My Books are Trying to Tell me Something

Wow.  I am not happy at the similarities between me and Cheryl Strayed, that author of "Wild".  Her mother died and Strayed, in her grief, allowed her life to crumble. 

I can relate, on a smaller, more middle-aged way.  I got cancer. Dad died.  And I took everything I had and clawed at it until it was shredded and ruined, and I stepped away from it.  As I express in the title of my blog, there once was a woman who was married for 19 years.  And she really, really believed that she could be a good wife and go the distance with her husband, even though she was not happy.  That was me. Chuck came into my life and made me feel like I could start again and build something new and better, where I could belong.

I read this quote from "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbary to Chuck the other night; because it described so well the way I have felt over the last few years.

"A New Heart

I remember that summer rain.

Day after day, we pace up and down our lives the way we pace up and down a passageway."

There follows a page of text that is a list of drudgery: mundane.  Mine would be something like:  "Those socks don't match...what's your ETA?...if your father says so...there's tea in the pot...sorry...I didn't mean it...whatever you think..."

"And then, summer rain.

Do you know what a summer rain is?

To start with, pure beauty striking the summer sky, awe-filled respect absconding with your heart, a feeling of insignificance at the very heart of the sublime, so fragile and swollen with the majesty of things, trapped, ravished, amazed by the bounty of the world.

And then you pace up and down a corridor and suddenly enter a room full of light. Another dimension, a certainty just given birth. The body is no longer a prison, Your spirit roams the clouds, you possess the power of water, happy days are in store, in this new birth.

Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person's soul something like endless breathing.

That is the way a summer rain can take hold in you - like a new heart, beating in time with another's."