Digging Deep...

The theory behind change is basically this...everything changes; but, if an individual wants change to happen in their life, they have to be willing to be in charge and actively seeking change.  You have to do things differently than you have in the past and be willing to explore.  I like to think of it as an archaeological dig.  I like change, actually love it, even when it scares me.  Believe it or not, where I am now and where I started in life are a million miles apart from each other.

Until I turned eighteen, I was raised to be a statistic through severe systematic abuse, and what saved me was my fierce determination to not be broken.  I knew nothing else but what I was experiencing, but I decided that I would be something different, and that is what I became, something different.  From the day that I walked out at eighteen until this very moment, I have been going through change after change, much of it happening because I was asking for "more" and not really aware of what I was asking to enter my life.  Over the past decade, I have begun to know what it is that I'm asking for and have found myself in many different ways.  Honestly, I believe that it was the dramatic growth I have experienced, during the ten years that I was with my ex, that actually led to the demise of my marriage.  Even though I feel rough around the edges right now, I am not the same gal coming out that I was going in.

My ex was right...I do live outside the box all the time and my problems arise when I try to force myself into a box.  That doesn't mean that I'm not relationship material, but it does mean that I have to figure out my boundaries and that fine line between merging with someone else and losing myself...in the end I will fight to burst out of the box, if it fits too tightly.  I don't know what that is...I wasn't raised to have a thought of my own and certainly punished severely for trying to find out.  The good news is that  I have traveled from a place where my relationships consisted of physical battery to the land of emotionally unavailable partners.  I've gotten better, much better, but I still have so far to go.  I really saw this in the online dating.  In fact, even I fluctuated with my ability to connect with others.  (I'll address online dating in its' own special post...it really deserves that much attention.) The even better news is that I have evolved enough to leave online dating with several friends, and maybe that is what's most important now.

In my constant process of physically unearthing myself, as I am unloading tons of belongings that I have hoarded over a decade, I found a semester project that I took on in a creative writing class, that I never told anyone about...too busy trying to fit in that box.  I realized that I had opened Pandora's Box that semester, it even led to my having the courage to start this blog.  In the past few months, I have unearthed my writings over the years, including decades of short stories, scripts and poetry.  I have been writing since I was five and have experienced successes when I shared it...which was rarely.  Most people don't know that I write incessantly.  But, in the piles and stacks of my written words, I found this poem that I wrote in 2004, when I started to really change in ways that I didn't expect....I asked for change and ...well...I got it.

I'm a bit terrified to share this because I don't consider myself a true poet, but I have a deep enough love of poetry to know that it comes from the soul...so this is my soul...my start...my beginning:

Raising the Wooly Mammoth

blue, under onioned, arctic earth

iced, frozen through age

no feeling, numbness,

immovable gestures, expressions of nothing

 with vacuumed head sucking feelings in

away from prying eyes

green, avocado carpet of my youth 

fading discolored mud

mixture of death and life

layered weariness, bones tired

 envy crystals press down on hidden rot; 

if

i could melt

and my decay fall away

leaving raw ancient tusked beast

white, hot center, 

pure colors combined

 crystalline reflection

not mirror, not ghost, not hollow, not lifeless-

beginning of who i was

 volcanic eruption of beauty light 

illuminating seared earth pressing against fierce flesh

pit or pinnacle? crevice or precipice?

creator or creation? allow this happening? 

to excavate and exhume?

is there nothing?

or a great wooly mammoth rising

ML 2004