I am alone in my flat. (not "my" exactly but where I lay my head) And listening to Joni Mitchell.
And I am thinking.
I am considering my life from the only perspective I currently have...my own.
I am a woman stretched out across oceans like a thin swinging bridge bowed low in the middle. On either side, the land continues with it's own pace and agenda and seasons.....and I,
I in the middle cannot let go of them. They are my life, my support, my connection. Without them, I am just rope and wood floating in the water, tangling around rocks. I am bound to them both while they can continue to ignore one another, misunderstand one another, forget one another.

Oh, this sounds so serious.

So, there are ways that my own understanding and view of the world is, by due course, changing. But more important than that, more true than that, it's my understanding of self that is so drastically moving.
I feel so inadequate to even describe myself to anyone, as I would be relying on old descriptions that are not quite apt any longer, or left to work out what the new truth is. And, as I have discovered, trying to do the latter leaves me with the certain impression that I am unsure...that if I am honest and look closely, I don't really know myself as well as I once thought.
Now, even that statement can send one into a spin if it's looked at carefully, but let's not go there right this moment.

This puts me into a delicate position with those whom I love and I have watched myself withdraw from those people on all sides over the past months.
I can't be 100% sure, but I suspect that my reasons are to do with the fact that I am reorganizing myself and that I am very susceptible to other people's expectations and desires. I can see that it has often made me feel safe and good to fulfil those unspoken or lightly spoken expectations. I think that possibly I have been long trying out the things that satisfy others' palates and superimposing their tastes onto my own, with some good result, due to an apparent flexibility or shape-shiftiness.

My moods often fluctuate depending on how a person or group feels about me, whether or not they approve. In part, I think this was what had me so drawn to my husband. He was always solid and sure, always approved and loved, and I was able to feel quite stable in the rest of my life with that kind of support. And arrogant. And insensitive.
I made the fatal mistake of believing that steady love and approval would remain so under the most rocky of circumstance.
The realization of this mistake, while physically and somewhat emotionally separated from a supportive network, has caused me to re-examine or perhaps examine for the first time things I have formerly accepted as true.

There are a few things I have noticed or examined that remain true for me.

I love animals. Especially horses and dogs. It seems to be so deeply a part of me that it must return again and again. So I can relax about that.

I am drawn to honeybees. Whether from my childhood exposure, or due to some other internal call I felt while I living in Albuquerque, I want to be around them, I want to be around people that want to be around them.
And this brings me to the next thing......the bees seem to offer me some sort of guidance or direction. This is a multi-faceted and sticky sort of reality which I might be able to explain more intelligently in another 5 or 10 years. They were the ones, that when I asked them about what to do next or what to follow or how to go about working with them (the question was not exactly written down) they answered yoga. Yoga???? I thought that was an odd request. Yes, yoga.

I also love people. God damn it. They also disgust me and scare me and hurt me. But I just keep loving them. Even the ones I think I don't love, I find that yes, I love them too.

Now, letting go. Back to the bridge. I feel like that. Like letting go is more of a relaxed allowing in my case. It's not cutting the rope.
It's more like can I allow what is to continue while I remain calm? Can I allow people to be who they are without getting tangled in who they are? Hmmmmmmm.

I am grateful to have such an opportunity. And I am grateful to be able to write about it in an attempt to clarify.