The wheel keeps turning. The clock keeps ticking. The going around keeps going around, and the coming around seems slow to arrive, but inevitably will come around. The grains of sand in our mortal hourglass keep trickling away. It is another new day, another new week, and another series of imminent moments to live, to savor, and to remember later.
… What will you do with your finite precious moments, today….?
Me? I’m starting with a walk. The trail is dark, and it rained through the night. The neighborhood that surrounds this trail is quiet. The darkness is illuminated by occasional lights, and the quiet is interrupted by the distant hum and whir of HVAC systems. Humanity exists here. I sigh and keep walking. “Peace and quiet” is relative, I guess.
I slept well and deeply. The weekend of much needed rest was a worthwhile deviation from more typical weekends, when I commonly swap “gainful employment” for the greatly appreciated, but wholly unpaid, domestic labor of errand running, housekeeping, grocery shopping, and caregiving. I’m both grateful and relieved that my Traveling Partner needs so little caregiving now, at all. As his capabilities around the house with day-to-day tasks continue to improve, my ability to cover “everything else” (more or less, most of the time) also improves. The shared effort is a quality of life improvement, and made it possible to just set stuff aside this past weekend and relax. I can’t easily describe how much more rested and able to focus I feel this morning. I definitely needed that restful time.
I breathe, exhale, and relax, smiling to myself and enjoy the lingering feeling of being loved.
The world looks different before daybreak.
I walked the wet trail carefully in the darkness. It is slick with wet leaves, and dotted with puddles. I playfully stomp through a puddle or two before a grown up sense of safety vs hazards catches up with my sense of whimsy. I slip, just once, nearly falling because I carelessly stomped a puddle that was full of slippery leaves. I catch myself, feeling a brief moment of embarrassment, although I’m alone on the trail this morning.
I get to my halfway point and stop to take in the scene, rest a moment, write and meditate. It has become a cherished routine. It begins to rain, softly, and I am grateful for the tree cover that keeps me mostly dry. Chilly morning, too, I think to myself. I’m grateful for the fleece over my sweater, and its warm deep pockets.
… Monday…
I’ve got no particular sorrow or stress over a Monday, these days. A work day is a work day. I smile in the darkness. I sit enjoying the moment. I’m ready for whatever is next, as the wheel continues to turn. I’m ready to begin again.
The days have been sort of tumbling by in a blur. Some days I am so thoroughly exhausted by day’s end, I fall into bed feeling spent, and sleep overtakes me quickly. Other days, I make it to the end with enough left in the tank to prepare a pleasant meal, and even to enjoy it, and clean up afterwards. Regardless, and seemingly without any direct connection to my relative state of fatigue, I’m looking back on this blur of days and nights. The feeling of constantly scrambling to gain traction on a slick floor, or of treading water in the dark, describes it best, I guess.
I sigh to myself as I walk this trail in the darkness. Walking in the dark isn’t my preference, but it’s the time I have for it. Not walking isn’t an acceptable option (for me, in my opinion). There’s a metaphor in that, or perhaps a lesson.
I get to my halfway point before daybreak. No surprise there; I got an early start. My left hip aches, and it feels like arthritis pain. I frown to myself. I guess it could be worse. I distract myself , to avoid dwelling on pain. It isn’t helpful (at all) to let my pain occupy my mental space for long. Giving it that much attention tends to make it feel worse. I breathe, exhale, and relax, and redirect my attention to the strangely pink night sky. The clouds are illuminated by the community below, in the distance… but why pink? I think about it pointlessly awhile longer. A snapshot taken with my cellphone does not capture what my eyes think they see. There’s probably something worth reflecting upon in that experience, too.
…The pain I’m in persists in distracting me. I persist in letting that go…
I can’t make myself look at the news today. It’s not worth the stress to be informed about the latest new way our government has found to cause needless suffering, or to find out how else government insiders and Trump cronies are picking our pockets to fill their own bank accounts. I don’t need to be told that another billionaire grifter or criminal has been pardoned; this is the era we are living in. It’s pretty fucking horrible. Reading more details about the same old shit doesn’t make it easier to accept – and not reading about it doesn’t stop the terrible degradation of our democracy, as it spirals into authoritarianism. If you have the means, it’s probably a good time to get out, and go somewhere safer.
