Slow Dancing in a Burning Room

I find this title to a John Mayer song intriguing, and the full song even more so. [Click here for the acoustic version of the song, the one I like best]

Since hearing this song live a few nights ago, it has haunted me in its description of a quality of relationship I feel I have emerged from...."leave me dirty because you don't understand"...and has formed another layer of my letting go and moving on, for which I am grateful.

I am going to take a few days away soon as retreat to write, and to re-work some of the writing I have done in the last few years. Many people have kindly encouraged me to write a book--it feels like something that has to emerge organically, and for which I need to dedicate nourishing time and space.

Over the last eight months, the personal nature of this blog has essentially merged with Beyond Oprah, which will continue of course. In the fall this blogspot will connect to a "real" 15 Minute Beginnings website. Looking at a draft of the portal for it made my jaw drop and my words stop, and I knew--though I felt vulnerable and terrified--that I was flowing as I needed to, and so is 15 Minute Beginnings.

In order to facilitate a more focused connection to the workshops and retreats and so on I am doing, this blog space will shift to a focus on those events and related matters, and less on the deeply personal--Beyond Oprah now holds space for as far as I can safely go, and I hope you will continue to meet me there.

Bridges

Riding home from a class in the east end this morning, I crossed the Danforth bridge. Torontonians, you know the one just west of Broadview. The one they had to barricade from end to end because too many people jumped off it.

Today was so sunny and beautiful, and my legs are getting stronger and the riding gets a little easier as the weeks go by. And I have many memories of this bridge. Years before the barricade, a dear friend collapsing in front of me after--as a passerby--rescuing a woman from jumping there. Travelling back and forth across the bridge day after day two decades ago when I was working in the east end doing research and crisis work. Relishing driving a pack of kids to my daughter's birthday party last year at a Danforth arts shop.

Although I am a west-ender, the east end holds countless memories for me. But the most striking of those is the one where I'm driving across the bridge on a sunny fall day with my kids, feeling I can't make it through the day. Taking in each breath and each utterance they make as a reminder that there is a reason to stay away from the bridge. But still, dreaming of bridges for months and months, more and more intensely. And becoming so absorbed in my desperate downward spiral that I didn't even know anymore that there were alternate realities.

Then, I believed absolutely that life was a terrible grind filled with pain, and it was everything I could do to keep going each day as a mother. I could not inflict the results of cruelty to myself on my children. I had to find a way to survive.

And so I did. As you know if you have followed this blog, I crashed and then slowly made a very beautiful recovery. But still, bridges haunt me. And physical barricades confuse me--I understand them, yet at the same time I understand even more deeply that the will to die is stronger than barricades, and that the retreat from the bridge lies deep in the soul, accessed almost always with a great deal of human support.