Writing again?

I have a difficult opinion to write, a gut-wrenching case with a three-year old child in the middle.  Looking for inspiration, somehow I stumbled across this beautiful peice of writing by Susan Shiver Barrow, a teacher in Georgia.

"While change is inevitable, forward movement is not, rather it is a choice that

often embodies the excavation of difficult memories. In my case, these were memories that were harmful to healthy functioning, memories that I had worked for many years toforget. Repressing those memories was like trying to contain a down pillow in a tinybox. Over time I managed to squeeze one side of the pillow into the box only to find thatanother had eased its way out; but eventually the troublesome pieces of the past werecontained, and the business of life helped keep them tightly bound within the walls of thetiny box.

As I grapple with my ghosts in my place of solitude, it is not my goal to soothe

myself with merciful lies but rather to propel myself into the depths of questioning; to

delve into my personal misery with the hope of reconceptualizing myself from the

shattered splinters I had become. It is facing the realization that every event has value, should we choose to explore it, and that it is potentially worth telling. In excavating those events I have found that beneath one thought lay another I had long forgotten was even there. Revealing difficult memories rather than sequestering them to the margins of my life has allowed me to begin to make sense of my journey, despite its treachery, with all of its wrong turns, and to reconcile my past with who I have become."

I think I may be able to begin writing again.

Been a while

It's been a while.  Tonight I am thinking about the tornado in Chicago, when I was a kid.  The waking in the night, my mother trying to shepherd us down to the basement of my grandparent's home.  It was hard to go down the   stairs, that's how strong the pressure was from the swirling wind.  I remember how I tried to walk down, bending my body as if I was walking in the wind, but it was inside the house my grandfather had designed and built. We walked by the clock which chimed every quarter hour: it had been silent since the day my grandfather had died just a year earlier.

When we got to the basement, the power was already off, off course.  With each flash of  lightening, we could see, out of the windows, the trees like a loomed cloth in the backyard--weaving a carpet of broken wood.  We survived.  Many did not. The next morning we drove to try to find my aunt and cousins: they were fine, as if the winds had bounced over their house.

New Start

Blogged before, wrote before.  I now feel some real need to write.  My job is being eliminated, for political reasons.  If crisis is truly opportunity, as some say, then this is an amazing opportunity.

We'll see.