Seems like you and I and maybe thousands of others were going through a grief-filled uprooting all around the same time. 🤔 Some of these offerings —especially this one—feel like a door to our common world (“IYKYK”); therein lies a sense of relief that the last three years weren’t lost ones indicative of failure, exacting shame because we didn’t have “moral resolve” to “steer” us through the morass. As I was reading, I thought, “wish I’d read this 3 years ago before I ditched my husband, sold my house, disastrously attempted to move to Maine, burned through a mountain of money and nearly drowned in ocean of wine…” But as my mother used to say, you can’t tell someone something until they’re ready to know it.
Life is messy. It’s fear that persuades people to believe otherwise, to believe that life can be tamed and controlled— and to a certain extent it can, but at the expense of ourselves.
"Commitment to what is not yet there" and "living unprepared" remind me of this passage from T.S. Eliot's "East Coker," which keeps coming up in my thoughts as I try to live my life and make art while dreading the election results in November.
"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting."
this is an incredible piece, Jessica. Coming to it later but in perfect timing for my circumstances. Last week after a pointy moment of painful reflection -the pinnacle of months (years?) of suppressed grief and angst, I came to a liberating awareness to seriously review and reassess my long-term and very stable relationship. I thought the answer would be to leave - but I literally prayed for guidance and 'received' as an answer or signpost a shocking synchronistic shift in life circumstances that slowed me down and reoriented my approach from independent self-sufficiency and rightness to serious, real conversations about recommitment. ... ongoing, outcome still unknown but definitely world-building. I note one of your reader's comments below about rushing in and upending their life - I think I was almost there.
Seems like you and I and maybe thousands of others were going through a grief-filled uprooting all around the same time. 🤔 Some of these offerings —especially this one—feel like a door to our common world (“IYKYK”); therein lies a sense of relief that the last three years weren’t lost ones indicative of failure, exacting shame because we didn’t have “moral resolve” to “steer” us through the morass. As I was reading, I thought, “wish I’d read this 3 years ago before I ditched my husband, sold my house, disastrously attempted to move to Maine, burned through a mountain of money and nearly drowned in ocean of wine…” But as my mother used to say, you can’t tell someone something until they’re ready to know it.
Life is messy. It’s fear that persuades people to believe otherwise, to believe that life can be tamed and controlled— and to a certain extent it can, but at the expense of ourselves.
"Commitment to what is not yet there" and "living unprepared" remind me of this passage from T.S. Eliot's "East Coker," which keeps coming up in my thoughts as I try to live my life and make art while dreading the election results in November.
"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting."
this is an incredible piece, Jessica. Coming to it later but in perfect timing for my circumstances. Last week after a pointy moment of painful reflection -the pinnacle of months (years?) of suppressed grief and angst, I came to a liberating awareness to seriously review and reassess my long-term and very stable relationship. I thought the answer would be to leave - but I literally prayed for guidance and 'received' as an answer or signpost a shocking synchronistic shift in life circumstances that slowed me down and reoriented my approach from independent self-sufficiency and rightness to serious, real conversations about recommitment. ... ongoing, outcome still unknown but definitely world-building. I note one of your reader's comments below about rushing in and upending their life - I think I was almost there.
Beautiful!