Some mornings I think I know the kind of day I am entering into. I drink coffee on the porch swing. I watch the woodpeckers maim the telephone poles and the robins hop around in their spring haste. I drag the hose around the yard, watering my starts and the tiny hopeful sprouts. I dream of zinnias and black-eyed- Susans and hollyhocks. I imagine the day moving ahead accordingly, with ease and creation and pockets of joy. I think I know the kind of day ahead. But sometimes I am wrong.
Sometimes my morning rituals do not appease the serotonin gods and I find that by noon I am fighting some shadowy presence lurking behind my eyes. It is part of me but somehow separate. I don’t know why tears sting my nose. I don’t know where the sadness came from. I realize soon that it does me no good to sit and analyze. Nor does it help to push it away, hoping for distraction. Instead, I scoop her up, this part of me I don’t yet know. She is so tender and lonely and scared but in that moment, she is seen. Maybe she is the sluffing off of old heartbreak. Maybe she is a kernel of human suffering, finding itself inside a heart that feels everything so deeply. Sometimes I never really find out. But it doesn’t matter because for a moment that tiny sliver of pain is witnessed. And like magic, gone.
It has taken me so many years to learn how to love myself in this way. I thought self-love was easy, a simple matter of “settling in”. But this kind of love is so much more active. It’s so much more vigilant. And sometimes it exhausts me. But it is so much less work than fighting my shadows. Now we just dance.