All right, already!

Whew!! I don't know about you but as I grow older, I am struck with how much this peeling the old onion of our lives takes out of me. I will admit that suffering a lung infection and massive colon dumping as a result of the antibiotics used to treat it could have something to do with the wiped out, over and under feeling that pervaded my being yesterday. But who is to say that I would have had the experience of flashing back and gleaning the fruits of that flashback without the bodily setup? Maybe, for me, it is truly and body, mind and spirit process that I must undergo in order to clear the detritus of grieving away from my hearth in order to start the new fire of my life.
All I can figure is that my illness, the treatment of it and the absolute fatigue of dealing with that and the prospect of moving out of this house into another all came together to exposed the soft underbelly of my vulnerability. God, how I hate being openly vulnerable! It is definitely a life and death feeling for me , fraught with all manner of boogey men from my past. It strikes me that the work that I am called to do, that I actually excel at is being witness to others vulnerability, at times even creating places and space for that precious feeling to unfold. Yet, here I sit with a real handicap when it comes to experiencing it myself. I know intellectually that this is the way of many things human, "Those who can do, those who can't teach!" I think that I am getting better at the whole thing, able to be comforted, learn from and be present with my vulnerability.

vul·ner·a·ble

adjective
1.
capable of or susceptible to being wounded or hurt, as by a weapon: a vulnerable part of the body.

As I study the word and it's meaning, I am struck with the utter tenderness that allowing one's self to be vulnerable brings to the world. To expose your hurt parts to another, trusting that they won't hurt them further seems to me to be the ultimate act of intimacy. In-to-me-see, if that is so, then exposing my hurt parts is a gift to those I care for. Maybe even a service. If my only true spiritual identity is as a servant, then being vulnerable to others is a way of expressing my truest self.
Wow, it isn't that I haven't thought along these lines before, it is that today it makes more sense and seems more doable and worth the effort, the scare and the snotty nose.
So as I pack up my former life as a wife, helpmate and healer, I will try to make myself available to acts of servitude from others and be ready to plunge head long into my own acts of service as painful and tiring as it may be.
I will also get you a cup of coffee if that is what you need instead, though it probably won't be in a cup that says Costa Rica on it!