Wednesday, January 16, 2013

shake me up


i recently stumbled upon a blog. okay, so these days, i tend to stumble on blogs daily. but this one was more of a shake-me-up stumble. a makes-you-think stumble. happyyolks combines a couple's love for food and words. their new perspectives and particularly introspective excerpts welcome self-analysis, pose huge questions, and give readers a chance to take a second to simply wonder. i came upon this passage while jotting down a killer recipe for thai carrot soup and i couldn't help but share. kelsey begins with a piece of Cheryl Strayed's book Tiny Beautiful Things:

I stood there, in the cold of the morning, hunched over the kitchen sink with my hands gripping the counters ledge watching the leaves fall and collect on the deck. Trying to count my breaths, I silently beg each one to play it’s reverse card and go back to the tree, the life-force, that created it earlier in the spring. They do not stop. With each yellow sliver that drops, I feel myself being pulled down to the ground with them. Pieces of my heart and understanding lay there, wilting, disentigrating back to the earth. I wished for Autumn all summer long — for it’s first snow, cold sheets, fires in the living room. Now that it’s here, I’m not sure I’m ready to dig through the “basement” for all that needs supporting it. Things have settled, and suddenly the stillness I asked for has arrived with a pretty bow and a painful but necessary awareness to all that has really taken place from January to October.

"I’ve highlighted and bookmarked Tiny Beautiful Things to shreds during this phase. Is it a phase? Can we call it that when it hasn’t yet passed? Anyway, Cheryl Strayed’s words are both comfort and a total slap in the face right now. In one particular letter, a young woman writes to Cheryl asking 'WTF, WTF, WTF?' She responds in sharing the bone chilling history of sexual abuse from her father’s father and how she came to realize that pressing against the wound, tackling it straight on, was the only way to get a grip on her life. She ends her response to the young woman, 'Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.'"

I share this passage not because I stood there staring at the leaves thinking, like the young woman who wrote Cheryl, 'WTF, WTF, WTF.' But I realize that the leaves falling is my life. I need to answer it. Simple as that. I need to ask better questions about the why. Ask questions that shed light on what needs adjusting. So you’re feeling like 'x' you’re acting like 'y' and it’s causing a sour, hollow feeling in your gut. It’s not WTF. It’s your life. Dig deeper. Lean in. Throw yourself down the basement stairs and scavenge for as much as you can. You’re going to need all of it, everything you got, to make it to winter."

- Kelsey Brown {happyyolks}