Emotion

Things have been busy lately. One thing after another. Spring usually is for me. So many ideas come and go through my head, but I haven't had time to sit down and record them. And once they're gone, they are hard to recall, being incorporated into my personality or discarded altogether.

But the overall tone of things lately has been about harmonizing and trying to exist fully. About trying to embrace what is real and what is important both positive and negative. I'm finding it ever so easier by degrees to embrace the possibilities and love both the good and the bad things in appropriate ways. It is a good growing process.

But I'm also finding that in the process, I am flooded with emotions. When I allow myself to feel, they come at me almost unmitigated, and in the embracing of the moment, I have to allow myself to feel them. I am finding it to be very similar to a time in the past when I had allowed myself to fully experience my own reactions in an effort to stop internalizing them where they would wreak havoc on my psyche. Though the experience is very similar, the circumstances are not and I am different too, but it does feel good to re-find this obviously elemental part of me.

The trick now is to learn how to balance them without losing the ability to function. anger must be tempered and appropriate, sadness has its time and place, and love can't be expressed too openly. Sometimes, the tempering may not even be good or natural. For example when a reaction is right, but society tells us we shouldn't have it. I have a friend that I am sometimes overwhelmed with love for. Not romantic, but a very deep familial love. I want to express it and know that it would be good for it to be expressed, but the friend doesn't believe this to be true, or is too knotted up still to accept it. The danger I can see is in this is losing the ability again in an attempt to conform too greatly.

So for now, I am loping along, learning to trust and to surrender and to feel. The sheepdog metaphor seems more and more appropriate. Dogs have much less trouble living rightly. They can distinguish good and bad in their own way and can even learn a lot of our own subtleties about good and bad which they can only be taught by humans. They are not afraid to express their feelings. They are happy and loving and sad and ill and excited and it all comes out every fiber of their existence. If we were allowed to be more this way, the world would be better. I will change it one at a time.