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It’ll Be a Walk in the Park

November 3, 2015 //
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I am enjoying having my preferred route to work [on foot] through the park back. I don’t think I understood how much it matters to my experience – my commute, generally, I mean. It is more than simply a means of arriving at work on time that is more pleasant than the harrowing commuter traffic on the roads at rush hour; in principle I have nothing against long commutes, and I have had quite a few. Time and again in life I have returned to the experience of being close enough to walk to work, and found it to be a more satisfying experience on a number of levels. It makes a difference where that walk takes me, though, and this is something I had not understood with sufficient clarity before this experience of having a walk I greatly enjoy taken from me for some time, and then returned to me. I have more information (about me) and deeper perspective (on how I enjoy my experience and what matters most to me).

Walking a favorite path.

Walking a favorite path.

I find that the walk itself is very productive cognitive time, whether I spend it meditating, problem solving, or day dreaming. It always feels ‘fast enough’, too, even on days when I am frequently distracted by things I see and want to take a picture along the way. In spite of feeling fast enough, it doesn’t feel rushed, or hurried; it’s actually pretty difficult to rush myself, or feel hurried, on foot. When I am walking from place to place, the world must wait for me. That’s a pace I can comfortably sustain – for a lifetime.

Beauty, perspective, and a few moments to think.

Beauty, perspective, and a few moments to think.

I took my time today, and I have treated myself well. Gently. With great respect, appreciation, and tenderness – and why not? I do so much for me! Besides, I’m right here, every day, handy for helping out with the ongoing process of learning to treat others truly well, also. I practice on me – because I’m certainly worthy of my best care (without me, where would I be?). It’s been a lovely day, and after a chilly walk home on a crisp autumn evening, a hot shower was quite splendid – far beyond what a few minutes of soap and warm water are generally expected to be, honestly. The apartment is warming up; I smile reminded that my traveling partner was right about the thermostat and happy that I already ordered it. Dinner next, that seems sensible.

As I sit and write, music in the background, I pause to reflect for a moment on how much more natural so many small basic self-care things feel now. Almost easy. I chuckle silently; I know from experience that if I stop practicing some good practice or another, however worthy and helpful, the habit of it will quickly be extinguished (thanks, TBI!), and I might even forget it had been a useful practice – maybe, just maybe, being reminded somehow, some time later, that it had been something I used to do I could then begin again. lol I keep practicing practices – and incremental change over time continues. My emotional quality of life is considerably improved over two years ago, and even my physical health seems more reliably good, much of the time. It’s a chilly autumn evening, and life is more good than bad – and I am content more often than I am not. That’s a nice bit of improvement right there. 🙂

I smile, thinking of things and people, and experiencing a tender moment of… ‘global well-wishing’? Something like that. It’s a nice evening to treat myself well. If you were here with me, I would treat you well, too. Why not?

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Jazz and Memories

November 2, 2015 //
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The work day slipped by after a good night’s sleep, wedged carelessly between two lovely walks through the park, and followed quickly by an intimate evening spent in the company of my traveling partner. My experience of the day, summarized in a single sentence. The day was so much more than words can easily describe. I generally reach for more words to try to achieve the thing… Tonight isn’t about that.

Now is a good time for love.

Now is a good time for love.

I am listening to jazz, boiling water for tea, and smiling. I don’t need more than this moment, here, feeling connected, and buoyed by the shared experience of loving and being loved in return. I can’t say this is ‘enough’ – it’s ever so much more than that. “Enough” I can generally manage on my own – love is this whole other thing entirely, and shared it has a depth and sweetness I don’t have words for at all. Relaxing in the warm glow of evening light, and love, I’ll just enjoy some jazz, and some memories…brand new, as yet unsavored… and yeah, that’s enough. (More than enough.)

It’s a good evening to be love. The words aren’t what matter most.

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5

A Walk in the Park

October 30, 2015 //
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Friday could not come soon enough, although peculiarly, and as anxious as I’ve been in the office, it’s never been actually straight up bad, and often quite a bit less bothersome than I seemed to have set myself up to expect. I’d say it’s weird, but the truth is simply that we are each having our own experience, each possessing free will, each making different assumptions, and communicating from ever so slightly different dictionaries than each other moment-to-moment – and to make things just that much more fun, if we’re all seeking growth, and investing in what we want of the future, we show up each day as a very slightly completely different person than we were the day before – and don’t really realize it, and it doesn’t necessarily show to anyone else, either. How odd. The week ended rather suddenly and without much fuss.

