Proof, positive

Yesterday was interesting. I damn near aced a quiz I hadn’t done the reading for. Caught BART into the city after class, to help with the food pantry at St. A's. I’d never done that; it was really fun. Aside from the Ranch, I haven’t done any volunteer work at all since May. This got me outside of myself, interacting with other people. Actually doing ministry. How about that?

Adopted-mom goes once a month or so. I’m going to keep it up—it’s too much fun, and too good for the world, not to.

Ran around with Calabash family all afternoon, and back to church with them in the evening, to the pet memorial service. That was really an experience. It was interfaith, between us and a Buddhist cleric, and beautifully done. It took me to a place in myself, that I don’t think I’ve ever been to.

The topic of pets takes me directly to childhood. I was thinking of my grandparents’ dog (who died when she and I were both ten), and a cat we had from when I was around eight, into college. I wasn’t really grieving them, though—I was just grieving. But I didn’t cry. I didn’t fall apart at all. I just was in a deeply quiet place. A self-sufficiently quiet place. I got lots of hugs, and I wanted most of them—but I wasn’t feeling like other people had to hold me up. At a different time, I would have fallen apart on the people I was closest to. Childhood-grief and guilt would have torn me up. I didn’t, and it didn’t. I said, I’m okay and this is what’s up, and they hugged me—but I didn’t lose my own strength.

When my friend Michael cut his leg on a nail in NOLA, our friend Judy described the healing process. She said it had to granulate; the cells closest to the bone had to regrow. I think that might be what’s happening. I absolutely knew I’d be loved through this—and I absolutely was, in ways that surprised me—but there was something deeper going on. I chose to go to that grief, and stay with it. I wasn’t swept there. I had support on both sides of me, when I wanted it. Between times, I just let myself feel, and watched other people. I didn't go to grasping. I wasn’t in a “Help me” place; it was more, “You get it. Thank you.” Part of my quietness was awe: “oh my God, I really am all right.”

I wrote a month ago, “I’m trying to figure out how to be responsible about this love-trust-need conflation I have going, and how to grow through and beyond it.”

I really think I’ve done that. Because it isn’t happening. It’s no longer a question of being responsible—the conflation no longer exists. It just isn’t there. I have bones now.

Yay and alleluia, ever yet again.