Today has been entirely enough. There will be more to say another time. For now, I am enjoying sufficiency, and solitude, and the calm stillness of sand, and sea and sunshine, and ‘enough’.
One perspective.
I woke with a headache, still managing to be eager to face my journey – both metaphysical, and geographical; I’m headed to the coast.
Sky, sand, and a distant horizon.
There’s something about being on the shore of the ocean, either ocean really, but the one on the left side is easier to reach at the present. I’ll take a few days, celebrate the changing season, walk, meditate, write, do some yoga on the beach and not notice that I’m not a lean hard-bodied yogi under 30 all strong core, tan skin, and toned muscles; it’ll feel amazing. There is so much living that is not about appearances at all, however cool it looks in a photograph.
I will write; I am hoping to finish a manuscript. I will meditate – at this point that goes without saying (lol). I will take some pictures and enjoy capturing the world through a camera lens, while I contemplate the way I view it through the less well-defined lens of my own experience, through my all-to-human eyes.
The headache is nothing much to bother with, I think I am a tad dehydrated, and I’m alternating water and coffee this morning to get past it. It astounds me what a huge piece ‘taking care of me’ a simple drink of water is! I pause for a moment to reflect what an advancement clean drinking water is, and how many people in the world don’t have even that most basic of resources readily available in the 21st century.
Today is a good day to make a journey. Today is a good day to be kind. Today is a good day to treat myself well, and enjoy the moment. Today is a good day to change the world.
Today is the Vernal Equinox. Yes, I always capitalize that. 🙂 What could be more worth celebrating that the changing of seasons? Certainly worthy of a capital letter or two.
Nothing else needs to be said – Spring says all she must without words.
Welcome, Spring! I know you won’t stay as long as I’d like before Summer crowds you out with more rambunctious fun, but we’ll have fun while you’re here. 🙂
Today is a good day to smile, a good day to pause for flowers, for funny stories, for a moment with a friend. Today is a good day to change the world.
Interestingly – I actually am ‘positive’. I’m not sure when I got here. I was once a pretty negative, cynical woman whose sense of humor was largely based on the humor of disappointment, the humor of bitterness, and the humor of ‘whistling in the dark’. A ‘can do attitude’ was, at that time, based more on ‘because it just has to be done’, than the more common ‘because I can’ I bring to my days now. It is a pleasant change to be here, now. I look forward to things because they will be worth experiencing, or attaining, or simply because they are ahead of me, rather than with a dreadful certainty that ‘the fantasy is better than the reality’.
Then there’s Spring.
Lovely Blossoms
As beautiful up close as from afar.
Cherry blossoms? Maybe, or some other fruit tree. A spring favorite.
Yesterday, most of my meetings were held beneath the graceful branches of flowering trees.
I’m rarely too rushed, these days, to pause for flowers.
This morning, what else really needs to be said? Insufficient sleep, but what I got was good. The remains of a short work week still facing me, and so little drama at work that all I am is eager to swat the alarm clock Friday morning and head to the coast for a weekend of meditating, writing, sketching, and taking pictures; without even a hint of reluctance to take on the work days between me and the coast.
It’s Spring. Love is. Today is a good day.
I have a beautiful spring weekend on the coast planned, to be spent in a ‘spa cottage’ a block from the beach, in a community more village than town, small, intimate, friendly. Time planned for stillness, for tenderness, for meditation, yoga, and long conversations with a new love. It sounds wonderfully romantic.
Oh, to be sure, this love of mine has been part of my life for years, a timeless measure of time that feels like ‘always’. ‘New love’ hardly describes the chronology of our life together… but somehow, I have been remiss where love is concerned. Blind? To be sure; blind to her needs, her heart, even her beauty. Deaf to her words, her poetry, and that creative spark that makes her so much of who she is. I’ve been so hard on her, for so long. So often forcing to her scream what could have been whispered. I’m very fortunate that she stuck it out long enough to see me turn toward her loveliness with real affection in my eyes. I’m very sorry she had to wait so long. Â
She will probably always seem about 22 to me; frozen in memory at that pinnacle of youthful beauty we each achieve, so often unnoticed until it has passed by. I have a photograph of her, then, dark-haired, fair, eyes-closed, thoughtful, mouth relaxed, she is calm and quiet; she is in a bubble bath, photographed on the sly, unaware of the subtle intrusion on her precious privacy.
22
I know so much about her, and until I realized how much love there is between us, I didn’t realize how little that knowledge meant for understanding her. Still, I know things. I know she thinks she’s fat. She struggles to ‘feel heard’ but doesn’t have words for her frustration, and too many for everything else. She rarely sheds tears, and when she succumbs to ‘crying’ it is often wordless, soundless, stuck like a scream frozen on a paused movie, that becomes garbled vocalizations of fury or terror through the force of her will. She yields to her animal nature as if forced, as though there might be something to prove, and perhaps in the proof she might find something like a soul; being too near her heat, her passion, her childish rage is hard to bear. I berate her for her impulsiveness and resent her lack of control. So often I have wanted to comfort her – or beat the hell out of her; unable to choose, I would choose instead to silence her, or leave her in pieces, alone. I did not want to believe she needed to be cared for; so often tenderness seemed the only thing that could move her to tears, at all. I know she doesn’t like to be touched by strangers, and doesn’t distinguish between sex and love; she says “love is a fraud, but sex is something I can feel’.  I know how she really feels when she says it. I know about her pain. I know she has a lifetime ahead of her, and finding her way will likely take all of it.
I know she doesn’t know how much she will survive, or how much she will change, in the years ahead of her in that photo.
Complicated, broken, she means the world to me now, and I wonder what I could do to ‘make it all up to her’ somehow. A quiet spring weekend at the coast, the luxury of being utterly heard, cared for, attended to – it’s just a down payment on a very large debt. She’s stuck it out with me, you see. It wasn’t ever certain that she would.
This weekend I’ll take the trip to the coast, for some solo time, getting to know this woman I love, hearing her stories anew, with compassion, and patience – I know she needs that from me. We’ve come a long way together, this me-of-22, and I. It’s been ugly, and more than once seemed at the edge of what could be suffered. It’s time we got together over a coffee or two, and really shared now together; there are things she never knew, that I’d like to share with her – like my love.
Evening Light 