looking back... and looking forward

its 4:48 pm and the rain pelts down clearing and cooling the air. i woke this morning to see my daughters bedroom door wide open. the bed neatly patted down, clifford and galtung, her red dog and peaceful shark lay cuddling on it. i miss her. this is the first year we've not been in the same city for new years. yet i sense her with me.

the doorbell just rang and a drenched man delivered 30 gorgeous red roses. One for every year of our married life together. this is the first year in a long time that my husband and i haven't fought on our anniversary. i think we may have been done with our battling through the year and have arrived at this unexpected, pure, calm day of togetherness.

2012 was a turbulent year for our little family as we worked deeply on our relationships. we surfaced our decaying corpses and all the deadness we had caused each other over time. it wasn't planned and it wasn't pleasant but in the end it was a gift. it was an exhausting year. many times i wished to go away someplace far away from them. but something incessantly pushed each one of us in different ways to get to the very core of the bonds between us. if we were not family and bound together would we still want to be with each other was a question we asked ourselves again and again. over and over we challenged each other and confronted our own murky shadows. sometimes i wondered how we survived our microscopic self inquiry.

today we are lighter beings. the healing may not be complete but the imbedded knives have been eased out and the gaping holes in us are beginning to close up. the best testament to our year of work was apparent in our last conflict of the year on christmas eve - even as we felt sad, betrayed and not understood by each other, we called ourselves each others best friends. 

it was also a year of living authentically on a personal level for me. i seemed to detach from everyone and particularly myself. most days i felt excruciatingly alone as i floated through a dense, merciless fog not knowing who or what i was. many days i felt i was a vapour, a very disturbing feeling. a friend sent me a beautiful sufi story about that. about water flowing happily till it reached a desert and the water realising that the only way to keep flowing and cross the desert was allow itself to change and become a vapour. last year was a very arid desert in the inner years of my life.

its hard to share this here on an open blog. i feel raw. i am not sure why i am choosing to do it - perhaps to remind myself that the seemingly empty year was really very full. perhaps to share my struggles with other families and individuals who are wandering through such fogs.

i feel that i have arrived back into my body on this last day of the year with a broader knowledge about my purpose in this life. the warrior knows again what she will die for and what is worth living for. the owl able to sense the unseen and the unsaid more easily. and i also know and hopefully am beginning to accept that these knowings are temporary and may disappear anytime.

now i look forward to 2013. 
and a warm happy new year to everyone who drops by on this page today. may your 2013 be filled with light, joy, good fortune and and deep living.