When Poetry Runs Dry

I most often blog in riddles via poetry- it is, after all, my first love, and I have reason to believe it's what I'm good at. But while the poetry hasn't been flowing of late, my thought world is churning beyond my ability to process it internally. So I shall let it slip out onto the page in prose, and if the same is not my forte, perhaps you, reader, will grant me grace to share my less polished streams of consciousness.

I recently remarried, and am settling in to a life that I had given up for lost years ago. I have my son, and now I have also a gentle, kind and loving husband and a beautiful daughter as well. My opportunities to love and be loved have multiplied in the last few months, as have my venues for repentance and healing.

Funny how that works. As a single (divorced) mother, I spent an awful lot of time alternately blaming my ex for whatever it was that went wrong, and myself for allowing whatever it was that went wrong to happen. No matter how often I repented for my part in our fall, I always came back to the point where my ex was primarily predator, and I, primarily prey. I think it's a comfortable place into which one settles- the belief that there was little one could do about one's circumstances, because one was, after all, a victim.

So now I'm remarried, and finding myself very happy to be; content for the first time in a very long time. At the same time, I am facing a great many of the demons I faced the first time around, only this time, I have a better grasp on who I am, and on who my spouse is, and I find that I tend to want (and to be able) to trust his integrity and character against some of my more negative perceptions of reality. And I find that when I choose to do this, and to communicate with him about the Shadows from my past, those same Shadows tend to be dispelled, and I find one of two things happens, and I'm never quite sure which it is. Either 1) My Beloved is who I trusted him to be, or 2) my Beloved rises to that expectation, and becomes that person for love of me, because I chose to trust him. Either way, our path is that much easier, because I choose to trust him and not my fleeting emotions.

And I'm driven to consider the possibility that many of the things my ex and I became, we may very well have become because we chose to trust our more negative perceptions against the other's integrity and character.