Underbelly: the underside of a body or mass, a vulnerable area.  This is where I am, quite squarely, at the moment.

I am in the underbelly, the underside, the undertow, the other side, the underneath, the what you see when you lift up the rock, the discovering, uncovering and really getting into and looking at and being with all that is underneath the decision–the decision that looks so shiny at first, and new, and full of energy and purpose and focus and vision and direction and dynamism and forward movement and pointedness and rightness and the way-it-needs-to-be-ness.  Underneath all of that there is loss and sadness and confusion and mud.  Mud with worms burrowing through and the rank damp smell of the decomposition of life.  In order to compost and to create new there needs to be a letting go, a decision– letting something go to waste, is that so?  Or can that discarded thing be transformed, can it become something else, perhaps what it was always meant to be.  Have I actually released it to become its real self, its most appropriate incarnation? What about the ways that the new rock can start to feel just like the old one?  Somedays the way that I experience the new rock can start to feel so sickeningly familiar.  Like today, after days without solitude, I feel less like myself and more out on a limb–more vulnerable, breakable, leavable, less loveable, more obsessive, wishing, wanting, waiting for him, the new shiny rock, to be there to love me, care for me, pick me up, shelter me, hold me, enter me.  Enter me because I feel empty.  Is that true?  Perhaps I feel full of my own shit.  Full of material that needs my attention, my solitude, in order for it to present itself to me, so I can comfort each thing that worries or upsets me…what was I saying?  Oh yes, the underbelly of the shiny new decision.  Pick up the rock that looks so smooth on the upside, and is so dank, dark and creepy underneath.  And that smell.  The smell of death, and new life.  Today, I am dying in the underbelly of things.