slowly emerging

I think I am slowly emerging from this "funk" (for lack of a better word) that has engulfed me for the last couple of weeks. I was laying in the bathtub a little while ago, reading a novel and it occurred to me that that in itself was a good sign.

I don't know if I'm emerging with a sense of deep revelation yet. Corey said that she thought that deep revelation was coming. I think sometimes that deep revelation isn't always something you recognize in the moment. You just kind of know that something has changed, and you keep waking up and realizing that something has changed, and one morning, six months later, you wake up and realize that whatever the change was had to do with some deep revelation that you can just now put words to, because you have lived with it and grown to love it, and the beauty of it is that it is not alien and hard to adapt to when you finally name it because you have spent six months learning it's in and outs, it's curves and lines, and it is familiar in that shockingly new kind of way that happens in relationships with the oldest and best of friends.

This is what happened when I was healed of depression. I sat in a car one night, praying with a friend, and new something had shifted in me when I left, but didn't really expect or even ask for healing. It wasn't even what we were praying for exactly. But I woke up the next morning and could get out of bed pretty easily, and that was something new. And that thing just kept happening. I kept getting up. I kept having reasons to smile in the middle of some of the most mentally, emotionally and spiritually challenging months of my life. And one morning, two or three months later, I work up and realized, "I've been healed." And I really liked life. And I didn't want to die anymore. And I wasn't as afraid. And I'd met God and fallen in love with Him. And He was talking to me, and I really wanted to hear it. And I was ready to hear - ready to move into a healed, healing life because I'd lived with it for a while before it was named. I'd learned to live in wonder a little bit. To really be grateful for the ability to easily get out of bed in the morning.

And so, I'm sitting here and listening to the new Jack Johnson CD i bought because it was on sale when Megs and I were shopping yesterday on one of her random "I must find a disc by this one specific and slightly obscure person," and Megs insisted that this was an excellent CD, and I really should buy it. So I did, and I bought the last recording Johnny Cash made before he died too. And I'm enjoying them both. But not playing them both at once.

So I'm sitting here and listening to Jack Johnson, and I have that same sense of wonder. That feeling of things shifting in new ways. Not ways that are always pain free, but ways that are promising new things. And I noticed some little signs in myself that mean I'm emerging from whatever phase of revelation, or construction or healing (or whatever term you want to use) that I've inhabited these rather painfully silent last couple of weeks. Signs like these:

• I once again have an attention span, and wish to engage my brain. Basically, I can do more than just sit on the couch and watch "The West Wing" on DVD like a vegetable. I've done a lot of this in the last week.
• I finished a novel last night. And started another one tonight and can't wait to get back to it when I'm done writing this post.
• I feel like writing again.
• I told customers today to "have a great day" and really meant it. I didn't just say it by rote while wishing they would just leave and I could again be alone with my thoughts like I have for much of the last week.

I consider these things to be positive signs.

So here's to emergence, slow, sometimes painful... but always with the promise of something wonder-full and beautiful on the other side.