I sigh again, and realize I was holding my breath – or at least not breathing. I sit for a few minutes, just breathing, and focused on my breath. It is too easy to let shit get to me, to let the stress and anxiety seep into my consciousness and wreck my mood. I inhale the mild autumn air, filling my lungs with it. I exhale, and let the stress leave my body along with my breath. No, it’s not “easy”, but it is a practice that can be practiced, and with practice it becomes easier over time. After some while, it becomes really effective. (Think in terms of months and years of practice, though, not minutes.)
I meditate, watching the treeline for the first hint of daybreak. I breathe, exhale, and relax, holding myself in this present moment. At least for now, there’s just this timeless moment of presence. I’m okay with that, it’s a pleasant moment, and for now I feel easy, and my heart is light.
Over the past 12 years of this blog, I’ve come so very far! I’m grateful. I’m not certain I could have endured the world as it is, where I was with myself, then. I was thoroughly mired in chaos and damage, and there was a long journey ahead of me before that would change in a notable way. I took it in steps, though, and I just kept at it, practicing practices, and walking my own path. I’ve learned some things along the way, about life, about love, and about finding meaning and a life worth living. It has been very much worth it.
So, no doom scrolling this morning, no news feed, just a woman, a trail, and a moment of pleasant solitude before dawn on an autumn Friday morning. Later, there is work to do, and there are errands to run. I’ll do my best with all of that, and that will have to be enough. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the moment I’m in. Later, I’ll begin again.
I’m grateful for this pleasant moment, here, now… It’s enough.
I walked through the early morning darkness alone with my thoughts. It’s a chilly autumn morning, and I’m glad I wore a heavy sweater. I am thinking about a recent demonstration that I found to illustrate a lasting concern I’ve had for awhile now. I’m not alone with this, a lot of people are concerned, though little is likely to be done.
…No, I don’t mean the wildly popular, well-attended, nationwide No Kings demonstrations over the weekend. Powerfully illustrative, no doubt, but not the thing on my mind. This other is… bigger. Deeper. Impacts more of the global society of humanity, and may be a warning of worse to come – things we’re not prepared for.
From Downdetector, around midmorning Pacific time.
I’m thinking about the AWS outage, yesterday. So many people and businesses now store data on, use services hosted by, or route traffic through AWS that the outage (which lasted many hours and disrupted many businesses and financial institutions) ground business to a halt in many places. A broad variety of services stopped operating. Companies whose support teams use browser-based digital communication tools suddenly couldn’t support the customer inquiries that were queuing up. Teams and individuals couldn’t get work done. Frustrated consumers unaware that this or that business now exclusively uses AWS for hosting and data storage became unable to function in the 21st century world of online everything.
Pretty wild that in such circumstances people so easily find themselves halted. Really? Do something else. Something real. Read a book. Go for a walk. Get some chores done. Leave the chaos to the engineers and devs who got this hot potato dropped into their laps in the wee hours, and get on with your actual life, damn. “Shit’s down, bitches! Let’s go outside.”
I laugh now, but I’m also concerned. Don’t we all have more to do in the real spaces of the actual physical world than anything online? Aren’t the precious few mortal moments we have in these finite lives worth more attention from us? Do we really “need” an online app to meditate? To read? To enjoy a coffee with a friend? To walk a lovely trail on an autumn morning? We are, perhaps, overly dependent on digital bullshit.
Before dawn, darkness and distant light.
I walked with my thoughts, and took a seat in the darkness, shortly before daybreak, to write and meditate. Nice morning. I’m not so exhausted, today. I definitely needed some rest, and it was a good choice to go to bed early last night. I woke ahead of my alarm this morning to the soft sound of my Traveling Partner calling out to me, “Baby?”, as if checking whether I was awake, or trying to get my attention. The house was dark and quiet and there was no sign my beloved was actually awake, at all. Probably just an “exploding head” sort of dream, although of a very gentle sort. Not uncommon, for me. These no longer cause me any stress; it’s just a dream.
