Yay for travel time!!!

Alright.. so 4 posts in 2 1/2 months.. not bad, not bad!!

SO as the title says we're beginning our travel time portion of the program, and I'm really excited!! Our group has been super ambitious and have decided to go ALL OVER the country and stretch our two weeks to the max!! It's gonna be so much fun!!

Now, time to switch things up...

I have been up and down lately.. good and sad - learning how to cope with the difficulties and trying to really let the amazing moments sink in and anchor themselves in my heart.
It's interesting the things that come up when one is thrust into a new world where nothing at all is familiar or stable...

Example 1: Journal entry on December 10th, 2008...

I feel fragile, but hard. I feel like the days and time are senseless, and I don't want to feel and hear and engage. Yet every tiny thing - the wind brushing past my arm, the tickle of my hair, the surprising heat of the sun - cuts so deeply into my emotions... I feel it so much, so deep, so innocent and so honest. I blank and block out the world I hate and love in this senseless tug-of-war that no one side will ever actually win, and I love and hate the numbness I find there. When will this end? Why must I feel EVERYTHING - from the mundane to the magnificent - so deeply? I don't feel like singing. I can't remember a time when I didn't feel like singing for so long. And the brief peace that comes when it's forced is barely worth the breath I painstakingly push from my lungs to produce it. Everything is so far away, and yet so present. Sometimes I feel like talking, but before I've even opened my mouth my brows have furrowed in response to the frustration of knowing that I'll never be able to find the words. I feel like crying, but not from full wells. From dried up places that harbour only dust and faint breezes of what once was - and from this dryness the tears simply cannot come. I want to be handled - to feel that security of a small, sunlit room where I can be open and broken for days and no one questions me or barrels forward without me. And yet I don't want to be touched, for the fear that the dryness would swell, and the sudden overflow would become an uncontrollable downpour no matter what my surroundings. And I fear the lack of safety in that. I fear so much. It is what holds me back and makes my heart heavy.
For as much as I cannot remember it, I miss my childhood. I miss the innocence. The world as my front yard and ballet class and summer and winter clothes, late night slurpee-runs with dad and pink ghetto blasters, self-choreographed dances and silly mushroom cuts - before it became old, complicated, weathered by sadness. I want it back. With every fibre of my being I want it back. Perhaps this is why I cling to the few memories I have - to the dreams I had back then and the people I shared them with and who allowed me to entertain them without the slightest caution of that they may not come to fruition - those people as I thought they were back then, who have somehow changed, though really, were always this way. I want that time back. I feel like I've been robbed of it: it's been snatched away, stealthily, in the darkest hour of the morning, just before the sun breaks and shadows begin to fade.
I am not quite found in the juxtaposition of everything that's made me who I am and who I've decided I will be yet. The balance is more of a see-saw, with one side rising at one moment, the other the next. Perhaps this feeling of being lost is really more the feeling of not being guided. Where does that come from? Faith? God? Me? Is it more an intuition, or just the culmination of random events that blows leaves over one path, exposing another, or throws a rock in the middle of a stream, forcing the water to carve another gully through previously unbroken soil?
I'm tired. So much energy just to sit and think. I can see what it will be like when I no longer need to spend such energy simply organizing my thoughts, but the bridge to that place is yet unconstructed, the roads yet unpaved. Do I build them alone? Am I even capable? Would I be asking these questions if I was? Would I be asking them if I wasn't?

Since then I have noticed a bit of a shift, though I am still not "found". I have only noticed that I have stopped spinning. I am still. Not planted, or firm. Just not spinning.

I am still. And it's surprising. And nice.