This year so far has been introverted. My minor face surgery for my skin cancer didn't go as well as I and the docs would have liked so I've spent the past two weeks trying to heal from that, staying still and quiet. But even before that, I had escaped to a warm, dark space i had created in my head and curled up there. I have lacked the appetite for other activities, lacked hunger, lacked focus and my mind has just slowed down.
It doesn't feel like a bad thing. I tend to hibernate in the winter anyway as I can't garden and walking or riding my bike is difficult in the frozen Finnish landscape unless you are really keen. So, I just slow down and do indoor things. I'm still writing and reading, but less than usual. I don't want to do anything, really.
Maybe I'm waiting for spring, as I always am, but in a new way, to uncurl and find a new appetite to turn towards. A new sun.
I sometimes tell myself I'm a fool, an old fool, that life is slipping by. But I know I have so much going on in the reality of my life, my kids' lives, that maybe I need this silence to conserve my energies.
My writing has also changed. I'm writing love poems to no one, to an invisible someone. I've been single for about 6 years, there's no one on my horizon and until this year my 'love' poems have been angry or happy to be defiantly single.
Now, what I write is overwhelmed with a different emotion, gazing with love into that dark stillness I've built in my head. I don't know what I see, but the lines that came to me today have that hope of spring in them.
Maybe I love you
or maybe now
there is the potential in me
to love
Maybe I can find a love for myself, for where I am right now.
Even though my world is still frozen, I have to remind myself that the sun is returning. The world is no longer held by the winter darkness. The sun is there when I go to work and when I return. It holds no warmth but is occasionally bright enough to blind. The true thaw will be months in coming but it reminds you that something good is possible.
