I wanted to be, so I'd better make some changes - some in myself, some in my expectations of myself.
There are those days, though, aren't there, when you feel like ya shoulda stood in bed (there's an expression that dates me). I wish you many fewer of those days and many more of the "I'm doing the best I can and that's good enough" days.
blessings
Mary
I thinks it is a rare occasion and a privilege to glimpse the introspective side of Juls: A dark reflecting pool in which we can all see our unacknowledged selves
ReplyDelete