feeling strange and empty

I've had a really good morning at work, and yesterday was very productive too. 'Good' as in 'got lots done and got through blockages', not as in 'fun': but that's ok.

I feel strange - odd - not lacking anything, but as though I'm finding space in me. I have a compulsion to find things to fill the space. For so long my life has consisted of limping from one crisis to another - and I admit that I created some of these by taking on more than I should. I've been through these 'empty' cycles before, and each time I've run around finding things to fill my time, and tried everything until I've imploded. Then I pull back out of everything (including life) feeling fragile and dispersed and slowly, incompletely, recover. This time it's different because I think I have insight, and can see it coming. Winter times are not to be avoided just because there is an apparent emptiness around - this is the time for hidden regeneration, for letting the pain in the world around blow over. In the past I've tried to build sad little shelters out of busyness to shield me from the emptiness - but when the time changed, I couldn't escape the clinging, cloying busyness and by the time I was in the glare of the summer sun, I couldn't stand being cluttered, subsumed and dragged down by everything. Too late, and unseasonally, I would bury myself and try to recover, but summer is for connections, and autumn is for harvest, trying to enter the dark before its time only lessens the value of the true dark, and mocks the needs of the time.

So where am I now? I think this is still autumn - I am still harvesting the proceeds of the last phase of my life, and I must allow myself to fall silent when the harvest is finished. I must allow some mundane time into my life, and be in it for it's own sake. Soon enough I'll have to start tending the next new growth of my life. Now it's time to finish the harvest - prune away the last of my old life, and gently melt into the rhythm of the mundane. Allow some predictability to protect me while my mind recovers and rebuilds after the assaults of recent years.

The last 4 years - the end with Tony, the separation, the redecorating of the old house, the sale, the purchase, the move, the new relationship, the renovations, the jobs (3 new ones in that time) - have been intense, always looking 3-6 weeks ahead, never time to be in the present, never time to contemplate 'next', no time to deconstruct the past. Now I have time to rest as my life's autumn coincides this time with the calendar. I'm looking forward to winter. It looks like desolation from the outside, but for me it will be about recovery, restoration and the prospect of renewal, maybe not in the calendric spring, but in my own, uncertain in timing, but certain to come.