I feel down low and I know I should just go to bed, it’s late and the sound of the fridge humming is the only accompaniment to these words. If I could I’d sing slow down you move too fast, but change the morning tomoment in the next line then thank simon and garfunkel for the words out of their mouths.
Already I feel better. Funny how these letters do that. Yes I thought I might try to address this to someone, mused abut who that someone might be, but my lover is in bed (the other noise I hear, his faint breath whispering in and out) and I have not written a dear john note in years, maybe ever. What is a dear john note, anyway? Did I just make that up?
I am a writer, as you may, not, have guessed. What is a writer? Someone who writes, well, count me in, because 22 years of ink rolling around on the blank pages of journals is a lot of experience in my book(s). And of course there is the poetry book I published, the articles in the past few year since I became a phd student.
Another reach at the letters, which are almost mine, another few months and this 40 something nerdy wordy girl is going to become even nerdier.
So what’s a girl like me doing writing a blog like this, with a title like that. Well, it’s not easy to tell all in the first post. and it is just january 1st. The year is only at its infancy. I wanted to at least say hello. and to tell you that I do mean it, it meaning that i am embarking on a year to love, a year of letters like these with no specific receiver attached but with an intention to make myself available for conversation and response to what I share here.
Yes, love, a year to love. what do I mean. Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine wrote a book years ago called A Year to Live. Full of meditations and contemplations on the nature of self, the body, death, mindfulness practice and getting comfortable with our mortality as human beings. I have done it, the course, over a year, with a group and it was so incredible to practice that possibility of dying, to learn what was most important to me, to do things that really mattered because I only had a little time left.
I have been thinking that it would be good to do it again, only with a personal, and professional slant. I’m a healthy relationships educator, and am writing (almost finished)a dissertation on a creative and contemplative practice called Loving Inquiry. I am most of all interested in being as loving as I possibly can, toward myself and others. I believe that we all deserve love, we are all connected, we are all vulnerable, fallible, beautiful in our own individually inimitable ways.
I write poetry about that, and tell stories, perform both. And the ways I love are many; these words being one of the most significant. And this here entry, it’s been one long love letter. As I sit here and tap out these words I create space for me to be here, with myself, to listen to how I am feeling, to say what comes, what is happening. When I do that, I feel loved, by yours truly, listened to, heard. So I can go back to writing the introduction to my dissertation tomorrow, to completing this next-to-last draft and sending it out to my supervisor by the end of the week.
Most especially, I can go to sleep now, because I am tired and there is a bit more peace in my heart. The more there is in mine, the more in yours, I hope, through reading these words, and through the actions that arise out of the mood of love I’ve created out of the unlove I felt when I first started this post. I was feeling exhausted, wanting to quit, to let go, disappear. Now I still feel exhausted. I also feel excited. I love this, this writing, this paying attention, this honesty, and this openness to my own vulnerability. I learn to be with yours as I allow myself to be with mine.
These are my theories. Over this year I hope to test them out, again and again. Simply by showing up here, like this, with all these sumptuous, silly, stubborn letters that somehow help me spell out love from pain, from fear, from despair.
These are my letters. Okay and I’m trying to find a bold, glorious first post finish. Here it is. Good night world.
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