Being awake, I got up and started the day, and here I am.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. Life. The autumn air is chilly and fresh. There is a mist clinging to the ground in the low places. The world is quiet, at least right here. Right here, now, I am indifferent to whether any given tech platform or app works, and I don’t much care about the clown show of American politics. I’m just a woman on a trail, on an autumn morning before sunrise. It is an experience that needs no app, and no connectivity. Fine by me. 😂
… What would you do if it all crashed, and didn’t come back? If you lost the Internet, could you still reach the people who truly matter to you? Would you get enough information about the goings on in your world to get by and live well? Would you be able to continue to do the job you do now, or would it suddenly be of no use or consequence at all? Would you easily entertain yourself with conversation, books on paper, jam sessions with neighbors, and impromptu block parties, or would you find yourself stalled, bored, and unable to function? Are you wholly dependent on a tech toy that became a tool, and is now a crutch? Who are you without your digital profile?
I sit here feeling okay, myself. My Dad didn’t have much trust in computer systems, software, and “helpful” technology. He taught us to fish, to hunt, to garden, to raise small livestock and make use of the resulting resources. He handed down recipes, and skills. He taught us a lot of useful things, long before the Internet was a convenience or a concern. I’m grateful. The Army taught me more. Life taught me still more after that. I mostly don’t care when or whether the Internet or some particular app or platform is down. I’ve got books. 😂
A frown passes over my face with a chill breeze. Life would be hard without shelter. Without power, heat, and potable water… disasters come in a lot of sizes. It could have been worse than an AWS outage, for sure. I think about Gaza, and Ukraine. It could be so much worse. Genocide. Warfare. Bombs. Earthquakes. Disease outbreaks. Disaster can strike anywhere, and takes many forms. Am I prepared? Are you?
I sigh to myself. Human primates make so much shit more complicated than it has to be… mostly over greed, or seeking power. Gross. Do better, humanity, your survival probably depends on it.
Daybreak comes, and I get to my feet. It’s time to begin again. I’ve got this trail ahead of me, and a destination in mind. All that remains is to begin.
I woke several times during the night. I never figured out why. Each time I woke, i returned to sleep relatively easily. My sleep was restless and disturbed by peculiarly realistic dreams. By the end of the night, it seemed I was dreaming that I was awake, and my alarm got to full brightness, overhead light shining like an artificial sun as I woke from that last dream, walking along a trash-strewn crater pocked “beach” watching a savage discolored sun rise slowly.
I dreamt of masked armed thugs on the streets of American cities. I dreamt of chemical attacks, drone strikes, and bombs dropping on already flattened neighborhoods, and neat carefully planned rows of… rubble. I dreamt of fleeing, of hiding, and of fear. I dreamt of nightmare cities blasted by violence. I dreamt of blood and sorrow. I dreamt of waiting breathless and anxious for the next shock. It was a bad night and when I finally woke, my face was strangely gritty with the salt of dried tears.
… I don’t recall the details of my dreams, now, only vague themes and sensations, which are already fading, and for that I am grateful…
PTSD is sometimes a literal fucking nightmare. Thanks largely to the violence, and vile horrors and bad behavior of the current administration, PTSD symptoms I haven’t had to deal with for awhile are flaring up and demanding my attention, and my most committed and loving self-care. More fucking verbs – as if I have time for this shit right now. I sigh, rubbing my neck, and my shoulders, as well as I can without having extra hands. I gently massage my temples, and breathe. My anxiety surges, then eases, again and again. I feel hyper vigilant and pointlessly uneasy. It is an ordinary morning in all regards, aside from my subjective sense of persistent dread.
… And I’m tired…
I head down the trail in the usual way, although I am in more pain than usual, and feeling wary and watchful in the predawn darkness. It is quite chilly – the coldest morning we’ve had since back in the spring. 38°F (about 3.3°C). I’m grateful for the warm hiking socks, and comfy sweater beneath a warm cardigan. I breathe deeply as I walk, enjoying the scents of autumn. There is a hint of wood smoke in the taste of the air; people have begun using their fireplaces as the temperature cools.
