Sorry, Gardener--I keep hijacking threads when I mean to respond to YOUR thread. I'm not really good at this. As for you: you are so aware of where your heart and mind are. You know what you are feeling, can name it, and can know it is part of the healing. I have wondered myself just how exactly God allows this incredible pain to exist. But there it is, and you--and all of us--plug along through it. It is life, it is human.Oh, that we could all be happy Labrador Retrievers!
Hijack away. They're not really hijacks; I consider them more like asides or simply "joining in." These are not dialogues we're having (oh, sometimes they are monologues when we vent and journal, true), they are conversations and we join in, interrupt, and digress just as if we were face to face. Thank you for your kind words. Fortunately, I am usually aware of where my heart and mind are (although the "wheres" have more often than not been bad places these last seventeen months. Indeed, one of the first questions X asked me when we were getting to know each other was how I would describe myself in one word. "Self-aware;" was my immediate response.
We do all plug through incredible pain, but I personally never wonder why God allows this pain to exist. He gives us this gift of life and the natural world and each other. After that, it's all up to us. I hope you are well and "plugging along" best you can.
And, ah, Labrador retrievers. I think dogs are even more zen-like than cats. My favorite New Yorker cartoon - which I've quoted often, here - shows a man in his easy chair glancing at his watch saying, "What time is it?" His dog is next to him, looking at him with a thought balloon that says, simply "Now. Now. Now. Now."
Gardener
"My soul, be satisfied with flowers, With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them In the one garden you may call your own." Cyrano deBergerac
