Archives for posts with tag: being and becoming
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Only an Egg

July 17, 2014 //
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I’m sitting here staring into the monitor. My espresso slowly going cold. Looking a blank title bar, just sort of stalled in mid-thought. “Speechless” – first thing in the morning? That’s rare for me. My dreams often fill my thoughts and kick off my writing at the start of my day. Other times, I wake still considering something that troubled me the day before. Sometimes I wake with a sensation or emotion that seems to drive my experience and inspire me, or the studying, reading, email, or yoga do the that, instead. This morning? I am sitting here, staring into a title bar – with no title. That’s generally where I begin, the focal point of what is to come – a title. Not this morning. Could be the product of the short night; it was past midnight before I slept, and I woke again at 3:00 am.

I finally type ‘TBD’ into the title bar, and jot a quick reminder to myself to connect with a librarian friend of mine and get some remedial schooling on semicolons and quotation marks. I suspect I’ve gone far astray of whatever rules may exist – and I do want people to read my words with some comfort and a sense of familiarity, with my punctuation and syntax if nothing else.

It has been an oddly difficult week. I’ve certainly been having my own experience. The OPD [Other People’s Drama]  levels in life seem pretty high, lately, too. Funny thing…a partner returned home from a recent event, and shared a short story someone cool had shared with him. The Egg, by Andy Weir. I was incredibly moved. It seemed very consistent with threads of ideas that already exist in my contemplation of what is, and what isn’t, and maybe why. He shared it with me almost shyly, I consumed it with great delight; I was moved. I was moved as much by the sharing, and the tenderness in that gesture, as the I was by the story – and that’s saying something.

I am just finishing off a re-reading of Stranger in a Strange Land.  An interesting connection, a thread of coincidence and meaning exists; throughout the book the main character, Valentine Michael Smith ‘The Man from Mars’ refers to himself as ‘only an egg’ in moments of doubt, troubling curiosity, and confusion. It’s a pretty powerful book, and at one time highly controversial. I suspect most people who read it get hung up on the representation of poly amorous love, or being affronted by perceived religious blasphemies, and miss some of the other insights and profundities. On this particular read through, I am far less interested in those portions of the plot than I am in hints and references to mindfulness, perspective, sufficiency and choice. This is a book that says a lot about free will, accountability and consequences, but I doubt most people reading it notice those elements; it is also an amazing story.

I’ve been eager to hear about my partner’s festival weekend, and realize with a touch of sadness that he’s had basically no chance to really share his traveler’s tales with me. Today he leaves to spend a few days with a cherished friend, doing meaningful things and taking time out to take care of needs of his own. We take few opportunities to actually ‘miss each other’, love is amazing stuff and we enjoy each other’s company greatly. There is growth and healing and progress in also taking time for the things we love that we don’t share, or don’t do together, and these things are also part of who we are. I’ll miss him, and when he returns I will eagerly listen to his tales of adventure. As I think on it, I realize he’s probably in the same situation; we haven’t actually had much in the way of conversation about what we did with our time, and what our experiences were, while we were doing our thing last weekend. I’d ask ‘where has the time gone?’ but I know the answer to that one; the minutes, hours, and days of a lifetime wasted on OPD can’t be calculated easily, but drama is as time consuming as child-rearing is costly.

Walking my own path.

Walking my own path.

So. A few quiet days without this being who is so dear to me; the world with benefit from his time with others, no doubt so will he. I will focus on taking care of me, studying, meditation, asking questions, and living quiet life, content and productive, and becoming the woman I most want to be. Today is a very good day to change the world.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, women, Words

New and Improved

June 12, 2014 //
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Well, or something like that; it’s my birthday. I make rather a big deal of some of them, less so of others, this one has been a strange wobbly roller coaster ride of achievement, change and the passage of time.  51 isn’t generally one of the ‘milestone birthdays’.  51 isn’t even cool enough to be a prime number birthday. It’s just… a year older than 50. 🙂

To be fair, 50 kicked ass in so many ways, how could 51 really challenge it on the very first day? So, we’ll keep things simple; dinner after I get home from work, a restaurant I like and consider a bit of a treat, and near enough to home that it won’t be a ludicrously late night. Sleep matters to my well-being and good cognition; 50 taught me a lot. I reached greedily for change, and learned a lot about choice, will, and love. I spent much of the year deeply invested in study and growth, and standing on the doorstep of 51, I feel a sense of purpose, and find that I have goals of my own that matter enough to build my life around them, to make my choices consistent with those desires on a daily basis, and to be willing to lean on those goals a little bit now and then and say ‘hey, I missed the mark here, I’d like to do this one differently…’. The occasional ‘course correction’ or adjustment in everyday trajectory feels less disruptive than it once did, generally. I am, overall, less stressed out, generally less confused, mostly more chill, and rarely deeply unhappy – only briefly, now and then.  It’s been a good year for change.

