The Bare Naked Truth

If I could draw a picture symbolically representative of what I've witnessed in my life over the past years, I would draw an orange. Standing perfectly abreast the spine of it's core and ripe with orange goodness. The course peel seemed to have come unravelled years ago behind it a naked fuzziness that not long ago was the only thing that prevented all the slices from coming undone. From where I sit in this moment, I can see those slices, carefully and gently breaking away from their internal neighbors, yet their fall does not feel chaotic and sudden but instead full of graceful solitude, a surrendering of sorts. So then, my life is a .......surrendered orange.

I used to think I'd be a writer. I had a childhood love of language and the music of syllables, as they wove together a picture of the things I saw in my head, born of the way I seemed to interact with the world. An outlet for a chaotic inner world, one that few understood and still young remained unaware that this would be my destiny, a sort of lone wolf alone in a crowd. The wolf still hunted, ate and mated with the pack, but that sense of aloneness would never really leave. Writing, gave me a way of talking about those feelings, the insights that seemed to visit with no concious provocation, the way in which I could hear the whispers in the wind in a way I didn't understand, my journal a place to make these unrecognized but burning knowings known, spoken, true. I always thought I'd be a journalist, but I became a social worker and every ounce of writing was left behind.

The vocation born of the trauma's of my life and my intense quest for healing actualized in learning how we conceptualized the way in which people broke and were fixed again, a means to understand the events of my life. I married, had a child, got busy doing the things i should be doing, and i forgot about myself. When my marriage ended brutally with domestic violence, poverty and a two and a half year old, I became one lone woman struggling for a life free of abuse she didn't even recognize despite working passionately with this very subject in her research. The peel had been punctured, thrust into a deep tear that just seemed to keep unravelling in a spiral. In the wreckage discovered after the demise, what she found were parts of her that used to be known to her, that she no longer knew, but the point was those same parts she thought had matured and grown out of in her becoming, were actually the parts of her left behind, ones that she apparently under the light of conciousness worked hard to repress.

And so her search began to find who she was, to discover the deeper undercurrents to her existence, the philisophical narratives of a life she had spent most of her life trying to understand. Who is there behind the masks, the disguises, the stories, so convincing she discovered she had managed to convince herself. The search became a journey, a seeking of and examination of truth, belief, origin, connection, purpose and meaning only to bring her back to a position of healing, but this time surrendered inward. A delicate balancing act between two realities that never quite seemed to get along. A surrendered orange..

Instead of investing that energy in a fruitless search for understanding in what seems like a world that has never understood her, I have decided to reclaim the communion of my writing as an outlet for my continuing internal quandries, this time exposed in a life of a larger community. Call it a sorting of one of those peices, a thread of knowing that seems to have a resonance and takng the chance at seeing it through.

and I kept wondering what on earth I would begin blogging about....