Shifting shadows

Leaving your faith is a massive thing.  They say the spiritual path is one walked alone and today I think I realised what people mean.    When you have a collective faith , you are walking with others,  there is comfort in conformity .

I felt sorrow in my heart today when I left my 3 close christian friends.   Nothing has been the same since I confessed that I just don’t believe what I once did .   There was a loneliness,    a longing ,   for things to be what they were –   I could sense the tension in some of our conversations as they struggled to grasp where I was.

The thing is ; I don’t know where I am &  I don’t mind .    That’s what’s hard for them perhaps,   that ‘  sure and certain hope ‘   is not for me what it is for them.

To step out of the community that you’ve built yourself within is a big leap.   It is at times liberating and wonderful and at others , like today ,  simply sad.    What once was , will never be again .    The shared convictions held so much ,   they were perhaps the glue and without it things become loose and rather lost.   I think when a friendship is built on something ,   it is almost impossible to shift the foundations.    If I had always been a ‘ non- christian ‘  friend ,  it would be normal –  but it’s the land in between where the foundations are damaged  &  shifted .

Now I don’t know where to go to seek friendship.   Nothing feels right. Old  school friends are far away ,  those  which span decades ,  so precious but so rare to behold their sweet company .    Different sets of friends that you cling to ,     to keep that part of yourself alive,   that era of youth where things were wild.   Yet now,   those friends perhaps have changed or grown in ways different to you and they just don’t fill that hole.  Work friends,  keep their distance in many respects ,   where does the line lie?

My husband ,  I am coming to appreciate , after 18 years ,  is my best friend.   At times ,  I literally hate this man with all my being ,  but you know what,    It is about being known and loved for all you are and all you’ve been .   Pot head,  fat ,  thin,   bible basher, anxious agoraphobic ,  arrogant know it all ,  lovingly humble & angry .   To be known on all these levels –   to be able to be what you are at the time you need to be it ,   to not have to conform to any label or box .   Surely that’s friendship.   To hate and then to love.

I am trying to vanquish the hating part.    Eviscerate the ego.

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I Just love my mutt..

My dog sits at my feet as I write.

I have often marvelled that dog backwards is God.    Dogs are like God.    They are relentlessly loyal ,  utterly devoted ,  all forgiving and they live for the moment in time that they soulfully inhabit.

I love my dog.

I had cats all my life until I got a dog at 36 years.   He is just mutt, wonderfully designed by many genes ;   but I often  marvel at the perfect symmetry of his teeth and his mane.   The beautiful way he sings a tune to me when he wants OUT.  And the look of utter disgust on his face should I try attempting to take him out in the rain.

My heart swells with such love for this mutt that it often brings tears to my being.

He has this thing ,  when we are crossing a big field ,  where he will sit and watch me walk away ,   we play this game where I turn back and look to him and then  turn away and continue.  ..  He waits stubbornly for our age –  old game .    I eventually ,   when he is no more  than a distant dot against the trees ,  turn around ,  sink to the ground and serenade him to join me.   With childlike abandon he runs as fast as his little legs can carry him,   with the proud gallop of a thoroughbred horse.   The moment is all his ,   he never tires of its joy.  Neither do I.   I just love my mutt.

It’s very joyful to say the word Fuck.

People come in and out of your life when you need them,    that is ,  if you are respecting your needs.       This month ,  I let down an old friend.    I just couldn’t face it.   I am learning to seek out only those people who I actually want to spend time with.   This sounds like an average thing for a person to do ,   but I haven’t been doing it I don’t think.  I have been going to things that don’t inspire me ,  nothing spectacular , just a night here or a lunch gathering there,    I go because I am asked and because I want to be a good friend,   or I want to show my face,  or I don’t want to be untruthful and say that I can’t make it when I can.    But lately.    I have been saying no  to those kinds of things.   And saying yes to the things that before I said no to ;   because I had lost who I was.

I am not talking about my old friend in this respect.   This was more to do with how little I wanted to commit and what effort it would take to go and see her.

But it is very emancipating ,    to do what the fuck you like,  in fact  ,  it’s very joyful to say fuck.

I haven’t  used the word fuck out loud for a long time.  This doesn’t count the times I have said it in my mind.   It’s as though all the years I have taught myself not to say the word fuck   ;  because it’s not right ,  it’s unholy,  it’s unnecessary,    now I am gaining back the fucks.

Oh fuck.  It feels good to be free.

Toxicity

Toxicity.

I experienced a strange shift this week. I made some  reasonably small but significant decisions which produced for me comfort and peace.  There were  some residual feelings of guilt & anxiety for the predicted effect of those decisions , but the overriding feelings were satisfaction & relief.  I realised that I spent an enormous amount of energy pleasing people –   mainly thought energy ,  ‘what would I say if they said this’ , ‘how could I explain that ‘,   or ‘I could go there and that would be a way of being a friend ‘..   And that the reasons for this is because I am stuck in my insecurities of needing to liked ,  wanting to be seen as lovely , needing inclusion .   Well ,  I just got a whole load of   ‘  Power of Now’  delivered to my door.  I woke up and realised I am running on an old script. So it is slowly getting ripped.   Just like when you tear documents up ;   as  the level of tearing accumulates  ,  the papers slowly lose their ability to ever be put back together.

Toxicity comes from within and the world,  it’s how you defend both lands which leads to your ultimate state of being happy; at peace.

As I become increasingly more attuned to myself and the beauty of the moment ,  the world seems to go faster and faster.   Mothers are running on exam results , colleagues are running on academic prowess , people in general are flooding the world with chaos.

It really doesn’t matter.

Slow the fuck down and look at the place you are right now.    Go take a walk in the woods  and listen to the hum of the Universe.

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