Safety to Feel

I spent the bulk of the day in the woods with my dog.  We retraced steps we've walked before.  And on the drive into the mountains, I put my i-pod on shuffle and listened to a soundtrack both old and new.  I was reminded of times in the past when I believed something different than I do now, and in the peace of the day, I was allowed to mourn and be joyous in the same moments.

I am struck by the amount of love that surrounds me.  I have an abundance of love in my life.  I have met people in my life who have the capacity for such goodness and unconditional love, and I am never ever "alone."  I've been enjoying time with myself of late--craving it, and also craving connection with the women in my life who have buoyed me through many difficult times.  I pride myself on self-sufficiency, but I also recognize that this self-sufficiency is borne out of the knowledge that I have so many cushions if I fall.

In this space and in this calm, I have been (finally) processing the level of cruelty that accompanied my divorce last year.  I lived through lies, hostility, outright hatred, and my resulting confusion.  I've been confused about what transpired during the course of the divorce process (the parts leading up to it were pretty obvious in retrospect...almost textbook :).   I also know that I can't ever understand what motivates someone to act as they do, nor do I need to in order to move on and let go.   Memories resurface in interesting ways:  snippets of conversation, emails and notes written to me, actions that were (to me) hugely disrespectful.  And I realize, and this is where the sadness lies, that someone I counted as my partner for a number of years, was capable of acting like this.  Oldest story in the book, and I know it plays out a million times over in a variety of ways, and I know there are many many scenarios that are so much worse.

What I keep realizing, as I slowly let things come back to the surface, is that it's all fine.  There are beautiful lessons.  This beauty, however, doesn't mean there isn't some residual pain, and some disbelief. It just means that I mourn not only the demise of a relationship that at one time I must have believed in, but that I mourn the loss of an illusion that I knew another human well, and that he had my best interest at heart, and that he was capable of things he wasn't.  And these realizations are disconcerting.

I think it's okay to celebrate the present, but it's also okay to recognize the past and what's been learned.
Thankfully, I live in a present that offers me the safety necessary to feel these things with no fear.  That, in itself, is a luxury I don't think everyone gets.  Gratitude.