Resolution, First Week of January

January is a month of fresh beginnings, of hope and newness. Holding onto a hope for healing - in whatever form that healing may take - feels inspiring, like a seed of possibility.

But sometimes that yearning for healing takes over and morphs into a pushing, a use of force against ourselves that can break our own hearts.

This week I heard a question, deep inside my body, about the chronic illness I've carried these past six years: What is this illness asking of me? In the wake of this question, I could see the many ways I continue to push, trying to return to what "I once was," rather than living within the life I have now.

My poet friend Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer says that when we write, we write to write what's true - not to write something good. Today I realized that only after I grieve what I think is 'good' - often what I wish could be - can I live within what's true.

Resolution, First Week of January

“We're not free when we're doing just what we like. We're only free when we're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.” - paraphrase of D.H. Lawrence

What I want most is so clear: a mercy that's large enough
to hold all of me. I don't want another book to read
or practice to do. I don't want another fence of no –
there are already too many. The list of foods I can no longer
eat and the list of things I can no longer do are greater
then my strength to give up one more thing.

I don't want to hear about another healer, another treatment
program, or another story about a miracle cure. I simply want
you to hold my body next to yours as I weep.

I don't want to hear of solutions or wellness plans.
I don't want a promise for healing. I want to hold
my soft body and my soft heart with my warm hands.

I don't want to do one more thing. But in truth, I will.
I'll make my food even when I feel too tired to cook.
I'll walk my dog and unroll my mat when I don't feel
up to it. I'll take my long list of pills and track my symptoms.
I'll breathe, a bellows deep in my chest, as I watch the sun
move across her long arc in the sky.

I'll get up and try again – even
when it feels like nothing's changing,
even when the relief doesn't last,
even when the pain shifts
and moves in another direction.

So what I want, what I most deeply want,
is a mercy large enough to contain all of me:
the frustration and the fear, the anger and the rage,
the loss and the grief, and the laughter
that comes, too, in this long, long descent into the dark.

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With a grateful heart, Karly