Riding the wind

Seven days ago, these glasses meant only one thing.

Wine.

Today they still mean wine.

But they also simply look like really cool empty glasses.
Shapes and colors.

These small shifts happen, they say, with time. Sooner or later these glasses will not trigger a craving. With time. One day at a time.

My feelings are shifting like wind, moment by moment some days, hour by hour other days.

I've never been good with waiting. I like to skip ahead, pass up the hard part, let's move along now. Stop feeling stop feeling stop feeling...

That just can't be the case this time. This is just too big.

So looking at those glasses today gave me hope, the way they were so kindly showing me that they look a little like something other than wine, even though they still mean wine, for now.

And strangely, yesterday's blustery wind also came bringing me hope. It was a completely nasty day, the kind of Minnesota day that causes most of us to duck indoors and stay there, looking out the window and muttering things like, why do I live here and, would you believe that wind....uff da.

The wind got me thinking about seven days ago, how I woke up in the night, sobbing. Because it was like a blustery wind coming in. I reached for my husband and spoke my secrets like gusts, catching his breath and mine. I did it like I had no control over it because I didn't, in that very moment, for no definable reason, I didn't.

It just happened and I felt like I was floating on the wind and watching, helpless.

I am so helpless right now, riding that wind. That's why I know I haven't done even one part of this whole quitting thing on my own. (Step 2, anyone? Step 2?)

The dark of winter was blasting through with that wind that night seven days ago, with those words spoken in the dark. It was pushing us toward Spring. It was there, with such a strength we couldn't help but be pushed toward light.

An email I got yesterday said, shame is like mold, it grows in the dark, but withers in the light.

That's what we were doing, we were moving the mold to the light.

I didn't plan it. I didn't even want it, but Spring came anyway. Before it could bring its light though, I had needed to feel that wind, to duck inside a while, shifting in the dark, tossing and turning and crying out.

We Minnesotans know full well we have no control over the weather, the shifting of seasons. We wait and we watch, we're surprised and we're not. We long for Spring. And it comes, it always comes, even when we least expect it.

Even when we don't reach out and ask for it or choose it. It comes.

Even when we've become comfortable in our misery, hunched over, backs aching and tight in the cold and the dark.

Even then, Spring always comes. And it leaves no other choice but to surrender to its beauty.

And then we begin to till the soil, and friends, that's hard work. Good, but hard.