enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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yellow is the colour of the afternoon

OK. I'm doing well now. I've stepped back and relaxed. I did some emotional "exercises" this afternoon after I returned from spinning.

I think I've decided to not go on the biking trip. I will feel badly letting Amanda down, but I feel as though I need to cut back on my ambitions for the spring. Perhaps going to Italy for a week or more by myself - to stay in a nice pensione, spend every day with my sketch pad, eat good food - would be more healing than the biking. I'm not sure. I do enjoy exercise and the scenery through the Adirondacks would be beautiful. But I can always do the bike tour next year.

PErhaps I'm saying this because stress takes a toll on the body. I haven't run all week as I've been feeling so tired. And this morning I had my worst spinning class ever. I mean, I enjoyed the class. But I felt so weak and uninterested in exerting myself.

I think that this is a good thing, this ratcheting back thing. As I feel myself slowing down I feel myself becoming more conscious of slowing down my thoughts and really hearing my emotions. Perhaps it is true that all of the energy and the exercise and work and the driving of myself that I do is really just a way to make noise to cover up the true feelings and the hurt and so on. I believe that the only way to move forward is to honour the feelings, as I've said so often. And how can I honour my true feelings when I can't even hear them speaking to me?

Ohhhhh....tired. I'm wearing my daffodil sweater at the moment. It is so happy and pretty. I feel comforted by it.

So after spinning I went to C's house for brunch. C. makes a mean brunch! It was excellent. Only C. gets all antsy about things so for the entire tiem that we were talking afterwards he was rushing about cleaning his apartment, sorting out his recycling. I think I hate this so much because when I was growing up this was how my mother was. My mother never ever listens to anyone by sitting down across from them and looking them in the face and concentrating. She is always doing something else. To me, with me, this always seemed as though she didn't really care or wasn't really listening. I remember eventually convincing my mother to buy me a dress to wear to an award ceremony - I had not owned a dress for years - and her not even having the patience to sit in the store whilst I tried a few on. Things were always a rush and I never felt "special."

Anyhow. I didn't say that to belittle my mother. I just said that because this is something that I have observed in life and that I don't like. One of the things that I know that I consciously do with people, as a result of my experiences and feelings, is make eye contact and listen and show patience when they are telling me things. I really do believe that the most important thing of all things is to pay attention. Paying attention is the secret to life, in my humble opinion, which is why I think the hustle and bustle and so on that I've been doing has been in order to thwart that and is therefore unhealthy.

Food for thought, anyhow.

Related to my mother though, I just wrote a long letter to her that I won't send. It was a long and angry letter. I won't send it to her because I know from my long experience that any honest expressions of pain and disappointment will only be met with retaliation and denial and disdain. I guess that I've realized the most difficult lesson: that you can't create epiphanies for other people. People have to choose to have their own awakenings. It doesn't matter how much you scream and shout and hope and dream. No one is going to change unless they want to.

Anyway. I say all of these things in surprising peace. I think that getting these things out is helping me. When I get them out I can throw them out. And then I can be that bird that I talked about. :)

You know, the most awesome nickname a boyfriend has ever called me is "smashing bird." He was English, of course, which will come as no surprise. He always said it with a voice that was winking. Of course bird is a very different word to a Canadian female than to a British male. Nevertheless it was perfect. I do think of my dream state as being a bird. Not because I want to get away but because I want to be able to lift myself up and be light.

My favourite post card from him read, "Shall I liken thee unto a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate and more smashing! Missing you. Hugging trees is a poor substitute!"

Yeah, he had charm. Fortunately he also had deeply redeeming decency. Only he openly stated that he felt his temperament to be too inclined to depression to ever make a life with someone else a happy one, particularly since he only felt attraction to women temperamentally compatible. He perhaps has a point.

Only I've come to have a more nuanced view of depression. Depression comes on a continuum, and I think that too often we view healthy sadness as depression. I have said this many, many times before but I truly believe it. Sadness is a teacher, if you're willing to be taught to it.

And, really, how unique are any of our emotions? Is sorrow or sadness ever truly distanced from anger or poignant delight? No, not they are not distant. I tend to think of emotions as the infinite shades of a beautiful spectrum.

When I was little I used to tell my mother that every letter has a colour or a range of colours, and that so too have words colours. Everything has a colour. When I was looking at the board in the French room the other day at the names written on the board I could see the shades of colour vibrating through the letters one by one. It's like pain and sadness are hints of the vibrancy of my imagination just aching to shine through the constraints of life again.

Hmm..I'm just kind of musing here. I think tonight that I will stay in and be peaceful, read some nice poetry, eat well, watch a film. I have a call to return that might be an invitation that I will feel guilty declining, but I think I must do this. I must breathe deeply and have patience with myself. Rome was not built in a day, as they say.

And you know, I've always felt intuitively that Mise van der Rohe was not only impish but correct when he inverted the devil thing to state, "God is in the details." I say this over and over again and never cease to believe that it is true.

:)

Have a great weekend, my lovely, generous, kind diaryland friends!

Incidentally, I just posted these on my wall (excuse the distortion - I have a poor scanner). It occurred to me that I need to post happy images everywhere. Not because I need to remind myself of winning a marathon - not at all, that is not the message! The message is that I have been able to do things that no one else thought I could do, when I decided that they were important to me. I had belief. I'm running a more important marathon now - an emotional, spiritual, healing marathon. And so, there you go, I'm going to remind myself that all is possible.

6:19 p.m. - 2008-03-15

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