I think about work and fret about money, and the future, and mortality, and preparedness, until I realize I’m getting spun up over imagined disasters and things that have not happened, or are not real concerns in my actual life, now. I inhale deeply, and exhale slowly until my lungs empty, as if the exhaled breath could carry with it all of my stress and anxiety. Sometimes it does. I pull my thoughts back to here, now. This is where I am, and everything begins right here. Every change, every moment of progress, every journey to come, it all starts in this moment – and conveniently enough, it is always “now”. That’s a lot of potential to work with!
I get to a pleasing stopping point, hands warm enough for writing, having been jammed deeply into my pockets while I walked. I sit on a convenient bench and examine the horizon for the first hint of daybreak. I take a moment to recognize that it is not my experience in this moment that is driving my emotions; it is my emotions creating my concerns, and my subjective experience of the moment. I can change this! I focus on the details here, now, and my breath. I breathe, exhale, and relax. I meditate for unmeasured time, until an imagined soft chime coincides with a sense of “completeness”, and contentment. I’m okay. Anxiety is a liar. Emotions are not the totality of my experience, or of reality itself.
… It’s not personal, it’s just biochemistry and a human being human…
Trauma in life changes our brain even down to the hormones and chemistry of our bodies and emotions. I’m no expert, but I’ve tried to keep up on the science. There are ways to regain our joy, corral our volatility, and manage our emotions without stifling our creativity with drugs, undermining our humanity by becoming numb to ourselves, or allowing our good character to be compromised. It may require asking for help. It’ll definitely require a lot of practice – and probably some new practices and considerable change. I sigh to myself. So much change. So much practice.
I reflect for a moment on how far I’ve come over the past 15 years… it’s been quite a journey. I would not have dealt with a night like last night so well (and with such ease, relatively speaking) back in 2010. I’d have been tantrum prone, volatile, irrational, irritable, unapproachable, suspicious, guarded, and teetering on the thin edge between anger and tears, ready to blast some unwary associate or loved one unpredictably – and unable to talk about it, or sort out my own emotions from the real circumstances.
G’damn I am so grateful to be in a different place as a human being. All the work, practice, meditation, self-care, and therapy has been very much worth the time, effort, and expense. I walk a very different path now. I’m grateful that I do. I am grateful for the choices I made to change. I’m grateful to have a partner who loves and supports me.
Daybreak. Dawn soon. It looks to be a cold cloudy morning. No colorful sunrise today, just a dirty, pale, vaguely orange smudge along the edge of the eastern horizon. As night becomes day, I get to my feet. It’s already time to begin again.
We have a hot tub. It came with the house when we bought it. It’s a make and model from sometime in the 90s, as I recall, so, “older”. It wasn’t in great shape when we moved in, and my Traveling Partner put a ton of work into repairing the leaking plumbing and replacing the skirting with beautiful cedar skirting he made in a wood shop that was only just being built, itself, in large part due to the tools needed to rebuild the hot tub.
That was back in 2020. Seems almost a lifetime ago, already.
A practical sort of luxury, a beautiful spot to linger on a sunny day.
It was wonderful having the hot tub, and I used it quite a lot the first couple years, even on snowy winter days, and in the rain. It did a lot to relieve my arthritis pain, and still does when I use it now. But… it’s pretty noisy when the pump is running, which is problematic for good sleep if the stupid thing cycles during the night (which it does, nightly), which is a real problem in a household of people with sleep challenges.
It’s not just the noise. Realistically, there’s quite a bit of maintenance involved in keeping it in good working order and the chemistry properly balanced, and I don’t have the capacity, the reliable skills, or the will to undertake the work required. I’m made of human, and I have limits. After my Traveling Partner got hurt, at the end of 2023, we drained the hot tub, and shut it down. It didn’t get refilled and turned on again until late in the following summer, after the Anxious Adventurer moved in. It was nice having it back… but the noisiness seemed more problematic, and now it leaks (again).
Sometimes the verbs outweigh the value.
My Traveling Partner isn’t quite up to the work of rebuilding it, now, and can’t easily use it, either. On top of that, the deck itself needs some repair work that is difficult to do with the hot tub standing there (and not gonna lie, we’d install it differently if we were doing it all over again). I use it less often, myself, now…about half the time I go to use it, the chemistry is wrong, or the water level too low. Other times, I think I may want to soak, but I don’t take action because I incorrectly remember whether it is running or not. Still other days, although I may want to soak, I’m less physically able to safely climb into or out of the hot tub without help than I was 5 years ago. It’s no longer habitual, after the long period that it wasn’t available, followed by the even longer period during which I was frankly so exhausted from full-time employment on top of full-time caregiving I couldn’t drag myself out there. Well, shit. All of that adds up to “we aren’t using it enough to make it worth the bother”.