So…here I am. 51. As with most birthdays, it really doesn’t feel any different than 50 did, yesterday.  I’m okay with that.  Every day is a new experience, and it isn’t about age. Age and aging just don’t seem to be the Very Big Deal people so often make them out to be.  Yesterday I enjoyed a video that proves that point.  I’ve started hiking again, myself. I still work in my garden. I manage about 5 miles a day on foot during the week and yoga every day.  I feel pretty good, in spite of pain.  I feel strong and capable. Hell, I feel more beautiful at 51 than I felt at 20, and the photographs support that, mostly because the pained and tense, vaguely angry look on my face at 20 was off-putting, to say the least. At 51, I am smiling, joyful, and generally delighted with life and love. 51 is a very nice place to be in life.

Here’s to life and love and 51! Today is a good day to celebrate life. Today is a good day to enjoy love and work and growth and the small delights that keep things fun. Today is a good day to enjoy the world.

Where will my path take me?

Where will my path take me?

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, women, Words

I’m Positive

March 19, 2014 //
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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

Lovely Blossoms

As beautiful up close as from afar.

As beautiful up close as from afar.

Cherry blossoms? Maybe, or some other fruit tree. A spring favorite.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, women, Words

Love, Me

March 18, 2014 //
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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.  

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

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.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, women, Words

Do You Know, Or…

March 18, 2014 //
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…Do you wonder?

This morning I’m musing about ‘certainty’ and ‘being right’ and ‘knowing’. I can remember a time when the lynch-pin holding my understanding of the world together was a sense of certainty, a willingness to ascribe immutability to some characteristic or another, or render some past event ‘precise’ or ‘exact’ with a level of reliability that I no longer think I can accept as a given. I needed, then, to be utterly able to ‘defend my point’ and sway others to ‘my side’. It gave me a powerful boost to ‘win’ arguments. I’m not so sure of things now.  I’m wrong too much. lol I let go of ‘being right. Doing so is a comfortable fit for where I am in life, and since I feel pretty good most of the time, and pretty calm, I’m willing to have it be what it seems now, and let it go there. Uncertainty is okay with me. Relativity seems alright, too. Perspective has a tendency to clear things up in time, with consideration, and a sense of wonder, and doesn’t piss as many people off, or distance them.

I don’t need to be ‘right’.

Interestingly, that ‘need’ to ‘be right’ has been a big driver of lifelong discontent, dissatisfaction, resentment, anger, hostility, and frustration, as well as a whole host of associated unpleasant behavior that wasn’t any less unpleasant, or any more tolerable or acceptable, because I didn’t actually understand how unacceptable or unpleasant those behaviors were. What we understand, as individuals, doesn’t change the world around us, doesn’t change ‘the facts’ of reality itself. What we understand colors our own experience, changes what we recognize our choices to be, gives us context in which to define our behavior, words with which to describe our experience, but does not change the reality of it. What we understand changes what we think about who we are, but it doesn’t change the experience others have with us.  The whole notion of ‘being right’ is a sort of ‘us vs. them’ scenario we play out in our heads, generally to regain control or enforce boundaries, set limits, or force another person to conform to our understanding of things, for our own security or personal gain.

I gave up on being right awhile ago. It’s not that I’m ‘always wrong’, or that errors in thinking or decision-making plague me more than others. My perspective on this is more that being right is entirely irrelevant to contentment, joy, love… beautiful experiences to have or to share. An urgent need to ‘be right’ can throw a bucket of icy water on a lot of loving and warm circumstances. I’ve found that where ‘right’ is relevant at all, whether someone else recognizes that I am ‘right’ is utterly irrelevant to my own experience, or ‘the true truth’ or the facts or reality of …whatever. Seriously. I was able to entirely give up on feeding a need to be right – because it frankly doesn’t actually matter even a little bit. I laughed with delight and wide-eyed wonder when I realized it.

Illumination

Illumination

These days, the only time I press even a bit if I sense I am ‘right’ about something and in disagreement with someone else is when I see legitimate potential for bodily harm, or an obvious safety hazard. The rest of the time? Yeah – if you’re sure you’re right, go ahead and enjoy that. I’ve no need to argue the point, and your perspective differing from mine has no effect on me whatsoever. Arguing never made me feel happy, or gave me any pleasure, although it sometimes provided me a connection to another person that was based on emotional content; how sad when we seek and find our emotional connections through confrontation, instead of intimacy.

A trick of the light...

A trick of the light…

It gets sticky here, though… because letting go of being right is something I think I am right about! What a delightful joke on me. But, just as a trick of the light doesn’t actually alter the thing I see, even this bit of paradox doesn’t actually alter my experience; being right has let me down many times. Discovering that it doesn’t actually matter to me whether I am right or not, and that ‘being right’ is one of the least valuable or relevant details of any experience, has been eye-opening, and allowed me to learn/grow more and faster. I guess it makes some basic sense – what we ‘know’ impedes learning what we don’t know, because learning something requires that we accept that we lack knowledge.

Today is a good day to be a student. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Words
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