In search of wholeness once again

After writing the last post, I thought that there was something oddly familiar about it. I dug into the archives of my blog, and, lo-and-behold, there was a blog from June entitled “Happiness is....” It's a bit worrisome when I rehash post titles. After all, the possibilities should have been infinite. Maybe it has finally happened: I've become an empty shell with not a new thought in my head anymore.

I've survived the first week of classes, and am getting accustomed to the routine again. This week has been breathtakingly gorgeous, and the trees are golden, as though they hold all the pleasures of the world. As mentioned in a previous post, I've started writing and reading more again. Both processes seem to plant new seeds of creativity and knowledge in me, and I'm glad to have picked them up.

Just finished Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly. The events described – Ethiopia in the 1970's and London in the 1980's and 1990's – tore away at the innocence I had believed in when I was growing up as a child. Yes, I remember seeing the ravages of famine on the people of Ethiopia on the news when I was a little girl, but somehow, the world still seemed a better place then. I was nine or ten when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Berlin Wall fell, a European Union planned, and the Soviet Union collapsed. I had lived through such upheaval in the world, but had been largely ignorant and oblivious. These events seem like someone else's history, yet they're of my world, my time. Knowledge indeed alters innocence; even the images of my carefree childhood seem somehow tainted now. It is as though I have burst the bubble that has protected those perfect memories all these years, and now, the child of those memories has awakened from a dream to be confronted by an onslaught of the terrors of the world. And the child doesn't know what to do but sit down on the shattered ground and cry. The world seems to be in upheaval yet again, and there is a deep, sad silence within me that rings louder than any other thoughts.

But, I've just had a lovely birthday celebration. These jolts of joy do temporarily enclose me in a bubble once again, and the dream-child resurfaces, and the world seems whole once more.