The grass has grown long under my fingers since I last blogged, and I wish I could say that it has been the exciting life of this forest-dweller-come-lately that has kept me from it; in truth, it's been a lot of treading water and straining my chin upwards to keep that water out of my nose that's kept me sufficiently distracted to ignore my thought-life, or at least to keep it brain-bound.
But tonight I've managed to break curfew, and I have a backload of things banging around in my head and wanting to get out somehow. This probably means that the proceeding words will be heinously rambly.
So the idea that's captured me lately is the painful dichotomy I feel between sensing a need to develop a life of simple contentment in my current circumstances ("bloom where you're planted" and all that) and the deeper, more dangerous need to embrace without reservation the profound sense of discontent that has dogged me my entire life. Siddhartha would probably say that the answer lies somewhere in between, and maybe he'd be right. But that kind of thinking is way too temperate for a heart bursting at the seams with dreaming and plotting and what-iffing about futures imagined and hoped for, and so it feels like I either need to hunker down and discover the magic in a life of quiet contentment, or damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead with it already!
What I can't figure out is this: is it a base, soulish want I have, to be happy inside a deep unhappiness, or is it a higher, more spiritual thing I'm chasing after? Is it glorious or gluttonous to chase that discontent forever and pray I never catch it?
--Teri.
