I know there is strength in the differences between us, I know there is comfort where we overlap

-"Overlap", Ani DiFranco

Lately, a league of ex's and old friends gone awol, by my cause or mutual, have reappeared at my doorstep, one by one (though there was one week when three appeared!). This is something that would have disgruntled me greatly in the past, but instead was cause for (though cautious) curiousity. It's been a real Saturn Return Year, full of all kinds of completing cycles and brand new beginnings, and somehow the appearance of open-ended endings seems appropo.

This weekend Erika and I participated in the Madison Area Open Art Studios, for which I did a shamefully small amount of promo, due to being in Toronto and being exhausted most of the week back. We got a pretty good turn out, regardless, and I got a lot more attention/interest to not only my work but my classes than ever before. In fact, I even made back money, and then some (usually I just cover expenses on this weekend), and quite a few of the folk coming by were looking just for me (usually they happen to notice my work but came mainly for Erika's). It was very reaffirming - a week and some of confirmation that my work can be spiritually significant and the teachings run deep, and a weekend of more of same, plus a bit of commercial/artistic blessing from the public.

But tides run deep, and it's tough to feel strong some days, even when I have joy for so many new things. Friday marked a year since I put Scotch to sleep (my twenty-one year old kitty, longer in my life than my mother!) and the week was a constant battle toward the anniversary matched only by my dire need to crash all day Friday, met with fierce resistance in the form of nervous breakdown trips to Woodmans and meanness toward myself in most ways possible. New relationships are blossoming in all of the old relationship reworkings, and drama around both finally put me in bed, where I should have been most of the day anyway, having good cries, leaning on phone friend shoulders and taking mini naps when my eyes dried up.

It's a hefty transition, and ongoing (when is life *not* transition?) but also lighter than it seems it should be somehow. I feel, even in a premenstrual mourning day like Friday, like I have witnessed enough endings and beginnings now, truly been present for enough, that I can sense, just barely taste, that all things do end, truly. It doesn't always help, honestly, but it is a way rather to somehow explain the strange comfort I take from life now, *in* it's up and down-ness. I am no longer reaching out into midair and hoping to find flesh, rather, seeking the warmth where I know is reliable and strong, in good friends, in relationships even though stagnant, still somehow strong. And I have gotten better at seeking out new worlds, discovering, exploring, on the basis of mutual curiosity. One of the ex's told me last night that he knows his desire for self-knowing and growth never matched mine, and still doesn't. Of course, I imagine his degree of self-aggression doesn't pace mine either (wink), but who knows. A new friend and I reached a place tonight that broke a degree of consistent misunderstanding and cracked a code between us, proving we were closer, overlapping even, where we had both though we were so far apart.

Tonight, the sun set and I was inside, missing it, watching tv with a glass of wine, and dinner, alone. It was lovely. There is no set here. No logic to my weekend or the way my feelings work. There is small comfort in moments of clarity, which then can seem much less clear in a day. But when they happen, I am actually here, for the first time ever. I get more present every day, for all of it, and I am grateful. This is where life and I overlap.