Friday, March 16, 2007

Two Houses

I have two distinct energy cycles and sometimes I call them my two houses. I move in and get accustomed to one house and then, after about eight weeks, things rattle and shift and I find myself landed in the other house. This repeats throughout the year and never ceases to amaze me. I get adjusted to my new house after a few weeks, and I convince myself that this time my understanding is so thorough that my cycle will never drastically switch again. Part of me always wishes this were true and that I could decide to live in one house and be done with it but that would be like trying to control the tides or the phases of the moon. What I can do is keep taking notes to understand and accept and maybe someday even love my cyclical nature. Over the years my husband and I have devised a language for exploring this phenomenon without putting a value judgment on it or oversimplifying it. We call it the cycle of receive mode and transmit mode.

1 comment:

Rachel Nguyen said...

This is good stuff, Emily.

In some ways, this is why I love the church year so much. It is designed to accommodate both transmit and receive modes. There are times of exhuberance and joy and times of darkness and introspection. It gets more subtle, too. Times of deep aloneness and times of community. Maybe the guys that designed the church calendar knew something about the ebb and flow of our natural energy cycles.

Oh, and PS: We go through the feeling shitty about ourselves too. That is when I go to confession! I always feel great afterwards, LOL.

Love you.
Rachel