Mountain Ash, My first reading of your post and beautiful poem "scared" me from delving too deeply, I didn't want it to fit, and I wondered what you were seeing that I wasn't. But an honest re-reading and a sigh of reluctant acquiesence later, I know it does fit. I'm currently in the fight of my life, for a life "fixed". Constant affirmations to "change a way of believing", constant refocusing from the dreary prison of old beliefs to the "other road" that I really want to be on...we've opened up a pandora's box in therapy, and it's a constant struggle to not just give up against that enormous woundedness we found, one that has undermined me my entire life. How to undo 50 years of unshakeable conviction (a belief nurtured by the most significant people in one's childhood) that one should not exist? It's unbelievably painful to look that wound in the eye and admit it really does exist - I think that all along I've harboured a fervant hope it was just my imagination or misperception. The depth and extent of the conviction might have been exaggerated by childish misperception, but the origins of the conviction are very real. And even now, it's still so painful that I continue to temper it with giving "benefit of the doubt", just to give myself a wee shred of hope that maybe it wasn't quite as devastating as it looks.

Anyway, this is a gratitude journal. So let me refocus all of that and say that I am tougher than this. I know without doubt that this is all working out for some greater good, that the lessons learned through all of this will somehow serve a greater purpose.

I shared a dream with Dotsie months ago. A very powerful dream. I know it's my "calling" now, the way to fix what's broken, the key to getting out of the dark dungeon into the rest of the magnificent castle that my life and self are.

Thank you for your beautiful poem, Mountain Ash. I don't know how you chose this particular poem to respond to my post about the woman who helped me, but it's uncannily appropro to everything else I'm going through right now.