A Melancholy Happiness

I finished writing a long journal entry a few minutes ago, ranting and musing. Not one for public consumption, but just for me, working through all the questions and issues floating through my brain tonight. Basically, if I don’t take the time to do that every once in a while, I don’t sleep! I’ve found these last few months that it helps a great deal to take the time to write down the things that are weighing heavy on my mind, that it brings perspective, and sometimes even peace.

The days feel long lately. I haven’t been feeling that well physically, and I find myself dreaming constantly of being elsewhere. There continues to be something deeply unsatisfied within myself, a desire to see and experience the world, to meet God in crazy new places and ways, to have less sameness and more adventure.

I am feeling tentative as I plan and begin to really immerse myself into working with youth this month and next. This has been an area where I have felt such a strong sense of spiritual opposition, and so very little covering and support. I wonder if I am up for the challenge of working with teenagers again. I was immensely bad at even being a teenager, how the heck am I supposed to connect with them? And it is something that I sensed a rightness about when I agreed to become involved all those months ago.

I am wondering what comes next with my grandma. She is doing well, but remains in hospital. Her heartbeat continues to be irregular, despite attempts to medicate it into regularity. They have, as yet, failed to find the cause. She is waiting for an MRI, hopefully sometime this week, to provide the doctors with further information. Is it selfish to hope that this resolves, and she remains on this for a very long time to come? Is it selfish to not want to go through the process of grief right now, the long drawn out illness that my grandpa had with congestive heart failure, the watching him slowly weaken, the eventual death and all that that then entails?

I have been deeply lonely at intervals over the last while – not the sort of lonely where I never see people, because I do, but the lonely that comes from the lack of deep heart connect – the friends with whom you can be silent, or speak a thousand words. The ones who can look at your face and read your heart. Mine are all quite distant – my best friend in Pakistan, and others scattered around, and I find myself generally unwilling to begin yet again to develop those deeper sorts of relationships.

So, that’s the update. Sigur Ros is playing on my laptop, and I am well, though it may not sound it. There are deep things going on in my heart, and that always excites me, though it hurts like the dickens just presently.