I've decided that I simply don't know what love is... or how people relate... or what life is really supposed to be about. Granted, I haven't been a public blogger over my personal life for awhile... it's really, frankly, been just too personal... but the make up of who and what I am right now is really about the internal chaos and questioning. My entire core has been shattered, repeatedly. I'm like half the person I used to be and trying to find the strength that God has given me... trying to find the breath... trying to find the spirit that I know is there.

It's not like this happened overnight... or even in a month or a year... it's been years... First with the crumbling of the marriage that I thought was real. The utter abandonment that I felt and the very real realization that love should be more than that. That love should be the someone that you can open your heart to. This doesn't mean you don't make mistakes, or screw up sometimes, or even screw up majorly often... it's the thing that lets you know whatever it is, that the openness in the heart is all that matters.

It took awhile... a major realization of the heart that I was strong enough to buck the rules, to live outside of myself and to take responsibility for everything that was to follow. The road has been littered and traveled but it is still a road... and, like everything I do in life, a bit fuzzy and a lot "against the rules."

I thought I saw what love was about again. I thought that I saw what living with an open heart looked like. The crushing realization is that I didn't but it isn't the realization that I have no idea what love looks like, it's the realization that I fell into every paradigm and every facade and every stupid romantic Hallmark card moment or classic Lifetime movie storyline. Now I don't mean this in the realistic sense, not like I had a Hallmark moment or even got brought flowers... I'm sitting in an empty apartment, in a city where most of the people I know I wish I didn't (with the rare few who are amazing friends and completely without strings) and feeling quite lonely and stupid.

I sometimes wonder why bother trying to find love. I look around and I see so few people who have what I think of as love. CIODude is one of them... the extent and openness of his marriage and the love he holds for his wife is nothing short of inspiring. I hear about it now and then with other friends... but, to be frank, the majority of people I know are unhappily married, divorcing, divorced or looking.

Quite honestly, I just feel like giving up. It will also come as no shock that the heaviness of my heart has really impacted my ability to show up on the mat. It's simply too painful to feel my body and too painful to realize how very far I've fallen. Too painful to recognize the self-doing involved... and the unhealthy state the journy as traversed... I am better than what I've become, I know that... I just haven't processed it yet... and I'm not ready to deal with the pain.

Oh the world isn't ending, no worries there.. in fact, finally we have something to celebrate in this country and I couldn't be happier (except with California)... but, for tonight, the inevitable heaviness of being can only be mingled with the thought that the world is changing... that starting anew means starting everything new... I just don't know if I can do that yet.... if I've worked out the gruntis of the misery and the inertia and the doubt.. the great big doubt that this world isn't really what I thought it was.