A year ago, I was feeling pretty hopeless. I mean, I have always been a glass-half-full type of person, so if you'd talked to me I would have told you things were looking pretty good, that I had a good job, that things were looking up.
Things are always looking up.
But these days, things are more than pretty good. Aside from the occasional lonely moment (there's always something), I am feeling great.
I love my job. I live in a pretty apartment in a city with a lot to offer. Friends visit regularly. I have enough time on my own to read books, to paint. I have enough money to have cable television and pay for my own Internet (sometimes it's the little things).
And then, last week, the country elected the person I had hoped and dreamed about since last year. I am very hopeful. Even with the terrible economy, even with crises all around us, I am inspired by this message of change, of "yes we can," of working together. I am hoping desperately now that our nation will be able to come together rather than ripping apart, that we will embrace bipartisanship, that we will be able to remember what a very few men did over two hundred years ago. Franklin's words still ring true--no matter what else, we must "hang together" or surely we will "hang separately." We are Americans, and I am proud, again, to be one of this group of pioneering people. It makes me want to learn even more about our history, about where we've come from. I'm finally excited about the future, and that makes me feel that I need to learn more about our past.
And so I haven't been blogging because I have been doing all these other things. I have been praying. And reading. And painting. And knitting. And spending time with my family. And writing stories.
This is the biggest development yet since moving back here--the writing.
A few posts ago I talked about my life and how much reading and writing used to be such a big part of it. Maybe I had to take a break and live for a while. Maybe I just took a break.
I stopped writing when I met the Boy and the Boy left and then my computer crashed and I lost the six years of writing that I did have and then I got all mopey about writing and felt sorry for myself...and mopey-ness and pity don't get you anywhere. In fact, they are the best writer's block around (unless you're Hemingway--but ugh, who wants to read that, anyway?).
Hope does feed creativity. So, as the nation grows and changes I, too, will grow and change, and I am trying, trying harder than I have in a long time. I am daring to hope again that I will be able to write something worthwhile. I am daring to think that my future might have something to do with my past, too. Acceptance is important.
As a nation, we accept that we have made mistakes, that we have caused irreparable scars because of the way we have treated each other. I am not comparing my personal "scars" to these, but I do believe that all of us have done things that we need to think about, and forgive ourselves so that we can forgive each other and move on.
I bet that if we all look back to the thing that made us happiest, where we felt the most like ourselves, it would be a good place to start. It's hard to be divided if we start from a place of wholeness within ourselves.
I'm moving toward wholeness. I hope that the nation is, too.
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