INCONSISTENT AND HEALING

 I clash with consistency. In particular, writing consistently.

Why is this? Your guess is as good as mine, really. Am I a chaotic human? Is it trauma? Or is my lack of consistency reflective of my ability to live? 

Whatever it may be, it is me. I am inconsistent. I live my minutes and days and weeks in all the chaos and joy and pain and annoyances and while I live it I let my thoughts bottle up until the words can’t be contained in my body anymore, at which point they start leaking out of me in bits and pieces. Jumbled sentences leak into my iphone notes app and my journals and my laptop until suddenly the dam breaks and full paragraphs flow and I feel so light, so full of relief for having let it all out of me finally.

But once I get all the words out, I’m dry. So I sit back and let it all begin to drip in the lake until the lake is full yet again. 

This is a vicious repetitive cycle that I’d love to free myself from, because wouldn’t writing consistently be just lovely? 

One day, I tell myself.

One day I will build a writing cabin in my backyard forest where I can simultaneously write and stare out the windows, finding an inspiration in the secluded space and watching my animals roam around the greenery.

Currently, realistically, my goal is just a simple writing date with myself and my laptop at a coffee shop once a week. But in juggling all of life in this stage, It’s stupid ridiculous how hard just one night a week becomes.

There’s a song on my Goddess playlist by Olivia Fern called “Remember Why You Came”. 

My favorite part is when she says, 

Bring your voice, your hands, your heart or your drum

Whatever it is that you make your art from

For if we don’t we may well choke

On all the words we never spoke 

and all the songs and poems we never wrote, 

and the fires within will turn to smoke.

For a vision, a dream, channeled through a brush stroke, a song or a scene

Can be the spark that lights the dark we find ourselves in

Art is and always has been a way for spirit to be seen.

I repeat that last line often when my resistance tells me not to sit and write, or not to publish something I wrote. ART IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN A WAY FOR SPIRIT TO BE SEEN.

I think about those lines often as a motivator when I’m hoping to find more consistency in my writing. Hope is all that I have sometimes, and sometimes it’s enough. (but sometimes it’s not.)

Life lately has been as follows:

I have been settling into all the parts of what life becomes on the brink of winter. We prepped the farm by blowing out the sprinklers, digging up and tilling the gardens, piling leaves in the rabbit house and the chicken coop and the base of all our newest trees. We are prepping now for winter indoor projects like finishing the gym and painting the laundry room.

I bought Dan his dream Harley Davidson for his birthday this year. It was the most exciting present I have ever given and I will never top that one again.

We lost our last OG hen - Goldie Hen, the last of the good old girls. Three and a half years of free range living and then just dying naturally of old age is a good way for a chicken to live, I’d say. Now all four of the good old girls are buried side by side in our backyard farm graveyard. 

Thanks to a very strict and full football schedule we didn’t get to go camping much this year. It hurt so much, I could actually cry about it. I’m dying a little inside. This sounds dramatic, but it’s just true! I miss the simpler days when we camped every weekend because no one was in sports and we could. In the same breath, I love watching the boys in sports and it fills me with pride to see how much they grow from them. So we win some and we lose some, I suppose.

I have been healing.

By this I mean, I have been feeling my feelings - the ones that are hard and petty and rude and uncomfortable. I’m feeling them instead of hiding them or numbing them or distracting them away because I’m trying my best to break cycles and somehow it seems that the answer often lies on the other side of my triggers and shadows and big heavy human emotions.

But damn if it doesn’t hurt like hell!

There’s this memory I have (and stay with me, this is relevant!) from a few years back when Dan and I hiked the tallest peak in Utah.

It was the second morning following a day of hiking fifteen miles while wearing a fifty pound backpack. We had woken up at four am to get started on heading from our tent to the peak. I was sore and anxious and heading into the unknown without much sleep and without any of the conveniences from a pampered day-to-day life that I’m used to. And the moment that comes back to me so often now wasn’t the tip top of the peak, it was on our way to the peak. 

I remember it so well, and the memory flashes through my mind still to this day at random times. We had entered the top of a valley in the hike right as the sun was rising above the hillside next to us. We stopped then to filter water from the ice cold stream into our water bottles. I stopped and I stood right there, smiling, letting the sun rays wash over me like a warm bath and feeling so full of peace that I could have burst. It was so quiet there that for all Iknew we could have been the only humans on earth. Nothing mattered except right then and there where we stood in all it’s beauty.

Because getting to that peak was one of the more painful weekends of my life, physically and mentally, the irony that this memory has become one of the best memories that I have is not lost on me.

And I think that’s why I remember that very moment when I’m feeling my feelings. Because it’s a reminder that even when I am far outside my comfort zone feeling stiff and sore and painful and anxious and unsure if I will make it, there is massive reward. There are moments, in between the pain, where I can breathe it in and know it in my soul- this is peace. This is growth. 

This is healing.