Sparkle and Zest

Here I am again.

I haven’t written for sometime, partly because October was a slumpy month for me.  My mood was slumpy.  Not drastically dark, but veering towards grey.

I tried various things to shake it.  Chocolate, red wine, a hamburger (and considering I’ve been mostly vegan for nearly 2 years, this was a dramatic lunge at a solution for me).  Hot baths, a jog, coffee, no coffee, a trip to sunny California.  All wonderful, enjoyable things.  All able to make moments twinkle.  But the grey feeling, it slumped back in, sometimes through the back door, sometimes through the front.  But there it was again, either way, sitting and waiting for me on my own damn couch.  “Hello,” it said, “I am here again today.”

I am trying to make friends with grey.  I am fully functioning with it around but I am slightly uneasy.  I feel a bit put out, with grey sitting there on my own inner couch.  “I didn’t invite you in!” I growl.  But grey doesn’t care.  Grey sits there anyway.  It even puts its feet up.

Grey is urging me to figure myself out.  Grey.  I try to look at her as a sister, a friend.  Stop resisting her. “Okay,” I say, “what do you want?”  But she doesn’t tell me outright.  That’s the nuisance of Grey, she has her own private language.  So I start experimenting, trying to break the code: bring her a glass of wine, take her out for a walk, put her to bed early.  What does it take to help this grey sister out?  What does she need, what is she asking me to give myself?

I start to see her as chunk of my soul, my longing, and what does my longing want?  Maybe she is here to poke and pester me in a positive direction.  Maybe when I get it right, when I figure out the mystery of what she is longing for and I give it to her, she will turn to me with a big smile.  She will shimmer and change shape, change shade.  Her Grey-ness will quiver and dissolve, walk out the door, the front or the back, doesn’t matter. Maybe she’ll fly out the window and say, “Thank you for finding what it is I needed.”  And I’ll say “Thank you for showing me what I needed to step into a fuller version of myself.”  Without Grey nagging me,  I never would shift into a more complete me.

So thank you, Grey.  For coming to visit.  Stay on my couch as long as you like.  Until you leave, I will be here, curling in, listening, trying to bring my own sense of longing what it needs, expanding my life to include the territory of her secret language.

I know she’ll be back.  She comes here and there.  Though next time, she’ll have a whole new language I’ll have to twist myself to translate.  So be it.  I can welcome her in again and again, expanding whatever it was I thought I was.