Archives for category: Allegories
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Breathe. Relax. This is now.

February 3, 2019 //
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Busy weekend. Home making. It’s satisfying work. I am tired and eager to see my Traveling Partner at the end of his long drive. This isn’t a moment that requires any analysis, or any sort of deeper-dive; it’s quite enough exactly as it is.

An earlier moment, almost forgotten in this busy weekend.

I look around satisfied with the day’s progress. I smile in acknowledgement of all the small things that remain yet to be done. The smile is because now I’ll have time. I just got a lot of time back that won’t be spent driving. I gain time in my life back, because I’ll be right here at home – and still get to hang out with this singular human being that I enjoy so much. It’s a brilliantly efficient choice. lol It’s an utterly commonplace choice. These things exist in the same moment of contemplation and joy.

I think about the container garden on the deck. I failed it in every regard, last year, in the ridiculous summer heat, because I was away most weekends, and exhausted most week days. I lost roses that had survived decades of moving with me. It didn’t end up being heart-breaking, which, for me, I realize now was quite an extraordinary bit of progress and healing itself – and I didn’t even notice that at the time. Circumstances were what they were, and I understood them to be a clear consequence of my actions (or lack of), and recognizing my accountability, and understanding what would be needed for a different outcome, I simply let it go at that point. I never noticed the lack of heart-break, the lack of emotional storm. It was what it was, and regrettable, but little more than that. I can, and will, do better this year.

I knock back a cold glass of water. Then another. I pause to appreciate having clean, safe, potable water, right here in the house. I recognize the privilege this presents. Realistically, it isn’t something everyone in the world is so fortunate as to enjoy (and not even reliably right here in the U.S.).

Tonight? Gratitude. Love. Sufficiency. Tomorrow? I begin again. 🙂

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Categories Allegories, Brain Injury, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, winter

There’s a Future Out There, Built on Your Choices

January 28, 2019 //
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Sipping my coffee and thinking about the day and week ahead. Time to get my head out of the studio, and back in the office. Very different scenes. Very different language. It’s a bit of an adjustment. lol

I find myself thinking about “the future” just generally. I think about recent conversations with my Traveling Partner. I think about plans we’ve made to do things together in the year ahead. I think about choices already made, and choices yet to be considered. A substantial portion of “the future” is built on as-yet-unmade choices. The rest? Well, a hash of circumstances, and choices already made, and not yet seen to their conclusions, I suppose. It’s not a static image, like a picture, or a calendar page, though, “the future” – however modest or grand – continuously redevelops, as new choices are made against changes in circumstance. So… yeah.

What are you doing to build the future you want to live in? What are you choosing, in order to get to that place?

It can be frustrating having to accommodate, or adjust for, the circumstantial bits and pieces of a developing future. Same for choices made by other people that result in change for us, ourselves. Nonetheless, it’s part of the puzzle. The most complicated piece of the challenge of “planning for the future”, I think, is about the verbs in the present; our choices right now, our actions right now, our words right now, all become part of what our future is built on. What are you doing about it? I ask, because the literal only piece I directly affect, myself, is the piece built on my own actions, my choices, my words. I’d love to shout back “I’ve got this!”, but I’m not that certain, honestly. 🙂

It is sometimes difficult to hold onto awareness that my choices right now, here, in this moment, directly affect my future. It’s a pretty direct connection, too. I’ll give an example; yesterday I did laundry. I chose to defer the last load (white towels) to “maybe after work tomorrow”, when the hour grew later in the day than I cared to be doing laundry. No problem there. I can do it tonight after work. That was yesterday’s decision-making (made in the present, yesterday). This morning, I hopped out of the shower having forgotten about that decision-making, yesterday… no towel. That’s right. No clean, dry towel waiting for me when I finished my shower. lol Damn it. I was fortunate there was a clean dry towel in the hall bathroom. Still. My decision-making in the present, yesterday, directly affected my (near-term) future. That’s how it works. 😀

The awareness that my decision-making right now affects my experience of some future moment is also a potential anxiety-driver. “Over-thinking” can become indecision and dithering, and all of that just makes the anxiety worse. What the hell?? That hardly seems right… is this some sort of bug in the code, here? Huh. I chuckle and sip my coffee. “Not today, Demons.” I say to myself, contentedly. I breathe. Relax. Let go of my own bullshit – and begin again. New day. New choices. Each choice potentially inching me closer to being the woman I most want to be, living a future life that meets my needs over time. 🙂 Some choices, maybe not so much; my results will vary. lol

 

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Categories Allegories, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being, winter

Sleeping and Waking

January 25, 2019 //
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I’ve been sleeping decently well for a couple days. In spite of that, I am still quite fatigued, and right on the edge of that human condition in which I might actually start acknowledging that I am indeed quite exhausted. It’s a thing that builds over time, and that I stubbornly, more often than not, pretend is not a thing until I just… can’t. The result? I wake each morning grateful to have slept well and deeply – and already explicitly excited about more sleep at the other of the day. I’m much less focused on any daytime successes or goals than savoring the moment I woke slowly this morning, and wondering how much more delicious that will be tomorrow, on a Saturday, with no alarm clock. Omg. So good.

I sip my coffee and pull my focus back to “now”. I encourage myself to engage the day ahead. To wake the fuck up completely. To ready myself for work, properly. lol I feel like I’m fighting a young child who doesn’t want to go to school. More coffee? Is that the answer? Well… it’s an answer. I’ll go with that.