As I left the building, peering into sodden gray skies likely to drip a few drops on me as I walked home, I recalled a team-mate commenting that the park bridge is open again, and that I would be able to “take the shortcut through the park” (it’s not a shortcut – it’s a longer walk, but more scenic, and definitely feels shorter). I took a deep breath, and walked on.

I pause at the top of the hill, excited to cross the new bridge. Is it silly to be excited about something so mundane?

I pause at the top of the hill, excited to cross the new bridge. Is it silly to be excited about something so mundane?

I take my time approaching the bridge, savoring the experience of the excitement and anticipation, and filling my senses with the prolonged yearning I had been experiencing in the background every day, waiting to resume my pleasant walks through the park each day. I make a point of lingering in this positive moment, and really feeling the joy of it.

As with much of Oregon these days, the bridge is higher.

As with much of Oregon these days, the bridge is higher.

I approach the bridge, eager to see the changes. The bridge has been elevated, which is a very good thing since many prior years the creek rose enough to swamp the bridge and make it impassable. I will be walking over this bridge all winter. I notice the very sturdy sides and rails, the closely spaced deck, and that the deck is not actually wood – some sort of durable plastic or composite material, it seems to shed water, and is not slick to walk upon even in the rain. Nice.

I cross the bridge; it feels like a moment.

I cross the bridge; it feels like a moment with significance.

I walk over the bridge, stand awhile in the center watching the water flow by sluggishly. This is not a fast-moving creek; there are many snags and places where nutria or beavers have felled trees and dammed the flow. I hear frogs peeping, and ducks quacking. I find myself wondering why “quacking” exactly? I don’t hear ‘quack’… I hear something more like… ‘gronk’. lol I walk over the bridge and startle a very auburn squirrel who was preparing to cross in the other direction. I reach the intersection of paths that decides whether this is a ‘short cut’ or not – turning right, and it shaves about 7 minutes off my walk, compared to taking the main road, but if I turn left (my preference) it takes me wandering through the park for about the same distance as the walk already was – definitely not a shortcut in miles, but how do I communicate that it feels like a shortcut… to my sanity?

Of course I turn left.

Of course I turn left…just up there…

Where does the path lead? Through the park, and into the evening, relaxed at home, and comfortable – and not even a little bit mad about seeing every square foot of sidewalk along the front of my building entirely inaccessible (having been torn out, replaced, and recently finished, it is not available for foot traffic yet). Nope, doesn’t matter. I carefully pick my way through the mud to the mailbox, and then back to the apartment, and taking my muddy shoes off before I step onto the carpet. I’m home.

I don’t know how or why it would make so much difference just to lose the walk through the park, but getting it back definitely made my evening, tonight. Dinner is cooking, and it seems a fine evening for something fun – a favorite animation, perhaps, or some game time? A movie? Fun and games matter too. It’s Friday night, and I’m taking care of me. It’s enough. 🙂

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

This is Real, This is Mine

October 16, 2015 //
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I’m not bragging – I’m just saying, this is a lovely moment right here, and it’s authentic, and warm, and it is built on the choices I have made in life, and in the recent moments just concluded; it’s mine and I get to keep it. It is my experiences that are my measure of wealth – and self – and they can’t be faked or stolen. I am.

I am floating, uplifted, and for the moment utterly transcendent. I fucking love Love.  Just dinner out and a drive through the countryside with my traveling partner’s masterful hand at the wheel, laughing and talking and singing along with a favorite song together. It wasn’t an exotic or expensive night out; we don’t need it like that to feel loved and cared for in each other’s arms. Great conversation built this relationship we share, and great conversation – intimate, vulnerable, connected, open and real – is what sustains it. I have never loved like this, so deeply, so easily – and we’re not even talking about the sex. By comparison, the sex almost doesn’t matter – and if you knew me ‘in the flesh’ (lol) you would know how significant it is that these words come from me. We are just so right together. Even when we fail – we win. Tonight was all win and good.

This isn’t about good moods or bad moods – and I’m in a lot of pain this evening. I’m tired from the long fairly intense week at work. I’m feeling the ups and downs of acknowledging the pain and fatigue, mingling with the eagerness to see the dawn for a weekend trip to the coast, and this fully saturated feeling of love and connection. I’m not crazy and I’m not making excuses – I feel.  I feel a lot, and I feel pretty intensely, and I’m not always sure this fragile vessel can hold the contents of my heart in some moment or another – and I’m okay. This, right here, feels like an ‘everything is going to be okay’ moment on some other level…  Is it ‘just’ the love, ‘just’ the connection…or is it absolutely and entirely always about the love, always about the connection – on some level, with some soul (even if my own, with myself)?

