In the woods

There I go again. A little girl lost in the woods. I thought I passed those oak trees already. I mean hello!! How did I get back here. Here where the light is too bright and the smile so far to fetch. You know here. Again. A book I am reading has helped this time around. The 7 Stages of Self Awakening – Robin Sharma. An impulsive buy I will never regret, which says that at times in life things happen to bring our attention to something in our lives. Like how you keep getting hang over even when you say you will never do so again and do a very smart job at quitting drinking only to one day cave in - and you guessed it - wake up with a pounding headache, or how you swear on some unfortunate someone’s grave that you will be more careful with your finances only to find a carrier bag of things you don’t need in your hands, no change and bills to pay.
Anyway, apparently life, God, the universe is on a mission to get you and I to be the best we can be and sometimes some pain, some events seem to repeat themselves for this very purpose. You keep losing friends, your feet must have some funny deal going with the rug cos u keep tripping on it, and so on and so forth. You get the picture. Basically it all boils down to the fact if you find yourself in the same situation over and over it is because you are failing to learn what you must learn and are yet to learn to react differently or to even arrange things differently.
Maybe if we paid more attention to our pain than to what kind of sympathy we are going to get for it we will learn something about life and will have transformed in such a way as to not even experience that pain again. And so that is why…I am in the woods again, going past that oak tree but so much more in tune.
Because I don’t know my next step and no one will sympathise with me I am forced to look at this oak tree, so big and bulky and try to understand its DNA, its positioning here. I mean does it like being here? Lumbering like that? In my way? Don’t the other oak trees compete with it. And I'm forced to realize that indeed there is more to life than me and I am to learn more than what this pain is trying to say.
This pain tells me I have lost. This pain says I must be the most useless person in the world. But its reason is very different from the pain I had last time I walked past that oak tree. And what I learn as I turn and look at my tree again is that though physically empty I know now that my body is a temple. A delicious place for delicious things. Not to be entered anyhow, deserving of clean feet and proper curtsy.
Why it takes a cut to know these things I will never know. I guess pain is indeed the only way we are able to learn. And the wound is deep and yes I am passing in the woods yet again. But to know what I know is life itself.
I have been given the will to live because I am now indebted to my pain. It has taught me why life is important and why this too shall pass. My little girl in the woods experience is me seeing who I have truly been and wanting to never ever be that way again.
I now notice how looking at my hand I could not see it for what it is. Wanting so bad to love and be loved I was never aware what love really means. And I am led to think perhaps I must be in the woods a while longer if I am to not pass this way again. Perhaps this time in searching my heart and soul for the tools I may use in love I will also make sure I understand how to show love. For in this greatest of searches I find that I have shown love exactly the way I always have and am not surprised to come out the way I did before.
This time, these woods better knock me out before letting me go.