rubbed raw/holding onto my sanguinity

As I look back, all I see are the waves of it all crashing, at first, a year ago, it was a tolerable amount of crashing, nothing I couldn't handle. Lately, I feel like I am drowning.

I know this is just part of the process of change, but as the water crawls over me, another inch, another mood, another moment, I find it hard to remain still, to let it embrace me, to give into the death of the things that don't work for me, to accept change is to give up those dead parts of my life.

It hasn't helped that I am adrift these past weeks, so that there is nothing to anchor myself to, except the spinning of time, and the small joys the world leaves me to sustain me. I have had so many trembling pleasures lately, moreso than ever before, but sometimes it feels like I have to give something of myself to have them. I have to pay for them in ever escalating terms, plunking myself down in places where I don't belong and cannot enjoy.

I see no horizon, no where to land, no beach waiting to hold me. I have always wondered where I will end up and I find that planning has made no difference, and letting things be as they are has relieved some of the worry, but it troubles me from time to time, the not knowing, the specks of thoughts of the future, and then reminding myself that there is only today and that is enough, for now. It has to be enough because it's the only thing I know for certain is real.

"It's really hard to find yourself if you keep on leaving..."

Every two years, I feel the need to shed a part of my self; and it is reflected in my starting a new blog. You didn't know? [2008; to escape his memories], and [2006; to evade his scrutinizing stares], and [2004; to find a new platform to dive from].

I've been running away from each of them, hoping that if I run far enough away it'll stick that time, and I can start fresh, accept and claim the perfection that comes with emptiness.

Every time it happens, I hope it is the self I yearn to be, the one I've always seen glimpses of, even when I was a kid, I saw myself in other women, in other people, perhaps in one it was their giving heart, in another it was their ability to articulate their thoughts, in another still it could have been the warmth I longed to share with someone, anyone.

This year, I don't feel the need to run. Perhaps because physically I have changed so much these past two years, I don't have any desire to make something new and start fresh, to have a beginning that makes sense to everyone, a clean slate for myself. I have been sharing my self in this form for years and years and years, with my father as my constant reader, who I will love forever, no matter what, simply for his eyes and attention to these words.

I never understood what I was doing here or there, or those other places. It wasn't until asked and I stumbled to come up with an answer, that I began to realize that the stringing of these moments in my life, creating strands of my stories required the entirety of my past, and that abandoning them didn't make them go away. All that I have known, loved, loathed, it is all part of who I am today.

The premise of this blog was based on the buddhist prayer bracelet called the mala, to which I added my nickname--or if you know me well enough, you just consider it my name--stine. I imagined that each entry might be something I ruminate on and in allowing myself to fully address whatever it is that is worrying me, I could let it go and I might find peace.

"All beads are worry beads - from the Pope's rosary all the way down to those little wrist malas... worn by Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. People of every religious tradition will claim that their beads are for praying - for appealing to a higher power, for collecting the spirit or concentrating the mind - and while this is indisputably true, that is not their primary purpose. Beads are for worry. They answer a human need so basic it actually precedes a religious consciousness - and that is to fret over things...The difference between the Buddhist mala and the various Western-style rosaries is simply that it makes this explicit in the symbolism of its beads.

"The message of the Buddhist mala is 'Don't worry about things; worry about the fact that you are so worried all the time, and address the foot of that." From Tricycle, Winter 2006 (Clark Strand)