I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
                      Dawna Markova

Rough evening. It's been almost a year since my life began to unravel and become the unrecognizable thing it is today. I have no doubt that there will come a time when I recognize it as mine again but right this minute, I kinda feel like I want to live an unlived life. What a relief that would be! To live in a daze of routine. Work, eat, sleep. Work, eat, sleep. 
     I want to dive into fear and wallow in it. To shake and cry and scream and run away. I want to catch fire while I'm falling. I don't want to inhabit my days, I want to inhabit my bed and never leave its safety. To sleep for hours and hours so those pesky feelings won't bother me. 
     I don't want to be "awake." I want to push things underground again and be numb. I don't want to open and be more accessible. I want to be closed and safe and protected!!  I feel my heart not loosen but tighten and freeze and crack into a million icy shards.
     Despite the pull of the dark side, though, and how much easier it would be not to, I do inhabit my days. As painful and annoying and enraging as these darker emotions are sometimes, I'm awake and I'm staying awake. It's just such a damn lot of work.
     When I wrote about my life unraveling, I had to think that's a good metaphor! My life was all knitted up into this one way of being. I pulled on one little string and it all came apart. The material is still there. I just have to figure out how to knit things back together again. 
     I'm knitting a very pretty scarf right now (the photos don't do the color justice - it's a nice warm, orange-y color) and it seems an appropriate metaphor too. It has a leaf pattern -- yes, the obvious -- turning over a new leaf, etc. It also makes me think of an organic process. Things grow the way they grow. You just have to step back and get out of the way. I just have to trust the process, right? I'll end up where I need to be.