So I have realized that I am happy with my body a few days of the year.  Bleak, yes?  I’ve decided that I will probably be the worst yoga teacher in my community.  I believe that I am a fraud as a writer and remarkably tone deaf as well.  Oh, yes! I’m also the world’s worst housewife.  I realize, finally, that I’m approaching an impasse that is so awash in the physical and social and soul realms that I can’t even begin to decipher the language!

So, basically, I am feeling miserable.

I’m not good at being miserable.  I’ve tried to channel my misery into poetry:

“Dreams of life and of love “

(yes, the miserable do wallow in figures of  speech)

Dreams fallen between the shadows of our doubt.

Walking through the days

Starving with lack

Wasting our dreams.

Waiting for the time when the veil tears and the memories mesh into flesh.

Reality calling all into the future.

Fallen angels will walk by our side,

Lifting our heartbeats to harmonize…

Pretty awful, right?

Since I am so abysmal at being miserable,  I decided that I had to find some possibility for bliss in my misery.  Then, as if on cue, I realized something.  (actually it wasn’t on cue… I’ve been feeling poorly for a while.) This very misery reminds me that we are in a constant state of transition.  If I’m feeling miserable, it may be because something in my life is no longer “fitting.”   It may be that I am coming out of a period of comfort into a period of change.  If we cajole ourselves into thinking that coziness equates with the static security of a closed heart and mind we are wrong.  We commit to keeping our hearts and senses open because only then are we called to the dance of life.  Only then can we float on the waves of intuition.  Only then can we travel with the soul.

So what are the gifts of this bliss of misery?  I am free to look at my daily life.  I am free to announce that I am a yoga flunky(which is absurd because yoga teaches us that we are perfect exactly where we are, though, today I will afford myself “flunk hood.”).  I am free to dislike my body even though my hips are really really really toned.  (I know this because I just jabbed at them and they are pretty tight.  There’s a little fun fat, but doesn’t that just make some things more fun? ;)…) I am free to look to the future with apprehension and wild dreams, knowing that I can’t know what will happen in my life even one week into the future….for again,  the open heart is called to the dance not knowing which mysteries await and which will be clarified.

So then, for me the bliss in this misery is opening my heart tenderly and lovingly to whatever surrounds me, knowing that the true bliss is in the time, the planning, the dreaming, the waiting…within the velvet softness of the beautiful kaleidoscope of longing.