This pretty much describes my current state...
One of my favorite songs by The Mekons. It goes like this:
Way across town a phone rings off the wall
If you know he ain't home why do you keep callin'
You're gonna drive yourself crazy and you know that it's true
It's making you wild and blue
Wild and blue it's no wonder
Look at the things that you do
They could just take you up to yonder
You're already wild and blue
In somebody's room on the far side of town
With your mind all made up and the shades all pulled down
Someone is trying to satisfy you
He don't know you're wild and you're blue
Wild and blue it's no wonder
Look at the things that you do
They could just take you up to yonder honey
You're already wild and blue
It's four in the morning
And your all alone
With no place to go
Why don't you come home
I'll be right here baby waiting for you
I know you've been wild and blue
This is very descriptive. I am blue. I am wild. I feel as though the grief over Lane has sealed me off from being able to touch another...I mean truly touch another. I have tried and I just can’t be satisfied on a whole host of levels. I miss him and feel like a part of me is missing from me. Like there is a part of me that he took with him when he left that I can no longer access without him. I walk around every day with this sadness...it isn’t debilitating, I just feel blue pretty much all the time.
Then there is the wild part...
I feel somewhat like a wild mustang...the grief and blueness of it all has made me somewhat reckless and unmoored from the life I was used to living. I have done things that I would have never, ever done before. Some of them good and some of them not so good. I haven’t just been skirting a moral line though, the wildness comes from deep inside me, like a river of rushing water that is coursing through a canyon. I feel this inside me all the time. Like the grief has gotten me in touch with this passionate river that runs through my soul. It feels a little dangerous and exciting and has given me a renewed zest for my life. I feel things more deeply in all areas.
It is like leaning into the blue (despite my misgivings and not wanting to) has given me access to this wild component of myself that I have been afraid of all my life. I care less what people think, I feel enjoyment in the small basic discrete units of my life. I sometimes feel like a horse that has been turned out in a beautiful pasture after having been cooped up in a pen for a long time. I am running wild and free but have absolutely no idea where I am going. I am just going and I am a little dangerous.
I find myself saying things that I really think and feel with almost no filter and instead of everyone being horribly offended...they are ok with my truer nature being expressed. Like somehow they see the wildness and encourage its expression. In equal measure, they see the blue and are ok with that being expressed too. No one is telling me to get over it or stop talking about it or move the fuck on. They just listen and support me.
When I left my marriage I said (sometimes I wish that I didn’t say this) that I didn’t care if my heart was smashed to bits, I just wanted to love someone with my whole self without abandon and feel that love fiercely, passionately and fully. Boy, did I get my wish...
I did not know that losing that love would be so hard. I did not know that it would make me feel everything in my life better. I did not know that it would give me strength where I had none prior. I did not know that I would be fortified in new ways and I would be able to walk through the days, weeks, months and then years, first in a daze where everything except the pain felt dull and drab. Only to be moved into a life where I began to feel everything acutely and fully.
Like this:
I was driving to work yesterday and when I approached the highway on the back country road, I came upon a police detour. They had this small section of the road leading to the highway blocked off and rerouted us to a smaller lane that took a divergent route to the highway.
As I began my descent into this beautiful little canyon, I was overcome with the beauty. The sun was shining on the dewey leaves and the whole valley was awash with freshness and serenity. I was moved. I felt completely alive and alert to my life. The beauty surrounded me and I felt it on a cellular level.
I then realized that I did not feel irritation at being rerouted despite my busy day ahead and my need to timely arrive at the office. I was present in the moment which was full, rich and life affirming. My next thought was to notice the intensity of my feelings which led me to realize that I could have just as easily and with as much power have been super pissed about my detour. This led me to realize that I feel pretty much everything this way...all my feelings are intense and deep and powerful. I do wild in a powerful way in as much as I do blue in the same powerhouse manner. The only difference is my orientation. Which way I am pointed...
It is just high emotion that is going in opposite directions. Whether I am oriented toward the beautiful and the positive (wild) or the depressed and sad (blue) it is the same energy either way. And somehow that brought me peace. To know that no matter what is going on in my life, I am going to have divergent thoughts about it and those thoughts are going to generate feelings. Those feelings are born of the same energy - and since it is the same energy, I can change the trajectory of that energy at any time. It all really depends on how willing I am to lean into the feeling. It is by this leaning in that I am given equal access to the opposite feeling and in turn opposite thoughts...
In my willingness to feel the wild and all that it invigorates and untames, I am given better access to the blue and all it brings with it. The more I lean into either, the more alive and present in my life I get to be. I realized that I was so incredibly blessed to be standing upon the continuum and feeling equally willing to be moved in either direction. In fact, as I drove through that small horse ranch valley, I saw that I just as easily could have missed it all by being pissed off about my detour. So I embraced that too - the shift of energy that could lead me away from the beauty and grace. I pulled my car over and cried because I was overwhelmed with just how fantastic it is to have a broken heart. The brokenness is where the light gets in and the light needs both the wild and the blue.
