I stayed up “late” last night with my Traveling Partner – somehow managed to wake up early this morning. lol S’okay, my coffee is hot, and it tastes “good” in that way coffee does (and doesn’t; it’s an acquired taste, I think). It’s a work day after a long holiday weekend. The morning is a chilly one, sort of, but at 45 degrees Fahrenheit, hardly reaches the potential for “the first day of Winter”. One of the perks of life in the Pacific Northwest, I guess; at least for now, winter is a mild season. The forecast hints at some small potential for snow on Giftmas, more likely on New Year’s weekend. Am I eager for the snow? I don’t know that I have any particular enthusiasm or reluctance, though I know I am likely to be as kiddy as a school kid to see it when it falls. lol
Yesterday, I took note of the season’s change with a longish walk in a nearby wildlife refuge. It was a lovely day, mostly on the sunny side, after many days of rain. It was a day well-spent in gentle contemplation and ease.
A lovely day for a walk along a path that wanders between meadow, marsh, and riverbank.
After many days of rain, the rivers are swollen and many have exceeded their usual path, flowing over into low-lying areas beyond their banks. It’s not a surprise. I see it nearer to home; the wee creek at the edge of the property is, itself, well-beyond the capacity of it’s banks, the ground beyond on all sides soaked, puddled, and marshy. Hard to get a clear picture through the trees and the berry vines. I feel fortunate that the water level seems to stay just beyond our little yard quite reliably.
…Another holiday behind us, other holidays ahead…
I sip my coffee thinking about the weekend that has so recently ended, and all the small details that made it so lovely. In the background, my Traveling Partner’s voice. I have on one of his flight simulator videos as a sort of “alarm clock”; it’ll end just at the time I want to redirect my attention to work for the day. 😀 His soothing tone, focused on the process in front of him, is pleasant and “feels like home”. Content creation is an involved endeavor, and I’m impressed with his will and progress, and I enjoy his work. I let the details of a weekend of love and conversation drift by in my thoughts, and smile.
…This is good coffee…
2021 begins to end… we’ve had our “longest night”, and it’s time for the days to slowly begin to grow longer. It’s time to begin again. 😀
I slept deeply, living an alternate reality, rich, colorful, surreal, and woke to recollections of some other life. Some other self. I remember lights, and music, and abundance, holiday festivities. Giftmas dreams. I woke, also, to a visceral recollection of sitting forlorn and draggled at a rainy city bus stop during the holiday season, surrounded by holiday lights and late afternoon winter darkness – thinking thoughts, then, that had a striking resemblance to the dream I woke from, this morning, but from the perspective of yearning, rather than celebration. How very strange. Later, with this cup of coffee, I’m struck by the unlikely coincidence of seeing a thumbnail for a video (the one I linked just now, earlier in this paragraph) that very much looked like the scene I was remembering! Stranger, still, it looks very like the city I once lived in, too. Odd morning.
…”It’s a journey.” Life, by way of metaphor.
Dreams are only dreams. Progress is made through actions. There are verbs involved. Surely I could sit at a bus stop in the rain, crying over what is not, for endless hours – but doing so changes nothing. I’m just saying; misery may love company, but it also tends to be lazy as fuck. 😉 Choose a verb, choose your adventure, take a step on your path… there is no “too late” if you’ve another breath to take.
Wins and losses in life don’t have to become a punishing point system that nags or mocks you for your perceived failures. Let that bullshit go, if you can. Dream your dreams, choose your verbs, find your own way – one step, one beginning at a time. 🙂 Try to be kind to yourself along the way – there will always be plenty of other people around you ready to be discouraging assholes, or just plain mean or discourteous. 🙂 No reason to add to all of that.
‘Tis the season
I think about the day ahead. The year drawing to a close. Thanksgiving already over. The Winter Solstice, Giftmas, and New Year’s ahead. I sip my coffee and enjoy the sound of rain (on this video, that I’m not sitting in, wet, at a lonely bus stop, broke, and alone). I think about the things that went quite well this year, in spite of the pandemic. I think about things that continue to challenge me, as a human, seeking to be the woman I most want to be. I think about love, and my Traveling Partner, and the life we build together every day. I feel fortunate. I feel thankful. I take a breath, filling my lungs with air clean enough to breathe. I sip coffee made with clean filtered water, and locally roasted, sustainably-sourced (they say) coffee beans. Choices that became advantages. Advantages that represent privilege – and good fortune. I did not build my life alone with my own two hands “from the ground up”, myself. To say that I have feeds into the cultural lie that is the “bootstrap fallacy“. This has always been a shared journey, and I am wholly interdependent on lives around me, and the actions and choices of others. That’s just real. Yeah, the verbs are spread out; I can choose my own. None of us get where we are without help, good fortune, useful circumstances, and a sprinkling of coincidence, however “self-made” we’re inclined to make ourselves out to be.
