Missing pieces

I often write about the things that have felt like negative aspects in my life. They have had a profound affect on me, but not just in bad ways.

I think I have been lucky because there has always been a voice in my head saying there is more to this than I am seeing and a niggling need to find out what that is.

The missing pieces have caused me lots of anguish, but they have also led me to an incredible amount of beauty and mystery and that mystery, that not knowing, has given me enough courage or ignorance to get out there and stumble into other things.

Had I never been divorced I doubt if I would have ever discovered big pieces of myself that thrive being alone. Born into a large family, always living surrounded by people who aren't just related to me, but more or less forced to be there for me, aloneness only meant being a room away from security.

Having my children grown and gone, my husband gone, and my friends all dispersing about the same time, I found myself reaching out for new paths. The sorrow of losing that great confining security blanket made me just reckless enough to explore the parts of me that were there, but hidden under a veil of learned responsibility, primordial morality and ancient ethics that were really not as important or valuable to me as I had been led to believe.

Chilvary is dead and so is my belief that dancing around fires and making sacrifices will garner gifts from the gods. Mostly what I have discovered is that extraordinary is really very ordinary.  It's the individual people and the light shifting beyond the clouds that make the real extraordinary.

And I have met some truly great people in my life. People who do the ordinary in extraordinary ways that add a burnished luminescence enhancing memories and beliefs in ways I would not trade for anything else in the world.

If I were writing fairy tales and folk lore, these would be the jewels in the dragon's lair, the holy grail that appears in the hidden cavern, the lady in the lake rising up to meet me, or the story of the green knight.

Ephemeral and difficult to describe, these give me sustenance during my darkest hours and envelope me with their light when I least expect it.