made it through

my dark moods are not pitch black anymore, but they are still cause for caution and sense. both of which i lack in dark moods. why is that always the case, that what we need most is most elusive at the time we need it? i don't know.

and the wood chuck munching on tender leaves at the bend in the road, whom i chased off the road with my obliging horn, lay dead in that very spot yesterday, and i wished i could have saved him somehow.

but the wild will do as the wild will do. and we can only enjoy them. let them light our lives and nibble on our plants. they cannot be helped to avoid the terrors that stalk them, they can only be loved. as they are. for however long they are. that they are is their beauty. their significance, their contribution. that we get to see them, and love them, is our reward alone.

it gives me such joy to see the giant hamsterlike woodchuck amble out of harms way. they are quite fast moving, and it's like watching a soaked bathmat take up the chase.

somehow, i have hope. i don't know where it comes from or why. i don't know how it reappears in my life so suddenly, but there it is. and i am grateful to see it. a life void of hope is no life at all.

but thich nhat hahn would say,

kill hope.

and i still can't reconcile this wisdom. it doesn't fit into my life. i know hope is for tomorrow, but sometimes, tomorrow is all that gets me through today. the hope that things will be just a bit more bearable tomorrow.

and i wonder, as tomorrow has arrived, that it feels a bit more managable. not easy, by no means easy. but manageable.

i do not know when certainty will come again, maybe never. but i hope it will arrive someday. and i will welcome it.

i got a fortune cookie, recently, which i found the fortune from, and it said "you will have an enlightening experience." which made me laugh, because my resignation letter, turned in just two weeks before said, the summation of my experience at that particular place was "enlightening" and i hadn't known why i chose that word. partly because it made me laugh, partly because it was true.

then finding the cookie fortune made me laugh again.

i remember i'm supposed to walk in beauty, i don't know that i've done that. but i hope, somehow, what people percieve as outward beauty translates to inner beauty, because that is the only beauty that counts.

i don't want to be a shell of a woman. a pristine exterior housing nothing. a facade. i want to be beauty embodied, but i don't know what that means or how it looks and most days, it feels very far from me. like i can't even touch the feet of it. or glimpse the shape or substance of it.

i guess, that i'm even moving in that direction is progress, but my horizons all look like the sahara, and i'm not sure which way i'm supposed to be going, or if the way i'm faced is the right way. if it will lead somewhere. i guess everywhere leads somewhere, but i just don't know. and here again hope finds its purpose:

i hope where i'm headed is where i'm meant to be.