How we do look back? In what way do we re-tell our stories?
Even just to ourselves?

Looking back, I wish I would have taken my life’s experiences more lightly.
Instead of consistently journeying with grace, I often died at many crossroads.
Instead of trusting divine purpose,
I swam furiously upstream trying to hold on to the things that weren’t mine to keep despite wanting them to be.
For many years, I kept a very tight grip, so hard sometimes my nails would make my palms bleed.
And when things slipped away, or go as they went, I clamoured the ocean trying to find them again.
Futile efforts. Futile energy. Futile stress. Futile worry. Futile remembrance.

Having said that though, I’ve always relied on my own capacity.
If God wasn’t going to open a window, I pried many a door open, just enough to squeeze out of.
I’ve made much of what I’ve wished for happen.
I’ve hustled, danced, conformed, tried, begged, stolen, lit fireworks and made magic happen.
But when magic is contrived you can’t help but notice the trick door, or the red scarf peeking from under one’s sleeve.
Contrived magic doesn’t feel so magical, it’s exhausting.
Futile efforts. Futile energy. Futile stress. Futile worry. Futile remembrance.

All of this doing came from a place of fear, 
and out of this fear came a need for control.
But it’s hard to measure a steady pace when fuelled by fear and control.
There were too many times I chopped too much wood preparing for the winter,
there weren’t enough branches to bare fruit in the summer.
Again, futile efforts. Futile energy. Futile stress. Futile worry. Futile remembrance.

And then someone taught me what my most precious commodity is.
I must have always known but never quite understood the concept.
My energy.
I am not a physicist or scientist to know Energy per say,
but as an adult deep in my forties, I know mine.
I know when I feel powered up and when I feel depleted.
And there are too many energy suckers already surrounding us,
(vampires, ogres, misers, zombies, kings, queens and jokers)
to allow myself and my own futility to drain my own supply.
So I am understanding my need to choose how I expend and preserve my precious commodity.

Despite life and it’s unpredictably,
despite the hard waves hitting so many of those around me,
I am trying to stop bracing.
Stop resisting.
Stop trying.
Stop needing to know and do it all.
It’s much easier said than done.
It’s something I have to revisit often,
learning to support and love people without taking their stuff on as my own
and being the fixer.
Giving, without giving myself away.
Trusting without neurotically needing to fill in the blanks.
Saving my precious energy for my own end, and consistently asking myself, to what is this end I am living for?
To love, to experience and to be whole.

I am learning authority over my own energy conservation so that I’m not running in red when it comes to what truly matters to me. 
Loving, dreaming, connecting, experiencing, accepting and healing my past humanness back to wholeness.
Conserving my energy so that I can lift my face to the sky, widen my heart’s capacity and say, yes, give me more and let me receive it all. <3