Sunday I wrote. Yesterday I wrote. I wrote a lot. The blog post about the sluggishness of the heart was one of the many attempts I’ve made to stare down the multi-headed and complicated beast of unrequited love, generosity, poetry, waiting, and urgency. It was an admission and a surrender; a breaking down and a building up.
Since then, and odd feeling has taken hold. A feeling which may or may not last. Such is the way of things in the turbulent waters of a mind that chooses feeling over numbness and curiosity over certainty. Since examining my sometimes sluggish heart, I’ve felt a sense of relief, a sense of a long impenetrable dam breaking… after which, all the words began to flow. Today, while running under a clear blue sky I wrote (in my head and later at my computer) a poem about life’s minor indignities (the irony being my mind was bitching about minor things while I’m running along a beautiful landscape). Before the run, and delaying me from getting out the door, I started a poem about dust bunnies and the desire to share our lives, our spaces, our minor domesticities. Elsewhere I began re-framing my thinking about the audacity of creating art or poetry or love and the pleading desire for legacy.
With all of these thoughts swirling around, I feel as though I’m on the joyous and exhilarating precipice of a cliff, and the grand chasm into which I’m staring is where the deeper truths are kept. Feeling this, I’m suddenly reconsidering my opening statement from yesterday’s post about the sluggishness of the heart – mainly that solitude breeds generosity. True enough… but after spending a few days revisiting my thoughts on unrequited love, I’m reminded that love also breeds generosity. Love also emboldens and enlarges.
Usually when I write about that relationship (and there are far too many posts on this blog to reference), I feel wrung out and guilty; sad and confused. Usually when I write about that time of my life, I immediately want to hide and I regret that I’ve even gone back to that place. Unintentional as it may have been, I think the worst thing that came out of that relationship of which I’ve written so much, is that I’ve always felt a sense of shame for not being better at letting go. I’ve always felt a sense of shame for having loved the only way I knew how… and writing without that shame (or at least a diminished sense of that shame) might have been the dam break moment. Being able to say I’d do it again with the same person or with someone new in much the same way (though probably softer and slower and with a few tweaks and improvements) brought a sense of that old love back into my heart: buoyancy, swagger, confidence, and gush. The expansiveness I’ve felt since then, the clarity with which I feel I’ve seen the world these past few days, has made me excited for what I might yet do once I welcome that type of commitment, connection, and love back into my life – with whoever can connect, commit, and grow in all the ways that feel alive and bursting with endless possibility.