My life could use more hugs and more eye contact, more cuddling, and more connection. That may easily be the most true thing I have ever put into words about life. Any life. Tonight I am smiling. I am grateful. I am loved. Love doesn’t need me to wait around for it, either; there is a wide world on the other side of my door, and it is filled with people who love, and yearn to be loved in return. Have you ever had that experience when the day is difficult, but some unexpected conversation with a stranger turns it around? I definitely want to have more of those. lol

I’m just saying – lonely is a thing, and there are practices for that, too. If I could just stand right here in life, feeling wrapped in love, secure, satisfied, content – motionless in this moment – I might not need to understand loneliness. I am so human… I am amused, for the moment, that some things about loneliness seem more obvious from this entirely different and not at all lonely perspective. Is that strange? When I feel loved, I am more able to love. There’s a lesson there. I will contemplate it tomorrow as I walk the beach, a solitary figure – alone, but not lonely, and very much loved.

Be love.

Be love.

I am rambling, and disrupted – but not in a bad way. I am moved. 🙂

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Now

October 7, 2015 //
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The evening is a quiet one. I arrived home at the end of a busy day with a headache, which has slowly become irrelevant, ignored in the background; my back aches much more. All evening my awareness has bounced between the two. I laid down for a while with the headache. The backache got me up some time later. Yoga eased the backache somewhat. The headache became more prominent. I had a bite of dinner, and meditated later, and found that my headache was substantially eased. I am now most aware of the backache. I’m not bitching, just noticing, being aware, and taking time to monitor these states without judgment, providing myself with whatever symptomatic relief is available, and doing what I can to make the most of the evening nonetheless. It’s a lovely quiet one.

I am enjoying the evening doing quiet things, and making a point to embrace the softer sounds, and the peaceful stillness. It is rare for things to be so entirely quiet, and I find myself wondering if it is the new windows; I don’t hear the traffic. The wall clock in the kitchen, a recent addition, ticks off the seconds quite audibly. It wasn’t long ago I would not have been able to bear the ceaseless ticking reminding me of time slipping away…precious…finite… The quiet tick-tick-tick no longer resonates with finality. It’s just a quiet tick that indicates nothing more or less than the movement, in increments, of the second-hand on a man-made mechanical device that measures time in arbitrarily selected units devised by human beings for record-keeping, communication, and convenience. That quiet ticking has no relevance to my subjective experience of time. The clock does not control me. It’s a nice feeling… I don’t know when I got here. (I wasn’t watching a clock at the time, I guess. lol)

I find myself favoring a different approach to time than I did when I was younger. Relative to subjective experience in the moment, the only time that is ‘finite’ is the time that has already happened, and become ‘the past’; my future, as yet uncreated and only imagined, is entirely infinite and limited only by my imagination itself… And my present? Also infinite – infinitely now – and utterly continuous, and also a series of tiny singular moments that quickly become experienced, and past. In my thinking of it, time isn’t so different from light…sometimes a wave…sometimes particles…sometimes science…sometimes poetry. I mean, sure, I am mortal (as far as I know) and someday I’ll die – I guess at that point I will, myself, pass from the present and into the past, but from my perspective, what then? Will I even continue to know time? I have no particular thoughts on the subject of ‘things after death’, and no answers, no conclusions, no expectations, or assumptions; I am comfortable with accepting that there are both things that are known and things that are unknown…about most things.

I didn’t have any particular notions when I sat down to write. It’s hard to think past this headache, even to notice the ticking clock. Oh, hey. The headache is back. The backache isn’t so bad, though; this chair is pretty comfortable backache-wise.

What time is love?

What time is love?

I find myself just sitting, fingers poised over the keyboard, thinking over my recent conversations with my traveling partner, and feeling secure, compassionate, understanding, and very much in love. For a few minutes neither the headache nor the backache have much to say to me, while love fills my thoughts. I smile, half wondering how is it that I love this particular human being so very much, the way I do? I am not concerned with troubleshooting love.  I am grateful to enjoy any measure of sentiment so profound; it’s a complicated journey, and the good bits are so splendid in good company – the bad bits far easier to endure when shared. I noticed time passing at some point. It wasn’t the clock; my traveling partner hits send on a moment of love on his end, and my reverie ends with a smile renewed when I see the emoji pop up, a brief distraction that is no distraction at all. Love comes first.

Be love, if you can, I remind myself; it’s enough.

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words
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