Yet Another LBS w/ WAW

[hongaku]

I tell myself: Surrender your intellect. Stop wondering and planning and just let it be. Sit in your sorrow and marinate. It softens your heart. Do not judge. It is simple, it is. What is, just is!

Many times, like now, I sit in the hole, my hole with my shovel, wondering how I got here. Dirt sliding all around me, as I claw at the sides of the hole trying to get out. Terrified by thoughts that this is forever. That I will be gasping for breath forever and one day it will kill me! Chest high in dirt. Shovel in hand, but I act like I do not know who wields the shovel.

I will let it be. I will cry when I need to and try to not panic when I cannot. I will let it be what it is, in a hole, that only I will turn into my grave, by the way I think about being in it. I go outside and I see all around me, people living freely, who can bike and run and walk in the sun, people who are young and have their whole lives ahead of them. Doing things I used to do, that they think are new. I cannot change this. I have to play the hand I am dealt from the hole. I am getting fairly good at cards. Sitting in the dirt. The funny thing is few people know I am in a hole, only I know that, me and my shovel, the one I dug the hole with. The hole is the bad things that have happened to me in my life that I cling to, that I let shape my view of my life because I won t let them go.

So I sit in the hole a while, curl up and sleep however long I can, wake up and see if I can stand a while and peek over the top of the hole. I may not be able to, I may have in my despair dug too deeply to see, I may need to crawl up the sides on my hands and knees. On my knees, the way I learned to walk in the first place, feeling much like that infant, as he ventured out into the world on his knees, searching, in a would he did not understand. That I still do not understand because the play has shifted to another script. I am on the stage and they have changed the play, I have the wrong lines, I have no idea who I am, or what I am to do. I am lost. The light is on me, everyone around me plays their part and I stand mute. Life is that, ever changing scripts in which we play many characters, re-written over and over because we are in each others play. You only think you are in the same play when the scenes are compatible and it is a shock to learn that you have been in a romance that then in the next scene becomes a tragedy. What is hard for me to understand is that my W and me never did share an identical dream of the future. Very similar in some parts but because it is a play being written while we go along, an improv, there is often no way of knowing what the other is creating.

It is our thinking we know that is the shovel. Our ego, our sense of ourselves in the world according to us. Because the world is different to each and every one of us, it is our own creation. If we don t know that, if we do not know how to collaborate with the other authors and actors, we end up standing stranded on an empty stage or, like in a nightmare dropped into a hole that we have dug without knowing. Sometimes there is no wrong, there is only difference. Different because of changing, through time. Even the self alone is dong that, changing, in ways you do not know. Growing up is all about that, character development in our scripts. We evolve, we change from the effects of the circumstances in our lives, our scripts, our play.

I am yelling out into an empty house, this is my play! I am demanding that everyone play the roles I have written for them. Like they have been doing, or seeming to have been doing, I was able to get them to adjust their scripts to fit mine for many years. But that has changed. My role has changed in the script of my Ws play, which has been being re-written for many of those years, bit by bit. I had a part in that. But being unaware that my Leading Lady had her own play that was not the same as mine, I have become shocked. We share our lives with one another, but they never really become one. That only happens in pregnancy, the only time when two lives are really one. And that is only for a very brief and beautiful time. Most of us long for the safety and comfort of the womb many times, after being pushed out into this glaringly bright and loud strange place. Frightened to be thrust out into the world from the womb. And you carry that fear with you. You write it into your script. And after every script change, every last act, every ending, that fear rushes into the heart and mind and you find yourself again in a strange and frightening, lonely place. It happens over and over, from brief moments to ones that feel like an eternity. They happen and we fight to keep them at bay, to no avail. We need not think it strange, people change

I am alone, on stage, still holding on to the old script. My masterpiece, now in need of a rewrite. It is awful. Painful. No one else can feel what I am feeling and no one else has the ability to set me free from this scene in the hole with the shovel. I may not let go of the shovel because it is all I feel I have left. All I think I have left. My thoughts are creating my feelings.

I am sitting here, curled in a ball, writing to you from my hole, shovel on one side, my script, laying on the other. I cannot see what to do because I dug the hole so deep, and I only have my shovel, and my script. But somewhere in the dark and the dirt is my pen. When I am ready, when I am done with the pain, I will know what to do. But it will be hard if I do not know that the shovel is my own, as is the pen and the script.

As long as I fight change, I will suffer the pain I am creating by fighting to control it.