Middle Earth

Do you know that feeling, when your perspective alters quickly, unexpectedly, and you go from feeling pretty good about yourself and all gods creatures, to wondering why you are such a failure, and how come everything around you is in a constant state of mess? That pendulum swing that happens when things gets hard, or you make a mistake, or something completely out of your control happens to knock you off your center and you start to see the whole thing – the world, the dog, that bag of Goldfish crackers — yourself — in a darker, doomier way?

The perspective switch sounds extreme, but if I’m not careful that’s where my thoughts take me – I’ve always had a tendency toward all or nothing thinking. In the middle of a heavy duty blow of emotion, don’t ask me what I think of life, because I might just forget myself and tell you the whole thing is a load of crap and I’ve done nothing during my time on this planet to improve the situation. Fortunately, this long, black thread of Plath doesn’t unravel me completely anymore, but I still tug at the end of it fairly regularly.

And fortunately, I have a lighter, trusted center. I wish I had a more original word for it than “center” –but it’s the place I go as touch point — a sacred space within that helps me unwobble myself and find a bit of balance. And I’m so grateful I have that place; that sense of light within. It’s hard won, actually. It took me a lot of time to clear all the weeds and do a controlled burn and prune out the deadwood and look closely enough to see the little green bits growing in all the right spots – so I’m glad I’ve found this opening in the copse, this meadow in the forest, this clearing in the wild. This place I can return to after a long day in the bristle and brush, so to speak.

Because sometimes the brush beats you up, the thorns grab for blood, you are in the thicket of it, and can’t see your way out. How could there be such a quiet, strong and lovely space right here within me – and why does it disappear when I enter the world?

It doesn’t disappear, I know. I just need to keep a birdseye view. Of both and all, of each and everything, of this and that. Of me, in the clearing – and life in the thicket. Together I guess they make the whole of the world. I just have to remember to find my way home — to middle earth, to the gray area, to where the light of my center, meets the dark of the woods. The place where my center, and my edges, both find their way home.