Life is on the verge of a lot of changes. (Change is a constant. I giggle at the thought.) The wheel continues to turn, always. My anxiety about my own missteps, errors, and the everyday risk of poor decision-making competes for my attention with my general excitement about a future that isn’t here yet. No point being overly emotionally invested in any case; the future isn’t “real” in any particular sense. That forward look? It’s imagined. Part of my internal narrative. Prone – very much so – to conflation, to exaggeration, to thinking errors, to poor assumptions, and expectations not tied to reality, thinking about the future is more like reading fiction than anything else. Some of it is excellent, insightful, work – some of it is just story telling. I breathe. Sip my coffee. Let it go.

Life has been filled with change – and turmoil – and trauma – and tedium – and opportunity – and also love. My “hustle” isn’t the same hustle as yours, but we’ve all gotta hustle, right? I smile at the open manuscript on my laptop. Where will I take this journey? I give silent props to my writer friends. There is a canvas on my easel; it too is a tale of past experiences. I smile a silent “thanks” to the friends who inspire me, and the artist friends who have work in progress staring back at them, too. I think about the trails I have already hiked, sitting here wearing boots worn down lovely through three re-sole-ings. I think about gardens I have grown. Pictures I have taken. Lovers I have loved. I sip my coffee and let those things simply be what they were, and what they now are; memories. I let that go, too. I don’t find my future living in my past, generally. 🙂

The wheel keeps turning. Change is. The next moment will be here when it arrives, and it will be as “now” as all the others. Impermanence.

I finish my coffee as I realize I am “pruning my dreams” as I sift through my thoughts; some dreams need to be let go, too, not due to any inherent flaw with the dreams themselves, but rather because they skipped over the part about having a shot at ever realistically being part of the present, at all, and have gone from the future directly to the past, unnoticed, unfulfilled, unrealistic from the vantage point of “now”. Why isn’t that more poignant? It feels so… practical.

I’ll raise my now empty coffee cup in a vague gesture of salute to life, on my way to the kitchen… it’s time to begin again. 🙂

 

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being

Some Fall, Some Are Cut Down

January 20, 2019 //
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I was sipping my coffee between moments in the studio when I really noticed; there’s a tree missing from the view beyond my deck.

What I expected to see…

It’s not a great picture, and I warn you now, it isn’t from an identical perspective – and perhaps that’s why it nagged at me so much. Something is different, I spotted that right away, but figured, in the gloom of twilight, last night, that perhaps it was just more winter, fewer leaves, more lights in the distance… something.

…what I see today.

There’s a missing tangle of mostly-dead tree. Obvious as anything could be, once I allowed myself to really see it, absent my expectations. There’s something to be learned from that.

The healthy heart-wood of the stump left-behind, quite evenly cut, about 18 inches from the ground, tells me it was not lost to misadventure or high winds. Willful. Probably well-intended. I feel sad about it anyway, thinking about the owl that had been making her home there. The squirrels using it as a freeway ramp to the tree nearer the deck. The loss of privacy from neighbors beyond. Just… the loss of a tree. It’s painful. Oh, I’m sure a dead tree just hanging out there on the steep edge of the yard, where it suddenly drops off just past the fence, was a hazard of some sort, to something, but… fucking hell. I’m getting a little sick of people just taking my fucking trees away every-fucking-where that I move. Irksome.

There’s much to learn from contemplating this change. Trees fall. Trees are cut. Impermanence is. Non-attachment helps with the pain of circumstantial misfortunes. We have choices. Trees can be planted. Trees sprout. Trees grow.

I sip a delicious afternoon coffee – a perk of having a 3-day weekend, afternoon coffee always feels like luxury to me. 🙂 I contemplate impermanence, and change – and choices. I think about seeing. I mean, really seeing – eyes and mind both open to what may be new and changed. I contemplate acceptance; change can be hard. Recognizing what has changed is not without it’s own challenges. I breathe. Relax, and consider what I am practicing, and what I want to achieve. I think over conversations with my Traveling Partner; this last visit was rich with thought-provoking, inspiring, observations, and discussion. Connected. Insightful. Loving.

We become what we practice. (Remember, “trees take a long time” 😉 )

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Despair, forgiveness, Free Will, Frustration, gardening, grief, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, winter

It’s Not Enough to Find Your Joy

January 19, 2019 //
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Once you “find your joy”, don’t forget to enjoy it. To explore it. To lavish yourself with the experience of it. Work toward it with purpose – fearless, guiltless, and without shame.

For me, it’s time to blur the line between art and self-reflection, and spend some time creatively, and in my own head (and heart).

This weekend I’ll be in the studio. Maybe I write, maybe I don’t. I’m feeling inspired by love, and deeply appreciative of a mature partnership that allows me to choose me, to choose us, to choose him; no wrong answers. We consider each other. We reciprocate. I feel more loved, and valued, than I’ve experienced in other intimate relationships, with the exception of a few rare very deep connected friendships of long-standing, and I want to celebrate this experience of being deeply loved. Love hasn’t always been my inspiration – I found love later in life.

Inspiration deserves action, and I certainly deserve to treat the woman in the mirror well, and nurture her creative side. 🙂 Choices.

I’ll see you right here, in a few days. There’s a canvas on my easel, and I earnestly need to begin again. 🙂

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Categories Allegories, Art, art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, winter, Words
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