My Traveling Partner made me more cute 3D printed earrings. These delight me, not only because earrings are the only jewelry I wear regularly, and I get a kick out of fun kitschy ones that aren’t too serious as much as I like sparkly gemstones (more, perhaps). These are wee axolotl and shark earrings that appear to be chomping on my earlobes. I giggle when I see them in a reflection. It’s the sort of moment of joy that is difficult to adequately communicate in words, but lingers and even deepens over time. I smile thinking about them now, the little axolotl’s hanging from my ear wiggling about as I laugh, seeing them in my reflection in the window.
Sometimes love takes a whimsical form.
Simple moments of joy and delight can be savored, and their value is bigger than the moments; taking the time to really appreciate and enjoy such moments helps build our emotional resilience. Don’t hold yourself back – enjoy the joy!
When I got into the office, I sat down with my coffee to do “the payday stuff”, update the budget, look over the numbers, put together a draft of the plan for this pay period, and send it to my partner for a second look and any recommendations to change the plan. We’re individuals – and partners. We have things we’re doing together, and goals, and plans, and things we are most involved in individually, but which also need to be accounted for in the household budget. It’s a shared endeavor, and that feels settled and comfortable. I finish that up and hit “send”, feeling a moment of grown-up satisfaction and preparedness. It’s a very different feeling than “joy” – but no less positive.
“Rainbow Happy Trails” blooming
I breathe, exhale, and relax, looking out the window at the gray morning. Spring in the PNW. lol Gray. Rainy. Green. Cloudy. Mists and fogs here and there on the way in to the office didn’t surprise me. Passing through rain showers was not unexpected. The garden loves these days of soft rains. The roses are beginning to bloom – more roses blooming, more blossoms on each rose. Spring feels so positive and hopeful, and for a little while I forget what a shit-show the world is right now. I mean, are you fucking kidding me with this genocide and warfare bullshit? Have we not outgrown all that as a species? What is our fucking problem? We have the capacity to reason, to plan, to remember, to comprehend, and to love, and yet… we still commit heinous acts against one another. It isn’t something that makes any fucking sense at all. I feel the look of distaste and disappointment on my face. Do better, Humanity.
“Nozomi” blooming
I sigh to myself and let that shit go. I’m here, now, and it is a pleasant morning, and a pleasant moment. It’s enough. I focus on these things within my direct experience, and think ahead to work tasks, and errands later. I sip my coffee, and grin again when I feel my earrings sway, tugging at my earlobes gently. My Traveling Partner’s love in earring form.
I notice the time, and realize that I’ve got a meeting coming up, and it’s already time to begin again.
I’m sipping my coffee over a break between catching up on everything I missed while I was out of the office for a long weekend, and getting started on all the things yet to be done with this new day. I’m thinking about what a joy the weekend was, and what a trainwreck it sometimes feel the world is (or has become). The immense value and promise of the Internet and global connectivity doesn’t change how easy it is for entities with an agenda to harvest our data – or our attention – regardless of the actual value to us as individuals, and it can be hard to detach myself from the outrage machinery and engagement-seeking drama all around. It can be done; there are verbs involved. Choices. Commitment. Will. Practice.
Choose your path and walk it.
I’m not “a perfect person” – not even close. I am seeking the best within myself, and making a point to practice the practices that serve to shore up (and improve) my mental health and emotional wellness, and build better relationships. I work hard to be become the woman I most want to be. It’s an ongoing bit of work to address character flaws, battle my inner demons, and just do my damned best to be a better person today than I was yesterday. My results vary. (Yours will too; it’s a very human experience.) Still – what better journey than this journey of self-discovery, and healing, and growth could I make over the course of a lifetime? Step by step, day by day, one practice at a time, one moment at a time… I’m finding the best within myself that I can, working to create better qualities where I find myself lacking, and living that life.
…It was a lovely weekend, celebrating love and spending time in the garden. I feel rested, nourished, and restored by the days spent on life and love in the company of my beloved Traveling Partner. I definitely needed it…
The new day began after a night of strange dreams. The sun rise was beautiful as I made the commute to the office. Traffic was light, the drive was pleasant, and my morning coffee is quite good. A nice beginning to the week. The only “fly in my ointment” this morning is this wistful pang of loss and vague persistent feeling of longing in the background; I miss my Traveling Partner intensely after 4 pleasant days spent together, present, connected, and loving. I could have worked from home, but… I doubt I’d have been able to focus on working. lol My heart is at home, in spite of the work in front of me. My thoughts are in my garden, and with my beloved. Taking a break to write, reflect, and indulge my emotions a bit is intended to let me “get back to work” more focused (the way out is through, and our emotions are not an enemy or a defect).
“Baby Love”, the first rose to bloom this year.