The day ahead is not really a holiday. Just a day off. I took it easy all weekend after getting my seasonal flu shot and my Covid booster. Choices. Today I feel pretty good. A good day for housekeeping, tidying up before the next holiday. Maybe playing some video games, or getting a hike in, if the rain stops. Choices aplenty. Choices, followed by verbs; doesn’t matter what I may “decide” to do, if I don’t act on that decision. Seems obvious enough.
I made a lovely plum pudding for Giftmas; I remind myself to baste it with spirits, again today. Odd tangent – my Granny once invited me to make a Christmas Pudding with her from an old recipe she’d found in her grandmother’s handwriting, tucked into an old cookbook. I was visiting, (my last visit with her as it turned out) over a holiday season. I was moody and she was seeking to lift my spirits and help me regain perspective. I declined, rather flippantly saying something about making a plum pudding seeming the sort of thing I’d only want to do “once I had a proper home of my own”, somehow. She was pleasant about that rejection; she didn’t want to put in all the effort if I wasn’t also into it, and we quickly found other delightful ways to enjoy our time together. This year I remembered. So… this year I made that plum pudding (linked recipe is very traditional, also very large, and was not the recipe I used, myself, just looks like a good one). Rather hilariously, my Traveling Partner has zero interest – it just isn’t his sort of dessert. So, this one is for me. A memory, and a celebration. I do wish I actually had that original recipe in my great-great-grandmother’s handwriting, though… what a treasure that would be. 🙂
My coffee is finished. My cell phone has finished re-charging. The rain outside continues to fall. Seems a good time to begin again. 🙂
Seriously, just put it all on pause for a minute or two. You’ll be fine. The work will wait. The pings and texts will wait too. That urgent whateverthefuck you just have to get done right now? Yep, even that will wait for a couple minutes. Take care of you for a minute. Breathe. Exhale. Relax.
Turn off the music. Quiet as much of the noise as you can control. Just sit for a minute. Another breath. Need a timer? I’ve got you… here, try this one. You’ve got two minutes for you, right?
…<sigh>… Feels good. Just a quiet minute or two…
There’s a lot to get done. Life sometimes feels so crazy busy that I walk around with a chronic lingering sensation of something being incomplete, unfinished, or forgotten. Sometimes, when I stumble on the thing driving that sensation, it’ll turn out to be something forgettably unimportant like being interrupted while reading a receipt, and having the sensation of “an unfinished conversation” that turns out to be with myself. lol I’ve found, more than once, that the “secret” to feeling less busy, less frantic, less consumed by the details… is to slow down. So. Do that.
Do it again.
Set expectations with yourself and others about how much you really can (or are really willing) to do. Take care of yourself. “Human” comes with some known limitations. Respect your limitations – and your boundaries. Tired? Rest. Hurting? Heal. Cross with the world? Take a step back and enjoy you for a little while. Recognize that everyone around you needs those same things – rest, healing, and time to just be who they are, and enjoy that experience.
Look, I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what I’m doing – and going to do, and planning to continue to practice until I get properly good at it. It just doesn’t make any damned sense to be the person in the world treating me the worst. lol I am practicing treating myself – and my loved ones – as well as I know how to treat anyone at all. Every day. Every interaction. Moment by moment. I expect to fall short of my goals – maybe a lot. Failure is an option – pretty commonplace, actually – and we learn more from failures than from successes, so… there’s that. 🙂 You’re gonna fail at some things. That has to be okay. Start over. Begin again. Understand where things went amiss, and do something different or change the context. Just don’t give up on yourself. You have room to grow – and even that journey can be fun, and even pleasant, and rewarding, and filled with love. 🙂 Worth exploring, I think.
…I’m in so much pain today. Arthritis in my spine. Cervicogenic headache. The consequences of injuries, aging, and cold weather… and it seems so completely ordinary as to defy being worth bitching about…but here I am. I think I’ll just begin again, myself. 🙂 I’m certainly too busy to let pain tell me what to do. 😉
Yesterday I read that Mike Nesmith died. I broke down in tears and just cried for what seemed an uncomfortably long time. I suppose he was most famous to the world as one of The Monkees. He was “most famous” to me as my first rock-star crush. I had every album. The edges of every one of them was worn and frayed from being held and gazed upon for many hours, song after song after song, daydreaming of the love and life that might one day be mine…
…I don’t live a life anything at all like those adolescent daydreams so long ago, and I don’t think I would enjoy it if I did! I’m not that little girl anymore, and much time has passed. 🙂 Still, to this day, the songs resonate with me. I’m listening to them now, on a long haphazard playlist yanked from YouTube, honoring the loss of a human being so dear to me… though we never met.
