I haven't written a journal like post for quite some time. I feel a bit lost as to how to do it, but I shall give it go. I've been feeling flat and tired in my spirit recently. This is on the back of finding somewhere lovely new to live and starting a new job that I find challenging but life giving. I've not really understood the flatness.
I had a chat with my lovely wife this eve and discovered in trying to explain where this might of being coming from that I have been trying so hard to live in the present, the now. It seems that my mind, heart, soul craves a bigger picture. I need to know that my lie and what I do isn't all a fleeting nothing in a vacuum going nowhere. I need to contemplate that my life is a part of a tapestry, a thread in the weave of master creation. I need to know this and feel this in order to appreciate beauty. My mental health is tied to this knowing.
As a support worker working one on one with a client I can feel quite isolated. My mind numbs and my thoughts become sluggish and limp. I have to be present but often present to what seems to me to be banal normality. I feel guilty labelling it as such for it reflects the opposite to how I feel about my client and his family. I still have this role but I now have a second job in which I am a learner support for an entire class in college. The challenges and stimulation are quite different. Living in the moment is more necessary as they are rambunctious group and need an eye keeping on them.
And then in the evenings and on my weekends I feel like I have to be present for my lovely wife. And that would be unfair for her if I used all my ability to be present in the moment on my work. I feel that I still do that sometimes. I have learned to be better at being present in the now and to the immediate surroundings. But I have being noticing a cost to my ability to see and feel that big picture and to have awareness of the bigger story enfolding about, and through me. I miss writing poetry, and taking photos. I miss seemingly pointless walks; walks just to be with myself. I miss reading poetry by un-knowns that is raw and unapologetic. I miss reading Khalil Gibran and Jonathon Safran Foer and feeling that ache and weight.
I can't heedlessly abandon the ability to be in the here and now but I need to find a way to do it that does not shut down the important parts of me that occupy the big and wide and deep, the parts that live in the ethereal but weighty unknown and other. I feel another trip about to begin within myself, a journey into a more rounded fullness of who I am and was created to be.
I am a questioner by nature. Even my earliest memories of my inner life are characterised by the asking of why and how. If I don't ask these questions verbally internally or externally; my mind fills with doubt and uneasiness with no apparent source or solution. I must ask. I have almost always asked out of wonder and awe, or dread and loathing, not often lightly do I voice these queries. I want to have ongoing conversations with my Father and with my wife and with my friends and even with those I know not so well. I want to share and give. I want a rich inner life, that my outer life mirrors that richness and rewards those that receive from me.
So in a long-winded way I am saying I want to write and take pictures again, and read beautiful books and prose that isn't self-aware, and poetry that gushes out of the fingertips like the monsoon rains. I want to be able to spend 45 mins gazing at an old oak tree, enjoying its beauty and contemplating the God that made such a thing.