I sigh to myself and smile at nothing much. I sip my coffee and stretch. Life is full of next steps and new beginnings. Incremental change over time may not feel like the fastest route to lasting change, but it is a reliable one. I gaze out the window at the brilliant blue sky streaked with a single vapor trail from a passing aircraft, watching the shifting hues of green in the trees as the sun rises higher. Nice moment to pause and reflect and feel the contentment I’ve worked to build over years. I’m standing in a good spot, metaphorically speaking…nonetheless, it is time to begin again. The clock is ticking.
I’m sitting in the artificial twilight of a lamppost at the edge of my preferred local trail. It’s not yet fully dawn, but there’s a hint of daybreak in the changing color of the sky. I caught myself scrolling through the news headlines, though there is nothing there worth reading. Nothing new. Mostly intentionally distressing – or selling something. I put it aside. I don’t benefit in any way from becoming sucked into that garbage.
I think about stumbling on the trail a few moments ago. I caught myself, didn’t fall, but it was a moment of inattention and the outcome could have been worse. There’s something to learn there. It’s a metaphor. In a sense, scrolling through the news feed mindlessly is another sort of stumble. Disregarding healthy portion control when I struggle with my weight? Another stumble. Skipping a planned walk or a workout when I have specific fitness goals? Stumble.
Other lives, other challenges, other ways to stumble on a path. An addict in recovery having “just a little, this one time…”. Stumble. Someone making an important lifestyle change yielding to an old habit. Stumble. Important financial goals overlooked for a little “retail therapy”. Stumble. Giving that toxic relationship another chance. Stumble. It’s so very human to stumble, but we really can catch ourselves, and get back on the path. We really can acknowledge our failures and begin again.
I sit with that thought watching daybreak come, turning the sky blue beyond the dark clouds overhead. It’s okay to fail and begin again. It’s okay to pause on the trail to rest or to reflect. It’s okay to be human. It’s a journey. The journey is the destination.
I think of a far away friend admitting to me that she hadn’t been reading my blog. I was surprised by the admission, not because I expect all my friends and people dear to me to read my writing, but more because she found the admission embarrassing or awkward at all. I’m pretty sure it’s a near inevitability that any one reader will eventually stop reading and move on to other things. lol I see “this place” as a resting point on a journey more than a path. Once my point is made, the rest is perhaps noise. Repetition. I certainly wasn’t hurt by her admission. I’m here. You’re here now. For a moment we travel together whether through coincidence or intention, and we nonetheless each have our own experience. I rarely cross paths “in real life” with someone who reads my writing. She’s rare and delightful in that way. I cherish the experience, but don’t expect it. Our Dear Friend connected us, here, through their conversations about my writing. I was fortunate indeed to eventually sit down with them together over coffee. What a joyful day! When our Dear Friend neared the end of her life, we shared that too. I’m grateful.
Dawn. A new day, and the path ahead is clear. When I see the path and walk it mindfully, I’m less likely to stumble. It’s a very human experience, though, and the path is uneven in spots. There’s still a chance I may stumble, or even fall. When I do, I get up, consider my missteps, and begin again.
This morning I woke to an ordinary Saturday, with ordinary plans: an ordinary walk on a familiar trail, a typical Saturday routine of grocery shopping and some housekeeping tasks. Of course, it’s only entirely predictable (and somewhat amusing) that today there’s no rain. I smile to myself at the utter predicability of such circumstances. Plans are only plans, and the weather doesn’t take my plans into account, it just happens.
Rainy trails, rainy paths, rainy day.
Yesterday rained. It rained hard. It rained persistently. It rained sideways. The wind blew the rain under the cover of the gazebo where I had hoped to paint with a ferocity that ensured I couldn’t. I can only laugh about it. I got some great hiking in (in the rain), and pleasant time spent with my thoughts (listening to the rain fall). It was a good day. I went home early, and painted some there. It was less of what I had in mind, but it was plenty of what I needed.
I saw some beautiful places.
Sometimes “enough” has to be… enough.
I walked some challenging miles.
The cumulative effect of days hiking new trails, eager and energetic, unconcerned about the terrain, finds me aching all over this morning. My ankles ache. My back aches. My head aches. I’m stiff and my muscles are sore. I’m not really complaining, just noticing how I feel, physically. It’ll pass, mostly, and the exertion and varied movement is healthy. (Besides, I’ve been having a great time, and this pain is a small price to pay.) I managed to actually sleep in this morning, waking almost two hours later than I ordinarily might. I woke feeling rested, calm, and content.
I sit sipping my coffee and watching daybreak become the dawn of a new day. I’ll walk this familiar trail, then return home, hitting up the grocery store on my way. Housekeeping today, definitely, but maybe I’ll also paint? The future isn’t written, and this is a very good time to begin again.
Every journey begins where you are. It’s a good place to start.
