For those of you like my friend, Crystal, this may be one of those blogs you will want to skip. She has said that she can only handle me in small doses. Thankfully, Alison can handle a large, continuous dose. Though I may leave some of you wondering how. This blog actually came about from my recent thinking on how good life is for me right now and thinking more about the Bel Monte race. I guess I could have written a nice, overly romanticized blog about a seemingly perfect life. Problem is that is not real, for me anyways. I doubt I would see life as so wonderful without the un-wonderful portions. My life has had the surviving sections, just the same way Bel Monte had a tough surviving section. That is one of the great things about ultras, many times the races will have ups and downs, literally, and emotionally, and physically. One of the biggest impacts on my life was going through divorce.
Going through divorce changed me and changed me more than any other life event I can think of. I use the phrase "going through divorce" because just the fact I was once married and got divorced isn't the key factor. It was all that I had to deal with personally, how I view life, and how I had dealt with life previously. It would be a book to write all of it so I'll just hit the high points. One, I wasn't ready to be divorced. I was a Christian, in some ways strict. I'd only be married once, only know one woman, love forever. I still love Kathy, my ex-wife. Personally, I don't understand how you once really love someone and stop. I do believe in God's love, the agape love, and in living it. Most people only seem to apply this to children. Kathy and I are still friends and talk regularly. Some people don't understand this. I don't understand any other way and haven't lost a rational discussion on the subject. The love has changed. It's not romantic or sexual. I love my sisters, I don't need to say more. But part of my dogma is once I care about someone, I don't stop regardless of the situation. Some folks have said they couldn't deal with my views toward Kathy. I guess that is one reason in a list of why I'm not married to them. I couldn't deal with someone who doesn't get my point of view, cause all they could offer me was a temporary love or concern. The point is that changing that type of love with Kathy was tough and rocked me to the core. What did it say about me that I would say I want out?
I also kept myself neatly packed inside in my younger years, before 26. My internal life was like a post office mail box. Everything was tidily categorized and ordered. Some boxes were locked shut. Things went in and disappeared from my mind. My divorce dumped everything back out on the floor for me to sort through again. I spent years sorting back through my past life, some parts I'd seemed to have forgotten. I'm not sure what I've done with all that crap now. I've written quite a few poems and some journals. To be honest, I drank some on nights I felt too overwhelmed. But one description of me now is that I am not afraid to be naked. If something about me is good, bad, indifferent, it is what it is. I'm not ashamed of any of it. I struggled with being a "perfect" Christian before. I'll just say that I don't now. I know that bothers some people, especially when I say exactly what that means. If I did it, I'll tell you. I might say it was or is bad, but I did it and in some instances will probably do it again. To use Christian terms, I sin, I know that I will repeat some sins. I'll try to sin less, but I sin as a willful act, a choice. I don't believe in the "it's not my fault, I couldn't resist." I'd rather own my actions. I might not be a perfect person, don't even want to be, but I'll be honest with you.
Somewhere in that rambling is how divorce upset my previously perfect, and falsely, balanced life. Divorce was a hard process for me that brought out some good things in me, some bad. It definitely changed me for better, and worse. I do like that I am more like I was as a kid. I wish I could recover the naivety I had as kid(that will be a good blog sometime), but I won't. One of my best lessons was that life, time, the movement of the sun and moon stops for no one. We each have a limited amount of time and I plan on living mine up. I don't want a gravestone when I die(don't believe in that, for me), but if I did I would want it to say, "He did too much," or "He did too much living." The second sounds a little arrogant, but I can live with that. I also have much greater appreciation of life after divorce. I am much more thankful for anything, even some of the "bad" and "difficult."
Below is a poem that I wrote this weekend. It's a first draft, which I seldom like. I like some of what this poem says, but not exactly how it says it. It was brewing in my head for years and finally fell out. Anyway, I thought I'd toss it out there. So the point of all my rambling is that some parts of life must just be survived. During my process of divorce, I made some different choices from before. I didn't try to be perfect. I shouted at God, cussed God, questioned my belief in God, but I talked to him and I talked honest. I was merely surviving for a year or more, and not doing that well. Just as I had to survive a large section of Bel Monte 50 Mile. You force yourself to put one foot in front of the other, whether it is fast or slow, running or walking. When you can, you make yourself run and good things can happen. If you walk when you could be running, you'll miss an opportunity. Other people can judge whether I'm good or bad, better or worse. You can judge. I'm not sure how much sense this blog makes, but who cares. It's me. I'm definitely different and not afraid to be judged or disliked or liked. But I plan on using my time up and I'm not afraid to be naked.
Drunk and Naked on the Floor
Looking back,
it was just a night
alone in the sea.
At the time,
it was night after night,
drunk and naked,
alone on the floor.
Where was my God?
Though I've asked,
he hasn't spoken.
Too many nights,
I couldn't sleep
and the Comforter
never came,
maybe my hard words
kept him away.
No one wants to see
a bare soul on the floor,
naked and drunk.
Someone came and walked away,
a man stripped a little too much.
They'd worry in silence.
I'd suffer alone.
Sometimes you have to
swim on your own
or drink
yourself naked and drunk
on the cold soil.
It seemed like years,
it seemed like a night or two,
maybe there's little difference.
A bad mind lost time,
a day, a year,
I remember little of either.
So looking back,
maybe just one night,
maybe four years,
a minor detail
of a corrupted mind.
Not sure who rescued me,
or if I swam the ocean alone
and found the shore.
God hadn't walked away
having seen me stripped bare
ranting in my nakedness.
Shrivel feet on course soil,
clothed once more
suddenly appropriate again,
but not underneath.
Though, the Comforter
could cover
a multitude of nakedness.
She'd say I still wasn't right,
though she found me
far from removed
from the shore
only sometimes
naked and bare.
Just a single night
alone in the sea
left me different and bare.
Maybe God needed
a man,