Sometimes however much we enjoy something and value it, we may have to choose to let it go for practical reasons. Not just luxuries like hot tubs, either. This is true of a lot of things in life. We are often called upon to change, and sometimes that means letting something go that we once cherished – and maybe still do.
As much as I loved my aquarium(s), there just weren’t any good spots for them in the new house. I had to let them go.
It is a Monday morning. A work day, but also a federal holiday. When I was a child, it was undisputably Columbus Day. There was nothing especially controversial about that, that I can recall. As I reached adulthood, though, there were more conversations around the negative consequences of colonialism, and very specifically the terrible results of “the discovery” of the new world for so many indigenous peoples, and also the horror of slavery in the US, and the lasting negative outcomes for generations of descendents of slaves, or slaughtered tribes whose land was (let’s be frank here) stolen from them. More and more people seemed more and more inclined not to celebrate Columbus Day, choosing to reframe the day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I can recall, initially, thinking that was sort of… weird and dumb… but the more I thought about it, myself, the more I understood the real healing power of making that change, and letting go of idolizing Columbus. He may have been “good for” business, for global expansion of trade, and for people in power seeking profit and glory…but he wasn’t good for the people who already lived in those places he reached in an era when riches were built on exploitation. So… yeah. I’m at work today, and it’s a routine work day. I let go of Columbus Day a long time ago.
I’ve let go of relationships that were causing me harm. I’ve let go of friendships that undermined my wellness, my values, or which put me at personal risk in some way. I’ve let go of “values” that turned out to be problematic and more likely to deliver harm to others than to improve the world in some small way. I’ve let go of lost items that I never found but which had sentimental value. I’ve let go of jobs that I could not ethically continue to do, even for a really good paycheck. There are a lot of reasons to let something go, and a lot of things we may be inclined to cling to long past the real value they once provided. Clinging to something is easier, and change is harder – but there is no growth in resisting change.
When my Traveling Partner first put forth the idea of draining the hot tub and shutting it off for the winter (and probably permanently), I resisted. I admit it; I don’t like change, generally. I enjoy stability. I definitely enjoy the luxury of the hot tub! But my Traveling Partner is right; this decades-old hot tub is noisy, and it does leak, and the maintenance required is much… and the deck needs repair. It all adds up to “time to let it go”. The fear, of course, is that letting it go will somehow leave us “worse off” than before – and that’s an illusion. That’s the emotional cling wrap talking. If we don’t let it go, that thing we’re holding on to will continue to worsen over time, in all the ways it is identifiably not ideal right now. Just worse, and progressively more so.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. So it’s time to let the hot tub go. I guess I’m okay with that – it doesn’t harm me to be without it, and there’s nothing to stop us replacing it later on, after the deck is repaired, with something more energy efficient, more modern, and quieter. Yes, it’ll come at a cost – but doesn’t everything worth having come at a cost? I think about that, and sip my coffee. I think about my Traveling Partner’s shared plan for rebuilding the deck quite differently, more suited to our lifestyle and future needs, with a hot tub standing firmly on a foundation on the ground, recessed in the deck such that it is easier for a couple of middle-aged lovers with mobility issues to get in and out of it, to enjoy it less constrained by our individual difficulties. I smile to myself, feeling loved and understood, and cared for; my partner didn’t push back hard on my clinging while I clung to the luxury of having a hot tub right now. He let me work through it in my own time, patiently emphasizing how having the noisy thing was affecting our sleep, each time it clearly did. We got there. I let go.
It’s not always easy to let go, even when we must. There are verbs involved, and choices, and a willingness to face change and to grow, and to practice non-attachment. It’s worth it though; it’s harder to walk my path if I’m wrapped in cling wrap. 😀
I glance at the time. Yep. It’s a Monday. My calendar is pretty full, and it’s time to begin again.
Evening Light 