I have a lot of pictures. Too many. Some of them are no longer meaningful. Some of them are reminders of times and people perhaps best forgotten or allowed to fade into the seldom recalled past. It’s strange that most of these pictures only reach back into the relatively recent past, around 2004 or so, and most are since 2010, when I got my first smartphone. Technology allowed me to accumulate clutter in the form of images. My hard drives and cloud storage are further cluttered by copies of backups, trying to preserve something meaningful of a life lived. I spent a lot of years struggling to account for the risk my poor memory represents, and admittedly overreacted quite commonly by saving yet another backup of something I’d forgotten I’d already backed up.
…More than 50k unique images, in 2800+ folders, across multiple drives, a cloud storage service, and a NAS on our home network, amounting to about 2TB of stored images, and a few gigs of written work, and I’d lose it all if humanity lost the power grid upon which we are so reliant….
Like a paved trail on a sunny day, some of this may seem obvious; it doesn’t hurt to check the map once in awhile, anyway.
… What is it all good for? What will become of it when I am gone? Will any of it matter at all? Who even gives a fuck about a random photograph from a walk along a trail on a sunny summer day, or yet another picture of a rose?
Roses on a sunny day. Impermanent. Like moments.
The pictures are not the experience (or even the memory). The map is not the world. Moments are unavoidably fleeting, and each is unique like a step on a trail, or a rose. Trying to capture them all in pictures so that I “don’t lose my memories” is (rather sadly) a wasted effort. I catch myself surprised again and again when I look over old pictures. Where was that? Who is that in this picture? Where did I live then? What was I doing at that time? Oh! I remember that – I’d forgotten all about that. The details are lost, in spite of having the picture. The pictures, then, would likely benefit from somewhat stricter curation, perhaps? I have too many pictures of some given moment, and too many that I’ve kept in spite of being poorly shot, out of focus or composed badly. In some cases, the backups of backups are (hilariously) nested within each other, pointlessly taking up digital space. Very few exist in any printed format at all. Once I’m gone, more than likely, someone at some point will simply “hit delete”, and it will all be gone.
I thought about this a lot over the weekend. I spent time cleaning up my archive of art images specifically, and while I was at it, I deleted several redundant backups (after checking carefully that they were truly copies of the one valued, useful backup). I looked at pictures of moments I’d forgotten, and enjoyed the refreshed recollection. I found moments for which I’d taken far too many nearly identical pictures, and kept the one I liked the best and deleted the rest. I found pictures of times long past I’d just as soon forget about, and deleted those without concern or trauma. I found entire folders of pictures that weren’t actually my own; I’d held on to them for some other person no longer part of my life, and happily deleted those too. No rumination, tears, or heartache, it was simply time to let a bunch of this garbage go. Digital hoarding is just as objectionable and problematic as any other sort; evidence of chaos and damage. I let a lot of stuff go, and it felt good.
The strangest ones were moments captured that lacked any sort of context at all. Why had I taken that picture of that moment? It wasn’t always clear what the point was, or what was going on. A picture of a lovely flower is reliably a beautiful thing of its own, and needs no explanation, but… a picture of a thing, place, or person that isn’t well-composed or interesting or beautiful on its own? What then? What was that about? What have I forgotten – and does it even matter now?
What was I hoping to remember?
Creating order from chaos is nearly always time well-spent. It provided helpful perspective to be reminded that there will always be things forgotten, and that not everything is worth preserving. Moments are fleeting – and it is a common characteristic of a moment. Fighting it doesn’t change that. Living the moment creates the memory. Being present is what matters, I think. I smile over my coffee, remembering the peculiar feeling of satisfaction and sanity that came of tidying up my digital archives. There’s more work to do there; there are so many pictures. I take fewer, these days, and I think about that too. I’m more likely to select a well-considered few on a particular theme, and create a wee photo book for someone (or for myself) to keep or share the memories that matter most, and provide them with some amount of context along the way. One day, perhaps when I’m quite old, those photo books will be a lasting thing I can hold in my hands and enjoy, and the digital images may be long gone and forgotten. There’s something to learn from that.
As the calendar turned toward 2023, I took a moment to let my paper journals of many years go. It was a process of “putting down baggage” and letting go of past moments and trauma, and beginning again. It was a way of reducing the clutter in my life and in my mind. It was about giving up a body of written work that had become “content without context”. As with the photographs, those journals had lived beyond their value to me. It was a strange moment to reach, and I’ve rarely regretted the choice at all. This process of sorting through old images and doing some digital “tidying up” feels quite similar, with fewer tears being shed, and less hesitation or uncertainty.
We become what we practice. If we practice clinging to images and words (or objects) without context or value, we become… hoarders. That’s not healthy. Isn’t sufficiency enough? Creating order from chaos, and keeping only what is useful and what matters most seems a much healthier practice. I sip my coffee and think my thoughts. Useful perspective.
Evening Light 