I haven't eaten or slept for four days. That's not that big of a deal taken into consideration.
People too oft say they're broken. I realize I'm the exact opposite. You see, when I went into the woods in Tennessee to fast for 18 days, I had hoped for one thing. To cry for Murphy.
I studied extensively about fasting prior and in everything I read, they all said that after the physical release, there is an emotional one. That never happened to me and after 18 days of starving myself I prayed for it. Hell, I begged for it. But it never came.
I never cried. This is not a good thing.
I think I've been trying to break myself ever since but to no avail. Every day I get a text or message or email about yet another dog being diagnosed with cancer. I didn't realize this when I started this mission but I can shoulder this responsibility as far and as long as God gives me the strength to. The prayer I prayed each day on the road was, 'Thank you for blessing me with this mission. May Your Grace and Glory be my guide today."
It has. But I think I need to break now.
2 comments:
Walt Whitman comes to mind.
“I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.”
Maybe numbness is a certain kind of brokenness too, a different stage of it? Whether you see it that way or not, I'm grateful for your honesty on this. When one person is honest it gives others permission to be so too, and escape from trying to be "perfect" and "invincible," whatever those things mean. Reading this I could help but think of a Mary Oliver poem, where she talks about such things, and how falling is a form of prayer and led to gratefulness, and it seems to me that is *you.* Thank you for not trying to hide your fall ("what else should I have done?")and for being willing to be idle and blessed and wanting all the sorrow to matter, and for your one wild and precious life.
~ JT
THE SUMMER DAY
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~ MARY OLIVER in *The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays* © 2008, Beacon Press
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