Listening to The Monkees, I hear where some important details of “who I am” may come from. Reluctant heartfelt departures? Check! Be sure to say gentle good-byes to the ones you love. Striving for perspective and balanced discourse? Saying I’m sorry? Being willing to change? Check! The Monkees shared an approach I didn’t see modeled at home. (I sure wouldn’t mind being able to do the song-and-dance thing, too… might lighten a tense mood? lol) Frustration with my origins in a wordless way that my adolescent mind did not understand how to express? Even that – The Monkees understood what I was trying to say. They “got me”. It was 1967. I was not even adolescent when The Monkees were on t.v. – the first time. Their music and sketches from their show settled into my consciousness pretty early on. I sometimes wonder if those of us on the tail end of the “baby boomer” generation – not quite a proper “boomer”, not quite Gen X, are more properly The Monkees generation, born to a world with television, and eager consumer minds right at that time when our formative malleable young consciousness ripe for “product placement” was feasting on … The Monkees. 🙂
Hell, for all I know, the earliest seeds of my utter lack of monogamy, and my long-time comfort with polyamory, may also source with those early years, clutching my record albums, seething with hormones, unwilling to really “choose” from among the “pre-fab four” – life with The Monkees looked like a proper romp! Surely there was room for me, with them…? LOL I wasn’t really thinking about sex in any explicit way, just thinking it would be rude to bust up a tight friendship when I really dug them all equally well. lol
Anyway. I’m okay, you know? It’s just a moment. A wee bit of a sorrowful celebration, saying good-bye to “old friends” who meant so much more to me than I had ever really reflected upon so deeply. I listen to Last Train to Clarksville again… the number of times I have happily sung this song at the top of my lungs on a long drive, to stay awake… this time it just sounds like “good bye”, and I cry a bit more. It’s okay though; nothing to be ashamed of in honest heartfelt tears. My Traveling Partner comes into the studio on a practical matter. He’s kind about my moment. I hear Mickey Dolenz remind me to begin again, to move on, to take that next step… they got that before I did, too, but the mere presence of this music in my mind for so long may have made it a bit easier to get my head around new practices, and new beginnings, when I needed to most.
What music moves you? Where do you come from, creatively? What are the songs that fill your heart, and provide a soundtrack to your dreams? The music you first danced to – as a toddler, perhaps. As a tween, certainly. It’s part of your “core programming”, probably. Have you looked it in the face and asked yourself if it became part of your path in a positive way – or if it may be something holding you back? Maybe it’s a good day to listen to the band?
Papa Gene’s Blues begins to play. I think of my life now. I think about my good fortune in life and love. I think about my Traveling Partner on life’s journey. I think about a second coffee, and I think about beginning again. Thanks, Mike.
The frown finally lifted. My jaw finally unclenched. My sheer-force-of-will pleasantness in meetings eventually resolved to simply being pleasant. I let go of being angry, in favor of feeling angry, which eventually let me look beyond my angry feelings to my hurt feelings, and then eventually to just letting shit go. Now? I guess I’m “quietly over it”, and it’s enough. Ideally, small things stay small. It’s not always easy to see that through from intention to outcome. It takes practice.
Neither societies nor relationships are (ever) “perfect”, not really; both are made up of human beings who are themselves entirely “human” in all the error-prone meanings of that word, and compounded by the very (very) subjective nature of our individual experiences. Hell, it’s not even a given that we’re all “doing our best” – or that any one of us is capable of a personal best of sufficient real-world value in any objective way. It’s an inefficient system, at best.
Work keeps me occupied. I pause for a break and reconnect with my Traveling Partner. The gray skies beyond my window seem to reflect back our own individual moodiness, today. Suitable backdrop. I think we’re past it, though, with “clearer skies”, though not exactly “sunny”. Metaphorically, I’m hoping for sunny skies (and sunny days) ahead. Funny thing though; the metaphor of climate and weather with regard to emotions and relationships breaks down a bit if pushed too far – we don’t control the actual weather, but do have substantial control over our emotional “weather”. Oh, for sure, not 100% of the control we might like to have, sometimes, and sometimes what we most want to control of the emotional weather isn’t ours to decide at all. Communication takes effort. Listening is work. Kindness requires practice – even for people in love with each other. “Being angry” is easier than taking the time and care to really process feelings of anger with real consideration, self-compassion, and without adding drama to someone else’s experience. It’s hard. It’s worth practicing, and improving over time. It’s worth failing at it and learning from that, and continuing to practice. Incremental change over time is slow – and it’s hard as hell to make the same room for someone else to fail and grow, as it is to do that for myself.
It’s a pleasant afternoon. My partner brings me a small serving of gelato. I take a break to enjoy that, and review what I’ve gotten done today, and what I’ve got coming up tomorrow. There’s so much to get done before the year ends – and it’s already time to begin again. 🙂
