Keep Digging: Finding Solace in the Self I’d Forgotten to Love.
An interesting thing came up today.
As I ran through my morning thoughts — my daily ritual
catching up on the train of mind, a few wagons back from the front, revisiting a journey I’ve taken a million times…
the words came again:
“Keep digging.”
I’ve heard them before. Over and over.
I know them, or thought I did.
But today, they landed differently.
Like a key I’d held all along but never dared to use.
Why this phrase again?
Haven’t I already learned what it means?
Apparently not — or maybe not in the way my soul had been waiting for.
⸻
And then another word arrived: Solace.
Familiar, soft-sounding.
I’ve carried that word like a tattoo under a sleeve
close to the skin, but never exposed to light.
Was the solace I knew real?
Or was it just a concept I clung to, a quiet corner I drew on the wall of my mind but never stepped into?
Maybe it was a shame. Maybe I thought I wasn’t strong enough to love that part of me.
Maybe I feared that if I touched it fully,
it would unravel everything I had built to survive.
But today…
The choice was taken from me.
And rightly so.
⸻
Today, I’m ready.
To be that little big part of myself, fully.
To love it, to cherish it,
but most of all, to accept it.
Because solace isn’t escape.
It’s return.
It’s the soft soil you reach only after digging through all the stone.
And I wonder…
How many of us are quietly standing at the edge of that place.
mistaking it for emptiness, when really, it’s the beginning of finally coming home?
Until next time,
Michel